#io 01

[sus-amogus-bot]

[bateauivree]

okay quindi posso usare il biglietto che mi ha convalidato lei molto gentilmente con uno scarabocchio per farmi un filtrino??

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!

Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/

This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.

I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.

Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.

But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:

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

Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.

As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:

https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act

But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").

The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.

Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.

The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.

Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

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

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:

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

And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.

One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/

What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.

A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.

But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.

At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[microscotch]

🍹 WOOHOO ON THE BEACH REDUX + WATERDROP EYES 🍹- A COMPLETE SET OF GENETICS

hi party people

SO i made these humble edits of ios skin twoish years ago and figured i should give them a bit of a face lift by giving it the same treatment wisteria got: supernaturals to go with it, an edited lip texture, an eye set to go with it(2) and the tongue actually shows up now like intended!

og description: its basically those darn skins by io with some collarbones i snatched from obscurus-sims, lilith’s buttercup nosemask, sms sugar cravings eyes, jammed some mouseyblue waterline recolor by digi on there because the less tab 4 time the better, these goppolsme lips and the teeth are taken from sixfootsims’ moonfruit skin. is that it? i think so. groundbreaking, i just shouldve called it an edit but i could not not use the opportunity for this ridiculous name. 🌝

i kept the shade range down to the essentials this time around, adding an extra light and extra dark shade to the defaults. 1 & 4 are io’s original colors, the rest is a variety of different trapping actions stacked onto one another.

NOTE: the zombie and vampire default come with an overlay mod! and the werewolf skins are correlated! please check out the hyperlinked instructions given by the respective creator ‼ also, these use the same packages as the original release of the skin, make sure to remove them first!

the eyes are praline's waterdrop eyes and come in 40 colors:

SO here are the downloads:

waterdrop eyes 💧 - custom / gen&town / defaults

wotb skin 🍹 - custom / gen&town / defaults / supernaturals / pngs for recolors + add ons 🖌

edit 01/08/25: freckles + moles add-on here

for the database:

credit: serabiet(base skin), pralinesims (eyes and lip texture), sixfootsims(teeth), keoni(bigfoot + genie), simgigglegirl(correlated lycans), episims(vamp mod), withlovefromsimstown(plantsims), deedee(converted vamp cracks), mouseyblue, digi, lilith, shastakiss(genie hair fix), veronavillequiltingbee(vamp overlay), obscurus-sims, sms(eyeshadow), entropy-sims, goppolsme, tvickiesims for playtesting

[ekip]

Acil Durum Numaraları

Kahramanmaraş'ın Pazarcık ilçesinde saat 04.17'de meydana gelen 7.7 büyüklüğündeki deprem, sayısız artçı ve takip eden bağımsız 7.5 büyüklüğündeki deprem sonrasında 4. seviye alarma geçilirken kurtarma ve yardım çalışmaları devam ediyor.

AFAD Deprem Bağış Kampanyası

Kızıl Haç | Türkiye-Suriye Deprem Bağış Kanalı

AFAD Acil Mobil uygulaması (Android, iOS)

Depremde hasar gören binalarda hasar tespitine ilişkin faydalı bir kaynak.

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Deprem sonrasında evlerini terk etmek zorunda kalan vatandaşlara kapısını açan kurum ve işletmelerin haritası için: go.ahb.app/guvenliharita

Depremzedeler için oteller

Afet Haritası

Depremzedeler için toplanma alanları, tesisler, oteller ve gönüllü evleri gibi kalacak yerleri gösteren platform: KalacakYer.org

Senin de yaşadığın bölgede depremde etkilenen bölgelere yardım amaçlı birimler kurulmuş olmalı. Bu gibi merkezlerde genellikle:

Battaniye

İlk Yardım Seti

Isıtıcı

Su

Uyku Tulumu

Çocuk Bezi ve Maması

Çadır

Kışlık Giyecek

Konserve Yiyecek

gibi malzemeler toplanıyor olacaktır. Sen de bu bölgelerde gönüllü olarak çalışmak ve bu merkezlere yardım götürmek istersen ya da bu konularda desteği olabilecek birilerini tanıyorsan ��imdi yardım etmenin tam sırası.

[genshin-impact-updates]

"Incandescent Ode of Resurrection" Version 5.3 Update Details

Dear Traveler,

Below are the details of the Version 5.3 update "Incandescent Ode of Resurrection" and the update compensation.

〓Compensation Details〓

Maintenance Compensation: Primogems ×300 (60 Primogems per hour the servers are down)

Issue Fix Compensation: Primogems ×300 (please refer to the relevant compensation mail for more details)

〓Scope of Compensation〓

Maintenance Compensation: Travelers who have reached Adventure Rank 5 or above by 2025/01/01 06:00 (UTC+8).

Compensation must be claimed before the end of Version 5.3.

Issue Fix Compensation: Travelers who have reached Adventure Rank 5 or above by 2025/01/01 06:00 (UTC+8).

Please log in and claim your compensation before 2025/01/04 06:00 (UTC+8).

Our developers will distribute compensation to Travelers via in-game mail within 5 hours after the update maintenance is finished. The mail will expire after 30 days, so don't forget to claim the attached compensation in time.

〓Update Schedule〓

Update maintenance begins 2025/01/01 06:00 (UTC+8) and is estimated to take 5 hours.

〓How to Update Game Client〓

PC: Close the game, open the Genshin Impact Launcher, and click Update.

iOS: Open the App Store and tap Update.

Android: Open the game and follow the directions on-screen.

PS5™ and PS4™: Highlight Genshin Impact from the Home Screen, press the OPTIONS button and select "Check for Update."

Xbox Series X|S: Open the system main menu, select "My games & apps," select the "Manage" tab, and on the "Updates" page, find "Genshin Impact" and confirm to update.

Please do not hesitate to contact Customer Service if you encounter any issues installing the new version. We will do our very best to resolve the issue.

〓Update Details〓

I. New Characters

5-Star Character "Night-Igniting Flame" Mavuika (Pyro)

◇ Gnosis: Pyro

◇ Weapon: Claymore

◇ The leader of Natlan who inherited the Ancient Name of "Kiongozi." She made a vow to illuminate the future of the nation of war with the Sacred Flame.

◆ Elemental Skill: The Named Moment

◇ Summons forth the "All-Fire Armaments" and enters the Nightsoul's Blessing state. Tap to have "All-Fire Armaments" manifest into the Ring of Searing Radiance. The Ring follows the current active character and attacks nearby opponents at intervals, dealing Nightsoul-aligned Pyro DMG. Hold to have "All-Fire Armaments" manifest as a Flamestrider, further improving Mavuika's terrain-crossing abilities. Mavuika's Normal, Charged, and Plunging Attacks will also deal Nightsoul-aligned Pyro DMG. While in the Nightsoul's Blessing state, tapping the Elemental Skill can switch the All-Fire Armaments' form.

◆ Elemental Burst: Hour of Burning Skies

◇ Mavuika's Elemental Burst is not reliant on Elemental Energy, but instead on "Fighting Spirit." When party characters consume Nightsoul points or their Normal Attacks hit opponents, Mavuika will gain Fighting Spirit. When Mavuika accumulates a certain amount of Fighting Spirit, she can consume it all to unleash her Elemental Burst.

◇ After Mavuika activates her Elemental Burst, she summons the "All-Fire Armaments" Flamestrider and enters the Nightsoul's Blessing state. She will execute a powerful Sunfell Slice on enemies, dealing Nightsoul-aligned AoE Pyro DMG. While in the special state, Mavuika's actions no longer consume Nightsoul points, and during this time, Sunfell Slice, the Flamestrider mode's Normal and Charged Attacks deal increased DMG based on the amount of "Fighting Spirit" consumed.

5-Star Character "Obsidian Opalstar" Citlali (Cryo)

◇ Vision: Cryo

◇ Weapon: Catalyst

◇ The great shaman from the Masters of the Night-Wind, the universally-revered Granny Itztli.

◆ Elemental Skill: Dawnfrost Darkstar

◇ Citlali activates her Opal Shield and summons Itzpapa, gaining Nightsoul points and entering the Nightsoul's Blessing state. When Citlali's Nightsoul points exceed a certain amount, Itzpapa will continuously consume Nightsoul points to summon a Frostfall Storm that will attack enemies within range, dealing Nightsoul-aligned Cryo DMG.

◇ After unlocking the Passive Talent "Itzpapalotl's Star Garments," Citlali will recover a set amount of Nightsoul points whenever a nearby party member triggers a "Nightsoul Burst."

◆ Elemental Burst: Edict of Entwined Splendor

◇ Citlali hurls an icy storm at the area in front of her, dealing Nightsoul-aligned AoE Cryo DMG. This also summons a Spiritvessel Skull near enemies that explodes after a period of time and restores a set amount of Nightsoul points to herself.

4-Star Character "Spring Woven From Jade" Lan Yan (Anemo)

◇ Vision: Anemo

◇ Weapon: Catalyst

◇ A rattan weaver from Chenyu Vale. Clear-minded and well-tempered, she is as lively as a mountain spring.

◆ Elemental Skill: Swallow-Wisp Pinion Dance

◇ Lan Yan summons a Swallow-Wisp Shield, dashes forward and, upon making contact with her target, will leap back into the air. While in mid-air, pressing her Elemental Skill again or pressing Normal Attack will cause Lan Yan to hurl her Feathermoon Rings at an opponent, and they will spin between nearby opponents upon hit, dealing Anemo DMG.

◆ Elemental Burst: Lustrous Moonrise

◇ Creates a Feathermoon Swallow Array, pulling in nearby opponents and objects and dealing multiple instances of AoE Anemo DMG.

◆ Passive Talent: Four Sealing Divination Charms

◇ When her Elemental Skill dash hits an opponent, the Swallow-Wisp Shield and Feathermoon Rings will undergo an Elemental Absorption depending on the elements they come into contact with.

5-Star Character: Traveler (Pyro)

◇ Interact with a Statue of The Seven - Pyro to resonate with the Pyro element, and use a new Elemental Skill and Elemental Burst.

◆ Elemental Skill: Flowfire Blade

◇ Wields a searing flame and enters the Nightsoul's Blessing state. Tap to summon a "Blazing Threshold" that follows the current active character. It will deal Nightsoul-aligned Pyro DMG to nearby opponents at intervals. Hold to summon a "Scorching Threshold" that follows the current active character. It will launch a Coordinated Attack that deals Nightsoul-aligned Pyro DMG to opponents.

◆ Elemental Burst: Plains Scorcher

◇ Condense the flames into a mark, dealing Nightsoul-aligned AoE Pyro DMG to opponents up ahead, and restores the Traveler's Nightsoul points periodically for a certain duration afterward.

◆ Resonance Unlock Criteria:

• Complete "Where All Hopes Lie" in Archon Quest Chapter V: Act V "Incandescent Ode of Resurrection"

◇ Giving offerings to the "Throne of the Primal Fire" will further enhance your Pyro abilities.

◆ Function Unlock Criteria:

• Complete Archon Quest Chapter V: Act V "Incandescent Ode of Resurrection"

II. New Equipment

New Weapons (Examples based on Refinement Rank 1)

A Thousand Blazing Suns (5-Star Claymore)

Gain the "Scorching Brilliance" effect when using an Elemental Skill or Burst: CRIT DMG increased by 20% and ATK increased by 28% for 6s. This effect can trigger once every 10s. While a "Scorching Brilliance" instance is active, its duration is increased by 2s after Normal or Charged attacks deal Elemental DMG. This effect can trigger once every second, and the max duration increase is 6s. Additionally, when the equipping character is in the Nightsoul's Blessing state, "Scorching Brilliance" effects are increased by 75%, and its duration will not count down when the equipping character is off-field.

◆ During the event wish "Epitome Invocation," the event-exclusive 5-star weapon A Thousand Blazing Suns (Claymore) will receive a huge drop-rate boost!

Starcaller's Watch (5-Star Catalyst)

Increases Elemental Mastery by 100. Gain the "Mirror of Night" effect within 15s after the equipping character creates a shield: The current active party member deals 28% increased DMG to nearby opponents. You can gain the "Mirror of Night" effect once every 14s.

◆ During the event wish "Epitome Invocation," the event-exclusive 5-star weapon Starcaller's Watch (Catalyst) will receive a huge drop-rate boost!

III. New Outfits

Hu Tao: Cherries Snow-Laden

◇ Hu Tao's outfit. Styled in a palette lighter than the dark ceremonial wear favored by the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor, the dress is a special gift from her good friend Xiangling. The sunglasses, for their part, are from Hu Tao's personal collection.

◆ After the Version 5.3 update to 2025/02/10 03:59, Hu Tao's outfit "Cherries Snow-Laden" will be available for purchase in the Character Outfit Shop at a limited-time discount! During the discount period, the price of the outfit is 1,350 Genesis Crystals. The price will revert to 1,680 Genesis Crystals after the limited-time discount ends. The outfit can only be purchased once.

Xiangling: New Year's Cheer

◇ Xiangling's outfit. The red coat glows like a stove amidst cold winds, topped with a hat that, at Hu Tao's suggestion, took inspiration from Guoba's appearance — a design that's right up Xiangling's alley.

◆ During Version 5.3, Travelers can obtain Xiangling's outfit "New Year's Cheer" for free by participating in the limited-time "Springtime Charms" event.

◆ After Version 5.3 is over, Travelers can buy the outfit in the Character Outfit Shop.

IV. New Main Story

1. New Archon Quest

Archon Quest Chapter V: Act V "Incandescent Ode of Resurrection"

Permanently available after the Version 5.3 update

◆ Quest Unlock Criteria:

• Reach Adventure Rank 28 or above

• Complete Archon Quest Chapter V: Interlude "All Fires Fuel the Flame"

• The "Focused Experience Mode" function is available for this quest.

2. New Story Quest

Mavuika's Story Quest - Sol Invictus Chapter: Act I "As the Blazing Sun"

Permanently available after the Version 5.3 update

◆ Quest Unlock Criteria:

• Reach Adventure Rank 28 or above

• Complete Archon Quest Chapter V: Act V "Incandescent Ode of Resurrection"

• The "Focused Experience Mode" function is available for this quest.

3. New Tribal Chronicles

"Memories Flowing With Color"

Act III of "Memories Flowing With Color" will be permanently available after the Version 5.3 update

◆ Act III Quest Unlock Criteria:

• Reach Adventure Rank 28 or above

• Complete Archon Quest Chapter V: Act V "Incandescent Ode of Resurrection"

• Complete Act I and Act II of the Tribal Chronicles Quest "Memories Flowing With Color"

• The "Focused Experience Mode" function is available for this quest.

You can use the "Quick Start" function to accept and progress through Archon Quest Chapter V: Act I "Flowers Resplendent on the Sun-Scorched Sojourn" while maintaining your current progress in the existing Archon Quests. After using the "Quick Start" function to complete Archon Quest Chapter V: Act I, you can continue to accept and complete the subsequent Acts of Chapter V until you unlock the latest Archon Quest or Tribal Chronicles introduced in the current version update.

V. New Enemies

Lord of Eroded Primal Fire

◇ A fell dragon, congealed from the power of pitch-black darkness.

Some of its attacks can cause stackable "Attrition" that, after a time, will cause your active character to lose HP. During combat, the Lord of Eroded Primal Fire will grant itself a Void Ward. At this time, use a certain number of elemental attacks to break the Ward, which will cause it to enter a confused state. Nightsoul-aligned elemental attacks will break the Ward more effectively.

Located in the Tezcatepetonco Range

Once you reach Adventure Rank 40, you can Quick Challenge the new boss's Trounce Domain through your Adventurer Handbook in Single Player Mode.

Wayward Hermetic Spiritspeaker

◇ A priestess of the Masters of the Night-Wind who has lived apart from her tribe, honing her abilities in utter solitude.

Will summon identical Radiant Reflections and hide amongst them. Destroy all the Radiant Reflections' Elemental Wards during this time to reveal and weaken the real body. Additionally, Iktomisaurs and Masters of the Night-Wind characters can Hold their Aim over Radiant Reflections to pause their movement for a short time...

Located in the Tezcatepetonco Range

VI. New Gameplay

New Gameplay: Repertoire of Myriad Melodies

In Mondstadt, Sansa the bard's heartfelt performance catches your and Paimon's attention. After a discussion with her about playing musical instruments, you receive a precious gift...

◆ Gameplay Unlock Criteria:

• Reach Adventure Rank 35 or above

• Complete Archon Quest Prologue: Act III "Song of the Dragon and Freedom"

Gameplay Details:

1. How to Participate: Reach Adventure Rank 35 to automatically receive the quest "To the Winds of Freedom." Complete the quest to obtain the gadget "Repertoire of Myriad Melodies" and access the performance interface for gameplay.

2. Gameplay Rules: Repertoire of Myriad Melodies contains a library of music scores that can be used for performances. Once you've activated Repertoire of Myriad Melodies, you can exchange scores as well as collect and play music created by other players.

3. Official Albums and Scores: From time to time, new music albums will be added to Repertoire of Myriad Melodies, and their official scores will be released.

4. Hall of Creation: Use the Score Exchange function to create scores of your own and try ones created by other players.

VII. Other Update Details

New Recipes:

○ Natlan's Zakan's Street Bites: Magmic Ode

○ Liyue NPC Lianfang: Qingxin Flower Cake

○ Event Reward: Drunken Plums in Snow

New Character Specialty Dishes:

○ Mavuika's specialty: Hymn of Gathered Flame

○ Citlali's specialty: Secret Art

○ Lan Yan's specialty: Jade-Cut Flowers

Adds new "Mortal Travails: Series V," "Challenger: Series X," and "Repertoire of Myriad Melodies" Achievement categories, and adds new Achievements to the "Wonders of the World" category.

Adds Set 37 of "Paimon's Paintings" chat emojis.

Adds some prompts for loading screens.

New Namecards:

"Mavuika: Sun-Crowned": Reward for reaching Friendship Lv. 10 with Mavuika

"Citlali: Opalstar": Reward for reaching Friendship Lv. 10 with Citlali

"Lan Yan: Silver Swallow": Reward for reaching Friendship Lv. 10 with Lan Yan

"Achievement: All-Seeing": Reward for completing all achievements under "Mortal Travails: Series V"

"Achievement: Blaze": Reward for completing all achievements under "Challenger: Series X"

"Achievement: Repertoire": Reward for completing all achievements under "Repertoire of Myriad Melodies"

"Travel Notes: The Flame Renewed": Reward obtained via the BP system

New Item: "Scroll of the Fiery Firmament": Purchased from Tubby the teapot spirit via the Realm Depot > Riches of the Realm after completing "Home of Hot Springs" in Archon Quest Chapter V: Act I "Flowers Resplendent on the Sun-Scorched Sojourn."

New Serenitea Pot Realm Layout: "Tletl Ilhuicatl": Unlocked after using the item "Scroll of the Fiery Firmament."

"Genius Invokation TCG" Gameplay Update:

New Character Cards: Mualani, Clorinde, and their corresponding Talent cards. Corresponding invitation duel and guest challenges have been added to the Player List.

New Action Cards: "Demon-Warrior's Feather Mask," "Qucusaurus," "People of the Springs," "Pilgrimage of the Return of the Sacred Flame," "Abundant Phlogiston," and "Puff Pops" can be purchased from Prince at The Cat's Tail.

The Forge Realm's Temper is once again available. The theme of this edition is "The Forge Realm's Temper: Game of Wits":

(1) During The Forge Realm's Temper: Game of Wits, some stages will have special victory and defeat conditions. Adeptly adapt your tactics to complete the challenge and avoid the conditions for defeat!

(2) Within The Forge Realm's Temper: Game of Wits event stages, there will also be special rules that can easily exert influence on the tempo of the match. Fully utilizing these special rules will contribute greatly to your success.

Imaginarium Theater

After the Version 5.3 update, the first season of "Imaginarium Theater" will be available on February 1, 2025.

Required Elemental Types: Pyro, Hydro, and Anemo

Opening Characters: Hu Tao, Gaming, Mona, Xingqiu, Venti, and Shikanoin Heizou

When Imaginarium Theater is open, the corresponding Opening Characters will obtain Fantastical Blessings.

Special Guest Stars: Clorinde, Ororon, Citlali, and Yun Jin

After the first season of Imaginarium Theater begins, the characters Tartaglia, Yae Miko, Bennett, and Lynette will each gain a new "Thespian Trick" that can be exchanged from the NPC Wolfy.

Envisaged Echoes Gameplay Update:

After the Version 5.3 update, new challenge stages and Echo cosmetics for Ganyu and Kaedehara Kazuha will be added.

Spiral Abyss

After the Version 5.3 update, Phase 1 of the Spiral Abyss will be updated on January 16.

New Ley Line Disorder Adjustment: Different Ley Line Disorders will occur based on the "Divergence" on each "Floor."

◆ Floor 11 Ley Line Disorder changed to:

• All party members receive a 75% Pyro DMG Bonus.

◆ New Floor 12 Ley Line Disorder:

• First Half: Pyro DMG dealt by all party members' Normal Attacks increased by 75%.

• Second Half: All party members' Nightsoul-aligned DMG increased by 75%.

◆ Updated the monster lineup on Floors 11 – 12 of the Spiral Abyss.

◆ Blessing of the Abyssal Moon:

Scorching Moon

After a party member triggers a Pyro-related reaction, a shockwave will be unleashed at the character's position, dealing True DMG to nearby opponents. This effect can be triggered once every 3s.

〓Adjustments & Optimizations〓

● Quests

Adds the function to lower the difficulty of some Domains in Archon Quests. This can be activated when all characters in the current party are defeated or when you exit the Domain (before this update, this feature was only available when challenging powerful opponents).

● Open World

After the version update, after obtaining rewards from Bosses consuming 40 Original Resin, you no longer have to teleport away and wait for the Boss to respawn. Bosses will respawn right away in their original location.

Adds a new Teleport Waypoint to the Tezcatepetonco Range in Natlan due to the addition of the new Boss (The number of unlocked Teleport Waypoints required to complete the achievement "Scaling the Scorching Sacred Mountain (II)" has also been adjusted. For Travelers who have already completed this achievement, after the update, the achievement completion status will remain unchanged).

Adjusts the Pyroculus and Wind Current height in one location in Natlan's Ochkanatlan area, allowing for a smoother experience when attempting the corresponding challenge.

● Artifacts

The "Artifact Salvage" function will generate Sanctifying Essence and Sanctifying Unction in a ratio of 1:4 (the total Artifact EXP generated remains the same).

After the version update, the "Character > Artifact" interface will highlight recommended Artifact Affixes for the current character (data is sourced from recently active players).

In the "Artifact > Enhance" interface and when comparing Artifacts in the "Character > Artifact" interface, you will be able to see the number of times each Minor Affix has been enhanced.

Adds a shortcut to navigate to the corresponding Domains of Blessing when using the "Source" feature for Artifact sets in the "Character > Artifacts > Recommended Sets" interface.

Adds the option to sort Artifacts by their recommended order to the "Character > Artifact > Sort" interface. This can be used to arrange Artifacts based on their recommended Affixes for characters and Artifact slots.

Adds the option to pin and mark recommended Affixes to the "Character > Artifact > Sort" interface.

Adds the option to filter based on recommended Artifact sets or Affixes to the "Character > Artifact > Artifact Recommendations" interface.

Increases the number of Artifacts that can be stored in the Inventory from 1,800 to 2,100.

● Reputation

Adds the "Quick Accept" feature to Natlan's "Tribe Reputation > Bounties" interface.

The "Bounties" and "Supply Notices" of Natlan's "Tribe Reputation" now display the Reputation rewards that can be obtained after completing relevant objectives.

In Natlan's "Tribe Reputation > Bounties" interface, the "Accept Bounty" screen now shows the range of rewards that can be obtained.

Optimizes the display of the "List of Recommended Quest(s)" pop-up of Tribal Chronicles in Natlan's "Tribe Reputation" interface.

● Genius Invokation TCG

Optimizes and standardizes the descriptions of effects for certain cards.

● Serenitea Pot

After the version update, Furnishings and Furnishing Blueprints introduced from Version 3.0 to 3.8 will be sold at a discount in the Realm Depot.

● Training Guide

Optimizes the layout of the "Training Guide" interface to display more detailed information. When Domains that correspond to a character's Talent Materials or Weapon Ascension Materials are available for a limited time, a tag will appear to notify the player.

Reduces the Adventure Rank requirements for certain tabs in the "Training Guide" interface.

Adjusts the requirement that needs to be fulfilled to disable the "Training Guide" prompt (from "Complete the World Level 6 Ascension Quest unlocked at Adventure Rank 45" to "Reach Adventure Rank 50"). The hint will appear when the party is defeated in battle, or when the corresponding challenge difficulty is much higher than the strength of the party.

Adds a button to open the "Training Guide" to the "Character > Attribute" interface.

● Other Systems

After the version update, Travelers with World Levels 8 and 9 will be able to freely enter each other's worlds in Co-Op Mode. The enemy levels and drops will be based on the World Level of the host player.

● Audio

Optimizes the sound effects of indwelt Qucusaurus when gliding.

Adds new voice-over lines for Ororon for entering the Spiritspeaking state and interacting with relevant objects.

Optimizes the sound performance of certain objects and interfaces.

Optimizes the performance of transitioning background music when switching between certain areas in Natlan.

Optimizes the phrasing of the Japanese voice-over for Hu Tao's voice line "About Baizhu" in the "Character > Voice-Over" interface.

● Other

Adjusts the text descriptions of certain "Tutorials" in Natlan.

Optimizes the effects of Echo cosmetics: When a moving character comes to a stop, their Echo cosmetic visual effects will gradually fade to appear more natural.

When the event "Springtime Charms" begins, "Xiao Lanterns" will be permanently sold by the Liyue NPC "Granny Shan."

After the version update, any "Kaboom Box" placed in the environment will disappear after characters enter combat.

〓Bug Fixes〓

● Enemies

Fixes an issue whereby when certain Bosses respawn, their respawn location could be abnormally affected by Geo Constructs.

Fixes an issue whereby when challenging the "Millennial Pearl Seahorse" and "Guardian of Apep's Oasis," there was a chance they wouldn't take DMG from Electro-Charged reactions.

Fixes an issue whereby when challenging the "Polychrome Tri-Stars," there was a small chance that they would not be able to activate their Elemental Buff after being knocked airborne when activating their Elemental Buff.

● Characters

Fixes an issue whereby when Chasca used her Elemental Burst in Co-Op Mode, the model of her "Soulsniper: Ritual Staff" would appear abnormally large to other players.

Fixes an issue whereby after Chasca used her Elemental Skill to enter a hovering state, her animations would be abnormal in certain situations.

Fixes an issue whereby after triggering Chasca's Nightsoul Transmission, there was a chance that Nightsoul points would deplete abnormally fast.

Fixes an issue whereby there was certain incorrect layering of some lighting effects in Gaming's "Thespian Tricks: Perfect Partner," causing them to pass through the character abnormally.

Fixes an issue whereby after Ororon leaped into the air and entered Aiming Mode, certain skill icons would be displayed abnormally.

Fixes an issue whereby when Ororon repeatedly entered the Spiritspeaking state and interacted with corresponding objects while leaping, there was a small chance of causing the leaping state to end prematurely.

Fixes an issue whereby when holding Jump to have Ororon leap into the air, the Stamina consumed would not be affected by other Stamina consumption effects.

Fixes an issue whereby when holding Jump to have Ororon leap into the air, the animation of the character's right arm would be abnormal.

Fixes an issue whereby when Ororon used his Elemental Burst, there was a chance that the summoned "Supersonic Oculus" would be blurry when playing on Android devices at lowest graphics settings.

● System

Fixes an issue whereby the material "Glowing Hornshroom" was incorrectly categorized in Creatures of the Realm as a seed, it has been corrected to "Glowing Hornshroom Spores."

Fixes an issue whereby certain branching dialog options were missing from Cyno's Story Quest in the "Travel Log" interface.

Fixes an issue whereby certain branching dialog options were missing from Archon Quests Chapter II: Act I and Chapter II: Act II in the "Travel Log" interface.

● Open World

Fixes an issue whereby under specific circumstances, after completing a Warrior's Challenge near the Masters of the Night-Wind in the "Tezcatepetonco Range" area, there was a chance that the reward treasure chest would abnormally disappear and would only reappear after completing the challenge again.

Fixes an issue whereby under specific circumstances, in the World Quest "The Flowing Primal Flame," during the quest objective "Collecting Burning Firestone," on the floating island northeast of the altar, the enemies near the mechanism would abnormally disappear, leaving no way to unlock the mechanism.

Fixes an issue whereby under certain circumstances, there was a chance that one group of enemies would refresh abnormally in an area near the Snow-Covered Path in Dragonspine.

Fixes an issue whereby in Inazuma, certain Electro Seelies and treasure chests, although fulfilling the detection criteria of the "Electro Treasure Compass," would fail to be detected.

Fixes an issue whereby when characters entered the Nightsoul's Blessing state and used Bouncy Mushrooms to jump, they would take Fall DMG abnormally.

● Audio

Fixes errors with the Chinese voice-overs for certain quests.

Fixes an issue whereby under specific circumstances, after using Kaedehara Kazuha's Elemental Skill followed by a Plunging Attack, there was a small chance that the relevant sound and controller vibration effects would be missing.

Fixes an issue whereby when Ororon leaped into the air, voice lines related to wind gliders would incorrectly trigger (despite the character was not using a wind glider at the moment).

Fixes an issue whereby in the "Character > Attribute" interface, after triggering Chasca's chat voice lines, they would continue to play abnormally after switching to other secondary interfaces.

Fixes an issue whereby there was a mistake in the Japanese text and Japanese voice-over for Xilonen in the quest "Wailing Cacophony" of the Tribal Chronicles Act III "A Prayer for Blessings, Told to Crested Peaks."

● Other

Fixes an issue whereby if the character who equips Chain Breaker is from Natlan, when the Weapon effects were triggered, the character count would not include the equipping character.

Fixes an issue whereby when under specific circumstances, when indwelling an Iktomisaur and jumping, the hang time while airborne would be abnormal.

Fixes an issue whereby the Furnishing "Companion Gift - 'Resolve to Protect'" had an incorrect color.

Fixes a text error in the tutorial for "Goldflame Qucusaur Tyrant."

Fixes a text error in the tutorial for "Radiant Pillars."

Fixes an issue whereby some content in the readable item "Artisan's Memo (II)" was not displayed normally.

Fixes an issue whereby when using Nahida's Elemental Skill to interact with Candlecap Mushrooms, the relevant icons would be missing abnormally.

Fixes some text errors in certain languages and optimizes text. (Note: Related in-game functions have not changed. Travelers can view the changes in different languages by going to the Paimon Menu > Settings > Language and changing the Game Language.)

◆ Optimizes certain inconsistencies between voice-overs and their corresponding lines in Neuvillette's Story Quest.

〓Genius Invokation TCG Balance Adjustment〓

Adjusts Elemental Skill DMG dealt by the Character Card "Fatui Mirror Maiden": Hydro DMG dealt is adjusted from 2 to 3.

Adjusts the effect of the Summon, "Dandelion Field," created by the Elemental Burst of the Character Card "Jean": The number of Usages is adjusted from 2 to 3.

Adjusts the effect of the Summon, "Bake-Kurage," created by the Elemental Skill of the Character Card "Sangonomiya Kokomi": The Usages can now stack, up to a maximum of 4.

Adjusts the effect of the Elemental Skill of the Character Card "Yae Miko": Adds the effect "If there is already 1 Sesshou Sakura in play, then increase the DMG dealt by +1. (Max +1)"

Adjusts the Elemental Skill DMG of the Character Card "Abyss Herald: Wicked Torrents": Hydro DMG dealt is adjusted from 2 to 1.

Adjusts the Elemental Dice cost of the Talent Card "To Ward Weakness" of the Character Card "Kuki Shinobu": The Electro Dice cost is adjusted from 3 to 4.

Adjusts the effect of the Elemental Skill of the Character Card "Rosaria": "...creates 2 stacks of Scope Out Soft Spots" is adjusted to "...creates 1 stack of Scope Out Soft Spots."

Adjusts the effect of the Summon, "Evercold Frostlance," created by the Elemental Burst of the Character Card "Rosaria": "...create 1 stack of Scope Out Soft Spots" is adjusted to "create 2 stacks of Scope Out Soft Spots."

*This is a work of fiction and is not related to any actual people, events, groups, or organizations.

"PlayStation", "PS5", "PS4", "DualSense", "DUALSHOCK" are registered trademarks or trademarks of Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.

[muffinrecord]

Previous pinned post.

Magia Record has announced End of Service on July 31st.

Credit to noobwithnohats for translating the EOS information translation.

1: the EOS itself

the DMM Bluestacks client will end service on 2024-07-01 3:00 PM JST

the iOS and Android clients will end service on 2024-07-31 3:00 PM JST

announcement mentions that "maintaining operations has become difficult," whether this is standard corporatespeak or the truth I cannot say

all purchases have been disabled, though existing stones and Magia Passports are still valid all the way up to EOS

you can apply for refunds for paid Magia Stones between 2024-07-01 and 2024-09-08 for DMM users, and between 2024-07-31 and 2024-10-07 for mobile users

2: what will happen between now and the dreaded day?

"BEYOND MAGIA," a Walpurgisnacht raid remaster

Kagome's Hundred Monsters rerun

Witch Extermination

another Atelier Alina run

one more Ranked Mirrors run

Kimochi Special: The Witch of Happiness

final story

There will also be a 4* rate-up selector and free daily 10x rolls all the way up to the dreaded day The existing Magia Record client will be converted into an Archive App, available to download between 2024-07-31 to 2024-10-14 3:00PM JST This will contain:

Magical Girl info

Memoria info

Doppel, Witch and Uwasa info

based on what you have unlocked some info from our Magia Record accounts will carry over to Exedra via our transfer codes, though how this will work is not explicitly mentioned at this time Terms of Service edit to allow them to use our ingame data "for other services provided by the company related to this app"

[a-ikuoliver]

────────⌕ SEARCH: IO/KATSUKI-BAKUGOU

updated 11th june 2024

masterlist • archive of our own • wip updates • my kofi please bear in mind all my works will be female/femme reader & remember to check the warnings

worship me | nsfw 18+ | 2.9k — 26/04/2022 *originally posted to gwen0m

summary: an unforgettable autumn night at your private catholic college when Father Bakugo approaches you after late-night studying at the church’s library. warnings: noncon, unprotected vaginal sex, blasphemy, manipulation, dacryphilia, corrupt priest, breeding & threatening

before he cheats | implied nsfw 18+ | 1.8k — 11/08/2022

summary: hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and god, does it turn a man on with that fire in your eyes and bat swinging in your hand, ready to key the car of the man who wronged you. warnings: feminine pronouns/nicknames/descriptions, fantasising, mentions of weapons (bat, knife), bakugou gets horny over crazy girls

what's your favourite scary movie? | nsfw 18+ | 4.9k — 03/11/2023

summary: finally convincing one of your best friends to come to the 30th anniversary re-release of scream, he figures out one of your best-kept secrets. warnings: femme reader (called girl, has a pussy, wears makeup n a skirt), death threat kinda lmao, public & unprotected sex, blood mention, knife mention, reader implied to be recon/stealth hero, not beta’d bc i got nervous and we die like men, this is like all lead up my b

do something, babe, say something | angst | 2.0k — 09/11/2023

summary: you tell katsuki bakugou you love him for the first time warnings: gn!reader, miscommunication, self sacrifice

wired | nsfw 18+ | 9.3k — 15/12/2023

summary: honing your kickboxing skills with pro hero dynamight can lead to a) insane improvements of your skills, becoming the best version of yourself with each critique you get, b) a crush like no other you’ve ever had in your life, or c) all of the above? warnings: fem!reader (“girl”, “cunt”, “pussy” used) slight age gap but not a main plot point, a lil bit of violence, making out, brattish reader, choking (ish), hair pulling, dry humping, slight edging, public sex, unprotected sex, implied use of birth control

bad enough for you | nsfw 18+ | 4.0k — 15/01/2024

summary: bathrooms at house parties are only made for one thing warnings:  fem!reader (has a pussy, wearing makeup + skirt), established relationship, toxic relationship, cheating, alcohol mention (tipsy sex), blood/biting/marking/cutting mention, unprotected sex, degradation/name calling (not really but just in case), hair pulling, fingering (f!receiving), oral (m!receiving)

like a girl does | nsfw 18+ | 6.7k — 19/02/2024

summary: you're finally being introduced to your girlfriend's friends, invited to a last minute party, any confidence melting from you when you see another girl clinging to her arm. warnings: fauxcest (bakugou referred to as your step sister/sister), dubcon, bakugou is TOXIC, feminine/girly reader (she/her pronouns; wearing makeup; nails + a dress; long hair/out/on her face), reader referred to as a puppy (degradingly not petplay lmao), pet names (pretty + baby), emotional manipulation, cheating (on reader, implied to be with ochako but not overtly), alcohol + weed mention, reader a lillll bit of a crybaby, public/car sex, oral (r! receiving)

fantasise | nsfw 18+ | 1.5k — 20/04/2024

summary: katsuki sees your sex toys once and is haunted by what you look like using them. warning/s: m! & f!masturbation, sex toys, fantasising

god is a freak | nsfw 18+ | 2.8k — 11/07/2024

summary: god is a bit of a freak, why's he watching me getting railed on the couch, staying pure for a wedding, he's got fucked up priorities — aka an ancient, obsolete god of fertility hears your prayer warning/s: fertility god!bakugou, f!reader, voyeurism, oral (f!receiving), references to sex rituals and safe sex lmao, i think that's everything, mostly lead up

bakugou helping you out when your piercing gets stuck — 11/12/2022

kiri n bakugou, under v overstimulation [nsfw] — 16/11/2022

katsuki watching a rabbit review [nsfw] — 27/10/2023

lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off — 14/11/2023

"make me" [nsfw] — 06/12/2023

if katsuki ever lost his memory — 12/12/2023

sleeping with bakugou — 24/12/2023

big brother bakugou [nsfw] — 11/01/2024

valentine’s day — 09/02/2024

childhood best friends — 23/03/2024

teasing him [nsfw]— 09/04/2024

katsuki bakugou + strawberry daiquiri — 26/04/2024

katsuki bakugou + jagerbomb [nsfw] — 27/04/2024

katsuki bakugou + bloody mary [nsfw] — 27/04/2024

katsuki bakugou + cosmopolitan — 05/05/2024

sirens call — 09/05/2024

© all works belong to @a-ikuoliver, @gwen0m, and dlirious on archive of our own, do not plagiarise, translate, repost, feed my works into ai or recommend my work on other platforms, or bind my fanworks for sale.

[jennyfromthebes]

Hey! I wanna talk for a sec about the Live Music Archive. If you're a tMG fan who's on here you probably already at least know about it, but for anyone unfamiliar I want to do a quick post talking about what it is and how you can listen!

The Live Music Archive is a collection hosted by the Internet Archive for audio recordings of concerts. Specifically, the LMA hosts, with permission from the band, user-contributed recordings of concerts. Some fans will go to concerts with recording gear to take a full audio recording of the show and then upload it to the archive under the band's collection. As of writing this post there are almost 450 live tapes uploaded to the tMG LMA collection!

There's a few ways that you can listen to recordings on the Live Music Archive. The webpage works pretty well both on desktop and mobile browsers, and that's what I typically use. You can also listen on web without having to make an account on the Internet Archive, which is convenient for browsing. I also use the webpage to download mp3s of favorite tapes to my phone, so that I can listen to them in my local music player.

However, if you don't mind making a free account and prefer the convenience of something more like Spotify, you can also listen to anything on the LMA via the Taper's Section app for Android or the Live Music Archive app for iOS! (Obligatory disclaimer that I use an Android and can't personally vouch for the iOS app, but afaik they have similar features.) The apps have the same functionality as the webpage in a more streamlined mobile-friendly interface, plus things like notifications when there's a new tape added to a collection you follow and downloading in-app for offline listening. The Android app also has a tab for tapes from today's date, there's often at least one (there are FOUR for today!) and that's a really fun way to find tapes to listen to.

If you're looking at this going, wow, that sounds really cool but there's so many tapes that it's a little overwhelming to get into this, don't worry! I'll leave you with a couple recommendations. As mentioned above, I like to listen to shows from the current date. Another fun way to find shows is looking for a specific song - you can go on the wiki and it'll list every show at which the song has been played live, and then just search until you find one of them that has a tape on the archive. Lastly, a few specific favorite tapes of mine:

- 2014-06-15 has the entirety of Taboo VI: The Homecoming played live + one of my absolute favorite performances of both Woke Up New and The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton.

- 2015-06-01 is the only time Straight Six has ever been played live and it's interestingly pretty different from the EP version, plus a phenomenal back to back Spent Gladiator 1 & 2.

- 2021-08-06 was the first show after the band started playing concerts again post 2020, and it has a really incredible energy and a phenomenal setlist.

- 2024-03-01 is from the recent run of solo shows, this one was at Grace Cathedral and the ambience is truly truly incredible, it feels so ethereal.

Please feel free to add any additional notes or some of your own favorite tapes to the post as well! Happy listening!!

[ofswanlake]

Melting

Melting is the first full album released by Nari. It was released on May 8th, 2024 through VIE Entertainment and Republic Records. It is available digitally and physically.

GET YOUR PHOTOCARD HERE!

PLAY ALBUM HERE.

TRACK 01. Espresso (orig. by SABRINA CARPENTER) is a funk-pop English song written by Nari and produced by Julian Bunetta. On Genius, she explains that she compares herself to coffee to emphasize how energetic her partner gets with her. The lyrics further explain that she can get the guy— any guy— and she is this person’s dream come true. Nari references pop culture with Nintendo and Mountain Dew in this song.

TRACK 02. Melting (orig. by KALI UCHIS) is a dreamy love song written by Nari and Kino and produced by IO and Diplo. The song details falling in love with someone who makes you lose all your worries.

TRACK 03. Rooftop * (orig. by YOOA) is a hip-hop dance number with addictive string sounds and the booming percussion sound of an 808 bass written by Nari and Ryder Kim, produced by Jimmi. On Genius, Nari states, “Rooftop compares the line between reality and dreams to a rooftop— and a bird in the cage represents being stuck, and the bird wants to fly away and be free.”

TRACK 04. Kitty Cat * (orig. by JULIE of KISS OF LIFE) is a hip-hop based pop genre song composed of both vocals and rap. It’s written by Nari and Jennie, produced by IO. The song defies society’s expectations that a woman should be tame and submissive, and Nari is exactly the opposite. The lyrics further that while it may she like she has everything, she feels unloved and feels objectified and controlled by those around her. The societal “gaze” becomes too much for her to handle, and she just wants to break free from everyone’s expectations.

TRACK 05. Nothing (orig. by KISS OF LIFE) is a medium-tempo R&B song inspired by the 2000s written by Nari and Lainey, produced by Sade. The song is about a love reaching its end, a love that changed and the lack of emotion in the relationship.

TRACK 06. Sugar Rush (orig. by BIBI) is a playful and empowering anthem with upbeat R&B pop with a sparse hip-hop beat. It’s written by Nari and Pink Slip and was produced by Pink Slip and inverness. The song emphasizes Nari’s allure and charm while also warning those who try to take advantage. This song in particular is popular for its lyrics, hidden meaning in lyrics and surprise guest appearances by the rest of BLACKPINK in the music video.

TRACK 07. Don’t Let Me Go (ft. GIRIBOY) (orig. by JEON SOMI & GIRIBOY) is an upbeat song with a catchy whistle tune and smooth rapping featuring K-rapper and producer, GIRIBOY. The song discusses the need to be with the one you love.

TRACK 08. Teenager in Love (orig. by MADISON BEER) is a doo-wop pop song written by Nari and One Love, produced by One Love. The song references Dion and the Belmonts’ 1959 song “A Teenager in Love”. The original is about

TRACK 09. Feeling Lucky (ft. Jackson Wang) (orig. by BIBI, JACKSON WANG) is an all English sultry pop song written Kurtis Wells, Aldae & ABSOLUTELY and produced by Aldae and Kurtis Wells. The song is about a mutual attraction and the thrilling dynamics of a romantic relationship. It is the only song not written by Nari on the album.

PHYSICAL ALBUM CONTENT

1 disc + photobook (68 photos) + two versions + one random photocard out of three + one out of two random mini posters + one out of two random solo polaroids + one ot5 blackpink polaroid + stickers + one big folded poster + one swan keychain (PRE-ORDER ONLY)

STYLIST’S CHOICE

Rooftop Stages

Kitty Cat Stages

Espresso Stages

HIGHLIGHTS

Espresso was released first as a surprise with one teaser announced on social media on May 6th, 2024 at 12AM KST. The song was an English pre-release single.

The music video for Espresso had 76 million views in the first 24 hours. It debuted at #1 on Worldwide iTunes Songs Chart, as well as charting #1 on Bugs and Genie, #3 on MelOn, and #94 on Flo. On all music platforms, the single cover was what captured many attention.

Melting was soon announced with teasers posted on May 8th, 2024. It received over 200k pre-orders in the first 24 hours and within two weeks, it had 1.5million pre-orders.

There are two versions of the album, HEART and FACE.

Melting was released across all platforms on May 27th, 2024. All songs charted in the top 100 across Bugs, Genie, and MelOn. Rooftop debuted at #97 on Flo. The track Sugar Rush was banned from music shows.

Rooftop gained 59 million views within 24 hours, debuting at #1 on Bugs and Genie, #2 on MelOn and #97 on Flo. Nari promoted Rooftop on Korean music shows for two weeks, gaining seven music show wins during the time but in total had eleven wins for the song and performed Kitty Cat three times.

Nari promoted Espresso first, after she went to the Met Gala. She performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

She also went on Genius Verified to explain the lyrics, along with Wired! for Nari Answers the Web’s Most Searched Questions.

She was super excited to do the Puppy Interview with Buzzfeed, she even posted a selfie teaser before the video and some videos on her Instagram once the video was out.

When promoting in Korea, she made sure to go on a lot of variety shows, mostly because she never got the chance before.

She went on Jaefriends, Knowing Bros, Let’s Eat, XYOB, The K-Star Next Door with Jonathan, D&E’s Wanna Come Here, PSICK Show, and The Killing Voice. She really enjoyed being on all of them, making sure to show her appreciation for being invited.

Nari explained on Genius Verified about Teenager in Love, “It’s not about anyone you know.”

VIE Entertainment (Nari) posted a live performance and dance practice for Espresso, Rooftop, and Kitty Cat on YouTube. Along with a lot of vlogs after the era was over, including her GRWM video for the Met Gala (which was posted before), preparing for her comeback, videos of her in the studio, etc.

She also opened her own TikTok account and began posting dance challenges with other idols, along with current trending challenges. She was the first idol Jennie did the Spot challenge with, and likewise for Espresso and Rooftop.

On social media, BLINKs were more ruthless than ever with getting rid of hate posts. VIE Entertainment also had to post a statement about taking legal action against malicious posts.

If she knew anything about said malicious posts, she never spoke out against them or seemed down at any point.

Not once did Nari answer any questions about Jungkook if she was asked by a reporter who couldn’t get the memo, known for either staring at them in silence until they changed the topic or laughing and ignoring them. But everyone knew they were still together as it somehow got out that she went to visit him.

Each time she went somewhere to a known schedule, she had multiple bodyguards with her just in case. And even for her just being out, she had bodyguards with her, no matter what. Which a lot of BLINKs (and Nari’s circle) were glad for.

All in all, it was a really good surprise comeback for Nari.

[project-lumen]

》》 The LUMEN M-AHA-sterpost 《《

It was a-BAM time.

Hi hello there, fellow Life Series enjoyers! Arto, Pinkish and Kori here, live from our Game-Making Void bringing to you our comprehensive list of resources in one post for easier access and navigation!

Here you'll find our current status, some important links to other posts, as well as an overview of our tags and a handy F.A.Q. section :3

Without further ado, thank you so much, all info is under the cut!

》Status《

Date Format: [DD/MM/YY]

Current mission: [10/01/25] Reviewing applications

Next up: [??/01/25] The new recruits' announcement

》Links《

First announcement: Applications

Meet the team!

Second announcement: Our official art guide

Essential info

Arto's lore scraps

》Tags!《

#projectLUMENasks : For every single one of the questions we have answered so far!

》F.A.Q.《

What is this?

Project LUMEN is an effort to bring the Life Series to life in a brand new way, in videogame form! A RPG of sorts with battle mechanics, interaction with npcs, our own unique spin in Watcher Lore, changing art styles and multiple endings with a bunch of mechanics we need to keep secret for now but we know you all will enjoy, at least we hope so.

Cool, how can I contribute?

We want LUMEN to be a game by the community for the community, a tribute to all the wonderful artists, writers and creatives of all kinds. And it is a HUGE project, as such, all help is appreciated. We plan to open applications from time to time to recruit people as passionate as us into our little team. But everyone can lend a hand if they so desire, all ideas, all likes, all reblogs, all comments, all art, is truly, genuinely appreciated. Project LUMEN is completely non-profit, a passion project turned group effort that we are willing to pour our heart into, and we want to be as transparent as possible with it.

How will development of the game itself go?

As for specifications, Kori is the one in charge of the coding department, we are going to use Unity and C# to program everything, Arto will manage music and Pinkish will be in charge of the Martyn and Ren section. But once we review our first batch of applications, we will contact our chosen ones with more details, either for character sprites, script or any other miscellaneous things. We will all be working together as a team, each contributing as much as they so desire.

We will then take to developing our early alpha build including our very first couple of chapters, and release it for playtesting, then we will take all the feedback and make the pertinent changes. We will improve the game and continue developing until we have an almost finished beta build that we will then publish for testing. Take all the criticism again to finally reveal our finished product. Releasing first on itch io and then hopefully ported into Newgrounds for mobile compatibility.

Is there a release date?

As of now, we'd rather not promise anything. But we are actively working on development, and we hope to, at the very least, have a playable alpha demo at the end of this year.

[tuesdaytothursday]

Good news, everyone!

Looks like Tumblr’s mobile apps are shitting themselves today, at least on iOS. But it appears the web version is still working.

[2024-01-07T14:53:xx]

[coldshrugs]

glamtober #01 - on the road

this is the look i used for io during dawntrail. unfortunately, it's impossible without using crime to itemswap a crafter top onto something else, but goldsmith items scream dalmascan aesthetic to me, so she can wear it as a treat. practical, comfortable, and perfectly io's style during "retirement."

items used:

weapon: ceiba longbow head: emperor's new hat body: gemsoph's vest (undyed) hands: woodland warden's fingerstalls (general purpose dark brown | N/A) legs: woodland warden's breeches (bark brown | N/A) feet: heirloom thighboots of aiming (undyed) accessories: emperor's new set

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Why Millennials aren’t leaving Tiktok

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW NIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and more!

The news that Gen Z users have abandoned Tiktok in such numbers that the median Tiktoker is a Millennial (or someone even older) prompted commentators to dunk on Tiktok as uncool by dint of having lost its youthful sheen:

https://www.garbageday.email/p/tiktok-millennials-turns

But "why are Gen Z kids leaving Tiktok?" is the wrong question. The right question is, why aren't Millennials leaving Tiktok? After all, we are living through the enshittocene, the great enshittening, in which every platform gets monotonically, irreversibly worse over time, and Tiktok is no exception:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

To understand why older users are stuck to Tiktok, we need to start with why younger users relentlessly seek out new platforms. To some extent, it's just down to youth's appetite for novelty, but that's only part of the story. To really understand why people come to – and leave – platforms, you have to understand switching costs.

"Switching costs" is the economists' term for everything you have to give up when you change products or services. Switching from Ios to Android probably means giving up a bunch of your apps and purchased media. Switching from an airline where you're a high-status frequent flier to another carrier means giving up on free checked bags and early boarding.

In an open market, rivals have lots of ways to lower these switching costs (it's an open secret that you can call an airline and say, "Hi, I'm a 33rd Order Mason on American Airlines, will you make me a Triple Platinum Diamond Sky-Baron if I switch to Delta?"). Of course, big incumbents hate this, and do everything they can to increase their switching costs, finding ways to impose high switching costs that punish disloyal consumers who have the temerity to go elsewhere.

With social media, lock-in comes for free, thanks to the "collective action problem." Getting people to agree on a given course of action is hard, and as you add more people to the picture, the problem gets harder. It's hard enough to get half a dozen people in your group-chat to agree on where to go for dinner or what board-game to play. But once you're reliant on a social media service to stay in touch with friends, relatives around the world, customers, communities (say, rare disease support groups), and coordination (like organizing your kid's little league car-pool), the problem becomes nearly insoluble. Maybe you can convince your overseas relatives to switch to a Signal group, but can you do the same for your small business's customers, or your old high-school pals?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

Taken together, switching costs and collective action problems make platforms "sticky," and sticky platforms inevitably enshittify.

Platforms, after all, generate value. They connect end-users with each other (say, little league parents) and they connect end-users to business customers (you and your small business's customers). That value needs to be parceled out among end users, business customers, and the platform's shareholders. A platform can make life better for business customers at its end users' expense by increasing the number of ads (hello, Youtube!), and it can make life better for its shareholders at its business customers' expense by decreasing the share of ad revenue given to publishers or performers (oh, hello again, Youtube!).

From a platform's perspective, the ideal state is one in which end users and business customers get no value from the platform, because it's all being captured by the platform's shareholders. But if Youtube interrupted every 30 seconds of video for ten minutes of ads and paid the video creators nothing, both users and creators would ditch the platform – and advertisers would follow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dab8sKg8Ko8

So platforms seek an equilibrium: "what is the least value we apportion to end-users and business customers without triggering their departure?" Maybe that means giving more value to end-users (for example, keeping Uber fares low by suppressing wages), or to business-customers (crowding more ads into your social media feed).

Every business – including brick-and-mortar, non-digitized ones – wants to find some kind of equilibrium between the value going to its suppliers, its customers and its owners, but digital businesses have an advantage here: digital systems are flexible in ways that analog, hard-goods businesses are not. Digital businesses can alter pricing, payouts and other dynamics from moment to moment – second to second – and make a different offer to every supplier and customer. They have a bunch of knobs, and they can twiddle them at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Well, not quite at will. Businesses face constraints on their twiddling. If they get too greedy, users or business customers might weigh the cost of staying against the switching costs and decide it's not worth it. But the more expensive – the more painful – a platform can make leaving, the more pain they can inflict on the people who stay.

In other words, there's two ways to keep a customer or supplier's business: you can make a better service so they won't want to leave, or you can make leaving the service so painful that they stay even if you mistreat them.

There's three ways a digital company can make things worse for their customers and users without losing their business.

First, they can eliminate competition (think of Mark Zuckerberg buying Instagram to recapture the users who'd fled Facebook to escape his poor management):

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

Second, they can capture their regulators and avoid punishment for trampling their suppliers' or users' legal rights (think of how Amazon has raised the price of everything we buy, both on- and off Amazon, through its "most favored nation" deals):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Third, they can use IP law to prevent competitors from modifying their services to claw back some of that value (think of how Apple used legal threats to block an Android version of Imessage, blocking Apple customers from having private conversations that included non-Apple customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Companies can't just use this tricks at will, of course. Antitrust laws can block companies from making anticompetitve acquisitions or mergers. Regulators can punish companies for cheating their customers, workers and users. Technologists can come up with clever ways of modding or reconfiguring existing services with "interoperable" add-ons that let users bargain for better treatment by refusing to accept worse:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Day in, day out, the decision-makers at tech companies test these constraints, twisting the knobs that shift value away from users to shareholders. Their bosses and boards motivate them with "KPIs" that dangle the promise of huge bonuses and promotions for any manager who successfully enshittifies part of the company's products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Decades of pro-corporate, pro-monopoly policy has loosened those knobs. 40 years of lax antitrust meant that companies had a lot of leeway to buy or merge with rivals – that's changing today, but it's tough sledding:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

As sectors grew more concentrated, they found it easier to capture their regulators, so that they no longer fear punishment for price-gouging, spying, or wage-theft, so applying the same amount of torque to the "break the law" knob cranks it a lot further:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Once you've captured your regulators, you can aim them at your competitors. A monopoly-friendly policy environment has transformed IP law into a bully's charter, allowing powerful companies to strangle would-be competitors who dare to offer their customers tools to shield themselves from enshittification, like scrapers, ad-blockers and alternative clients. Big companies can crank the enshittification knob all the way over and know that smaller rivals knobs won't turn at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

At one point, bosses faced one more constraint on knob-twiddling: their workforce. Many tech workers genuinely cared about their users' welfare, something bosses encouraged as a sneaky trick to get techies to put in long hours without exercising their leverage by quitting rather than destroying their lives to meet arbitrary deadlines. These workers would fearlessly slap their bosses' hands when they reached for the enshittification knob, threatening to quit rather than allowing the products they'd given so much for to be enshittified. Today, after hundreds of thousands of tech layoffs, tech workers are far less like to challenge their bosses' right to twiddle, and far more likely to get fired if they try:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

All this means that tech bosses don't have to change their approach at all, and yet, their services will grow steadily worse. The boss who twiddles the enshittification knob in exactly the same way as he did a year or a decade ago will find it turning much further, because his customers are locked into his platform, his regulators won't protect them, the same regulators will stop his competitors' attempts at countertwiddling, and his workers fear losing their jobs too much to speak up for their users.

That's the contagion that produced the enshittocene: the forces that constrained companies (competition, regulation, self-help and labor – all melted away, allowing every company's MBA-poisoned knob-twiddling leaders to shamelessly caress their knobs with every hour that God sends:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

Which is why people want to leave platforms. When a platform loses its users, those users have weighed the switching costs against the pain of staying and decided that it's better to bear those costs than to stay.

So why have Tiktok's younger users found the costs too high to bear, and why have their elders remained stuck to the platform?

For that, we have to look at the unique characteristics of young people – characteristics that transcend the lazy cliche that kids are easily bored, fickle novelty-seekers who hop from one service to another with unquenchable restlessness.

Whether or not kids are novelty-seekers, they are, fundamentally, a disfavored minority. They want to do things that the platforms don't want them to do – like converse without being overheard by authority figures, including their parents and their schools (also: cops and future employers, though kids may not be thinking about them as much).

In other words, kids pay intrinsically lower switching costs than adults, because a platform will always do less for them than it will for grownups. This is a characteristic kids share with other supposedly technophilic, novelty-seeking "early adopters," from sex-workers to terrorists, from sexual minorities to trolls, from political dissidents to fascists. For those groups, the cost of mastering a new technology and assembling a community around it is always more likely to be worth bearing than it would be for people who are well-served by existing tools:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#sex-tech

Pornographers didn't jump on home video because of its superiority as a medium for capturing flesh-tones. Home video was a good porn medium because it was easier to discreetly get into the hands of porn consumers, who could, in turn, discreetly view it. The audience for porn in the privacy of your living room is larger than the audience for porn that you can only watch if you're willing to be seen marching into a dirty movie theater.

Every new technology is popularized by a mix of disfavored groups and neophiles, who normalize and refine it – and yes, infuse it with their countercultural coolth – until it becomes easy enough to use to become mainstream. As more normies drift into the new system, the switching costs associated with leaving the old system declines. It gets easier and easier to find the people and services you want in the new realm, and harder and harder to find them in the old one.

This is why tech platforms have historically experienced sudden collapse: the platform that gets more valuable and harder to leave as it accumulates users gets less valuable and easier to leave as users depart:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

If you're a Gen Z kid on Tiktok, you experience the same enshittification as your Millennial elders. But you also experience an additional cost to staying: as late-arriving adult authority figures become more fluent in the platform, they are more able to observe your use of it, and punish you for conduct that you used to get away with.

And if you're a Millennial who isn't leaving Tiktok, it's not just that you experience the same enshittification as those departing Gen Z kids – you also face higher switching costs if you go. The older you get, the more complex your social connections grow. A Gen Z kid in middle school doesn't have to worry about losing touch with their high-school buddies if they switch platforms (they haven't gone to high school yet – and they see their middle school friends in person all the time, giving them a side-channel to share information about who's leaving Tiktok and where they're headed to next). Middle-schoolers don't have to worry about coordinating little league car-pools or losing access to a rare disease support group.

In other words: younger people leave old platforms earlier because they have more to gain by leaving; and older people leave old platforms later because they have more to lose by leaving.

This is why Facebook is filled with Boomers. Yes, their kids bolted for the exits to avoid having their parents (or grandparents) wading into their sexual, social and professional lives. But the reason the Boomers were late joining younger users' Facebook exodus – or the reason they never joined it – is that they stand to lose more by going. Facebook deliberately cultivated this dynamic, for example, by creating a photo hosting service designed to entice users into uploading their family photos while disguising how hard it would be to take those photos with them if they left:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The irony here is that tech has intrinsically low switching costs. All other things being equal, a new platform can always build a bridge to ease the passage of users from the old one. There's no (technical) reason that moving to Mastodon, or Bluesky, or any other platform should mean cutting ties with the people who stayed behind.

A combination of voluntary interoperability (where old platforms offer APIs to allow new services to connect with them), mandatory interop (where governments force tech companies to offer APIs) and adversarial interop (where new companies hack together their own API with reverse-engineering, scraping, bots, and other guerrilla tactics) would hypothetically allow users to hop between networks as easily as you change phone carriers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Tech platforms tend to offer APIs when they're getting started (to ease the inward passage of new users) then shut them down after they attain dominance (locking the door behind those users). The EU is tinkering with mandatory APIs through the Digital Markets Act (though bafflingly, they're starting with encrypted messaging rather than social media). Restoring adversarial interoperability will require extensive legal reform, which is getting started through Right to Repair laws:

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/13/oregon-passes-right-to-repair-law-apple-lobbied-to-kill/

The people who are stranded on social media platforms shouldn't be mistaken for uncool, aging technophobes. They're not stubborn, they're stranded. Like the elders who can't afford to leave a dying town after the factory shuts down and the young people move away, these people are locked in. They need help evacuating – a place to go and a path to get there.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/21/involuntary-die-hards/#evacuate-the-platformsr

[microscotch]

WISTERIA SKIN + PUPA EYES: A COMPLETE SET OF GENETICS

BOI that was an undertaking! but finally, and with lots of assistance from the wonderful @kestrelteens, this skin is completed. and it turned into an entire set of cohesive genetics, too! more info under the cut ⤵

essentially this is a mix of woohoo on the beach (aka ios those darn skins slightly edited) and various other components taken from @obscurus-sims, @lamatisse and @buglaur, (such as collarbones and ears), and some moles/freckles for the elder bodies i snuck from @episims, and @sixfootsims tongue + teeth texture. lips are a nod to maxis and a blend of so much stuff that i dont even remember it.😅 also tried to eliminate the smeared lipstick texture under the feet, and p much blended every seam i could find.

here's a swatch of the full range, which is more undertone rather than gradient based:

yay, first time doing supernaturals! 🌙 it was a lot of fun doing eye textures for them, here's the swatch:

NOTE: the zombie and vampire default come with an overlay mod! and the werewolf skins are correlated! please check out the hyperlinked instructions given by the respective creator ‼

also, i highly recommend downloading shasta's genie hair fix!

the eyes - squeas pupa eyes to be exact! come in 17 colors.

SO here are the downloads:

pupa eyes 👁 - custom / gen&town / defaults

wisteria skin 💗 - custom / gen&town / defaults / supernaturals / pngs for recolors + add ons :)

edit 01/08/25: showerproof add-on here

NOTE: these eyes are meant to go with the alien skin. 👽

dec 3rd update: EM chubby morph for shadowrealm has been fixed, feel free to redownload the non default version you're using!

for the database:

credit 🥰: serabiet, squea, obscurus, buglaur, themeasureofasim, sixfootsims, epi the phenomenal mod maker (and correlated werewolf skin maker!), withlovefromsimstown (plantsim textures), deedee(vamp cracks), platinumaspiration for more vamp cracks, veronavillequiltingbee (vamp overlay base), magical-girl-sandbox(bigfoot base), tvickiesims, lordcrumps, lamare & teaaddictyt for playtesting & feedback 💗

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~updates~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

dec 3rd-- EM chubby morph for shadowrealm has been fixed, feel free to redownload the non default version you're using!

january 13th-- i noticed that the s3 range for females is a little too highlighted in the chest area, to the point that clothing where the skin texture mapping is just off the *tiniest* bit makes it clip with the neck, which also applies to a lot of ea meshes. i have toned down the shine and blended the neck down further for this range so that it looks better with differently mapped clothes :)

please redownload the natural defaults and/or non defaults. make sure to keep a backup of the previous version in case you end up not liking the changes ive made to this range!

july 1st-- oh, ~fun fact~ seems like the genetic values werent saved correctly as simpe takes note of the digit separation convention of your own localization (as in, if , or . is used in your region) SO if ure using the gen/town version of this skin, redownload that one, please!

[genshin-impact-updates]

"Starlit Letter" — The Web Event for Genshin Impact's 4th Character OST Album Is Now Available

>> Click to Take Part in Event <<

We parted in one melody

and reunited in another.

〓Event Duration〓

2024/01/18 12:00 – 2024/01/24 23:59 (UTC+8)

〓Event Summary〓

During the event, unlock 5 character tracks and share the event to obtain Primogem rewards.

〓Event Rewards〓

Primogems ×40

〓Notes〓

1. Players must have an Adventure Rank of 10 and above to activate the gift pack, and each UID can only receive the pack once.

2. The event might take a while to load due to the large amount of resources. Thank you for your patience.

3. As this event requires the use of the recording function, we recommend that you update your mobile operating system to iOS 12.0 or Android 7.0 and above, and enable voice recording-related permissions. When using the recording function, the accuracy and validity of the rating may be affected by network or force majeure. In the case of a misjudgment, you can ask Paimon for help to continue the event. Additionally, you will be responsible for any disputes or damages resulting from sharing inappropriate content.

(Note: Wearing headphones may improve your experience.)