#obvious solution is to create new one but

[tarasahl]

I wanna play swtor so badly, just not happy with or feeling any of the characters i have in that game!! 🥲

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

fools: the tuvix situation is like the star trek version of the trolley problem! you're either letting two dear friends die to allow this new, third person to live, or you murder the new person to get your friends back me: just create a transporter duplicate of the combined guy and split up one of them fools: ... me: sometimes people are so excited to philosophize they forget that star trek problems get to be solved by star trek science

[lesbianbishounen]

i hate talking about genai bcus its fucking everywhere and even talking about that fact feels redundant but i cannot help but think about how people's arguments for why it could be good feel so indicative of how many americans think about the day to conveniences we have.

like people will say stuff like "oh wouldn't it be nice to have someone who can't draw be able to have art or voices or music for a game or other project they're working on when they're not an artist or voice actor and can't afford to pay one" and like yeah sure it would be nice. devoid of context its a fun little novelty that wouldn't hurt. it'd be a welcome convenience for them but the entire problem is what the cost comes at.

Setting aside the fact that we don't live in a world where that tech will just be used for small personal use, the stuff it comes at the cost of is the whole issue, massive water and energy consumption, people in other countries paid pennies to filter through all the horrific stuff that gets submitted to machine learning datasets. but the people touting this stuff as a great convenience that'll "democratize art" or whatever don't care about that, and it feels like the same mindset of people who refuse to boycott any company that's doing harmful shit.

Who cares if people in another country are dying, i get my convenient caffeine fix. Why should I care about the reason why I get to have out of season fruits year round, it makes things easier for me. Why would I want to take public transportation and change my behaviour, my car is easier. Why should i tolerate any level of inconvenience for the sake of another person or trying to cause less harm. Just complete and utter apathy towards what the negative effects of the things that help you are.

[perfectlyoongi]

SECOND-CHANCE!JUNGKOOK who sent you a happy birthday message and managed to get you two talking again.

SECOND-CHANCE!JUNGKOOK who tries everything he can to deny the love he still feels for you. you had finally started talking again after an eternity apart — Jungkook didn’t want to ruin this. you were always important to Jungkook, long before you two dated, and the lack of your complicity and existence was what hurt Jungkook the most. of course he wanted all the kisses and hugs back. it was obvious he wanted all the nights you slept together and the mornings you cuddled back. but what Jungkook wanted most was simply you. the friendship he had built with you before feelings covered your hearts. Jungkook couldn’t ruin this, not now that he had you again. talking to you again was as if you were mending Jungkook’s heart with every word exchanged. he couldn’t miss this, Jungkook just couldn’t mis—

SECOND-CHANCE!JUNGKOOK who knows perfectly well that he will never stop loving you, so he might as well be honest with you. it took several days for Jungkook to realize the obvious: that strong feeling he always had for you saw no hope of being erased. for a lifetime, Jungkook loved you. for an eternity, Jungkook allowed himself to be loved by you. and in the next world, Jungkook wanted you back. maybe it was a mistake, yes, but that love squeezed Jungkook’s heart. Jungkook had to be honest with you, it was the only way he could ease his restless heart a little.

SECOND-CHANCE!JUNGKOOK who was afraid to tell you the truth because he didn’t want to lose you a second time. but, you and Jungkook were talking again after a lifetime apart — how could he put that at risk? couldn’t he just suffer alone, in silence? would he really have to tell you? Jungkook didn’t want to. Jungkook thought a lot about not wanting to. but that tightness in his heart, that hole in his soul, that grayness of his innocence — Jungkook longed for your love. and, no matter how much it cost him, no matter how risky it was, the truth is that there was only one solution to all his heartache. as such, with his heart racing inside him, Jungkook finally spoke to you. “i know we agreed to maintain a friendship, but i need to be honest with you. i still like you. to be honest, i never stopped loving you and i feel this feeling eating me up inside. i don’t expect anything from you, but i really had to say it and i really needed you to hear me. so, yea. that’s it. i still love you.”

SECOND-CHANCE!JUNGKOOK who feels like your silence lasts an eternity. Jungkook’s confession was made. Jungkook’s words had left his lips and lodged in your ears where they made a small bed of anticipation. there was no going back. what was done was done, and Jungkook would now have to live with the consequences of his heart. and he waited. impatiently, but waited. Jungkook was trapped in your silence, the bars of your uncertainty creating a small cage around Jungkook, preventing him from running away. he would have to face the consequences of his actions. but, god, how you tormented him. silent, without any hope, you just looked at Jungkook. and how agonizing it was to live that wait wrapped in regret and humiliation — Jungkook should never have confessed. “please say something. i don’t think i can take another second of your silence. please reject me if you have to, but speak. i beg you.”

SECOND-CHANCE!JUNGKOOK who almost cries when you say you want to give your relationship a second chance. but you answered at last. you let your own feelings be heard. you confessed to Jungkook that not a day went by where you didn’t love him. you wanted Jungkook back, almost as much as Jungkook wanted you back. there was hope. not only that, but also desire. you wanted to go back to Jungkook. you wanted to build a life with him again. you wanted to leave behind your entire separation that was nothing more than a mistake made by the two of you. you wanted. and Jungkook wanted it too. a new happiness. a new relationship. a new beginning. a new life — Jungkook swore he could cry. “i swear i think i haven’t been breathing this whole time and you just gave me the air back. oh my god, this is real. you want. oh my god, i love you so much. i missed you so much.”

SECOND-CHANCE!JUNGKOOK who treats your second chance as if it were made of the most fragile glass. he would protect you. he would protect your relationship. Jungkook wasn’t going to let anything in the world or in you to ruin what he loved so much. loving you every day and showing it without any hesitation, Jungkook began to plant a garden of pure devotion where he made you walk daily to realize that, outside of there, there was no beauty at all. the world only turned because you two were together. the moon only shone because you loved each other. life only existed because you had each other. Jungkook won’t let this second chance slip through his fingers — he would forever love you. “knowing that i no longer need to remember our moments to be happy. knowing that i can continue to create more memories with you. knowing that you love me the same way i love you… oh, my love, i couldn’t be happier.”

[overandundertarot]

pick a tattoo; message for you

pile 1; Queen of hearts, The Hermit reversed, Ace of swords.

Pile 1 I feel you are taking time to cultivate a specific state of mind. Stillness, being present while at the same time appreciating such intense aspects of human emotions and meeting them with kindness and love. Right now, you are considering pursuing a solo journey, it's not something everyone will understand or that you can even explain. This can be physical or mental; you want to incorporate a potent source of creativity and connection to source in your daily experience. Keep at it, you're still wondering how to go about it. It feels like a half formed idea in your conciousness but let it marinate. You will arrive at a conclusion soon. For some there is something to do with cutting it off with/reaching out to another person. I heard making the best decision for both of you; do what you know and feel is right.

pile 2; 10 of cups, Ace of cups, Ace of swords.

Wow Pile 2! Romance is in the air! You have a romantic prospect right now(or several!) and are trying to be discerning. If not one is coming towards you very soon. You want to protect your heart, but are a secret hopeless romantic! You want in your deepest of hearts to get lost in the feeling and go crazy with love; experiencing the joys and exhileration of being with another person. You hope your partner can be an escape from reality for you, if not a soothing balm to the exhausting end of your day. You want a partner, a family and domestic bliss. Message for you is to give them a chance; let them show you how good it can be. Say yes to that movie or that trip! It seems too good to be true, but it's all you deserve. Enjoy it. So much happiness in in store for you pile 2! Ahhhh I wanna hug you, my heart is feeling full with it.

pile 3; Queen of pentacles, 9 of wands, King of wands.

Pile 3, how're you feeling? It's important to check in with yourself every now and then. You're working hard on a journey but you need to give yourself appropriate time to rest. I'm hearing that you romanticise the suffering. Not to a toxic degree but to make it all the more bearable. You likely already know your message. Keep going. You're doing wonderfully. This pile reminds me of Victoria Monet's words at the recent grammy awards. To paraphrase she explained that her receiving that award last night was a process years in the making; she was growing roots, laying ground. And she's finally begining to sprout. It's the same for you. You are patient with yourself, tending to to your work that you know will put you at the top one day. You have this regal air about you, keep your head held high. Some of you are facing a decision, I'm hearing to go with the shocking option lol.

pile 4; 6 of wands reversed, Queen of cups reversed, Ace of swords.

Things are very much upside down for you pile 4. There's been a thwarted victory(or a hollow one at the very least). It left you feeling empty. I get the feeling like you're crying out to the universe for help but it seems like no one is listening. You're keeping all these things bottled up; refusing to open up. There are people in your life who want to reach out to you but you are not trusting them, very guarded though i feel like its not obvious. Many people may not even know that you are struggling; they think everything is going great for you. The message for you is basically what you just read; you didn't know how to pinpoint what you were feeling. Reframe the situation; are you satisfied with those conditions? That's a no, open up to the people around you, or find a channel to process these emotions. Let yourself bloom again. There's also a big theme of turning your pain into profit. Perhaps use your experience to create art or to find a new persepctive in your work. There are solutions available to you. Use them.

[chaifootsteps]

With Moxxies origin, wouldn’t it have made more sense if Moxxie just lied about his home ring? This would explain why he didn’t fit in with the wrath imps in harvest moon and wasn’t used to the culture. It would also have more impact to find out he lied to Millie of all people, because it makes you wonder, “why would he do that? He trusts Millie.” And while Millie is upset and questions it, Blitzø understands. A turn around of the usual dynamic.

Moxxie: Oh no, no, I hate this place. I grew up right over there.

Blitzø: I thought wrath was your old stomping grounds Mox?

Moxxie: Shit, busted. Okay. I haven’t been honest. This may be hard to believe, but I didn’t grow up on a ranch in the wrath fields.

Blitzø: Thats actually not hard to believe. I get it. I’m a greed imp too. Not the prettiest place.

Moxxie: I didn’t know that.

(After meeting Crimson)

Millie: Mox, why did you lie to me about where you’re from, and how come I haven’t met your Pa before?

Moxxie: I just don’t like to talk about this part of my life. I’m ashamed of the things that happened here. I’ll explain everything later Millie.

(Maybe you could add Blitzø telling Millie that some people aren’t proud of their families or where they grew up. This is something Millie struggles to understand, since she’s so proud of her own.)

I feel like there are ways to make new ideas fit with your story, and if they have an obvious inconsistency at first, you can adapt that into characters voicing the same confusion and questions the audience may have. Then just provide an in-universe answer. Book no more explanatory Twitter threads needed for your show.

Don’t just throw shit at the wall and hope it sticks. Or less graphically, don’t paint a wall green then later touch up the paint with blue and call it the same colour. Paint it turquoise.

It makes sense that Moxxie would lie about his home ring since he changed his own name just to hide from it. And that twist even makes the story and conflict better. At the dinner table Millie might even bring this lie up, having Crimson use it to try and drive a wedge between them. Because what else is he lying about? Same with Blitzø going to wrath after leaving Verosika, but in the next episode say to stolas that hes never been there. Both cant be true.

This episode just missed so many marks. On paper, Crimson and Chaz are a good dynamic duo of villains, one serious and dangerous, the other the less scary comic relief. You could have kept Crimsons scene very dark and serious, then after it ends and he goes upstairs to bed, Chaz does the dumb dick jokes. You keep Crimson as a threat, and keep the silliness you wanted, just keep that part focussed on Chaz. That’s what a comic relief is.

I just feel like the show needs consideration of its audience. There are ways to resolve plot holes by adapting the story slightly, even use them to create new reveals and new conflict.

There are absolutely ways to resolve plot holes by adapting the story slightly and ways to paint a green wall turquoise and all of this other extremely good and actionable writing advice. Unfortunately, Viv's solution to writing dilemmas is a mixture of "Do whatever and let the fandom harass anyone who points it out" and "add more rape."

[deesseshesca]

PAC : Why are u the best ? (10 reasons)

Y'all are my favs...

Good evening pretty souls, let me dive into your energy and bring the best of it out.

SALE 

Until October 31 all readings on my ko-fi is 30$, only

Choose the image that’s speak to you and allow yourself to soak ONLY what’s reasoning with YOUR SITUATION.

Rules and Disclaimer 

I am the type of tarot reader to say as it is. Nothing is sugar coated but everything is sent with good intention. If you are not ready to face some truth, you should vagabond somewhere else. 

PILE 1. 

Even when life feels repetitive or unexciting, you have a unique ability to see potential in every moment. Instead of feeling bored, you use this time to reflect, recharge, and come up with new ideas.

Conflict just isn’t your style. You thrive on harmony and always manage to bring people together, diffusing tension and making sure everyone feels heard and respected.

 Where others may feel dissatisfied, you find hidden opportunities. You see beyond the obvious, turning situations that might seem stagnant into valuable moments of growth and reflection.

 You effortlessly navigate through competitive or chaotic situations, preferring to focus on collaboration rather than competition. You inspire others to work together, not against each other.

 Even in moments where others might feel unfulfilled, your optimistic outlook helps you find joy in simplicity. This ability to appreciate what you have sets you apart as someone who truly understands life’s deeper values.

You steer clear of unnecessary conflict. Instead of engaging in arguments, you stay calm, centered, and focused on what truly matters, avoiding drama and negativity.

Even when life doesn’t give you everything you want, you are still grateful for what you have. This mindset allows you to maintain a positive outlook and inspire others to appreciate the beauty in every situation.

 You solve problems in ways that bring people together. Your natural optimism helps you see solutions that others miss, and you always strive for peace, finding compromises that make everyone happy.

Your energy lifts those around you. When people feel stuck or negative, your optimistic nature reminds them that better days are always ahead. You have a talent for helping others see the bright side.

 No matter how chaotic things may get, you stay centered and calm. You don’t get pulled into unnecessary conflicts, and your peaceful energy helps keep everyone else grounded as well.

💌: Do you wanna to discover 10 other reasons why you are sooo good in bed + moodboard, also you are the only pile where your current/future partner came through, so there's also 10 other reason as for why they love u sexually all on my ko-fi.

PILE 2.

* You’ve faced deep emotional wounds and heartbreak, yet you rise stronger each time. Your ability to turn suffering into growth shows just how powerful and resilient you are.

* After healing yourself, you instinctively help others. Your journey through emotional turmoil has equipped you to guide others through their own struggles, making you a beacon of light for those in need.

*  You embrace your vulnerability, knowing it makes you stronger. This openness creates deep, meaningful connections with those around you, elevating everyone you come into contact with.

*You don’t shy away from difficult conversations. Your emotional intelligence allows you to speak your truth with grace, offering clarity and comfort to others in a way that few can.

* Even when you struggle to fully trust your intuition, you’re constantly learning about yourself. You know your flaws and strengths deeply, which makes you one of the most self-aware people.

* Despite the pain life throws at you, you keep fighting. Your heart may have been pierced, but your spirit remains unbroken. This inner strength radiates in everything you do.

* Even when things seem unclear or you’re second-guessing yourself, your emotional intelligence helps you see through confusion. You know how to sift through the noise and find the truth within.

* You’ve mastered the art of balancing your emotions. You know when to hold on, when to let go, and how to approach situations with both empathy and rationality, making you a stabilizing force for others.

* Even when your intuition feels blocked, you still find a way to navigate through challenges. Your ability to persevere through uncertainty is a testament to your inner wisdom and strength.

* You are unapologetically yourself, even in moments of doubt or confusion. 

💌: Do you want to discover 10 reasons why you are so good in bed ? + Moodboard.

PILE 3. 

You have a vast array of dreams and aspirations, and unlike others who might hesitate, you boldly go after them. Your imagination is boundless, and you’re never afraid to chase what you truly want.

While others might be stuck waiting for the right moment, you seize the day. You don’t let life pass you by, and instead of overthinking, you take immediate action toward your goals.

 Where others see limitations, you see opportunities. You live with an open mind, always aware that the world is full of limitless choices, and this makes you incredibly resourceful and creative.

 You refuse to be stuck or trapped in situations that don’t serve you. Your ability to recognize when it’s time to move on makes you a forward-thinking, dynamic individual.

You possess the ability to dream big, seeing things that others wouldn’t even imagine. This visionary energy sets you apart as someone destined to create and manifest things far beyond the ordinary.

While others may get stuck in indecision, you are decisive. Even in the face of many options, you know how to make swift choices, refusing to let overthinking slow you down.

While many people get lost in their dreams, you know how to bring them into reality. Your combination of creativity and action makes you a master of manifesting what you desire.

Even when challenges arise, you find a way to move forward. Your ability to quickly adapt and make changes ensures that no obstacle holds you back for long.

Your imagination knows no bounds. This not only fuels your dreams but also makes you incredibly innovative, constantly coming up with fresh ideas and perspectives that others find inspiring.

 While others may wait for the perfect moment, you create it. Your proactive approach to life ensures that you’re always ahead of the curve, moving forward when others remain stuck.

💌: Do you want to discover 10 reasons why you are so good in bed ? + Moodboard.

[azullumi]

“are we…” ; kazuha, ayato, alhaitham, & tartaglia

details — here on another agenda of listening to songs, reading the lyrics, realizes how it would sound so good on a fic, and boom! slapping it on a character i think would suit it; basically, songs and tropes as some genshin men

characters — alhaitham, ayato, kazuha, tartaglia (w/gender-neutral reader)

tags — a sprinkle of angst, some of them are out of character, nothing happy is going on (my life relates to it) ; headcanons/scenario

words — 1558

note — getting back to writing so sorry if this fic seems shitty, i’m trying to get my style back by reading the fics i wrote. also i’ll be mostly writing in lowercase now bcs i’m typing on my phone

waiting ; unrequited love — kazuha (bags by clairo)

“can you see me? i’m waiting for the right time.”

kazuha settles on a boundary between you two, standing close behind it, afraid to take a step and cross. and though he was a man who had no fears and wouldn’t let anything hold him back from attaining what he wants, he was scared of going past the boundary as if he would be treading the path of misery once he chooses to do so.

there is always the urge to touch you, the desire to feel your skin underneath his fingertips and unbeknownst to him, his hand would act on its own—he would reach out, his fingers stopping close to your skin before immediately taking his hand back once the realization of his actions had sunk inside his head: “what is it?” you have asked him upon noticing his actions and he could only shake his head before saying, “there’s something on your hair.”

he has this strong sense of denial whenever he does something for you or says something to you, reasoning the flowers that he gives from time to time as an act of friendship and appreciation or the poetry that he creates with you in mindbut he keeps hidden was just because you were too beautiful to not have your being expressed in words and written in poems—

—and every single day, in each morning that he wakes up, he strongly believes that his feelings for you had already dissipated into thin air as if it never existed in the place but only to see your stupid smile and mesmerizing eyes and having himself fall in love again. oh, the amount of times he convinces and tells himself that he’ll avoid you from then on only to have himself basking in your presence later on: “this is the last time,” he tells himself.

there are only two states he would end up in if he decides to go further the line, without you and with you, and he wasn’t stupid to not know that he’ll only have the former happen to him.

he would rather have you close to him and yearn for you despite being so near than the heartbreak and admiring you afar.

“it’s not like you’re in love with me or anything, right?”

toxic ; unhealthy relationships — alhaitham (cry by cigarettes after sex)

“saying you’d wait for me to stay, i know it hurts you.”

you don’t have a toxic relationship with alhaitham nor did you have a healthy one but instead it was miserable, simply one-sided. however, it wasn’t like that at first, he wasn’t like this at first when you two would decide to start over again and create a fresh new page of your love story only for it to end in the same way.

he was good, was great, was wonderful—was. you don’t even know how it got to this point. how did the gentle and sweet murmurs of love and compliments turn to endless shouting and fights at every chance you two get? alhaitham, despite already having raised his voice at you on several occasions, had never raised his hand at you but nevertheless, it doesn’t make anything less hurtful.

“let’s just stop this, i’m tired,” it was clear, it was obvious that the only solution for this wretchedness was to simply just stop and end everything, to cut yourself off him but it doesn’t seem to happen. alhaitham, who possesses such great knowledge and intelligence to know the answer to nearly every problem, never seems to understand that. moments of begging, of asking for forgiveness, for a chance that you always give him, that you always provide him outright, seemingly served and topped with the syrup of your tears and blood.

he only loves you when he’s about to lose you, you know that. you weren’t blind but perhaps you were dumb with that but he loves you then, right? if he really does love you at those moments, then perhaps he did love you right from the start and he just never realized it—it was an endless cycle of gaslighting and making a fool of yourself, finding the reason and making logic out of his actions and words.

it was hard to lose him, you were too used to his presence always guiding you, helping you, and encouraging you that the moment you lost him, you just never seemed to know anything—like a child that was just taken out of the womb, you knew nothing, even yourself. it was a clear fact that you were nothing without him and without you, he was nothing.

“what happened to us, alhaitham?”

convenience ; arranged marriage w/ one-sided feelings — ayato (you’re losing me by taylor swift)

“i wouldn’t marry me either, a pathological people pleaser.”

it was a marriage of convenience—oh, how you hated the word itself. it feels like a painful slap on your face whenever you hear it being used along with the word marriage, one that would leave a burning mark on your skin.

ayato tried to be a good husband, he tried, really. even when he would come home late, he would always have something to give you. despite not having that many conversations and seldomly seeing each other outside the dining room and bedroom, he would still treat you rather kindly and gently, even when you spend most of your nights alone in a bed that was too large for one, you never felt lonely (perhaps you do, you just don’t want to face it because then you’ll realize that your good husband wasn’t good at all); “i apologize, my dear. here, i bought you something on the way back.”

perhaps all of those acts of kindness and sweetness are his way of saying sorry but what’s there to say sorry for even? was it because he failed to arrive for dinner every time or was it just the whole marriage experience overall?

everything was built on convenience, the only time you two would talk to each other is when it’s needed and the conversation you two will have would end rather shortly and the only time he would touch you in a way that makes you feel loved and cherish—making love—is when it’s convenient for him; you were just never a priority, not anything of importance in his life.

what hurts even more is that ayato isn’t even doing any of this because of a boundary that you two had made but rather there was really nothing in between you two, nothing, not even a speck of dust could be found in the distance you two had.

ayato wasn’t even in a state of turmoil, he wasn’t in a position wherein he had to choose something, to sacrifice, to risk something, it’s just that you were there—you were convenient and not because he chose to choose you over anything else. you were easy to woo, easy to hold, easy to fool.

did he really lose you when he never even wanted you to be his in the first place?

“isn’t this convenient for the both of us?”

pleasure ; one-night stand turned to friends w/ benefits— childe/tartaglia (k. by cigarettes after sex)

“we had made love earlier that day with no strings attached, but i could tell that something had changed how you looked at me then.”

it was simply a relationship that was born out of pleasure; created with the foundation of desire, lust, and need. formed in a single night to escape the reality of the misery of your own lives and consistently being nurtured like a seed that was dropped into the soil and naturally taken care of by the rain and sun—it all seemed natural, him inviting you out for dinner, enjoying your time with his stupid jokes and flirty remarks that is luring you to another night of passion just to wake up with a note and a cold bed the next morning.

and there are times you wish to disappear from his life, to stop whatever you two have, and simply just release yourself from his grasp and though he also wishes for the same, childe always holds onto you so tightly as if he never wants you to leave, as if he always want you to stay even if he knows that he’s hurting you, even if you’re just hurting each other; somewhere deep inside his bones, in the crevices of his mind, he doesn’t wish to see you with someone else other than him despite the fact that he wants you to be happy; “stay with me,” he had told you as he kissed and held you.

but childe was a romantic, he always shower you praised in and out of the bed, he was sweet to you; a gentleman with his words and actions. he was lovely, so breathtaking, so poisonous and it wasn’t hard to love him. and he was well-aware of how your gaze seems to linger at him, how there’s something swirling and drowning in the depths of your eyes, and he was well-aware of what it was. and yet, he chooses to ignore it—was it for the good of himself? for you? either way, he can’t have himself falling.

had you known that night with him would end up in this way, you wouldn’t have taken his rough yet gentle hand on that night.

“what’s there for me to stay for?”

© azullumi — do not plagiarize, copy, repost, nor translate any of my works.

[nunalastor]

Lucifer's noticed a certain pest in the halls of the hotel. It's silent and immaterial; not the sort of critter that Nifty has any interest in hunting. Unbothersome to most, yet so very maddening to him.

It's distracting, impeding, and generally a nuisance.

And it follows Alastor everywhere.

He's long wondered what exactly it is; a familiar, an offshoot of Alastor's soul, a shade- But it doesn't really matter. The problem is that it keeps getting in the way.

Every time they're talking, every time they're remotely near each other, it's always there. Watching, pointing, nudging, and tearing Alastor's focus away. It whispers things that only its owner can hear, pulls laughs and reactions from him that Lucifer's only had minimal success in accomplishing himself. It knows him.

It's infuriating. To be so helplessly aware that some other being, so much closer to Alastor than he could ever be, shares so much history that Lucifer could only hope would one day be shared with him as well. It's a revolting feeling that makes him want to tear his hair out, it burns something inside him that screams to just get rid of it.

Lucifer wants it gone.

He can't take it. He can't stand the bile at the back of his throat when he sees them together. He can't handle the feeling of his muscles tightening in on themselves as he wonders why he isn't good enough to be in its place. He can't handle the burning hatred of this lesser than being that's managed to put itself in between what he so desperately wants.

He learned very quickly that it was rather communicative with Alastor. The first and only attempt to 'accidentally' blast it with holy light ended with a very, very angry Radio Demon.

Every other more discreet attempt has ended in failure. Deals and negotiations didn't work; it seemed to not understand him- or at least pretended not to. Even when he cycled through every ancient language in his knowledge, it would simply tilt its head in the same cute manner as Alastor.

A sickening reminder of what he was doing this for.

He tries and tries to distract it, keep it occupied, keep Alastor's attention on him-

And he finally realizes the obvious solution.

He doesn't know what language this thing speaks, or if it's even open to communication with him. But a smaller facet of him might be more amiable. And, more importantly, more able to interact with it.

Regardless of where this creature comes from, it takes the form of a shadow. As a being of light, he's perfectly capable of creating the absence of it. Imbuing just a small part of his consciousness into his own shadow is easy, and after that, it's free to roam without him.

When he first walks into the parlor with his new companion, Alastor seems... confused. And then irritated. Which is fine, because this is just a means to an end. Most importantly, Alastor's shadow is very intrigued. It doesn't take long for it to venture over and meet its soon-to-be friend, circling around cautiously before beginning to prod at it. His own shadow prods back, and it practically jumps.

Lucifer can feel the connection, though very distantly. Easily ignorable; and so he does, in favor of moving closer to Alastor, temporarily free of the shadowy nuisance getting in his way.

"What is that?" Alastor asks the moment he reaches him.

"Hm? Oh! I thought your friend could use a buddy. Doesn't seem like he has any good company to talk to."

Alastor simply sneers at that, though any follow up questions on Lucifer's intentions are easily brushed off or eluded. The pest's attention is successfully enraptured by its new playmate, and Lucifer finally gets a moment of peace, and Alastor's full, undivided attention.

👀

[cupidastrology]

asteroid groom 5129 through the signs -  🕊.⋆｡⋆༶⋆˙⊹

please do not repost or copy my work.

asteroid groom 5129 is one of many marriage asteroids in asteroid astrology. this is the asteroid that shows the influence of who is meant to be your one and only in the marriage area of your lifetime.

asteroid groom can also show who, what, and where is best to have an engagement with your groom or mainly how your groom treats you when it comes to being a husband in your daily life. it can show you how your wedding with this person will go.

.｡❅*⋆⍋*∞*｡*∞*⍋⋆*❅｡.

asteroid groom in aries: the groom is risky, non hesitant, and fun. your connection with this person will be out of bounds, reckless, and ruthless in the way they wish to wed you. you may go through experiences where the wedding or connection to this groom will be raw, unexperienced, and brand new. a fresh breath of air.

asteroid groom in taurus: your groom is verbal, loud, and expressive with their desires, wants and needs. may want to be committed to you in a very passionate way or provide you with endless indulgence in order to get the desire or points across in their need to consummate with you. getting involved with lots of flowers or different wines.

asteroid groom in gemini: you may happen to have a groom that writes you love letters, create experimental and intellectual content, and even engage with you that is full of speeches from the observation of how they see you. this is a position that is all about having someone hold your hand while they take you through the process of making you theirs.

asteroid groom in cancer: you receive nothing but reassurance, support, and guidance from having this position in the birth chart. your groom is attentive and wishes to go through a raw connection with you into creating a family with you. children and babies are involved.

asteroid groom in leo: your groom is loud, fun, and challenging to others around them. when you find someone who wants to wed you, you will find that they're very obvious and will be prone to making sure that you're impressed with their antics. you may go through insecure suitors that want to wed you.

asteroid groom in virgo: your groom is highly observant, dark, and often bluntly honest with what they want, wish, and desire to commit with you in an engagement or wedding. they will capture you in knowledge, solutions, books, and many pretty blankets or clothes to sway you to the best wedding.

asteroid groom in libra: you will receive many flirtatious ways of love, seduction, and desire with your groom due to this position. you may have a suitor that has alot of experience with women and romance, so be sure that your groom is sure to be wed to you. indecisive or dishonest grooms may come out of this position.

asteroid groom in scorpio: your groom will want to pull you in with their emotions and emotional desires. their connection with you is very deep and more consuming than buying a ring just to give you. the groom will want to bed you and worship you more than sway you with just a question to wed more than anything else.

asteroid groom in sagittarius: you may travel or have to get in touch with a personalized way of living your own life in order to seek out the groom that brings you happiness and inspiration. you may encounter your groom through religion or some form of spiritual practice.

asteroid groom in capricorn: your groom may be older and more in touch with traditions rather than the modern take on relationships and weddings. engagements will happen in a very intricate and expensive place, the question being done in a huge way.

asteroid groom in aquarius: your groom is out of this world, boundless, and not necessarily connected to the traditions or aspects of getting married. engagements and gifts around this groom will be outlandish, fun, and even odd.

asteroid groom in pisces: you will go through a possible intricate ritual or process in order to connect with this type of groom; you will be bound to experience paranormal experiences or even a spiritual experience with your groom with this position.

[khaire-traveler]

🔮 Subtle Circe Worship 🪄

Grow your own herbs, especially those you plan to use in magical workings (kitchen related magic may be the most discreet for this)

Take a walk on a sunny day; bask in sunlight

Wear/collect rings or hoop jewelry

Have a candle that reminds you of her (no altar needed)

Keep a picture of her in your wallet

Wear jewelry that reminds you of her

Go for a swim in the ocean; wash your hands in salt water

Visit the beach or the bank of a body of water

Have a pig, dragon, stag, or snake stuffed animal

Have imagery of rings, magic, the beach/islands, winged serpents, various beasts (I'd say whatever animals come to mind with "beats"), or the sun around

Volunteer at an animal shelter

Support environmental preservation, animal sanctuary, or humanitarian organizations

Cook a warm meal for someone in need

Learn to trust your own judgement; trust your instincts

Drink an herbal tea, using the herbs with intention; cook using herbs with intention

Read the Greek Magical Papyri or The Odyssey (you can usually find a PDF; check the Internet Archive)

Bake cakes and pastries, especially with honey; give them to loved ones

Take time to meditate in the sunlight; do this in nature if able

Go outside of your comfort zone; try new things, and take risks

Dedicate time to learning about a new subject or topic

Go out of your way to meet new people or engage with a community

Listen to music that empowers you or that you feel represents you; dance to it!

Play a TTRPG; play D&D (yes, really)

Start a garden; tend to plants

Connect with local nymphs or nature spirits

Stand up for others; stand up for yourself

Learn about the history of witchcraft, especially that of ancient Greece (this ties into the GMP)

Take a self-care bath or shower, especially with herbs

Go camping; take time to appreciate nature

Ground yourself often; practice healthy coping skills; practice emotional regulation skills

Clean your space; keep your environment feeling comfortable, and make it your own

Think outside the box for solutions to problems

Be creative; engage in activities that help you express your creativity

Press flowers; keep dried flowers (preferably for use in later magical workings)

Sit by a fireplace; light a bonfire; allow yourself to focus on the heat and comfort of the flames

Learn non-obvious forms of divination; pyromancy, cartomancy, shufflomancy, carromancy, etc.

Make a list of your personal strengths and pride; focus on how strong and resilient you are; know that you have power, you have strength

Create a sigil or symbol that represents/invokes you and your personal power

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This is my list of discreet ways to worship Circe. I may add more later on! For now, I hope this was helpful. Thank you, and take care! 🩷

Link to Subtle Worship Master list

[anarchotolkienist]

Nationalism troubles me a lot.

Like as a matter of course and fact I take it as obvious that nationalism is an invention of modernity and of liberalism, that nations do not exist, and that their creation will always be genocidal or aspiring towards genocide as the natural end point of their political existence. It's an effort to match the territory to the map and not the other way around and that it therefore should be rejected.

However - if we accept that the invention of nationalism applied not only to the perceived own nation which needed defining and defending, it also created other nations. To take just one example, French nationalism created the Basques and the Bretons, foreign nations who were a threat to the integrity of the french national state and that needed to be utterly culturally assimilated into frenchness, needed to disappear as distinctive cultures (not as political/legal entities, which is a project of the imperial and medieval state before it, but as cultural entities). This causes massive oppression and discrimination against all Bretons and all Basques under french control along national lines, and in fact to some extent gives them shared national interests across class and other political/religious/social lines - the ending of that oppression. Therefore it arguably creates a Breton, say, nation that actually exists because there are actual shared interests here. Multiply these examples across the globe.

However, I don't know how to deal with this at all. The kinds of liberatory nationalism produced by the above dynamic has rarely if ever worked even as a stopgap, and usually just produces a new national state that goes on to try and exterminate or assimilate it's own national minorities (think of the place of Arab Jews after Arab Nationalism broadly succeeded, despite being early contributord and inventors of that project, or the treatment of Irish Travellers by the Irish Republic, or the 'successful' Vietnamisation campaigns carried out on indigenous peoples to the north of Vietnam by the Communist Party following independence, or Breton nationalist collaboration with the Nazi occupation in exchange for a promised Gautelier of Brittany that never materialised, Norwegian nationalism that as soon as they got independence from Sweden pursued extremely brutal Norweiganisation campaigns on the Sámi, and on and on and on), while also creating a new National Culture that extinguished local culture, dialect, traditions...

Therefore, it's clear to me that nationalism isn't a workable solution to the problems supposedly adressed by it, but I frankly don't know how you can struggle on behalf of minoritised peoples and their culture(s) without either being some kind of a nationalist or without the liberal appeal to a seat at the table of the imperial national project. It depresses and troubles me deeply, politically, because I don't see any way out. I worry that liberalism let the national genie out of the bottle and the only thing that can happen now is another two centuries of rolling genocides.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

In “Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation,” a trio of business researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Pamplin College investigate the difference between the goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4398428

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/08/late-stage-sea-monkeys/#jeremys-razors

Specifically, stuff that’s pushed to you via targeted ads costs an average of 10 percent more, and it significantly more likely to come from a vendor with a poor rating from the Better Business Bureau. This may seem trivial and obvious, but it’s got profound implications for media, commercial surveillance, and the future of the internet.

Writing in the New York Times, Julia Angwin — a legendary, muckraking data journalist — breaks down those implications. Angwin builds a case study around Jeremy’s Razors, a business that advertises itself as a “woke-free” shaving solution for manly men:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opinion/online-advertising-privacy-data-surveillance-consumer-quality.html

Jeremy’s Razors spends a fucking fortune on ads. According to Facebook’s Ad Library, the company spent $800,000 on FB ads in March, targeting fathers of school-age kids who like Hershey’s, ultimate fighting, hunting or Johnny Cash:

https://pluralistic.net/jeremys-targeting

Anti-woke razors are an objectively, hilariously stupid idea, but that’s not the point here. The point is that Jeremy’s has to spend $800K/month to reach its customers, which means that it either has to accept $800K less in profits, or make it up by charging more and/or skimping on quality.

Targeted advertising is incredibly expensive, and incredibly lucrative — for the ad-tech platforms that sit between creative workers and media companies on one side, and audiences on the other. In order to target ads, ad-tech companies have to collect deep, nonconsensual dossiers on every internet user, full of personal, sensitive and potentially compromising information.

The switch to targeted ads was part of the enshittification cycle, whereby companies like Facebook and Google lured in end-users by offering high-quality services — Facebook showed you the things the people you asked to hear from posted, and Google returned the best search results it could find.

Eventually, those users became locked in. Once all our friends were on Facebook, we held each other hostage, each unable to leave because the others were there. Google used its access to the capital markets to snuff out any rival search companies, spending tens of billions every year to be the default on Apple devices, for example.

Once we were locked in, the tech giants made life worse for us in order to make life better for media companies and advertisers. Facebook violated its promise to be the privacy-centric alternative to Myspace, where our data would never be harvested; it switched on mass surveillance and created cheap, accurate ad-targeting:

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876?ln=en

Google fulfilled the prophecy in its founding technical document, the Pagerank paper: “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They, too, offered cheap, highly targeted ads:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Facebook and Google weren’t just kind to advertisers — they also gave media companies and creative workers a great deal, funneling vast quantities of traffic to both. Facebook did this by cramming media content into the feeds of people who hadn’t asked to see it, displacing the friends’ posts they had asked to see. Google did it by upranking media posts in search results.

Then we came to the final stage of the enshittification cycle: having hooked both end-users and business customers, Facebook and Google withdrew the surpluses from both groups and handed them to their own shareholders. Advertising costs went up. The share of ad income paid to media companies went down. Users got more ads in their feeds and search results.

Facebook and Google illegally colluded to rig the ad-market with a program called Jedi Blue that let the companies steal from both advertisers and media companies:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/google-meta-jedi-blue-eu-uk-antitrust-probes/

Apple blocked Facebook’s surveillance on its mobile devices, but increased its own surveillance of Iphone and Ipad users in order to target ads to them, even when those users explicitly opted out of spying:

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

Today, we live in the enshittification end-times, red of tooth and claw, where media companies’ revenues are dwindling and advertisers’ costs are soaring, and the tech giants are raking in hundreds of billions, firing hundreds of thousands of workers, and pissing away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

https://doctorow.medium.com/mass-tech-worker-layoffs-and-the-soft-landing-1ddbb442e608

As Angwin points out, in the era before behavioral advertising, Jeremy’s might have bought an ad in Deer & Deer Hunting or another magazine that caters to he-man types who don’t want woke razors; the same is true for all products and publications. Before mass, non-consensual surveillance, ads were based on content and context, not on the reader’s prior behavior.

There’s no reason that ads today couldn’t return to that regime. Contextual ads operate without surveillance, using the same “real-time bidding” mechanism to place ads based on the content of the article and some basic parameters about the user (rough location based on IP address, time of day, device type):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads

Context ads perform about as well as behavioral ads — but they have a radically different power-structure. No media company will ever know as much about a given user as an ad-tech giant practicing dragnet surveillance and buying purchase, location and finance data from data-brokers. But no ad-tech giant knows as much about the context and content of an article as the media company that published it.

Context ads are, by definition, centered on the media company or creative worker whose work they appear alongside of. They are much harder for tech giants to enshittify, because enshittification requires lock-in and it’s hard to lock in a publication who knows better than anyone what they’re publishing and what it means.

We should ban surveillance advertising. Period. Companies should not be allowed to collect our data without our meaningful opt-in consent, and if that was the standard, there would be no data-collection:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/22/myob/#adtech-considered-harmful

Remember when Apple created an opt out button for tracking, more than 94 percent of users clicked it (the people who clicked “yes” to “can Facebook spy on you?” were either Facebook employees, or confused):

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html

Ad-targeting enables a host of evils, like paid political disinformation. It also leads to more expensive, lower-quality goods. “A Raw Deal For Consumers,” Sumit Sharma’s new Consumer Reports paper, catalogs the many other costs imposed on Americans due to the lack of tech regulation:

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/A-Raw-Deal-for-US-Consumers_March-2023.pdf

Sharma describes the benefits that Europeans will shortly enjoy thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, from lower prices to more privacy to more choice, from cloud gaming on mobile devices to competing app stores.

However, both the EU and the US — as well as Canada and Australia — have focused their news industry legislating on misguided “link taxes,” where tech giants are required to pay license fees to link to and excerpt the news. This is an approach grounded in the mistaken idea that tech giants are stealing media companies’ content — when really, tech giants are stealing their money:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/18/news-isnt-secret/#bid-shading

Creating a new pseudocopyright to control who can discuss the news is a terrible idea, one that will make the media companies beholden to the tech giants at a time when we desperately need deep, critical reporting on the tech sector. In Canada, where Bill C-18 is the latest link tax proposal in the running to become law, we’re already seeing that conflict of interest come into play.

As Jesse Brown and Paula Simons — a veteran reporter turned senator — discuss on the latest Canadaland podcast, the Toronto Star’s sharp and well-reported critical series on the tech giants died a swift and unexplained death immediately after the Star began receiving license fees for tech users’ links and excerpts from its reporting:

https://www.canadaland.com/paula-simons-bill-c-18/

Meanwhile, in Australia, the proposed “news bargaining code” stampeded the tech giants into agreeing to enter into “voluntary” negotiations with the media companies, allowing Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp to claim the lion’s share of the money, and then conduct layoffs across its newsrooms.

While in France, the link tax depends on publishers integrating with Google Showcase, a product that makes Google more money from news content and makes news publishers more dependent on Google:

https://www.politico.eu/article/french-competition-authority-greenlights-google-pledges-over-paying-news-publishers/

A link tax only pays for so long as the tech giants remain dominant and continue to extract the massive profits that make them capable of paying the tax. But legislative action to fix the ad-tech markets, like Senator Mike Lee’s ad-tech breakup bill (cosponsored by both Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!) would shift power to publishers, and with it, money:

https://www.lee.senate.gov/2023/3/the-america-act

With ad-tech intermediaries scooping up 50% or more of every advertising dollar, there is plenty of potential to save news without the need for a link tax. If unrigging the ad-tech market drops the platforms’ share of advertising dollars to a more reasonable 10%, then the advertisers and publishers could split the remainder, with advertisers spending 20% less and publishers netting 20% more.

Passing a federal privacy law would end surveillance advertising at the stroke of a pen, shifting the market to context ads that let publishers, not platforms, call the shots. As an added bonus, the law would stop Tiktok from spying on Americans, and also end Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft’s spying to boot:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

Mandating competition in app stores — as the Europeans are poised to do — would kill Google and Apple’s 30% “app store tax” — the percentage they rake off of every transaction from every app on Android and Ios. Drop that down to the 2–5% that the credit cards charge, and every media outlet’s revenue-per-subscriber would jump by 25%.

Add to that an end-to-end rule for tech giants requiring them to deliver updates from willing receivers to willing senders, so every newsletter you subscribed to would stay out of your spam folder and every post by every media company or creator you followed would show up in your feed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

That would make it impossible for tech giants to use the sleazy enshittification gambit of forcing creative workers and media companies to pay to “boost” their content (or pay $8/month for a blue tick) just to get it in front of the people who asked to see it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

The point of enshittification is that it’s bad for everyone except the shareholders of tech monopolists. Jeremy’s Razors are bad, winning a 2.7 star rating out of five:

https://www.facebook.com/JeremysRazors/reviews

The company charges more for these substandard razors, and you are more likely to find out about them, because of targeted, behavioral ads. These ads starve media companies and creative workers and make social media and search results terrible.

A link tax is predicated on the idea that we need Big Tech to stay big, and to dribble a few crumbs for media companies, compromising their ability to report on their deep-pocketed beneficiaries, in a way that advantages the biggest media companies and leaves small, local and independent press in the cold.

By contrast, a privacy law, ad-tech breakups, app-store competition and end-to-end delivery would shatter the power of Big Tech and shift power to users, creative workers and media companies. These are solutions that don’t just keep working if Big Tech goes away — they actually hasten that demise! What’s more, they work just as well for big companies as they do for independents.

Whether you’re the New York Times or you’re an ex-Times reporter who’s quit your job and now crowdfunds to cover your local school board and town council meetings, shifting control and the share of income is will benefit you, whether or not Big Tech is still in the picture.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: freeimageslive.co.uk (modified) http://www.freeimageslive.co.uk/free_stock_image/using-mobile-phone-jpg

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

[Image ID: A man's hand holds a mobile phone. Its screen displays an Instagram ad. The ad has been replaced with a slice of a vintage comic book 'small ads' page.]

[mariacallous]

A new report by environmental groups lays out a case for banning deep sea mining—and explains why the real solution to humanity’s energy crisis might just be sitting in the trash.

Deep sea mining is the pursuit of rare, valuable minerals that lie undisturbed upon the ocean floor—metals like nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements. These so-called critical minerals are instrumental in the manufacture of everything from electric vehicle batteries and MRI machines to laptops and disposable vape cartridges—including, crucially, much of what’s needed to transition away from fossil fuels. Political leaders and the companies eager to dredge up critical minerals from the seafloor tend to focus on the feel-good, climate-friendly uses of the minerals, like EV batteries and solar panels. They’ll proclaim that the metals on the deep seafloor are an abundant resource that could help usher in a new golden age of renewable energy technology.

But deep sea mining has also been roundly criticized by environmentalists and scientists, who caution that the practice (which has not yet kicked off in earnest) could create a uniquely terrible environmental travesty and annihilate one of the most remote and least understood ecosystems on the planet.

There has been a wave of backlash from environmentalists, scientists, and even comedians like John Oliver, who devoted a recent segment of Last Week Tonight to lambasting deep sea mining. Some companies that use these materials in their products—Volvo, Volkswagen, BMW, and Rivian among them—have come out against deep sea mining and pledged not to use any metals that come from those abyssal operations. (Some prominent companies have done the exact opposite; last week, Tesla shareholders voted against a moratorium on using minerals sourced from deep sea mining.)

Even if you can wave away that ecological threat, mining the sea might simply be wholly unnecessary if the goal is to bring about a new era of global renewable energy. A new report, aptly titled “We Don’t Need Deep-Sea Mining,” aims to lay out why.

The report is a collaboration between the advocacy group US PIRG, Environment America Policy Center, and the nonprofit think tank Frontier Group. Nathan Proctor, senior director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at PIRG and one of the authors of the new report, says the solution to sourcing these materials should be blindingly obvious. There are critical minerals all around us that don’t require diving deep into the sea. You’re probably holding some right now—they’re in nearly all our devices, including the billions of pounds of them sitting in the dump.

The secret to saving the deep sea, Proctor says, is to prioritize systems that focus on the materials we already have—establishing right to repair laws, improving recycling capabilities, and rethinking how we use tech after the end of its useful life cycle. These are all systems we have in place now that don’t require tearing up new lands thousands of feet below the ocean.

“We don't need to mine the deep sea,” Proctor reiterates. “It's about the dumbest way to get these materials. There's way better ways to address the needs for those metals like cobalt, nickel, copper, and the rest.”

Into the Abyss

Schemes for delving into the deep ocean have been on the boards for years. While the practice is not currently underway, mining companies are getting ready to dive in as soon as they can.

In January 2024, the Norwegian Parliament opened up its waters to companies looking to mine resources. The Metals Company is a Canadian mining operation that has been at the forefront of attempts to mine in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ)—an area of seabed that spans 3,100 miles between Mexico and Hawaii.

The proposed mining in the CCZ has gotten the most attention lately because the Metals Company secured rights to access key areas of the CCZ for mining in 2022, and its efforts are ramping up. The process involves gathering critical minerals from small rock-like formations called polymetallic nodules. Billions of these nodules rest along the seabed, seemingly sitting there ripe for the taking (if you can get down to them). The plan—one put forth by several mining companies, anyway—is to scrape the ocean floor with deep sea trawling systems and bring these nodules to the surface, where they can be broken down to extract the shiny special metals inside. Environmentalists say this poses a host of ecological problems for everything that lives in the vicinity.

Gerard Barron, the CEO of the Metals Company, contends that his efforts are misunderstood by activists and the media (especially, say, John Oliver).

“We're committed to circularity,” Barron says. “We have to drive towards circularity. We have to stop extracting from our planet. But the question is, how can you recycle what you don’t have?”

Both Barron and the authors of the activist report acknowledge that there aren’t perfect means of resource extraction anywhere—and there’s always going to be some environmental toll. Barron argues that it is better for this toll to play out in one of the most remote parts of the ocean.

“No matter what, you will be disrupting an ecosystem,” says Kelsey Lamp, ocean campaign director with the Environment America Research and Policy Center and an author of the report. “This is an ecosystem that evolved over millions of years without light, without human noise, and with incredibly clear water. If you disrupt it, the likelihood of it coming back is pretty low.”

For many of the life-forms down in the great deep, the nodules are the ecosystem. Removing the nodules from the seabed would remove all the life attached to them.

“This is a very disruptive process with ecosystems that may never recover,” says Tony Dutzik, associate director and senior policy analyst at the nonprofit think tank Frontier Group and another author of the report. “This is a great wilderness that is linked to the health of the ocean at large and that has wonders that we’re barely even beginning to recognize what they are.”

Barron counters that the life in the abyssal zone is less abundant than in an ecosystem like rainforests in Indonesia, where a great deal of nickel mines operate—although scientists discovered 5,000 new species in the CCZ in 2023 alone. He considers that the lesser of two evils.

“At the end of the day, it's not that easy,” You can't just say no to something. If you say no to this, you're saying yes to something else.”

The Circular Economy

Barron and others make the case that this ecosystem disruption is the only way to access the minerals needed to fuel the clean-tech revolution, and is therefore worth the cost in the long run. But Proctor and the others behind the report aren't convinced. They say that without fully investing in a circular economy that thinks more carefully about the resources we use, we will continue to burn through the minerals needed for renewable tech the same way we've burned through fossil fuels.

“I just had this initial reaction when I heard about deep sea mining,” Proctor says. “Like, ‘Oh, really? You want to strip mine the ocean floor to build electronic devices that manufacturers say we should all throw away?’”

While mining companies may wax poetic about using critical minerals for building clean tech, there's no guarantee that's where the minerals will actually wind up. They are also commonly used in much more consumer-facing devices, like phones, laptops, headphones, and those aforementioned disposable vape cartridges. Many of these devices are not designed to be long lasting, or repairable. In many cases, big companies like Apple and Microsoft have actively lobbied to make repairing their devices more difficult, all but guaranteeing more of them will end up in the landfill.

“I spend every day throwing my hands up in frustration by just how much disposable, unfixable, ridiculous electronics are being shoveled on people with active measures to prevent them from being able to reuse them,” Proctor says. “If these are really critical materials, why are they ending up in stuff that we're told is instantly trash?”

The report aims to position critical minerals in products and e-waste as an “abundant domestic resource.” The way to tap into that is to recommit to the old mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle—with a couple of additions. The report adds the concept of repairing and reimagining products to the list, calling them the five Rs. It calls for making active efforts to extend product lifetimes and invest in “second life” opportunities for tech like solar panels and battery recycling that have reached the end of their useful lifespan. (EV batteries used to be difficult to recycle, but more cutting-edge battery materials can often work just as well as new ones, if you recycle them right.)

Treasures in the Trash

The problem is thinking of these deep sea rocks in the same framework of fossil fuels. What may seem like an abundant resource now is going to feel much more finite later.

“There is a little bit of the irony, right, that we think it's easier to go out and mine and potentially destroy one of the most mysterious remote wildernesses left on this planet just to get more of the metals we're throwing in the trash every day,” Lamp says.

And in the trash is where the resources remain. Electronics manufacturing is growing five times faster than e-waste recycling, so without investment to disassemble those products for their critical bits, all the metals will go to waste. Like deep sea mining, the infrastructure needed to make this a worthwhile path forward will be tremendous, but committing to it means sourcing critical minerals from places nearby, and reducing some waste in the process.

Barron says he isn't convinced these efforts will be enough. “We need to do all of that,” Barron says, “You know, it's not one or the other. We have to do all of that, but what we have to do is slow down destroying those tropical rainforests.” He adds, “If you take a vote against ocean metals, it is a vote for something else. And that something else is what we’ve got right now.”

Proctor argues that commonsense measures, implemented broadly and forcefully across society to further the goal of creating a circular economy, including energy transition minerals, will ultimately reduce the need for all forms of extraction, including land and deep-sea mining.

“We built this system that knows how to do one thing, which is take stuff out of the earth, put it into products and sell them, and then plug our ears and forget that they exist,” Proctor says. “That’s not the reality we live in. The sooner that we can disentangle that kind of paradigm from the way we think about consumption and industrial policy the better, because we're going to kill everybody with that kind of thinking.”

Just like mining the deep sea, investing in a circular economy is not going to be an easy task. There is an allure of deep sea mining when it is presented as a one-stop shop for all the materials needed for the great energy transition. But as the authors of the report contend, the idea of exploiting a vast deposit of resources is the same relationship society has had with fossil fuels—they’re seemingly abundant resources ripe for the picking, but also they are ultimately finite.

“If we treat these things as disposable, as we have, we’re going to need to continually refill that bucket,” Dutzik says. “If we can build an economy in which we’re getting the most out of every bit of what we mine, reusing things when we can, and then recycling the material at the end of their lives, we can get off of that infinite extraction treadmill that we’ve been on for a really long time.”

[laurabenanti]

Duplicate Frame Deletion: A Likely Unnecessary Tutorial

So… you updated to MacOS Sonoma, and–while it is amazing in many regards for photoshop things–it is a dang bummer and mood killer if you use MPV. However, after slamming my head into a wall trying to change the code on my own, I realized there is a much, much simpler solution to this.

In this tutorial, I will be showing you all how to delete duplicate frames from your gifs, with two options:

duplicate finder

within photoshop

Under the cut because pictures are a visual learner’s best friend!

A quick note:

MPV is odd with this. I’ve not had to do this on 4k capping, but have had to on anything under that. I don’t know the full reasoning, but it mostly looks to be something with the way it is reading frame rate. I know it’s in the code, but could not pinpoint it myself, and these were the only tricks that worked. If you find a better solution, please let me know! It has been rough, otherwise.

Step 1: Cap in MPV as normal

Now, this may be obvious, but make your caps in MPV. For a full tutorial on this, I highly recommend this one by kylos. The only difference between our software and their suggestion is going to be using the newest version of MPV (.0.36 at the time of this), and not the older. This is because there is an issue with MacOS Sonoma and older versions of MPV that prevent it from opening for… Some reason.

Step 2: Make sure you have your caps

I recommend moving your caps to whatever folder you like for your own ease of use. My biggest rec is to have it in its own folder, with no older folders within the folder. Not really a requirement, but in my mind, it makes the process faster (only true depending on number of files in other folders). You should have something like this (I am doing a scene from TWOT, as it’s one I’ve tested this method on a few times in several instances):

Once there, it’s time for the line split. I recommend option 1 the most (it’s faster, IMO), but again, this is a two option thing.

Option 1: Duplicate File Finder

So, duplicate finders are what they sound like. They are pieces of software that can be used to scan your device (or specific sections of said device), for duplicate files. It does not matter the title of the file, if the system reads it as a copy, it will find it.

There are a number of varieties for this, paid and free. I will not lie, the one I use is a paid version, because I had a huge issue with duplicate files taking up space when I moved to a new device. This also helps a lot with cloud file keeping, in my opinion. But that is beside the point.

This is Duplicate File Finder Pro, which I got for other reasons, but has been very useful since this became an issue. The free version is sufficient for removing duplicate files found in folders, and that is why I still suggest it. You only need to get the pro if you have other intentions.

Now, onto the next step…

Step 3: Drag and drop the folder

With our folder full of caps, we simply drag and drop it into the application to begin.

Step 4: Click “Find duplicates” and watch the pretty graph roll.

Step 5: Select the duplicate images

You can see here it found the duplicates.

Now, I could go through by hand and click them, but… that’s a lot of time I don’t want to waste. I let it auto select them instead (you can tweak the settings for auto-select, but this is not that tutorial).

Step 6: Select review & remove, complete!

Wham bam! You’re completely set and good to go. Gif as normal~ (all final results at bottom)

Now, of course, maybe you don’t want a duplicate remover. Understandable, so what then? Well…

Option 2: Photoshop & the Changing Frame rate

So, this one is a little more technical. I suggest basic giffing and Photoshop knowledge before attempting.

Step 3: Import folder as you normally would

I believe this works as it would for import video, but I don’t want to say that and be wrong. But load your files in and you’ll be here:

Now create video timeline, make frames from layers, yada yada (kylos’ guide is very good with this if you need help, it’s the same that was linked at the beginning of this). You’ll now be here:

And the actual part of the tutorial you all came here for...

Step 4: Change the frame rate

So, in the bottom, next to the mountains for zooming in on the timeline, you’ll see it reads “30.00 fps.” We need to change this to 60. How? Easy! Click the three lines circled here:

Then click “Set Timeline Frame Rate…”

A little box will pop up, change the 30 to 15 (dropdown or typing, it works the same) and click “OK.”

Your timeline will now be cut in half for length. That’s OKAY. DO NOT PANIC.

(Optional) Step 5: Double Checking

Click play on your gif, and you’ll notice it is no longer duplicate framed! To verify, let’s convert back to frames, just to see…

And it did, success! So make the rest of your gif as normal.

Your final results for the gif will be the following, with the gifs all labeled on what option was taken (or not). These were cropped for uploading and sharpened because of how I am. No coloring applied.

If anything was confusing, please don't hesitate to reach out! I'm happy to help in any way I can on this. My ask is always open. Happy Giffing!

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

Wait, are you Pro-Palestine?

...........……………………………......................yes?

I had really hoped that was obvious from my FAQ/About that I require all new followers to read, but here it is for your convenience:

I think both Jews and Palestinians deserve to live in peace, safety, freedom, and self-determination for both. I’m not so arrogant as to think I know the best solution for how to accomplish that, seeing as I don’t live there myself. But my values are humanitarian across the board, which besides basic safety includes respecting cultural needs and access to important religious sites.

And an update in light of Current Events:

***Update post-10/7/23: Please read this article, this guide, and this theory of change, and consider becoming a friend of Standing Together. This is a group that truly cares about creating a just society that recognizes both peoples’ deep roots in the region, legitimate grievances, and the truth of history. They are the ones doing the hard work on the ground to create a lasting and just peace together. No one is going anywhere; any real solution must recognize that.

And look anon, idk if you're Jewish or not, but if you're not: don't do this. I put myself out there because I'm physically incapable of shutting up but a lot of Jews don't and it's not your place to ask them. I care about Palestinians because I care about human rights. I also care about Israelis because they are also humans whose rights I care about.

If you're a fellow Jew who is feeling betrayed somehow? Don't do that either. I care fiercely about our people and that is precisely why I want us to do better. I can care about multiple issues and multiple groups of people at the same time, no matter how many times people try to offer me an ultimatum or get upset with me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway none of this is a change in my positions or should come as a surprise to anyone if you actually read my required pinned post.