#for now it's lossie out

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election

I'm in to TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (Monday, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.

But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.

To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.

But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.

It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.

Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.

Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo

On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582

They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html

And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/

But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

Amazon also invents implausible corporate fictions that allow it to terminate entire sections of its workforce for trying to unionize, by maintaining the tormented pretense that these workers, who wear Amazon uniforms, drive Amazon trucks, deliver Amazon packages, and are tracked by Amazon down to the movements of their eyeballs, are, in fact, not Amazon employees:

https://www.wired.com/story/his-drivers-unionized-then-amazon-tried-to-terminate-his-contract/

These workers have plenty of cause to want to unionize. Amazon warehouses are sources of grueling torment. Take "megacycling," a ten-hour shift that runs from 1:20AM to 11:50AM that workers are plunged into without warning or the right to refuse. This isn't just a night shift – it's a night shift that makes it impossible to care for your children or maintain any kind of normal life.

Then there's Jeff Bezos's war on his workers' kidneys. Amazon warehouse workers and drivers notoriously have to pee in bottles, because they are monitored by algorithms that dock their pay for taking bathroom breaks. The road to Amazon's warehouse in Coventry, England is littered with sealed bottles of driver piss, defenestrated by drivers before they reach the depot inspection site.

There's so much piss on the side of the Coventry road that the prankster Oobah Butler was able to collect it, decant it into bottles, and market it on Amazon as an energy beverage called "Bitter Lemon Release Energy," where it briefly became Amazon's bestselling energy drink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

(Butler promises that he didn't actually ship any bottled piss to people who weren't in on the gag – but let's just pause here and note how weird it is that a guy who hates our kidneys as much as Jeff Bezos built and flies a penis-shaped rocket.)

Butler also secretly joined the surge of 1,000 workers that Amazon hired for the Coventry warehouse in advance of a union vote, with the hope of diluting the yes side of that vote and forestall the union. Amazon displayed more of its famously selective competence here, spotting Butler and firing him in short order, while totally failing to notice that he was marketing bottles of driver piss as a bitter lemon drink on Amazon's retail platform.

After a long fight, Amazon's Coventry workers are finally getting their union vote, thanks to the GMB union's hard fought battle at the Central Arbitration Committee:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/04/26/amazon-warehouse-workers-in-coventry-will-vote-on-trade-union-recognition/

And right on schedule, Amazon has once again discovered its incredible facility for ease-of-use. The company has blanketed its shop floor with radioactively illegal "one click to quit the union" QR codes. When a worker aims their phones at the code and clicks the link, the system auto-generates a letter resigning the worker from their union.

As noted, this is totally illegal. English law bans employers from "making an offer to an employee for the sole or main purpose of inducing workers not to be members of an independent trade union, take part in its activities, or make use of its services."

Now, legal or not, this may strike you as a benign intervention on Amazon's part. Why shouldn't it be easy for workers to choose how they are represented in their workplaces? But the one-click system is only half of Amazon's illegal union-busting: the other half is delivered by its managers, who have cornered workers on the shop floor and ordered them to quit their union, threatening them with workplace retaliation if they don't.

This is in addition to more forced "captive audience" meetings where workers are bombarded with lies about what life in an union shop is like.

Again, the contrast couldn't be more stark. If you want to quit a union, Amazon makes this as easy as joining Prime. But if you want to join a union, Amazon makes that even harder than quitting Prime. Amazon has the same attitude to its workers and its customers: they see us all as a resource to be extracted, and have no qualms about tricking or even intimidating us into doing what's best for Amazon, at the expense of our own interests.

The campaigning law-firm Foxglove is representing five of Amazon's Coventry workers. They're doing the lord's work:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/05/02/legal-challenge-to-amazon-uks-new-one-click-to-quit-the-union-tool/

All this highlights the increasing divergence between the UK and the US when it comes to labor rights. Under the Biden Administration, @NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has promulgated a rule that grants a union automatic recognition if the boss does anything to interfere with a union election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

In other words, if Amazon tries these tactics in the USA now, their union will be immediately recognized. Abruzzo has installed an ultra-sensitive tilt-sensor in America's union elections, and if Bezos or his class allies so much as sneeze in the direction of their workers' democratic rights, they automatically lose.

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/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove

Image: Isabela.Zanella (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ballot-box-2.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[mxbo]

I couldn't fit the tutorial on a reply lmao, here's a full post explaining my process :]]

STAMP TUTORIAL (TF2 edition, but works for everything)

99% of the process is done on the website ezgif. Ezgif carries the stamp-making process lmao

1. Get your GIF

Tenor: Ok place to grab your GIFs. Average quality of the GIFs is good enough, and looks ok when resized to the size of the stamp. You'll find like 1 normal GIF every 4 buff characters GIF tho.

GIPHY: Average quality of the GIF is better (I don't think the web compresses the GIFs that are uploaded)… If you find what you're looking for. You'll have to SCROLL before finding what you're looking for because there are always non-related GIFs on the top of your searches or the same GIF multiple times, it's crazy.

makeagif: You will find cool GIFs, but the quality is pretty low (I think the web itself compresses the GIFs a lot). It looks bad even when resized down. And it has a watermark, which I recommend cropping because it's not even visible when resized, it just looks like a gray blob on the corner.

Google: Best option by far, quality is pretty good and the ratio of “things I was looking for/things I actually find” is SLIGHTLY in favor of “things I was looking for” (and most of “things I actually find” are just the characters rotating, not NSFW, so that's only a nice change from Tenor). You won't have to scroll much to see different and interesting GIFs. JUST REMEMBER TO FILTER BY GIFS.

You search whatever > Images > Tools > Type > GIF

Make it on your own: Aka, you download your video, go to ezgif's “Video to GIF” (then you can crop it, CUT IT. THIS IS IMPORTANT, YOU DON'T NEED TO GO ANYWHERE ELSE TO CUT YOUR CLIP, YOU CAN DO IT ON EZGIF ITSELF). Ok, I lied, it wasn't Google, this is the best oftion by far. You get exactly what you want, the best quality if you don't compress it much until after the GIF has been resized into the size of a stamp… It's just super time-consuming, and you'll have to spend like an entire hour just watching a video to find the clips.

OK, I HAVE MY GIF NOW

Hehe, his legs go pipupipu

2. Resize

Go to ezgif, this is where the fun begins (if you weren't on ezgif already). You download your GIF, or copy the link and insert it, or you'll have it there if you made it yourself.

A STAMP MAKES 99px × 56px

THE INNER PART OF THE STAMP MAKES 91px × 47px

I RECOMMEND MAKING YOUR GIF 92px × 48px

BTW, THESE MEASURES ARE FOR THE TEMPLATE I'LL GIVE YOU LATER. If you use another template, just go to an image editor and see what the inner size of the stamp is.

So, you set your GIF's width to 92px.

Then crop it, so your height is 48px.

Or you can resize it so it's directly 92px × 48px, but the crop will be in the center, and SOMETIMES YOU DON'T WANT THAT.

For example:

It's a vertical GIF whose area of interest is not in the center, so if we resize it directly-

oops-

ANYWAY

Once you have your GIF resized:

IMPORTANT: BEFORE THE NEXT STEP, REMEMBER TO CONVERT TO GIF IF THE FILE YOU'RE WORKING ON ISN'T A GIF ALREADY

Sometimes you'll be working with a webp without even noticing (EW, I hate webp) and transparencies don't work particularly well with that extension.

3. Overlay

Click on this icon.

Ok, now that that's fixed:

Extend the size of the canvas.

Select your template and Upload image!

This is the template, btw.

Then move the overlay around until it contains the GIF nicely, or just set Left to 43, Top to 20 and Generate image! (I have these numbers memorized, it saves you like 20 seconds lmao)

Also, again, these numbers work on MY template, if you use another one, you'll have to figure it out yourself.

4. Crop

THIS OPTION IS A TIME-SAVER FR

5. Optimize (optional, highly recommend)

I always set my optimization method to Lossy GIF and level 10 because I find that there is no quality loss, and the file size might drop by 30%-70% (actually crazy). These percentages don't change much in higher compressions, even though you'll start seeing a drop in quality around level 35 of compression (the default).

6. Save

YIPPE!!! Your stamp is done :D

You can save it and look at it and place it on your profile or website.

Here it is btw, in case someone wanted it :]] The Sniper GIF but correctly cropped and made into a stamp as well.

Now do that another… eleven times, and you'll have a stamp pack to make into a Tumblr post... Oof TT

There's no website that lets you make stamps faster lmao (I wish)

@sir-broken-bones (I'm @ them so they actually see it, I made this tutorial for them after all lol)

[fishermanshook]

GANJI GUPTA HEADCANONS.

( batter ) aka GANJI GUPTA.

TW: MY H/C’s 😨 , this layout is giving cheese , grammar and spelling warning

INTRO

Who is Ganji Gupta? And how do you know him? As a friend, a loved one, or as a nobody?

*manor au where they are trapped inside.

꒰wc꒱ 641

GANJI GUPTA, also known as the manor's one and only Batter, acts as a lone wolf. He most likely won’t start conversations and will keep his answers short. Though, it’s just another barrier he puts up out of the need for protection. He doesn’t know who he can confide in here and, in his eyes, everyone seems to be another untrustworthy person out for their wants and needs. That’s all that they are sized down to at the beginning.

GANJI GUPTA struggles with being alone, at least, less than most others. He has experience with the feeling, but everyone caves eventually. He, on the other hand, can withstand it for quite some time.

GANJI GUPTA who, after quite some time, starts to warm up a bit more to the manor inhabitants. Realizing that it’s better not to hold any grudges if you’re going to be stuck here for all eternity.

GANJI GUPTA enjoys the company of others most when they play cricket with him. It doesn’t even matter if they’re good or not, he finds the act endearing and appreciates it more than anyone could imagine.

GANJI GUPTA would need a partner who takes things slow with him. Someone who understands that he (sometimes) has his moments, and will give him the time and space to sort through them. That might mean leaving your side for a while or hitting some cricket balls as far as he possibly can, imagining that all his anger flies away with it.

               ↳ However, there are moments where neither of these things can help him and he needs you instead. Help him to breathe again, and talk him through it instead. Distract his mind from thinking about why he was so upset in the first place. Just, don’t treat him like a child.

GANJI GUPTA who can’t help but feel jealous as you laugh and joke around with the others. There’s a part of him that sometimes wishes he too could enjoy the company of the rest but is too shy to say it. Although, if you happen to pick up on it, grab his hand and pull him into the conversation. He’ll find the flow, eventually.

GANJI GUPTA also hates the pit of spitefulness that pools in the bottom of his stomach when he notices someone else flirting with you. He goes red in the face with his arms crossed and looks furious. The Batter can’t seem to grasp how other people aren’t yet aware of your relationship and is quick to wrap an arm around your waist and come up with some lossy excuse to pull you away elsewhere.

↳ You can't help but whine a bit as the Batter pulls you away. You had a friendly conversation going on with the “Prisoner”, what’s the matter? As you continue your complaining, it dawns on Ganji that, you hadn’t realized he’d been trying to court you the entire time.

GANJI GUPTA will always use his last cricket ball to benefit you in a match. Whether it’s to save you from your third chair or to help prolong your kite, he never hesitates to use it for your sake. He’s gotten some rather harsh comments on it before, but he just ignores them and carries on with his day.

GANJI GUPTA deals with frequent night terrors that wake the both of you up. He’s quick to apologize, brushing it off as if it were nothing. Unfortunately, the tears in his eyes give him away. You don’t ask what they were about, and you probably shouldn’t for now. All he wants is to fall asleep in your embrace with the reminder that you’re here. That you are alive.

note: you thought I was gonna post that painter fic? erm whattttt? why would you ever think that???? that’s so weird what….

fishermanshook — no stealing , translating , plagiarizing or reposting my work on other any other sites + reblogs adored !!

[intertexts]

dakota would let william poke around in his guts in a heartbeat however william would Never, like,,, ask him to do that. he absolutely would not even consider it he'd feel awful just thinking about it. if it ended up happening it would be either in some absolutely dire scenario where there's no other option & dakota in kind of a blood lossy haze goes Ohhh. i don't. i'm not freaking out about this. Or. dakota brings it up first. they would both feel hysterical about it because it's not like dakota ever. Cuts him open. he just throws himself in front of the metaphorical traffic a lot. but that's what he'd be asking him to do. But like. the baggage. the baggage. god i am too tired right now but like u get it right. it would be so emotionally fraught. good lord.

[leonaquitaine]

Post-Processing Guide: Image Quality

So you went and took that perfect screenshot! Now it's time to share it around, but you noticed a certain graininess, a certain fuzziness when posting it on Twitter or Eorzea Collection. So what's going on? Well, let's understand some concepts related to digital images: namely formats, how they influence images in simple operations like crop and resize, and how to prevent loss of quality.

Resolution

This is the easiest concept to explain; the higher the number of pixels, the more detail the image will have. For example, a screenshot taken at standard 2K resolution (2048 x 1090) will have 2,211,840 pixels, while a 4K (4096 x 2160) will pack more details at 8,847,360 pixels.

That also affects file sizes, if you ever hear me crying about the size of my screenshots folder.

There's a myriad of resolutions and formats out there; for more information, check out this Wikipedia entry about display resolutions.

Digital Image Formats

There are many different digital image formats, but the 2 most common for XIV photography are JPEG and PNG - each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

PNG is a lossless format, meaning no data is lost when the image is saved. This results in higher-quality images, but also files that are larger.

JPEG is a lossy format, meaning some data is lost when the image is saved. This data loss can result in artifacts, such as blockiness and color banding. However, JPEG files are smaller than other formats.

The issue with JPEG is that its data loss is cumulative: Each time that you edit and save the file, a little bit of information is lost. Also, depending on the chosen compression level, the loss is quite noticeable. The image below shows how much noise (wrong data) is actually introduced by each compression level:

Crop and Resize

When you crop an image, you are removing pixels from the edges, often to give focus to a specific subject. In this scenario, the loss of information is irrelevant.

But when resizing- often to decrease the size of the image to better adapt it to a target site- you're losing detail, and the chosen interpolation algorithm may influence how much of the original image is used to help determine the result. Here's an example with a 20% resize, using raw pixel mapping on the left and linear sampling on the right. Notice the antialiased result that creates a much better effect:

Keep in mind that different programs may present the interpolation options in different ways. For example, this is how GIMP displays its options when resizing:

So with all that said, how should we proceed to preserve as much as possible of the original data?

How to Prevent Loss of Quality

Use a high-resolution image. The higher the resolution, the more detail the image will have, and the less likely you are to lose considerable quality when cropping or resizing. Nya Nya has an excellent guide about resolution upscale (a method that allows you to take a 4K screenshot on a 2K native resolution, for example) here. I highly recommend a read!

Use a lossless image format. Lossless formats, such as PNG, do not lose any data when the image is saved. This will help to prevent loss of quality when cropping or resizing.

Keep resizing to a minimum. The more you resize an image, the more likely you are to introduce artifacts or jitter. If you need a close-up, for example, take a close-up screenshot and resize it a little bit instead of cropping around a small area in a larger full-body image.

When scaling down, use interpolation methods that take more data from the original image into consideration, like Linear or Cubic, instead of raw interpolation.

Resize and save images in the expected resolution of a target site. For example, Eorzea Collection uses 339x570 for its vertical shot; cropping and resizing your image to this resolution will prevent artifacts from being introduced by the site's own resizing algorithm.

TL;DR: Keep the resolution high, the changes to a minimum, and save as PNG.

Let me know if you have any questions!

[isaacsapphire]

The poisoned Skittle problem, from the perspective of a non poison Skittle

The metaphor of the bowl of Skittles, some percentage of which are poison, and how many of those Skittles you want to eat, has been used by feminists about men, and republicans about immigrants. I'm increasingly devoid of shits to give about what kind of vile things I'm going to be called, so what the heck, I'll use it too for this.

With class and housing in the US, there is a poisoned Skittle problem; the lower income you go, the higher the percentage of assaults George type people are in the mix. (Please note now that I am Not claiming that the elite are not prone to being assaults Georg, or that there's no assaults Georg in higher income brackets) For added fun, the poorer you are, the more you have to be in physical proximity to others who live in your area, while walking to the store or taking public transportation, increasing your vulnerability to being assaulted, etc. In the suburbs, a lot of the time, the guy who lives three houses down from yours and you have literally never seen each other, so it doesn't matter if he would immediately grab your crotch if he was in crotch-grabbing range, because the two of you have never been that close together. If you live in a more dense environment and travel by foot, your chances of being in crotch-grabbing range are much higher, so a crotch-grabber, etc. in your area is a more concerning problem for you.

Most people very reasonably prefer to live somewhere further away from assaults Georg. The thing is, other people also prefer to live further for assaults Georg, and if you were just living next to assaults Georg, you are a Skittle of indeterminate poison. So when a nice redlined Blue suburb with a great school district is considering if they're going to permit some affordable housing, they are going to look at the income bracket that will be living there and say, "There's too high a percentage of poison Skittles in that income bracket. We don't want to live in a community with assaults Georg, or invite assaults Georg Jr into our nice school, so we don't want affordable housing here."

So now you, as an innocent non poison Skittle are left trying to figure out how you are going to communicate your non poison status so you can get the heck away from the poison Skittles. The current way this information is conveyed is by convincing a higher paid job to hire you, making more money, and buying your way into a better neighborhood. This is a rather lossy way to sort, and shit like constantly disrupted sleep at the weekly hotel from all the shitty people who live there with you doesn't help with better job thing. There's plenty of non poisoned Skittles in that bowl, but how to extract them safely?

The obvious next question is why we as a society don't seem to have any solution to the problem of getting assaulted by assaults Georg other than to individually just try to scramble away from where such folks are statistically and to price the entire category of people who are statistically more likely to be assaults Georg out of certain areas. And now it's a criminal justice system problem and I'll leave that for another day, but overall, the criminal justice system seems a lot more interested in hassling people based on statistical similarities to assaults Georg than doing fuck all about stopping assaults Georg.

[oliveroctavius]

your collage on Harry's schizophrenia drives me up the wall, because it's SUCH a cool and well-executed idea and inspires me to try something similar, but comics are so uniquely perfect for it and none of the topics I'd want to focus on are comics. </3

(I guess I don't really have a point to this ask, I just think abt that collage a LOT)

Oh, I absolutely get that frustration, wanting to do something similar with non-comics things!

A comics collage is kind of like an AMV: it lets you relive something you know but cut up to be punchier, and with an additional layer of ideas on top helping reinterpret what you see. Unlike with an AMV, though, the collage makes it equally as easy to use an academic paper as your reinterpretation-medium as it is to use poetry. Or both! At the same time!

The comic format is unique in that... Okay, I'm going to get into an Amateur Media Theory ramble here, so bear with me.

Audio is a one-dimensional medium: you can only go backwards or forwards in it along an axis, and it drags you along at a predetermined speed.

Text is also one-dimensional (there is only one "correct" order in which to read a paragraph), though you can set your own speed.

Images are two-dimensional. Your eye can explore at its own speed up, down, left, or right.

Video is three-dimensional, but the time dimension is not controlled by you (like with audio) and limits your ability to explore each individual image.

The fragmented text of comic books extends some of that user-controlled two-dimensionality to the way you approach words. I can use a combo of comic images + cut-up poetry techniques to change how the reader experiences the texts I'm using as a source.

Anyone writing an essay has to decide on an order in which to introduce their ideas. But what if you wanted to approach your concept as a cloud, or a tree with multiple parallel but contradictory branches? What if you wanted to leave visible gaps in your argument to demonstrate that some parts may be left out on purpose?

I love the idea of "web-weaving" that's popular on tumblr right now. It encourages ideas to be considered together without having to commit to just one linkage or interpretation. Like with comics, it can include images beside text, skipping the necessarily lossy attempts to convert one to the other.

But despite the "web" idea, it's usually presented as discrete chunks of text (or images) for the reader to consider one after another. The reader may construct a web of connections themselves. But in the comics collage, I can show the reader the overlaid jumble of wordless connections, contradictions, and associations much closer to how it appears in my head. High dimensionality, high information density, high creative control--and it all looks pretty darn cool.

[dragon-deez-ballz]

talking out of my ass about disability headcanons and random bullshit hee hee

we need more dbz characters w chronic pain + disabilities........ i havent seen a lot of headcanons about this......YES this post is brought on because i have had an unrelenting pain in my left shoulder / diaphragm for several days. but i have been thinking baoutthis for a while regardless

i could eprfectly imagine z fighters constantly waving off magical treatment for injuries for the sake of saving senzu for near-death / emergency situations since they take so long to synthesize . like the z fighters are fighters they are not strangers to ghe most common types of sports injuries as well as their own recurring injuries. whayever happened to the swagful compression clothing or ki based mobility aid

or like the saiyans when they get a new transformation always say its super energy-efficient / lossy........ im convinced that the saiyans pushing ghemselves past their limits introduces bone+ muscle damage or quickens degeneration. but they often enough get injuries magically fixed via senzu or dende or w/e post fighting to the death so i dont imagine this is usually a longterm issue

the onyl time i see headcanons about physical disability its like "vegeta gets phantom tail sensations". this is popular because the fans love saiyan tails & want them back, but otherwise have no reason to care about disability HCs outside of this -_-

wai.. actually now im thinking about it. s/o to a goku vegeta bodyswap fic i reqd where the author explains vegetas reduced mobility and military injuries in detail . ily i dont know where i put u.

speaking of health. collectively we need to make gokufatter there is no fucking way Guy who is characterized by being hungry + Guy who is strongest pretty much 99% of the time is as skinny as he is. official art goku has unnaturally defined musculature &is scary and dehydrated. + put those clavicle bones away mister

^image i want to look at

[centrally-unplanned]

I don't have some grand political party reform platform in mind, it isn't something I have studied in crazy depth or anything. My instinct is that the US system right now "buys in" to the framing of the legal system of how individuals, not parties, serve. It is a fiction, parties matter much more, bu we structure primaries around that same "individual competition" framework. Which is an even more lossy sorting system because majority-of-a-majority dynamics poorly capture true majorities, and the primaries are first past the post with staggered election times! It functions, but with a ton of inefficiencies for no benefit.

Those same instincts lead me more towards primaries where people vote for factions over candidates; and then at conventions those factions can go to the smoke-filled rooms and haggle out A: candidates, and B: party platforms. You would ideally get trades of like "okay we endorse more electable candidate X, in return you gotta bite the bullet and be 5% more left on healthcare reform" kind of stuff.

But given how legally weak parties are I see how that has enforceability issues, not insurmountable but a barrier. Republicans should take note of this, honestly, they ran a ton of weak candidates in 2022 in a party that has greater platform discipline, they were gonna vote for the same shit anyway!

[moonlit-tulip]

What's your favorite ebook-compatible reading software? Firefox EPUBReader isn't great, but I'm not what, if anything, works better.

Very short answer: for EPUBs, on Windows I use and recommend the Calibre reader, and on iOS I use Marvin but it's dying and no longer downloadable so my fallback recommendation is the native Apple Books app; for PDFs, on Windows I use Sumatra, and on iOS I use GoodReader; for CBZs, I use CDisplayEx on Windows and YACReader on iOS; and I don't use other platforms very often, so I can't speak as authoritatively about those, although Calibre's reader is cross-platform for Windows/Mac/Linux, and YACReader for Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android, so they can serve as at least a minimum baseline of quality against which alternatives can be compared for those platforms.

Longer answer:

First off, I will say: yeah, Firefox EPUBReader isn't great. Neither, really, are most ebook readers. I have yet to find a single one that I'm fully satisfied with. I have an in-progress project to make one that I'm fully satisfied with, but it's been slow, probably isn't going to hit 1.0.0 release before next year at current rates, and isn't going to be actually definitively the best reader on the market for probably months or years post-release even assuming I succeed in my plans to keep up its development. So, for now, selection-of-ebook-readers tends to be very much a matter of choosing the best among a variety of imperfect options.

Formats-wise, there are a lot of ebook formats, but I'm going to collapse my answers down to focusing on just three, for simplicity. Namely: EPUB, PDF, and CBZ.

EPUB is the best representative of the general "reflowable-text ebook designed to display well on a wide variety of screens" genre. Other formats of similar nature exist—Kindle's MOBI and AZW3 formats, for instance (the latter of which is, in essence, just an EPUB in a proprietary Amazon wrapper)—but conversion between formats-in-this-broad-genre is generally pretty easy and not excessively lossy, so you're generally safe to convert to EPUB as needed if you've got different formats-in-this-genre and a reader that doesn't support those formats directly. (And it's rare for a program made by anyone other than Amazon to work for non-EPUB formats-in-this-genre and not for EPUBs.)

PDF is a pretty unique / distinctive format without any widely-used alternatives I'm aware of, unless you count AZW4 (which is a PDF in a proprietary Amazon wrapper). It's the best format I'm aware of for representations of books with rigid non-reflowable text-formatting, as with e.g. TTRPG rulebooks which do complicated things with their art-inserts and sidebars.

And CBZ serves here as a stand-in for the general category of "bunch of images in an archive file of some sort, ordered by filename", which is a common format for comics. CBZ is zip-based, CBR is RAR-based, CB7 is 7-zip-based, et cetera; but they're easy to convert between one another just by extracting one and then re-archiving it in one's preferred format, and CBZ is the most commonly distributed and the most commonly supported by readers, so it's the one I'm going to focus on.

With those prefaces out of the way, here are my comprehensive answers by (platform, format) pair:

Browser, EPUB

I'm unaware of any good currently-available browser-based readers for any of the big ebook formats. I've tried out EPUBReader for Firefox, as well as some other smaller Firefox-based reader extensions, and none of them have impressed me. I haven't tested any Chrome-based readers particularly extensively, but based on some superficial testing I don't have the sense that options are particularly great there either.

This state of affairs feels intuitively wrong to me. The browser is, in a significant sense, the natural home for EPUB-like reflowable-text ebooks, to a greater degree than it's the natural home for a great many of the other things people manage to warp it into being used for; after all, EPUBs are underlyingly made of HTML-file-trees. My own reader-in-progress will be browser-based. But nonetheless, for now, my advice for browser-based readers boils down to "don't use them unless you really need to".

If you do have to use one, EPUBReader is the best extension-based one I've encountered. I have yet to find a good non-extension-based website-based one, but am currently actively in the market for such a thing for slightly-high-context reasons I'll put in the tags.

Browser, PDF

Firefox and Chrome both have built-in PDF readers which are, like, basically functional and fine, even if not actively notably-good. I'm unaware of any browser-based PDF-reading options better than those two.

Browser, CBZ

If there exist any good options here, I'm not aware of them.

Windows, EPUB

Calibre's reader is, unfortunately, the best on the market right now. It doesn't have a very good scrolled display mode, which is a mark against it by my standards, and it's a bit slow to open books and has a general sense of background-clunkiness to its UI, but in terms of the quality with which it displays its content in paginated mode—including relatively-uncommon sorts of content that most readers get wrong, like vertical text—it's pretty unparalleled, and moreover it's got a generally wider range of features and UI-customization options than most readers offer. So overall it's my top recommendation on most axes, despite my issues with it.

There's also Sigil. I very emphatically don't actually recommend Sigil as a reader for most purposes—it's marketed as an EPUB editor, lacks various features one would want in a reader, and has a much higher-clutter UI than one would generally want in a reader—but its preview pane's display engine is even more powerful than Calibre's for certain purposes—it can successfully handle EPUBs which contain video content, for instance, which Calibre falls down on—so it can be a useful backup to have on hand for cases where Calibre's display-capabilities break down.

Windows, PDF

I use SumatraPDF and think it's pretty good. It's very much built for reading, rather than editing / formfilling / etc.; it's fast-to-launch, fast-to-load-pages, not too hard to configure to look nice on most PDFs, and generally lightweight in its UI.

When I need to do fancier things, I fall back on Adobe Reader, which is much more clunky on pretty much every axis for purposes of reading but which supports form-filling and suchlike pretty comprehensively.

(But I haven't explored this field in huge amounts of depth; plausibly there exist better options that I'm unaware of, particularly on the Adobe-reader-ish side of things. (I'd be a bit more surprised if there were something better than SumatraPDF within its niche, for Windows, and very interested in hearing about any such thing if it does exist.))

Windows, CBZ

My usual CBZ-reader for day-to-day use—which I also use for PDF-based comics, since it has various features which are better than SumatraPDF for the comic-reading use case in particular—is an ancient one called CDisplayEx which, despite its age, still manages to be a solid contender for best in its field; it's reasonably performant, it has most of the features I need (good handling of spreads, a toggle for left-to-right versus right-to-left reading, a good set of options for setting how the pages are fit into the monitor, the ability to force it forward by just one page when it's otherwise in two-page mode, et cetera), and in general it's a solid functional bit of software, at least by the standards of its field.

The reason I describe CDisplayEx as only "a solid contender for" best in its field, though, is: recently I had cause to try out YACReader, a reader I tried years ago on Windows and dismissed at the time, on Linux; and it was actually really good, like basically as good as CDisplayEx is on Windows. I haven't tried the more recent versions of YACReader on Windows directly, yet; but it seems pretty plausible that my issues with the older version are now resolved, that the modern Windows version is comparable to the Linux version, and therefore that it's on basically the same level as CDisplayEx quality-wise.

Mac, EPUB/PDF/CBZ

I don't use Mac often enough to have opinions here beyond "start with whatever cross-platform thing is good elsewhere, as a baseline, and go on from there". Don't settle for any EPUB reader on Mac worse than the Calibre one, since Calibre works on Mac. (I've heard vague good things about Apple's native one; maybe it's actually a viable option?) Don't settle for any CBZ reader on Mac worse than YACReader, since YACReader works on Mac. Et cetera. (For PDFs I don't have any advice on what to use even as baseline, unfortunately; for whatever reason, PDF readers, or at least the better ones, seem to tend not to be natively cross-platform.)

Linux, EPUB

For the most part, my advice is the same as Windows: just go with the Calibre reader (and maybe use Sigil as a backup for edge cases). However, if you, like me, prefer scrolled EPUB-reading over paginated EPUB-reading, I'd also suggest checking out Foliate; while it's less powerful than the Calibre reader overall, with fewer features and more propensity towards breaking in edge cases, it's basically functional for normal books lacking unusual/tricky formatting, and, unlike Calibre, it has an actually-good scrolled display mode.

Linux, PDF

I have yet to find any options I'm fully satisfied with here, for the "fast launch and fast rendering and functional lightweight UI" niche that I use SumatraPDF for on Windows. Among the less-good-but-still-functional options I've tried out: SumatraPDF launched via Wine takes a while to start up, but once launched it has the usual nice SumatraPDF featureset. Zathura with the MuPDF backend is very pleasantly-fast, but has a somewhat-unintuitive keyboard-centric control scheme and is hard to configure. And qpdfview offers a nice general-purpose PDF-reading UI, including being quick to launch, but its rendering backend is slower than either Sumatra's or Zathura's so it's less good for paging quickly through large/heavy PDFs.

Linux, CBZ

YACReader, as mentioned previously in the Windows section, is pretty definitively the best option I've found here, and its Linux version is a solid ~equal to CDisplayEx's Windows version. Like CDisplayEx, it's also better than more traditional PDF readers for reading PDF-based comics.

iOS/iPadOS, EPUB

My current main reading app is Marvin. However, it hasn't been updated in years, and is no longer available on the app store, so I'm currently in the process of getting ready to migrate elsewhere in anticipation of Marvin's likely permanent breakage some time in the next few years. Thus I will omit detailed discussion of Marvin and instead discuss the various other at-least-vaguely-comparably-good options on the market.

For general-purpose reading, including scrolled reading if that's your thing, Apple's first-party Books app turns out to be surprisingly good. It's not the best in terms of customization of display-style, but it's basically solidly functional, moreso than the vast majority of the apps on the market.

For reading of books with vertical text in particular, meanwhile, I use Yomu, which is literally the only reader I've encountered to date on any platform which has what I'd consider to be a sensible and high-quality way of handling scrolled reading of vertical-text-containing books. While I don't recommend it for more general purposes, due to awkward handling of EPUBs' tables of contents (namely, kind of ignoring them and doing its own alternate table-of-contents thing it thinks is better), it is extremely good for that particular niche, as well as being more generally solid-aside-from-the-TOC-thing.

iOS/iPadOS, PDF

I use GoodReader. I don't know if it's the best in the market, but it's very solidly good enough for everything I've tried to do with it thus far. It's fast; its UI is good at getting out of my way, while still packing in all the features I want as options when I go looking for them (most frequently switching between two-page-with-front-cover and two-page-without-front-cover display for a given book); also in theory it has a bunch of fancy PDF-editing features for good measure, although in practice I never use those and can't comment on their quality. But, as a reader, it's very solidly good enough for me, and I wish I could get a reader like it for desktop.

iOS/iPadOS, CBZ

YACReader has an iOS version; following the death of my former favorite comic reader for iOS (ComicRack), it's very solidly the best option I'm aware of on the market. (And honestly would be pretty competitive even if ComicRack were still around.) I recommend it here as I do on Linux.

Android, EPUB/PDF/CBZ

It's been years since I've had an Android device, and accordingly have very little substantial advice here. (I'm expecting to move back to Android for my next phone-and-maybe-also-tablet, out of general preferring-open-hardware-and-software-when-practical feelings, but it'll plausibly be a while, because Apple is much better at long-lasting hardware and software than any Android manufacturers I'm aware of.) For EPUB, I recall Moon+ reader was the best option I could find back circa 2015ish, but that's long enough ago that plausibly things have changed substantially at this point. For CBZ, both YACReader and CDisplayEx have Android versions, although I haven't tried either and so can't comment on their quality. For PDF, you're on your own; I have no memories or insights there.

Conclusion

...and that's it. If there are other major platforms on which ebook-reader software can be chosen, I'm failing to think of them currently, and this is what I've got for all platforms I have managed to think of.

In the future... well, I hope my own reader-in-development (slated for 1.0.0 release as a Firefox extension with only EPUB support, with ambitions of eventually expanding to cover other platforms and other formats) will one day join this recommendation-pile, but it's currently not yet in anything resembling a recommendable form. And I hope that there are lots of good reader-development projects in progress that I currently don't know about; but, if there are, I currently don't know about them.

So, overall, this is all I've got! I hope it's helpful.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (TONIGHT, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

#15yrsago New York Times webteam nukes the careers of many journalists https://web.archive.org/web/20090511024122/http://www.thomascrampton.com/newspapers/reporter-to-ny-times-publisher-you-erased-my-career/

#15yrsago It’s Useful to Have a Duck/It’s Useful to Have a Boy: great board-book tells the story from two points of view https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/08/its-useful-to-have-a-duck-its-useful-to-have-a-boy-great-board-book-tells-the-story-from-two-points-of-view/

#10yrsago Fast food workers around the world to strike on May 15 http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/7/fast-food-workersuniteactivistsannounceglobalprotest.html

#10yrsago Former NSA boss defends breaking computer security (in the name of national security) https://www.wired.com/2014/05/alexander-defends-use-of-zero-days/

#10yrsago Tor: network security for domestic abuse survivors https://web.archive.org/web/20140509221534/http://betaboston.com/news/2014/05/07/as-domestic-abuse-goes-digital-shelters-turn-to-counter-surveillance-with-tor/

#10yrsago The Oversight: conspiracies, magic, and the end of the world https://memex.craphound.com/2014/05/08/the-oversight-conspiracies-magic-and-the-end-of-the-world/

#10yrsago Charlie Stross on NSA network sabotage https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/05/the-snowden-leaks-a-meta-narra.html

#10yrsago Peter “brokep” Sunde launches campaign for Finnish Pirate Party MEP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fModmx3U8HI

#5yrsago Test your understanding of evolutionary psychology with this rigorous quiz https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/05/evolutionary-psychology-quiz

#5yrsago Why “collapse” (not “rot”) is the way to think about software problems https://hal.science/hal-02117588/document

#5yrsago Human Rights Watch reverse-engineered the app that the Chinese state uses to spy on people in Xinjiang https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2019/05/02/china-how-mass-surveillance-works-xinjiang

#5yrsago Google will now delete your account activity on a rolling basis https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols/webandapp?view=item&otzr=1&pli=1

#5yrsago Charter’s new way to be terrible: no more prorated cancellations https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/charter-squeezes-more-money-out-of-internet-users-with-new-cancellation-policy/

#1yrago California to smash prison e-profiteers https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/08/captive-audience/#good-at-their-jobs

[paradise-in-k4]

Bunbunmaru Lost Word Report - 11/8/24

Ayayayayayayaya! This is our special report for 3 and a half years after the Lost Word Incidents started up here, and it all culminates from a special Dev Letter livestream. Missed it? Here’s the YouTube link! Server maintenance for the update will take place on November 10th, 11 PM EST.

Say “Ayayaya!” For Hourai Hobbies!

(11/11 - 12/5)

Did you wanna see more of my beautiful face? Now you can with this Say “Ayayaya!” Epic Prayer for C3< Aya Shameimaru and a 5 Star Story Card, “Phantom Photo” to remember her by too! Rated A by the community for “AYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYA”

On a similar note, a second Epic Prayer for C3< Alice Margatroid titled Hourai Hobbies is also available with another matching 5 Star Story Card, “100th Black Market” based on that same game! Rated D by the community for “Dud Dolls Despite Her Best Effort” but at least she’s on the tier list.

As a special bonus, the Faded Divine Spirit Pure Prayer featuring L0g Kanako Yasaka is here too! This is the 2nd Pure Friend that’s being added to the game, so just a reminder. There Are No Dolls To Substitute. The only way to Limit Break her is with a duplicate, which adds up to pulling her 5 times to unlock and max out. This banner is only for God Crystals only, so the Yorigamis might be harping over your bad financial decisions here… just like the Pure Exchange Emas that are for sale in the shop in step-down bundles. The first one goes for $79.99 USD immediately. Yikes! These bundles stay until December 12th.

Doesn’t matter which way you roll, all three banners also have a chance to reveal either L0g Kanako Yasaka or Sanae Kochiya as a rerun! According to the community, they’re both rated SS on their community tier list, so with just a bit of Tewi’s luck and a lot of financial support, you could meet them yourself! The odds aren’t increased for them outside of their own banners, which means they’re just as likely to drop as an unfeatured character. All 3 new characters also have trial quests, where you can get to play with them as Guest Characters assumingly at max level.

Take it Icy!

Yukkuri Cirno is coming. I repeat, Yukkuri Cirno is coming! Meet her in the new story, “Take it Icy!” Find it in: Explore -> Yukkuri -> Yukkuri-Verse

AA Cirno will now appear in the Yukkuri Prayer, changing the drop rates for each Yukkuri character to 33.333… ongoing forever percent.

All three Yukkuri characters will have English voices added to their voiceover selections. Yep, that’s audible English! Talk about Easy!

A Yukkuri Campaign for the 3.5th Anniversary comes in full of tasks is incoming following maintenance through the end of the year (12/31). Clear them for Spirit Points and Yukkuri Prayer Tickets!

Lossy’s Title

You can now put a title on your profile for everyone else to see! These are basically achievements that you can win for doing stuff in the game after you meet the goals for it. Longtime players can win a number of titles retroactively because of stuff they already completed a while back, while other titles start counting after maintenance ends. The latter’s probably numbers.

Anniversary Campaigns

Super EXP Quest - Play and play until you drop! This quick and easy stage awards lots of EXP and has no daily limit! (- 12/5)

Login Bonus - 15 days full of bonuses including 45 Seal Crystals and 15 Fortune Dust! (11/12 - 12/31)

Daily Presents - Free stuff just for logging in, sent right to your mailbox!

Special Ritual Campaign - Tasks for an all-encompassing gacha banner containing a lot of characters, including Festival and Ultra Festival! (- 12/31)

Hifuu LostWord Clear Campaign - Finished the 3rd chapter of the Hifuu story? No? Clear stages in Universe L? to get materials and Lucky Mirrors! (- 12/31)

Everyone Wins! Campaign - Log on for 30 days between the end of maintenance and January 16, 2025 to qualify for a payout of 600 God Crystals and 50 Seal Crystals for FREE! You’ll also be qualified for a chance to win a Yukkuri Cushion! Crystal payouts will be distributed between (2/20/25 - 3/31/25)

Comeback Login Bonus - Players that haven’t logged in for 2 weeks or more can win special rewards including a 3.5th Anniversary COMEBACK Ultra Festival Exchange Ema (character details unknown, ends 12/31)

Anniversary Packs - See Nitori in the shop about those. (- 12/31)

Limited Time Costumes - Multiple limited-time costumes are returning for the anniversary, including two new ones for Kasen Ibaraki and Lily White! (- 12/31)

Other Stuff

New Lunar Capital Expo

Extra Stages are being added with 6 daily attempts. See it after finishing the main event storyline! (- 11/19)

VS: Divergent Spirits - 2 New Challengers (- 11/28)

L1 Minoriko Aki with a chance to win the 5 Star Story Card “Expo Photographer”

L1 Keiki Haniyasushin with the chance to win the 5 Star Story Card “The Model Maker”

Both can award the Luck Story Card “It’s Just Like I Heard”

3x drop rates in the main story, Hifuu, and Yukkuri stages (- 11/28)

Advanced Challenge Ongoing (- 11/19)

Event Pick Up Prayer for Son Biten, Enoko Mitsugashiram and Chiyari Tenkajin Ongoing (- 11/19)

Kourindou Slot Login Bonus and Aya Assistance Ongoing (- 11/30)

“Foxindigo” Home BGM Giveaway Ongoing (- 12/31) and a hint that this might be L80 Ran’s song

[lossis]

Hey you! Yeah, you, do you like an exploration of adulthood and generational trauma? How about, what it means to be a parent? How kindness can be crushed and then reinstilled? Grief and what it is to be human?!?!

If yes, then BOY DO I HAVE THE FIC FOR YOU.

The Foam that Rolls Beteen the Waves, is a Hetalia Ancients fic concerning the Nation of Mycenae, AKA Ancient Greece, and her thousands years old mental breakdown!

It has a lot of crying and a lot of betrayal and a lot of overtly inhuman Nations. That's what the Eldritch Nations tag is for!

With our dear protagonist we have:

Minoooooan dad! (caused trauma)

Cycladic daaaaaad! (also caused trauma)

Egyptian lady! (likes wine a bit too much)

Hittite child from the 'a knife!' vine! (hangs out with horses more than people)

A short Sumerian gremlin! (oh my fucking god this man has so much trauma and PTSD I did not mean to be this cruel to him I am so sorry guys-)

AND MANY MORE TO COME!

Here are some of my favourite (non spoilery) excerpts:

1 “Fine, in which yard do you want me to wai-” 

“The central, now leave ” And he slammed the door on her face.

2 Obviously, she couldn’t understand a word, but it was still suspicious...

3 The guard groaned. “It’s... nice. But one shouldn’t stay in for long. It can lead into dangerous paths. The women there are especially...” he paused for a moment. “... they always frightened me. Maenads. Priestesses of Dionysus. That’s why I only slept with men there.”  

Anyways I'll drop art of the fic soon enough ok bye!

[belsaas]

An ode to the iRiver iHP-120

For whatever reason, I've found myself deeply nostalgic for high school as of late. And for me, that is intractable from nostalgia for what is perhaps the peak mp3 player ever made:

The iRiver iHP-120 was released in 2003, my sophomore year of high school, and it changed my life. This thing held an astounding 10GB of music—for comparison, most mp3 players at the time were flash based, and held 128 or 256 MB of music. The only big competitor at the time was the 1st generation iPod, a mac-exclusive device that transferred data over firewire and had to be synced using the fledgling iTunes. Juxtapose that to iRiver, who took what I like to call the "we don't give a fuck" approach:

When you plugged in the iHP-120 with USB 2.0, it just showed up as an external hard drive—you could throw whatever you wanted on there. Naturally, it could read mp3 files, but this thing introduced me to the world of audio codecs and processing in a way nothing could have prepared me. WMA files worked fine (a big deal at the time because of DRM issues, during the heyday of KaZaA and Limewire). You want to play uncompressed .WAV files? No problem, put them on there. FLAC files? Absolutely, let your audiophile freak flag fly. Fucking OGG Vorbis files played on this thing. Hell, you could put text files on here and read them.

(The firmware for these was also basically open-source, and people did even crazier stuff with them. By the time I retired my player, it could do gapless playback, crossfading, 10-band equalizing, normalization and more. I think I also changed the boot screen to a picture of Sailor Moon.)

But the magic didn't end at uploading music to the iHP-120—controlling this thing was more intuitive than any other device around at the time. All of your music was displayed on the player in whatever folder structure you loaded onto the device—navigating the music was as simple as using Windows Explorer. You had your standard play/pause, skip forward/back and volume controls on the front joystick, but what are the other buttons for?

Yeah. This thing was also a portable recorder. At anytime you could just hold down the Rec button and start recording with the onboard mic, or using an external input (more on that later). On the right side, an A-B Interval control. You ever wanted to just listen to one part of a song on repeat to learn the lyrics? Just hold down the button. Lastly a hold switch to disable control inputs while it was in your pocket—no accidentally pausing the music.

Okay, back to the external input mentioned before. The top of the iHP-120 is wild.

The top I/O panel of the iRiver iHP-120, with 4 jacks.

From right to left, you have a 3.5mm headphone jack (naturally), a 2.5mm microphone jack, the remote control port (more on this in a bit), and in white you have Line In/Out jacks which you could use to record as well as just plug in a second pair of headphones for a friend—jacks which support both 3.5mm analog input, as well as 3.5mm TOSLINK optical cables.

The TOSLINK 3.5mm male plug. A plug I only ever encountered on this device and the Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium, a sound card I wrote a review of in 2009 which seems to still be up at PC Gamer and reading it now I don't know how any of my writing was ever published, let alone in print.

Chances are good you've never encountered this, it's phenomenally uncommon, and TOSLINK as a whole largely died with the emergence of HDMI—but this fucking mp3 player could both record and transmit fiber optic audio in uncompressed stereo or lossy 7.1 surround sound. In high school, I would plug the iHP-120 into our home theatre and listened to Porcupine Tree's Stupid Dream on repeat (side tangent, I'm pretty sad 5.1 album recording never really caught on, but the Dolby Atmos music format is better in every way, and I'm grateful Apple is bringing it into the mainstream).

"Okay, so we have an music player/text reader/voice recorder with optical audio, and basically every codec under the sun, what else could you go on about Erika?"

-you, the person reading this

THE REMOTE

Let me take you back to 2003. I was a depressed theatre kid teenager who would listen to Rooney on repeat on my Koss UR40s while crying over a girl who wanted nothing to do with me.

The Koss UR40 Headphones I wore like a fashion accessory everyday.

The other thing I wore everyday besides those headphones? Baggy cargo pants (it was acceptable at the time, I swear). Inside the right cargo pocket was my iRiver iHP-120, and clipped to the velcro flap of that cargo pocket was the iHP-115R remote control.

The iHP-120 remote unit

Every function of the iHP-120 could be controlled from this little fucker. Play/pause and stop buttons. Volume, skip track and recording are all here on rocker switches. You could even change the fucking bitrate of playback on this little thing, all without taking the actual mp3 player out of your pocket because the LCD screen on the remote has all the same info you'd get on the main unit.

The remote itself connected to the iRiver with that big plug you can see in the picture above (shamelessly stolen from Nathan Edwards who I worked with at PC Gamer in the late 2000s and only while writing this post discovered has already written a much more professional ode to the beauty of the iHP-120 this year).

You would plug your headphones into the remote, (or in my case you could also plug in your 1988 Chevrolet 2500 suburban's tape deck adaptor and have controls at your fingertips. No more distracted driving).

An image of a 1988 Chevorlet 2500 diesel Suburban. Not super relevant but god I miss my high school suburban. We would take the rear and middle benches out and put a queen-size mattress in the back, which 9 of my friends would ride on as we went to Little Caesar's for lunch. Also, cars just looked way fucking better back then.

I think I'm about done waxing nostalgic, but I really do miss the days of discrete devices—I kind of find myself fighting back against my smartphone. I have a camera I carry around, a pen and paper planner and writing notebook, and a kindle for reading. There's something appealing about not having my phone be my access to music either—rather, having a device that I just threw my music on and it plays it really well was rad. The iHP-120 was really fucking rad.

[consistencydotcom]

That can bother a real variant teacher and take it around and you need to go back and evolve that a riddle of rain teenager and takes a rally out and take your right teacher completely out of here it's so much of couthey're out did you write Kendrick I'm pretty idiot some of the questions is that humor you're smart and intelligent I will continue to expect you to be smart and touch it at a time though it uses fsen's butts to procrastinate reasons no it's adults here because I could want yo and you've you want to use the brain and says I'll go gave you one slut it'll never go and keep on setting all of our gun and you'll get it right here I'm pretty Italian somebody

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[draconianfleet]

You don't know me so feel free to not answer if this is too personal or an imposition, but what's it like being a system and how did you find out?

So, late reply, but you could very well be a system.

Anyways, one of the ways you can tell is if there are apparent lapses in memory (this would be dissociative). Though you don’t need that, there can just as well be thoughts/voices which are fairly distinct and have some type of consistency to them like another person/non-person (some entities are like that). It could also just as well be emotions that have some intuitive knowing of, “these aren’t/wouldn’t be my emotions” which is another thing to look out for. Then there’s always the chance that is just… it just feels right.

Ultimately it’s up to you. Though, if you are comfortable with the idea of having a headmate, you should probably do some introspection. Perhaps you ride it out, perhaps you poke it until it blossoms or shrivels up.

As for how it’s like for us? We share most/all memories, though ones of other headmates have a… fog… a resistance to them that gives a very alien feeling of “this isn’t really mine, but it kindof is.” We behave very distinctly if you know what to look for. So what might look to a neurotypical/nonsystem(perhaps) as “a mood” is actually a different entity. We also interact intra-system thanks to our rather large amount of imagination processing power. Our relations have me(Aury) and Kait being partners/mates (take your pick, but we are close and have known eachother for 5-6 years now). Not all systems interact intra-system though so it doesn’t preclude you. It’s nice, comfy even, to just know you aren’t alone. It’s beautiful to be able to know you can always lean on someone.

As for how we found out? Our other headmate Shade split off Kait and had full dissociation fronting, since there would be things that happened that she had absolutely no recollection of, and not in the adhd memory lossy way, that feels different. But well that was only noticeable in hindsight since it was “normal”, I came in like a meteor with shared consciousness but very distinct thought processes by virtue of my source material. I won’t go into specifics, but in some respects I am neither fictive nor factive. Shade also no longer has full dissociation since I fucked with our head a bit and got dissociative barriers to lower and also unlocked a few memories that previously were “blacked-out” from memory.

Have any further questions? Go ahead and reply, I’ll try to answer.