#gadgets 2019
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drawfee-quot3s · 1 year ago
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[about the emergency fabulous grenade]
it's for when you're the only one serving
and i don't mean the food
- karina
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some-melon · 11 months ago
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Some Old Art of Gadget I Found
Going thru some old post and files, when i came across old art i made of gadget LOOL
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Found this in my old 3ds files. sadly idk when i made this due to my sd going RAW and when i recovered my files they got redated to when they were recovered, but ik i made this when i was 15, maybe around dec 2019 all the way to april 2020
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These two i found on my personal insta- they were posted in march 2020 when i was 15 LOLOL second one he looks so judgmental i wish i could remember the context....
Hope i can find more, i just need to get my old art out of my dads place, i left my boxes of old sketchbooks there bru
gadget brainrot lasts forever
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joethetoonfanandoutcast · 3 months ago
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An attempt at a Disney crossover Walmart Super Bowl ad
With the Super Bowl tomorrow, I thought I'd give a script for another commercial that'd be like the usual commercials we see. I remember them doing two commercials with Walmart where famous visitors arrived to pick up their online orders, one car-themed and one space-themed.
I thought I'd do one with Disney characters. Now Disney has a massive character library and only few can make it in a 1-2-minute commercial for a superstore like Walmart.
So here are the lucky ones who did make it.
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(Music: "When Can I See You Again?" by Owl City)
Racing to the nearest Walmart store are Ralph and Vanellope on her candy kart, Herbie the Love Bug, the Incredibile, the 1999-2003 Gadgetmobile, and Roger Rabbit, Jessica and Baby Herman in Benny the Cab.
Benny: So where to, my meter's runnin'?
Roger: Jeepers, Benny, we gotta pick up some new paints at Walmart!
At the Walmart parking lot, the Pizza Planet truck ran right through a hedge, destroying it, yet it parallel parked perfectly. A couple employees opened the doors and saw nothing but a dummy in a trench coat to make it look like someone was driving, along with Andy's toys lying inside in toy mode.
A second Walmart employee carried a bag filled with circus food as its customers who ordered, both the original animated Dumbo and his live-action counterpart, came flapping down and arriving to pick up their groceries.
Walmart Employee #2: Here are the peanuts, popcorn and cotton candy you ordered, Dumbos.
Both Dumbos trumpeted happily, though the second Dumbo's trumpet blew Timothy back a bit.
The third Walmart employee brought out a pair of bags for Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, though Flora frowned at the bag's color.
Flora: Make it pink!
She used her wand to turn the bags pink, to the annoyance of Merryweather.
Merryweather: Oooh! Make it blue.
She used her wand to revert the bag back to its first color.
The fourth Walmart employee handed bags filled with bear-shaped honey containers to Pooh (your choice between his animated form, the puppet form from Book of Pooh, or the Christopher Robin (2018) form).
Walmart Employee #4: That's fifteen bottles of honey, Pooh. Hope you make them last.
Then without warning, Tigger came out of nowhere, pouncing the poor teddy bear and spilling a couple of the bottles on the sidewalk.
Pooh: Oh bother.
Then the fifth employee looked up to see Mary Poppins floating down in his direction, with his mouth dropping in utter shock.
Mary: (once she's in front of him) Close your mouth, Ryan. You're not a codfish.
The employee (whose name is Ryan apparently) closed his mouth.
Fagin with his dogs and Oliver came on his motorized cart to pick up the dog food he ordered, but he left his money elsewhere, so he offered to trade a gold watch he had, in which a spring had popped out.
Walmart Employee #6: You can just take one of our cards and charge it to that, sir.
Then a floating pirate ship, the Jolly Roger, appeared from the sky and descended down onto the lot, and a gang-plank was dropped down.
Captain Hook: I believe you have something for me.
Walmart Employee #7: (hands filled grocery bags to the pirates) Ah yes, your foods. And your new hand.
He pulled out a new prosthetic hand, handing it to Smee, who promptly replaced the hook with it. Then, Peter Pan swooped in out of nowhere, stealing the fake hand and laughing.
Captain Hook: Grrr! Blast you, Pan!
Mater the Tow Truck drove through the parking lot backwards to the confusion of the personel.
Mater: Whooooo! Git 'er done!
He then used his tow to snag a bag of items from the eighth employee's hands. Then a humongous thud and rumble occurred, scaring everyone there and shaking up the lot. They looked and saw that a giant peach had descended onto the parking lot. A little boy, James Henry Trotter, crawled up from the side and spoke to the employee below.
James: Sir, are we at the Empire State Building?
Walmart Employee #9: No, you're at Walmart.
Then six giant bugs, Centipede, Miss Spider, Grasshopper, Ladybug, Earthworm, and Glowworm, came up beside the boy.
Centipede: Oh terrific! I need some vittles before I waste away.
The employee was creeped out by six giant bugs to the point where he fainted and dropped the bags.
Centipede: Was it something I said?
Walmart. Save money, live better. (Imagine the slogan in Disney font)
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What do you think? If it was filmed and animated, would it be one you would air during the Super Bowl?
There are millions of other eligible Disney characters that would have worked (including ones from Marvel and Lucasfilm) but I didn't want to overkill for a 2-minute commercial, especially if the rest could saved for a sequel commercial.
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milkyberryjsk · 1 year ago
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i got back into r6
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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months ago
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The paradox of choice screens
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I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).
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It's official: the DOJ has won its case, and Google is a convicted monopolist. Over the next six months, we're gonna move into the "remedy" phase, where we figure out what the court is going to order Google to do to address its illegal monopoly power:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve
That's just the beginning, of course. Even if the court orders some big, muscular remedies, we can expect Google to appeal (they've already said they would) and that could drag out the case for years. But that can be a feature, not a bug: a years-long appeal will see Google on its very best behavior, with massive, attendant culture changes inside the company. A Google that's fighting for its life in the appeals court isn't going to be the kind of company that promotes a guy whose strategy for increasing revenue is to make Google Search deliberately worse, so that you will have to do more searches (and see more ads) to get the info you're seeking:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
It's hard to overstate how much good stuff can emerge from a company that's mired itself in antitrust hell with extended appeals. In 1982, IBM wriggled off the antitrust hook after a 12-year fight that completely transformed the company's approach to business. After more than a decade of being micromanaged by lawyers who wanted to be sure that the company didn't screw up its appeal and anger antitrust enforcers, IBM's executives were totally transformed. When the company made its first PC, it decided to use commodity components (meaning anyone could build a similar PC by buying the same parts), and to buy its OS from an outside vendor called Micros-Soft (meaning competing PCs could use the same OS), and it turned a blind eye to the company that cloned the PC ROM, enabling companies like Dell, Compaq and Gateway to enter the market with "PC clones" that cost less and did more than the official IBM PC:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/ibm-pc-compatible-how-adversarial-interoperability-saved-pcs-monopolization
The big question, of course, is whether the court will order Google to break up, say, by selling off Android, its ad-tech stack, and Chrome. That's a question I'll address on another day. For today, I want to think about how to de-monopolize browsers, the key portal to the internet. The world has two extremely dominant browsers, Safari and Chrome, and each of them are owned by an operating system vendor that pre-installs their own browser on their devices and pre-selects them as the default.
Defaults matter. That's a huge part of Judge Mehta's finding in the Google case, where the court saw evidence from Google's own internal research suggesting that people rarely change defaults, meaning that whatever the gadget does out of the box it will likely do forever. This puts a lie to Google's longstanding defense of its monopoly power: "choice is just a click away." Sure, it's just a click away – a click, you're pretty sure no one is ever going to make.
This means that any remedy to Google's browser dominance is going to involve a lot of wrangling about defaults. That's not a new wrangle, either. For many years, regulators and tech companies have tinkered with "choice screens" that were nominally designed to encourage users to try out different browsers and brake the inertia of the big two browsers that came bundled with OSes.
These choice screens have a mixed record. Google's 2019 Android setup choice screen for the European Mobile Application Distribution Agreement somehow managed to result in the vast majority of users sticking with Chrome. Microsoft had a similar experience in 2010 with BrowserChoice.eu, its response to the EU's 2000s-era antitrust action:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
Does this mean that choice screens don't work? Maybe. The idea of choice screens comes to us from the "choice architecture" world of "nudging," a technocratic pseudoscience that grew to prominence by offering the promise that regulators could make big changes without having to do any real regulating:
https://verfassungsblog.de/nudging-after-the-replication-crisis/
Nudge research is mired in the "replication crisis" (where foundational research findings turn out to be nonreplicable, due to bad research methodology, sloppy analysis, etc) and nudge researchers keep getting caught committing academic fraud:
https://www.ft.com/content/846cc7a5-12ee-4a44-830e-11ad00f224f9
When the first nudgers were caught committing fraud, more than a decade ago, they were assumed to be outliers in an otherwise honest and exciting field:
https://www.npr.org/2016/10/01/496093672/power-poses-co-author-i-do-not-believe-the-effects-are-real
Today, it's hard to find much to salvage from the field. To the extent the field is taken seriously today, it's often due to its critics repeating the claims of its boosters, a process Lee Vinsel calls "criti-hype":
https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
For example, the term "dark patterns" lumps together really sneaky tactics with blunt acts of fraud. When you click an "opt out of cookies" button and get a screen that says "Success!" but which has a tiny little "confirm" button on it that you have to click to actually opt out, that's not a "dark pattern," it's just a scam:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/27/beware-of-the-leopard/#relentless
By ascribing widespread negative effects to subtle psychological manipulation ("dark patterns") rather than obvious and blatant fraud, we inadvertently elevate "nudging" to a real science, rather than a cult led by scammy fake scientists.
All this raises some empirical questions about choice screens: do they work (in the sense of getting people to break away from defaults), and if so, what's the best way to make them work?
This is an area with a pretty good literature, as it turns out, thanks in part due to some natural experiments, like when Russia forced Google to offer choice screens for Android in 2017, but didn't let Google design that screen. The Russian policy produced a significant switch away from Google's own apps to Russian versions, primarily made by Yandex:
https://cepr.org/publications/dp17779
In 2023, Mozilla Research published a detailed study in which 12,000 people from Germany, Spain and Poland set up simulated mobile and desktop devices with different kinds of choice screens, a project spurred on by the EU's Digital Markets Act, which is going to mandate choice screens starting this year:
https://research.mozilla.org/browser-competition/choicescreen/
I'm spending this week reviewing choice screen literature, and I've just read the Mozilla paper, which I found very interesting, albeit limited. The biggest limitation is that the researchers are getting users to simulate setting up a new device and then asking them how satisfied they are with the experience. That's certainly a question worth researching, but a far more important question is "How do users feel about the setup choices they made later, after living with them on the devices they use every day?" Unfortunately, that's a much more expensive and difficult question to answer, and beyond the scope of this paper.
With that limitation in mind, I'm going to break down the paper's findings here and draw some conclusions about what we should be looking for in any kind of choice screen remedy that comes out of the DOJ antitrust victory over Google.
The first thing note is that people report liking choice screens. When users get to choose their browsers, they expect to be happy with that choice; by contrast, users are skeptical that they'll like the default browser the vendor chose for them. Users don't consider choice screens to be burdensome, and adding a choice screen doesn't appreciably increase setup time.
There are some nuances to this. Users like choice screens during device setup but they don't like choice screens that pop up the first time they use a browser. That makes total sense: "choosing a browser" is colorably part of the "setting up your gadget" task. By contrast, the first time you open a browser on a new device, it's probably to get something else done (e.g. look up how to install a piece of software you used on your old device) and being interrupted with a choice screen at that moment is an unwelcome interruption. This is the psychology behind those obnoxious cookie-consent pop-ups that website bombard you with when you first visit them: you've clicked to that website because you need something it has, and being stuck with a privacy opt-out screen at that moment is predictably frustrating (which is why companies do it, and also why the DMA is going to punish companies that do).
The researchers experimented with different kinds of choice screens, varying the number of browsers on offer and the amount of information given on each. Again, users report that they prefer more choices and more information, and indeed, more choice and more info is correlated with choosing indie, non-default browsers, but this effect size is small (<10%), and no matter what kind of choice screen users get, most of them come away from the experience without absorbing any knowledge about indie browsers.
The order in which browsers are presented has a much larger effect than how many browsers or how much detail is present. People say they want lots of choices, but they usually choose one of the first four options. That said, users who get choice screens say it changes which browser they'd choose as a default.
Some of these contradictions appear to stem from users' fuzziness on what "default browser" means. For an OS vendor, "default browser" is the browser that pops up when you click a link in an email or social media. For most users, "default browser" means "the browser pinned to my home screen."
Where does all this leave us? I think it cashes out to this: choice screens will probably make a appreciable, but not massive, difference in browser dominance. They're cheap to implement, have no major downsides, and are easy to monitor. Choice screens might be needed to address Chrome's dominance even if the court orders Google to break off Chrome and stand it up as a separate business (we don't want any browser monopolies, even if they're not owned by a search monopolist!). So yeah, we should probably make a lot of noise to the effect that the court should order a choice screen, as part of a remedy.
That choice screen should be presented during device setup, with the choices presented in random order – with this caveat: Chrome should never appear in the top four choices.
All of that would help address the browser duopoly, even if it doesn't solve it. I would love to see more market-share for Firefox, which is the browser I've used every day for more than a decade, on my laptop and my phone. Of course, Mozilla has a role to play here. The company says it's going to refocus on browser quality, at the expense of the various side-hustles it's tried, which have ranged from uninteresting to catastrophically flawed:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91167564/mozilla-wants-you-to-love-firefox-again
For example, there was the tool to automatically remove your information from scummy data brokers, that they outsourced to a scummy data-broker:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/22/24109116/mozilla-ends-onerep-data-removal-partnership
And there's the "Privacy Preserving Attribution" tracking system that helps advertisers target you with surveillance advertising (in a way that's less invasive than existing techniques). Mozilla rolled this into Firefox on an opt out basis, and made opting out absurdly complicated, suggesting that it knew that it was imposing something on its users that they wouldn't freely choose:
https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/
They've been committing these kinds of unforced errors for more than a decade, seeking some kind of balance between monopolistic web companies and its users' desire to have a browser that protects them from invasive and unfair practices:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/14/firefox-closed-source-drm-video-browser-cory-doctorow
These compromises represent the fallacy that Mozilla's future depends on keeping bullying entertainment companies and Big Tech happy, so it can go on serving its users. At the same time, these compromises have alienated Mozilla's core users, the technical people who were its fiercest evangelists. Those core users are the authority on technical questions for the normies in their life, and they know exactly how cursed it is for Moz to be making these awful compromises.
Moz has hemorrhaged users over the past decade, meaning they have even less leverage over the corporations demanding that they make more compromises. This sets up a doom loop: make a bad compromise, lose users, become more vulnerable to demands for even worse compromises. "This capitulation puts us in a great position to make a stand in some hypothetical future where we don't instantly capitulate again" is a pretty unconvincing proposition.
After the past decade's heartbreaks, seeing Moz under new leadership makes me cautiously hopeful. Like I say, I am dependent on Firefox and want an independent, principled browser vendor that sees their role as producing a "user agent" that is faithful to its users' interests above all else:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet
Of course, Moz depends on Google's payment for default search placement for 90% of its revenue. If Google can't pay for this in the future, the org is going to have to find another source of revenue. Perhaps that will be the EU, or foundations, or users. In any of these cases, the org will find it much easier to raise funds if it is standing up for its users – not compromising on their interests.
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Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!
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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/2024/08/12/defaults-matter/#make-up-your-mind-already
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Image: ICMA Photos (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/icma/3635981474/
CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
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numelfanclub · 4 months ago
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Can you draw jjk x demon slayer?
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sure!! i watched demon slayer once back in like... late 2019-2020?? i think?? anyways i don't remember or know all that much about it so i just drew tanjiro and yuuji being buddies or whateva 🙏 i might rewatch demon slayer though because i should prob catch up ^^
[psst @go-go-gadget-autism the satosugu betta fish you asked for 🫶 i love drawing the suguru betta it's so creature]
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if you want to PLEASE suggest more stuff i love drawing suggestions
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truly-sincerely · 2 months ago
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ALEX RIDER (BOOK 1-5) TIMELINE
According to years given in Skeleton Key the books all take place in 2001. Alex Rider's birthday is February 13th, 1987.
Caveat: April 1st, 2001 was a Sunday and while it wasn't explicitly stated as being a Monday in the book, that's the day of the week that makes the most sense based on what events happened on what days. So I've based the days of the week on the 2002 Calendar year (Bonus: April 1st was also on a Monday in 2013 and 2019).
Dates marked with a tilde (~) are approximate
STORMBREAKER
March 12 - Tuesday - Alex told about Ian’s death
March 13 - Wednesday - Ian Rider's Funeral
March 14 - Thursday - Alex almost gets compacted in Ian's car
March 15 - Friday - Alex goes to "the Bank" where he gets tranq'd
March 16 - Saturday - Briefing w/ Blunt and Jones
March 17 - Sunday - Day 1 at Brecon Beacons
March 26 - Tuesday - Killing house (day 10)
March 27 - Wednesday - Big hike (day 11)
March 28 - Thursday - Parachute, gadgets, Yassen briefing (day 12)
March 29 - Friday - Arrives at Sayle Enterprises
March 30 - Saturday - Plays with Stormbreaker
March 31 - Sunday - Yassen arrives 2am, daytime quad bike attack (claustrophobia)
April 1 - Monday - Ceremony at the science museum of london
April 2 - Tuesday - Sayle Yassassinated
POINT BLANK
April 3 - Wednesday - Alex is back at school
April 5 - Friday - Alex commits crane crimes (dissociative episode)
April 6 - Saturday - Point Blanc briefing
April 9 - Tuesday - Fiona Friend plays the most dangerous game
April 10 - Wednesday - Horse vs train (claustrophobia)
April 13 - Saturday - Meets Mrs Stellenbosch, hotel in paris
April 14 - Sunday - Arrives at Point Blanc
~April 22nd - Monday - Hits the panic button
~April 23rd - Tuesday - Captured and monologued
~April 24th - Wednesday - Alex’s 2am escape and funeral
~April 25th - Thursday - SAS raids Point Blanc
May 1 - Wednesday - Alex and Julius death match
SKELETON KEY
Note: There are major timeline problems internal to this book that have repercussions on Scorpia's timeline. This is the only way I could make it make sense with Wimbledon.
May 7 - Tuesday - Summer Term starts
May 24th - Friday - Crawley approaches Alex about Wimbledon
May 27th - Monday - Alex starts training to be a ball boy
June 24th - Monday - Wimbledon Tennis Tournament begins
~June 1st - Monday - Fights the Big Circle gangster
July 13th - Saturday - Arrived in Cornwall for vacation
July 17th - Wednesday - Jet ski attack
July 22nd - Monday - Packed off to Miami
July 23rd - Tuesday - Mayfair Lady explodes
July 24th - Wednesday - Arrived on Cayo Esqueleto
July 25th - Thursday - Scuba diving, shark racism, sugar crusher
July 26th - Friday - Sarov tells Alex about Vladimir
July 27th - Saturday - The Russian president arrives (claustrophobia)
July 28th - Sunday - Refueling stop in Edinburgh, Murmansk
August 2nd - Friday - Jones and Blunt meet to debrief
August 3rd - Saturday - Sabina invites Alex to the South of France
EAGLE STRIKE
August 10th - Saturday - Bomb at the rental (panic attack), bullfight
August 11th - Sunday - Back in London, blows it with Sabina
August 12th - Monday - Gameslayer launch party
August 13th - Tuesday - Meeting Marc Antonio in Paris
August 14th - Wednesday - Spying on Cray in Sloterdijk (claustrophobia)
August 15th - Thursday - Sabina kidnapped by Cray
August 16th - Friday - Cray’s ransom demand
August 17th - Saturday - Eagle Strike
SCORPIA
September 7th - Friday - Alex arrives in Venice
September 9th - Monday - Masquerade at the Widow’s Palace (claustrophobia)
September 10th - Tuesday - School trip leaves Venice without Alex
September 11th - Wednesday - Consanto blows up, dinner with the Widow
September 12th - Thursday - Malagosto
September 24th - Tuesday - Told he’s being sent back to England (suicidal ideation)
September 25th - Wednesday - Football team dies at Heathrow, Alex doesn’t kill Mrs Jones
September 26th - Thursday - Alex attends COBRA, sent back to Scorpia
September 27th - Friday - Invisible Sword
October 5th - Saturday - Alex debriefs, learns about his dad, and gets shot
TV Show Timelines: Season 1 and Season 3 and John & Ian Rider.
Complete Yassassination Count (for both TV and books)
Post where I talk about my methodology
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drawfee-quot3s · 1 year ago
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[disbelievingly]
dondarf snowbonk??
- julia
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fangedxnight1836 · 5 months ago
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Character of the day:
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Virginia Hex aka Jinny Hex
Some information about her:
Jinny Hex is the great-great granddaughter of Jonah Hex.
Joined the Young Justice in the recent comic series (2019).
A former mechanic.
She gained access to the gods eye which used to belong to Jonah Hex, and was what her biological father wanted.
She is a century baby, meaning that she is immortal, and has energy negation.
Is implied to be queer.
Owns a lot of her grandfathers left over weapons and gadgets at the back of her car.
Some HC’s:
Her favourite hero is superman.
She plays resident evil.
She loves her truck. She drove it when she was 12.
She hates when people call her apple jack.
She lives off junk food.
She can defo rap.
She KNOWS EVERYONE.
One time she made everyone clean their shoes after a battle before they got in the truck.
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some-melon · 11 months ago
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holy fuck who allowed this
i need gadget moots NOWNOWNOWNOWNOWWWWW
funfactoid i got fixated on gadget when i was around 15 in late 2019-early 2020 then kinda dropped it out of embarrassment BUT NOW IM BACK BABEEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(i still love the prince of egypt i promise)
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doraemon-facts · 9 months ago
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Doraemon keeps many hammers in his pocket.
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Source: ジークフリート, 1977 (manga)
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Source: モアよドードーよ、永遠に, 1978 (manga)
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Source: 出てくる出てくるお年玉, 1979 (manga)
He uses them to destroy unwanted gadgets.
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Source: 人間製造機, 1974 (manga)
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Source: かがみでコマーシャル, 1977 (manga)
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Source: なぜか劇がメチャクチャに, 1981 (manga)
When overcome by guilt or embarrassment, he sometimes tries to use them to destroy himself.
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Source: 好きでたまらニャい, 1971 (manga)
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Source: Nobita and the Castle of the Undersea Devil, 1983 (manga, Doraemon Long Stories)
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Source: Nobita and the Green Giant Legend, 2008
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Source: Nobita's Chronicle of the Moon Exploration, 2019
Doraemon keeps a lot of other mundane items in his pocket too.
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beardedmrbean · 2 years ago
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California became just the third state in the nation to pass a "right to repair" consumer protection law on Tuesday, following Minnesota and New York, when Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 244. The California Right to Repair bill had originally been introduced in 2019. It passed, nearly unanimously, through the state legislature in September.
“This is a victory for consumers and the planet, and it just makes sense,” Jenn Engstrom, state director of CALPIRG, told iFixit(which was also one of SB244's co-sponsors). “Right now, we mine the planet’s precious minerals, use them to make amazing phones and other electronics, ship these products across the world, and then toss them away after just a few years’ use ... We should make stuff that lasts and be able to fix our stuff when it breaks, and now thanks to years of advocacy, Californians will finally be able to, with the Right to Repair.”
Turns out Google isn't offering seven years of replacement parts and software updates to the Pixel 8 out of the goodness of its un-beating corporate heart. The new law directly stipulates that all electronics and appliances costing $50 or more, and sold within the state after July 1, 2021 (yup, two years ago), will be covered under the legislation once it goes into effect next year, on July 1, 2024. For gear and gadgets that cost between $50 and $99, device makers will have to stock replacement parts and tools, and maintain documentation for three years. Anything over $100 in value gets covered for the full seven-year term. Companies that fail to do so will be fined $1,000 per day on the first violation, $2,000 a day for the second and $5,000 per day per violation thereafter.
There are, of course, carve outs and exceptions to the rules. No, your PS5 is not covered. Not even that new skinny one. None of the game consoles are, neither are alarm systems or heavy industrial equipment that "vitally affects the general economy of the state, the public interest, and the public welfare."
“I’m thrilled that the Governor has signed the Right to Repair Act into law," State Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman, one of the bill's co-sponsors, said. "As I’ve said all along, I’m so grateful to the advocates fueling this movement with us for the past six years, and the manufacturers that have come along to support Californians’ Right to Repair. This is a common sense bill that will help small repair shops, give choice to consumers, and protect the environment.”
The bill even received support from Apple, of all companies. The tech giant famous for its "walled garden" product ecosystem had railed against the idea when it was previously proposed in Nebraska, claiming the state would become "a mecca for hackers." However, the company changed its tune when SB 244 was being debated, writing a letter of support reportedly stating, "We support 'SB 244' because it includes requirements that protect individual users' safety and security as well as product manufacturers' intellectual property."
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antagonistchan · 6 months ago
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in early 2019, there was a trend going around about making Favorite Character Bingo cards. i participated, and recently stumbled upon mine again. i shared it with some friends, and they felt inspired to do their own. in turn, i felt inspired to update mine- for one, it was almost six years out of date, but also i was never that confident in the accuracy of it even back then. i am MUCH more confident in this 2024 update.
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Julian Bashir (Star Trek) | Reisen Udongein Inaba (Touhou) | Legion (Mass Effect) | Luna Platz (Mega Man) | Inspector Gadget (specifically the one from the 1999 Matthew Broderick movie)
Keima Katsuragi (The World God Only Knows) | Epsilon (Red Vs Blue) | Road Rage (Transformers) | KITT (Knight Rider) | Kaoru Seta (Bandori)
Madoka Kaname (Puella Magi Madoka Magica) | Rin Hoshizora (Love Live) | FREE SPACE | Hayate Yagami (Lyrical Nanoha) | Marta Cabrera (Knives Out)
Optimus Prime (Transformers) | IA (Vocaloid) | The Doctor (Doctor Who) | Noire (Hyperdimension Neptunia) | Miku Kohinata (Symphogear)
Sofia de Sainte-Coquille (Rune Factory) | Tsugumi Hazawa (Bandori) | Robo-Ky (Guilty Gear) | Hazumu Osaragi (Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl) | Sideways (Transformers)
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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago
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Subprime gadgets
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I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THIS SUNDAY in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON: YA Fantasy, Room 207, 10 a.m.; Signing, 11 a.m.; Teaching Writing, 2 p.m., Room 213CD.
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The promise of feudal security: "Surrender control over your digital life so that we, the wise, giant corporation, can ensure that you aren't tricked into catastrophic blunders that expose you to harm":
https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/
The tech giant is a feudal warlord whose platform is a fortress; move into the fortress and the warlord will defend you against the bandits roaming the lawless land beyond its walls.
That's the promise, here's the failure: What happens when the warlord decides to attack you? If a tech giant decides to do something that harms you, the fortress becomes a prison and the thick walls keep you in.
Apple does this all the time: "click this box and we will use our control over our platform to stop Facebook from spying on you" (Ios as fortress). "No matter what box you click, we will spy on you and because we control which apps you can install, we can stop you from blocking our spying" (Ios as prison):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
But it's not just Apple – any corporation that arrogates to itself the right to override your own choices about your technology will eventually yield to temptation, using that veto to help itself at your expense:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
Once the corporation puts the gun on the mantelpiece in Act One, they're begging their KPI-obsessed managers to take it down and shoot you in the head with it in anticipation of of their annual Act Three performance review:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill
One particularly pernicious form of control is "trusted computing" and its handmaiden, "remote attestation." Broadly, this is when a device is designed to gather information about how it is configured and to send verifiable testaments about that configuration to third parties, even if you want to lie to those people:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1
New HP printers are designed to continuously monitor how you use them – and data-mine the documents you print for marketing data. You have to hand over a credit-card in order to use them, and HP reserves the right to fine you if your printer is unreachable, which would frustrate their ability to spy on you and charge you rent:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hp-wants-you-to-pay-up-to-36-month-to-rent-a-printer-that-it-monitors/
Under normal circumstances, this technological attack would prompt a defense, like an aftermarket mod that prevents your printer's computer from monitoring you. This is "adversarial interoperability," a once-common technological move:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
An adversarial interoperator seeking to protect HP printer users from HP could gin up fake telemetry to send to HP, so they wouldn't be able to tell that you'd seized the means of computation, triggering fines charged to your credit card.
Enter remote attestation: if HP can create a sealed "trusted platform module" or a (less reliable) "secure enclave" that gathers and cryptographically signs information about which software your printer is running, HP can detect when you have modified it. They can force your printer to rat you out – to spill your secrets to your enemy.
Remote attestation is already a reliable feature of mobile platforms, allowing agencies and corporations whose services you use to make sure that you're perfectly defenseless – not blocking ads or tracking, or doing anything else that shifts power from them to you – before they agree to communicate with your device.
What's more, these "trusted computing" systems aren't just technological impediments to your digital wellbeing – they also carry the force of law. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, these snitch-chips are "an effective means of access control" which means that anyone who helps you bypass them faces a $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence for a first offense.
Feudal security builds fortresses out of trusted computing and remote attestation and promises to use them to defend you from marauders. Remote attestation lets them determine whether your device has been compromised by someone seeking to harm you – it gives them a reliable testament about your device's configuration even if your device has been poisoned by bandits:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil
The fact that you can't override your computer's remote attestations means that you can't be tricked into doing so. That's a part of your computer that belongs to the manufacturer, not you, and it only takes orders from its owner. So long as the benevolent dictator remains benevolent, this is a protective against your own lapses, follies and missteps. But if the corporate warlord turns bandit, this makes you powerless to stop them from devouring you whole.
With that out of the way, let's talk about debt.
Debt is a normal feature of any economy, but today's debt plays a different role from the normal debt that characterized life before wages stagnated and inequality skyrocketed. 40 years ago, neoliberalism – with its assaults on unions and regulations – kicked off a multigenerational process of taking wealth away from working people to make the rich richer.
Have you ever watched a genius pickpocket like Apollo Robbins work? When Robins lifts your wristwatch, he curls his fingers around your wrist, expertly adding pressure to simulate the effect of a watchband, even as he takes away your watch. Then, he gradually releases his grip, so slowly that you don't even notice:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/ppqjya/apollo_robbins_a_master_pickpocket_effortlessly/
For the wealthy to successfully impoverish the rest of us, they had to provide something that made us feel like we were still doing OK, even as they stole our wages, our savings, and our futures. So, even as they shipped our jobs overseas in search of weak environmental laws and weaker labor protection, they shared some of the savings with us, letting us buy more with less. But if your wages keep stagnating, it doesn't matter how cheap a big-screen TV gets, because you're tapped out.
So in tandem with cheap goods from overseas sweatshops, we got easy credit: access to debt. As wages fell, debt rose up to fill the gap. For a while, it's felt OK. Your wages might be falling off, the cost of health care and university might be skyrocketing, but everything was getting cheaper, it was so easy to borrow, and your principal asset – your family home – was going up in value, too.
This period was a "bezzle," John Kenneth Galbraith's name for "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." It's the moment after Apollo Robbins has your watch but before you notice it's gone. In that moment, both you and Robbins feel like you have a watch – the world's supply of watch-derived happiness actually goes up for a moment.
There's a natural limit to debt-fueled consumption: as Michael Hudson says, "debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." Once the debtor owes more than they can pay back – or even service – creditors become less willing to advance credit to them. Worse, they start to demand the right to liquidate the debtor's assets. That can trigger some pretty intense political instability, especially when the only substantial asset most debtors own is the roof over their heads:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/
"Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," but that doesn't stop creditors from trying to get blood from our stones. As more of us became bankrupt, the bankruptcy system was gutted, turned into a punitive measure designed to terrorize people into continuing to pay down their debts long past the point where they can reasonably do so:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/
Enter "subprime" – loans advanced to people who stand no meaningful chance of every paying them back. We all remember the subprime housing bubble, in which complex and deceptive mortgages were extended to borrowers on the promise that they could either flip or remortgage their house before the subprime mortgages detonated when their "teaser rates" expired and the price of staying in your home doubled or tripled.
Subprime housing loans were extended on the belief that people would meekly render themselves homeless once the music stopped, forfeiting all the money they'd plowed into their homes because the contract said they had to. For a brief minute there, it looked like there would be a rebellion against mass foreclosure, but then Obama and Timothy Geithner decreed that millions of Americans would have to lose their homes to "foam the runways" for the banks:
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/
That's one way to run a subprime shop: offer predatory loans to people who can't afford them and then confiscate their assets when they – inevitably – fail to pay their debts off.
But there's another form of subprime, familiar to loan sharks through the ages: lend money at punitive interest rates, such that the borrower can never repay the debt, and then terrorize the borrower into making payments for as long as possible. Do this right and the borrower will pay you several times the value of the loan, and still owe you a bundle. If the borrower ever earns anything, you'll have a claim on it. Think of Americans who borrowed $79,000 to go to university, paid back $190,000 and still owe $236,000:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt
This kind of loan-sharking is profitable, but labor-intensive. It requires that the debtor make payments they fundamentally can't afford. The usurer needs to get their straw right down into the very bottom of the borrower's milkshake and suck up every drop. You need to convince the debtor to sell their wedding ring, then dip into their kid's college fund, then steal their father's coin collection, and, then break into cars to steal the stereos. It takes a lot of person-to-person work to keep your sucker sufficiently motivated to do all that.
This is where digital meets subprime. There's $1T worth of subprime car-loans in America. These are pure predation: the lender sells a beater to a mark, offering a low down-payment loan with a low initial interest rate. The borrower makes payments at that rate for a couple of months, but then the rate blows up to more than they can afford.
Trusted computing makes this marginal racket into a serious industry. First, there's the ability of the car to narc you out to the repo man by reporting on its location. Tesla does one better: if you get behind in your payments, your Tesla immobilizes itself and phones home, waits for the repo man to come to the parking lot, then it backs itself out of the spot while honking its horn and flashing its lights:
https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/
That immobilization trick shows how a canny subprime car-lender can combine the two kinds of subprime: they can secure the loan against an asset (the car), but also coerce borrowers into prioritizing repayment over other necessities of life. After your car immobilizes itself, you just might decide to call the dealership and put down your credit card, even if that means not being able to afford groceries or child support or rent.
One thing we can say about digital tools: they're flexible. Any sadistic motivational technique a lender can dream up, a computerized device can execute. The subprime car market relies on a spectrum of coercive tactics: cars that immobilize themselves, sure, but how about cars that turn on their speakers to max and blare a continuous recording telling you that you're a deadbeat and demanding payment?
https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/
The more a subprime lender can rely on a gadget to torment you on their behalf, the more loans they can issue. Here, at last, is a form of automation-driven mass unemployment: normally, an economy that has been fully captured by wealthy oligarchs needs squadrons of cruel arm-breakers to convince the plebs to prioritize debt service over survival. The infinitely flexible, tireless digital arm-breakers enabled by trusted computing have deprived all of those skilled torturers of their rightful employment:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers
The world leader in trusted computing isn't cars, though – it's phones. Long before anyone figured out how to make a car take orders from its manufacturer over the objections of its driver, Apple and Google were inventing "curating computing" whose app stores determined which software you could run and how you could run it.
Back in 2021, Indian subprime lenders hit on the strategy of securing their loans by loading borrowers' phones up with digital arm-breaking software:
https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/
The software would gather statistics on your app usage. When you missed a payment, the phone would block you from accessing your most frequently used app. If that didn't motivate you to pay, you'd lose your second-most favorite app, then your third, fourth, etc.
This kind of digital arm-breaking is only possible if your phone is designed to prioritize remote instructions – from the manufacturer and its app makers – over your own. It also only works if the digital arm-breaking company can confirm that you haven't jailbroken your phone, which might allow you to send fake data back saying that your apps have been disabled, while you continue to use those apps. In other words, this kind of digital sadism only works if you've got trusted computing and remote attestation.
Enter "Device Lock Controller," an app that comes pre-installed on some Google Pixel phones. To quote from the app's description: "Device Lock Controller enables device management for credit providers. Your provider can remotely restrict access to your device if you don't make payments":
https://lemmy.world/post/13359866
Google's pitch to Android users is that their "walled garden" is a fortress that keeps people who want to do bad things to you from reaching you. But they're pre-installing software that turns the fortress into a prison that you can't escape if they decide to let someone come after you.
There's a certain kind of economist who looks at these forms of automated, fine-grained punishments and sees nothing but a tool for producing an "efficient market" in debt. For them, the ability to automate arm-breaking results in loans being offered to good, hardworking people who would otherwise be deprived of credit, because lenders will judge that these borrowers can be "incentivized" into continuing payments even to the point of total destitution.
This is classic efficient market hypothesis brain worms, the kind of cognitive dead-end that you arrive at when you conceive of people in purely economic terms, without considering the power relationships between them. It's a dead end you navigate to if you only think about things as they are today – vast numbers of indebted people who command fewer assets and lower wages than at any time since WWII – and treat this as a "natural" state: "how can these poors expect to be offered more debt unless they agree to have their all-important pocket computers booby-trapped?"
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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/2024/03/29/boobytrap/#device-lock-controller
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Image: Oatsy (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oatsy40/21647688003
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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dontforgetukraine · 8 months ago
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US-Ukraine startup Esper Bionics makes robotic prostheses that are currently being used by over 30 Ukrainian soldiers serving in Russia's war and 80 veterans in Ukraine.
While the bionic arms and hands are not for military use and are not durable enough for combat, the wartime setting has yielded live feedback for the company from soldiers and veterans. One such example of Esper Bionics striving to meet the needs of their clients was making the fingers in the hand out of metal so that it could withstand more stress.
The company never planned to provide bionic prosthetic hands that would help soldiers return to combat back in 2019 when it was founded, but Russia's full scale invasion changed the startup's course. Now, research and development, assembly, and production all take place in Ukraine.
Through its donor-funded program Esper for Ukraine, the company is able to donate all the hands it produces to Ukrainians in need of prostheses.
In an example of artificial intelligence being used for good, Esper Bionics wants to incorporate AI into their bionic hands so the prostheses are more "context-aware" and "better able to predict its user's movements" and what the user wants to do in any particular situation.
The idea behind Esper Bionics' AI-powered future hand will be to create “an entire ecosystem” that can pass information from a series of sensors attached to its user to cloud-based software that constantly analyzes data to learn its users' habits.
The robotic look isn't just for functionality either, but a company goal to avoid the "uncanny valley" look. With attractive branding and designs, Chief of Marketing Dmytro Ganush says Esper Bionics seeks to promote the idea that people with limb differences don’t have a medical issue but “a really interesting lifestyle” or, if anything, “a gadget just like any other."
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Ukraine is highly likely to become the country with the most prostheses used among its population. The effort to normalize and de-stigmatize disability must start now, and I'm glad Esper Bionics seems to have this in mind with their designs. The enthusiasm users have in the design of the bionic hands is promising, and I hope everyone involved has a bright future.
Source: Ukrainian startup Esper Bionics makes cyborgs a reality
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anueutsuho · 5 months ago
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Completely out of season, but since it's on my mind: Every SiivaGunner April Fool's Day Special ranked from worst to best:
2022: Logan Paul's birthday: I think you can guess why this one was my least favorite. NEXT!
2019: Blue Balls Day: I mean, it was alright. I don't HATE it, it's just that almost every other April Fool’s Day was better.
2017: SiivaGunner and GilvaSunner swap upload rates: I put this one a tad below the other one just because it makes no sense unless you know how both Siiva and GiLva rolled. But I love the idea. They should rip more entire soundtracks at once.
2016: SiivaGunner and GilvaSunner swap upload styles: this was actually the day I got into Siivagunner. How painful was it that GiivaSunner was terminated only 3 days later! I actually thought that was the end until a month later! Anyway, this was the best thing they could have done for an April Fool’s Day: uploading an unedited soundtrack and claiming it was a remix.
2018: Inspector Gadget Takeover #2: Oh! Minecrap! Do you know what my favorite thing to do is, in Minecrap? I love to build brown bricks in Minecrap! But seriously, unpopular opinion but I never got tired of Inspector Gadget. And I loved the second takeover even more due to the AVGN theme and the like being featured too. Gadget's Gay Maze 2 was my favorite track from this one.
2020: Rips of April Fool's Games: this was a nice little April Fool’s Day, especially in the middle of Covid. Fake game rips are always funny. And them mocking Cloud getting two whole songs in Smash Bros was hilarious. And it helped to introduce me to Homestar Runner with the Subscription Plus joke, so that's always a plus.
2024: Algorithm Slop Day: Siiva opinions that make you go like this: This was a nice bit of satire of the current state of Youtube. I am docking points for reminding me how overpresent Skibidi Toilet is, though. But some great rips from this period include: calling out Scoose Me, One-Winged Angel using MODERN memes (I completely forgot Stick Bug was a meme), GIMME 20 DOLLARS, that one rip with the overly long story description that ends with the guy shilling his life coaching services, and a few uploads that led to a fake Patreon.
2021: Mario Dies Day: the Mario Wiki made the exact same joke and I'm still unsure who did it better. Either way, a lot of thought and effort was put into this one. They went as far as to private ALMOST EVERY RIP with Mario's name it it. I especially loved the custom art for Super M̸̌̊a̴͛̿█̸͌̑i̵̛͊█̷̾̓ Sunshine, it really looked official. And the best part was it ending with a Your Best Nightmare and Finale pair of rips.
2023: Lore & Announcements (Beta Mix): I dunno if this is an unpopular opinion but I just loved seeing announcement videos of varying seriousness being ripped and parodied. I loved that "a movie based on your defeat" was ripped. Apology (Beta Mix) crossed the line twice. And I never read the SCP that it was referencing, but the end of the event where The Voice was arrested for "crimes against anime" was hilarious.
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