#issue 175

[archiesoniconline]

Sonictober 2024 Day 22! Theme: Limit. We all remember Sonic’s famous “Limit Break” scene, but what if that happened earlier in the story with a more comedic tone? Can the power of puns and the 4th wall overcome Robotnik’s deadliest creation?

Art by Sea-Salt

[rushingmelody]

Nothing to add I just like his grandpa outfit

[aeonchangelings-art]

Got bored waiting for the eclipse to start and decided to try my hand at redrawing a panel from the Archie comic. From issue 175, the “Limit” panel.

[l3irdl3rain]

save me senior cat on petfinder, save me

[mcnuggyy]

just a little behind the scenes but I ran the numbers and found I need to be making 420 book sales in order for my comic to be making a profit <3 hehehe funny weed number

[beevean]

Random question out of the blue, but I saw a post on a forum I lurk, that offhandedly alluded to Archie comics nearly killing Sonic even before Sonic 06, due to Sega not paying attention to what was being done with the character until it was too late. Having seen you rant about IDW Sonic before, (which I don't think is the same thing? But still adjacent enough to be relevant) you seemed like the best person to go to for context on what happened with that prior run.

I'm not well informed on Archie, sadly. I tried to read the reboot, but turns out it wasn't a reboot at all because it still required me to know events happened before that issue 😂 and pre-reboot is a complete mess I wouldn't even know how to touch.

I do know that technically the "real" Robotnik the comics start with dies early on, and then he gets replaced by another dimension's counterpart. A bold move, I suppose.

TvTropes gives me this:

Mistaken for Dying: Though he survives some near-fatal adventures, his friends and family thought he had died more than once. Issue 125 was easily the most dramatic as he stopped a doomsday device from destroying the planet. Everyone thought he was vaporized when he was really warped halfway across the universe. It took him a year (in Mobius time) to get back.

Plot Armor: No matter how bad things get, Sonic is always guaranteed to win in the end or eventually rebound from a short term defeat. It's eventually revealed to be an In-Universe case: according to Mammoth Mogul and Eggman, Sonic's long-term exposure to Chaos Energy has essentially made him an Anthropomorphic Personification of Chaos, a living unknown factor; no matter how strong the bad guys get, no matter how ingenious their plans are, and no matter how far they calculate and plan, Sonic will win at the last minute. This has driven Mammoth Mogul to play the Long Game, using his immortality to his advantage to simply wait it out until Sonic dies of old age or just gets too old to fight, and is what led Eggman to create the reality warping Genesis Wave tech to have a way to counter it.

(this last part explains a few fanon misconceptions, huh)

Sorry I wasn't of much help lol. I hope someone else can answer your question!

[pochapal]

in the Horrors bonanza year that has been 2024 nobody expected the oldest and dearest Horrors of all (covid horrors) to make a third act comeback

[viiridiangreen]

so I took my PC to my Trusted PC Wizard yesterday to have her RAM & SSD installed & I'm using the work MAC while she gets back but turns out: SHIT'S HAUNTED

It's bitching @ me over 'very little space left' while also saying that supposedly my user folder is LARGER THAN THE ENTIRE HARD DRIVE SHOULD BE 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

AMERICA EXPRAIN!!!

[ur-mag]

Homeowners ‘living in fear’ after cars towed from their driveways in the middle of the night and $175 fines issued | In Trend Today

Homeowners ‘living in fear’ after cars towed from their driveways in the middle of the night and $175 fines issued Read Full Text or Full Article on MAG NEWS

[must-have-been-thewind]

I've seen a lot of these recently so here we are

If this gets __ notes, I'll …

5 - clean my room

10 - start drinking enough water

25 - try to limit my screentime to like 2 hours a day

50 - fix my sleep schedule

75 - try my absolute best to not sh anymore (I'm already trying but yk extra motivation)

100 - actually do my homework this school year

125 - study regularly

150 - tell someone about my mental health issues and sh (again just need extra motivation)

175 - clean my room regularly

300 - actively try to stop hating myself

400 - tell one of my friends I'm questioning my gender

600 - run regularly

5000 - tell an adult about my mental health issues and sh

Rules: no spamming ig and also don't reblog like a hundred times

[eldritchgriffin]

Also, some pasted together context for the second panel, because I feel like "You'd better hope you can run faster than me." hits harder when it comes right after him basically saying "if I weren't the good guy, I would kill you right now"

On a similar topic, I was thinking of Sonic's capabilities earlier and how scary it is if he decided to go apeshit *glances at last page*

Like seriously, anything going super sonic is scary, but to also be a living thing that's doing it by themselves and also can turn into a deadly ball of spikes? That can think and strategize? You'd be dead before you knew it, before you could think it. It takes nerve signals like what, 0.2 seconds to travel? Sonic could travel, bare minimum (speed of sound), around 68m in that time frame. Fucking scary, man.

Also partly why I'm very excited to see this comic lol

I think about these two panels in Archie Sonic a lot for the exact thing you're describing.

[ms-demeanor]

i’m curious what your opinion is on the finer points of the case mentioned in the JSTOR post you reblogged earlier. the two sources in the post say that JSTOR didn’t press charges against him and had already settled with him by the time he killed himself. from what i read on wikipedia, the concern seems to be that JSTOR complied with a subpoena, which i don’t believe they have a choice to ignore? if anything it seems like the us government had reason to want him dead for wikileaks and public court records reasons, so they took a terms of use violation and blew it up into a dozen federal crimes.

is there more context i should be aware of? i have no particular affection or malice for JSTOR but the sources i found don’t exactly implicate the database or its employees in murder.

That's from page 175 of this document. This line: "The activity noted is outright theft and may merit a call with university counsel, and even the local police, to ensure not only that the activity has stopped but that - e.g. the visiting scholar who left - isn't leaving with a hard drive containing our database" is where I think the culpability starts.

If someone is downloading 1000s of articles (what seems like reasonable threshold for us to take action), what's wrong with us - or the university in collaboration with us - alerting the cyber-crimes division of law enforcement and initiating an investigation, having cop search dorm room and try to retrieve any hard drive that contains our content, etc. Our content is extraordinarily valuable and hard to replicate by the sweat of one's brow, but can be duplicated by savvy hackers and who knows what they want to do with the content?

Page 379: "Does the university contact law enforcement? Would they be willing to do so in this instance?

From page 1296:

I think the important thing to note here is that JSTOR had worked with MIT and had plans in place to prevent future similar downloads, but remained focused on identifying the person responsible for the downloads and ensuring that their data was deleted.

"I might just be irked because I am up dealing with this person on a Sunday night, but I am starting to feel like they need to get a hold of this situation right away or we need to offer to send them some help (read FBI).

And there it is. Page 3093 of the document.

JSTOR can hem and haw about it all they want, but you can't un-call the cops.

MIT was working with JSTOR on preventing future incidents of pirating, but JSTOR repeatedly said that they weren't going to let it go, that it was unacceptable to drop the issue, that they were going to continue to pursue the pirate.

You can scroll through the document and see the JSTOR tech department and abuse team talking about Swartz as a script kiddie, and a hacker. You can see someone talking about how this was real theft - making the comparison to stealing books even while admitting that piracy doesn't close others out of access.

You can see the thread starts with a joke about punching someone in the face for hacking their system, and includes the tech team ominously considering whether they should threaten the MIT librarians with the FBI.

There's something really important to note here which I don't think that people who aren't PRETTY DEEP into hackery shit aren't aware of: US law enforcement is absolutely rabidly feral about prosecuting hackers. People may be more aware of this now because of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden (and perhaps a bit on tumblr because of maia arson crimew), but people who work in tech and who are in infosec - like the people joking about calling the FBI in these emails - would be aware of the bonkers disproportionate punishments faced by hackers. And knowing that, they kept pushing and pushing and pushing for identification of the hacker. They kept digging with MIT, they kept saying that simply preventing future incidents wasn't enough.

Early in the exchange someone from JSTOR asked "what's wrong with us - or the university in collaboration with us - alerting the cyber-crimes division of law enforcement and initiating an investigation, having cop search dorm room and try to retrieve any hard drive that contains our content, etc." and the answer is what happened to Aaron Swartz.

It is absolute bullshit for JSTOR to say "we arrived at a solution privately and didn't want to press charges" after law enforcement has gotten involved with a hacking case, especially one where they're talking about "real theft" and are attempting to quantify and emphasize the amount that was "stolen" from them.

The *public* may believe that private individuals or institutions are the ones who "press charges" but that's simply not the case. It's prosecutors who decide whether or not to go ahead with charges; they do it based on what cases they think they can win and what their office's perspective is on the crime. When you hear about people choosing to press charges it simply means that they decided to tell the prosecutor they wanted the case to go forward. It's up to the prosecutor whether or not that happens.

And the tech team at JSTOR had to know that law enforcement wasn't just going to wag a finger at an academic hacker.

There's a parallel here that happens sometimes when people have their identities stolen by their parents. If you mom takes out a credit card in your name, that's identity theft. That's fraud. That's illegal. If you reach the age of 25 and realize that your credit is ruined because your mom has been defaulting on cards in your name, you've got two choices to fix that: one is to accept the debt and pay it off and build up credit, and the other is to report the identity theft - which will end up with your mom in prison for a decade or so. Ruin your own personal finances, or your mom goes to jail for ruining your finances. So if you find out that your mom stole your identity you can't just call the cops to pressure her into transferring the debt to her name or something. That's not an option. The cops are not a threat to wave over people, they are not a way to get people to fall in line or act right. They aren't someone you can send to a college student's dorm room to retrieve a hard drive and have the matter drop.

When you call the cops on someone you are sending the full force of the law after them, and the full force of the law falls really heavily on hackers, and how heavy that blow can be is something that the JSTOR team must have been aware of when they were making snide comments about calling the FBI because they were frustrated with the noncommittal responses they were getting from librarians.

Ultimately it was the carceral state that killed Aaron Swartz, but they would not have been involved if JSTOR didn't think that what he did constituted theft.

Taking an *EVEN LARGER* step back from that, the idea that information can be owned and locked behind a paywall is what killed Aaron Swartz, someone who fought for information to be free.

Like. JSTOR is a licensing company. At the end of the day, cute social media posts and all, they're the same as the RIAA and ASCAB. They exist to extract a fee from people attempting to access information.

Aaron Swartz and all that he stood for are an existential threat to their core function.

Are JSTOR's hands as dirty as the federal prosecutors? Absolutely not. But they operate on a model that puts them in opposition to open information activists and it ended up with a hammer falling on Aaron Swartz that they dropped.

[rushingmelody]

Ah shit

[faerygardenparty]

Sorry for talking about this again but I keep seeing people go “oh don’t you think artists deserve to be paid for their work??” in response to the watcher shit and it’s so…. disingenuous, by that logic we should all be fully in support of NFT artists and YouTubers who sell shitty online courses for exorbitant amounts of money, one of my biggest issues with this is that a subscription service is an inherently predatory business model that typically relies on the customer forgetting they signed up, making them jump through so many hoops to unsubscribe in the hopes that they’ll give up and keep giving them money, and making the refund process just as difficult as the unsubscribing process so the service can keep the money they scammed out of the customer

You also really can’t guilt people into paying for such a highly unreasonable price, Hulu is $7 a month, $2 with a student discount, and has over 1,200 shows and 1,300 movies, even rooster teeth at its peak had a lot more content to offer to their subscribers than watcher does, even dropout, which I’ve seen far too many people compare this to, has over 20 shows, many of which with multiple seasons, the longest of which being dimension 20 with 21 seasons and over 200 episodes, the other service I’ve seen people bring up is nebula, which has 175 content creators on it and is a dollar cheaper than watcher tv, watcher does not have nearly enough content to justify the $6 a month fee

I should also point out nebula has a membership option in which you pay a one time fee and get access to the service forever without ever having to pay again, which, yes, while it may be expensive, it’s also much better in my opinion than a predatory subscription-based model

This is also not an artistic decision, it is a business decision, artists can make shitty business decisions too, it doesn’t make them exempt from criticism just because they’re an artist

[fullscoreshenanigans]

#this seems much more likely to me than the alternative #which is that leuvis experienced a drastic worldview change as a side-effect of his brush with death #and is impressed enough that he wants to give these specific kids (or humanity at large) a chance #and that… kinda seems to be what canon suggests? #which grosses me out a bit ngl #probably my least favorite aspect of the ending and that’s saying something #anyway I like this much better #lifelong disappointment be upon this fiend (via @esthelle18)

Leuvis waking up on November 14, 2047, after having sweet, sweet dreams of hunting humans openly in the wild again for the first time in 1000 years:

Did Leuvis even know the kids were escaping to the human world when he announced to abolish all the farms?

Imagine he was hoping to hunt naturally but then was met by disappointment 💀

[scoobyganggifs]

PLEASE HELP THESE FAMILIES ❤️🇵🇸

hello all, several Gazan families have reached out to me to share their campaigns. please, PLEASE if you can spare it match my donation of the minimum 5 euros and if you send me proof of such a donation eg the receipt i will make a gifset or write a minimum 500 word fanfic (nothing explicit/suggestive) of your choice. if that is an incentive. i hope you donate anyway and don’t need to be encouraged to like that

if not, PLEASE SHARE

first @amalashuor reached out to me.

Amal and her husband and their beautiful baby girl Maryam were made to flee their home and after staying with friends for some months ended up in a tent in Rafah. I do not need to tell you of the carnage, the death and destruction livestreamed to us every single day of this genocide, that Israel is wreaking there but imagine living that. we see it through our screens but Amal, baby Maryam and her husband LIVE it. on top of the direct impacts of genocide there is the indirect disease and famine and unsanitary conditions manmade by Israel and its supporters ravaging the Gaza Strip. and they have been made to evacuate once more but THERE IS NOWHERE IN GAZA LEFT TO GO

Amal should be continuing her studies, her master’s degree in French language. baby Maryam should be giggling and playing. please help, in any way you can, to make this their reality

HERE IS THEIR GOFUNDME

€21,516 raised of €30,000 target

number #175 on the vetted fundraiser spreadsheet by @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi

secondly, @fahedshehab-new reached out to me

Mr Shehab, Fahed, is a father of 5 beautiful children: Sahar, the eldest at only 14; Dana; Mona; Malak; and Yehya, the youngest at one and a half years old. there is also his wife and their mother Mrs Shehab, Reem, and their grandmother, Mona

Israel bombed their home and the gym Fahed owned in Gaza, forcibly displacing them to the south of the strip where they have been surviving this genocide in inhumane conditions. they have been displaced ten times and are now in a tent in Rafah where conditions get worse and worse as the genocide persists. they are threatened every day with bombing and ground offences from Israel on top of the ecocidal campaigns that have led to disease and famine other health issues and unsanitary conditions that further exacerbate all of this. again THERE IS NOWHERE IN GAZA LEFT TO GO. THIS IS A GENOCIDE

the funds will be used for departure costs as well as basic living costs: accommodation, food, transportation and healthcare

this family like yours and mine should be living in safety and peace and freedom of oppression. these kids should be playing and going to school. Fahed, Reem and Mona should be at peace knowing they can do that

HERE IS THEIR GOFUNDME

€28,790 raised of €50,000 target

vetted by @el-shab-hussein

thirdly, Amal’s sister @nourashoure44 reached out and needs urgent help for her son Muhammad

Muhammad has a medical condition resulting in muscle relaxation and immobility and was receiving treatment in Gaza before Israel’s genocidal campaign destroyed the healthcare services. his condition has deteriorated and puts him at even greater risk, he NEEDS his treatment to continue URGENTLY

HERE IS THEIR GOFUNDME

£347 raised of £80,000 target

vetted by @90-ghost and Amal herself

if you cannot donate PLEASE SHARE

@feluka @appsa and tagging scooby blogs @tubapun @thescoobydooby @threephantomrey @scoobypineapple @scrappedtogether @cometcrystal @velmautism @nemmet