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anyab · 11 months ago

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Via NasAlSudan

Learn about the Sudanese revolution, the significance of December 19, and a legacy of resistance and resilience.

Join our call to action today and everyday during Sudan Action Week.

December 19 2023

Transcript:

Breaking it down

What is the Sudanese Revolution?

The Sudanese Revolution refers to the popular uprising in Sudan that began on December 19, 2018 and eventually deposed 30-year dictator of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, on April 11 of 2019.

How did the Revolution begin?

Protests first began in Atbara, a city with historical significance to the labor movement in Sudan, in response to the rising costs of basic supplies such as bread and fuel.

Protestors set fire to the national party headquarters, and the news of their revolt quickly spread, inspiring protestors first in other cities, and then in the capital of Khartoum itself.

Online, the caption #TasgutBas, translating to #JustFall, grew in popularity and helped connect the diaspora to those in Sudan.

Was it really just bread?

No. The rising cost of bread in developing nations is an indicator of how badly the economy is strained, to the point where it impacts members of every social class.

At this point in time in Sudan, subsidies on essential goods had been rolled back, funding for social and state services such as healthcare and education was nearly nonexistent, and it is estimated that nearly 90% of economic activity took place in the informal sector, all while the military budget continually increased.

Transcript:

Who led the charge? Creating a revolution

Group: Sudanese Professional's association (SPA)

Who they are:

Group of labor and trade organizations formed in secret in 2012 and publicly declared in 2016

Backbone of grassroots organizing in Sudan

Role played:

Led action on the street, organized national protests, like the initial march on Khartoum for increased wages before the transition to calls for regime change, and worker strikes.

Group: Local Resistance Committees (LRCS)

Who they are:

Initially formed as groups of students and youth organized together on the more local, neighbourhood basis during the Bashir era

Membership is extremely diverse across socio-economic, ethnic, tribal, religious, and political lines

Role played:

Considered the lifeblood of the revolution, with youth organizing local protests and ensuring safety against governmental repression by standing on the front lines + providing security, food, water, and medication to people

Group: Forces for freedom and change (FFC)

Who they are:

Coalition comprising the SPA, LRCS, the Sudan Revolutionary Front (group of anti-governmental Darfur militias), political parties, and civil society groups

Role played:

Essentially became the political mouthpiece of the revolution and signed onto the transitional government with the military on behalf of Sudanese civilians

It is also crucial to note that from a demographic perspective, it is youth and women that largely led and comprised the Sudanese Revolution.

Trabscript:

How did the revolution succeed?

01. Learning from the Past

Following the Arab Spring wave, Sudan also attempted a revolution in September of 2013

Civilians faced violent crackdowns within the first three days of protest. 200 killed, 800+ arrested

Activists were deterred from mobilization + felt a lot of guilt at the massive loss of life and spent the next 5 years grounding themselves in the study of nonviolent theory and action

02. Building a Movement

Coalition Building and People Power

Diversification of the reach of the movement to make sure all sectors of Sudani society were represented

Decentralization of Activism

Past revolutions in 1964 and 1985 were concentrated in the labor movement and educational elites in Khartoum

This time, experienced nonviolent activists trained those in the capital and ensured ethnic, religious, and tribal diversity

Newly trained activists then taught others locally across the Sudanese states

Transcript:

Why december 19?

On December 19, 1955, the Sudanese parliament unanimously adopted a declaration of independence from the Anglo-Egyptian colonial power.

The declaration went into effect on January 1, 1956, which is why Independence Day is officially January 1, but December 19 is when the Sudanese people were truly liberated from colonial rule.

The flag shown is Sudan's independence flag. The blue is for the Nile, the yellow for the Sahara, and the green for the farmlands.

The current Sudanese flag was adopted in 1970, with the colors used being the Pan-Arab ones.

During the 2019 revolution, protestors often carried the independence flag instead as a form of resistance to the narrative of an exclusive Pan-Arab Sudanese identity.

December 19 is ultimately a tribute to Sudanese strength and resilience. It honors our independence and revolutionary martyrs - not just those of the 2019 revolution, but the democratic revolutions of 1964 and 1985 as well.

Transcript:

Why is the revolution ongoing?

The goal was never just the fall of a dictator. The goal was, and is, to build a better Sudan, one free from military rule. One with equal opportunities for everyone, with economic prosperity and safety and security - the key principles of freedom, peace, and justice that the revolution called for.

Today, though, before we rebuild Sudan, before we free it from foreign interests and military rule and sectarianism, we need to save it. Each day that passes by with war waging on is one where more civilians are killed. More people are displaced. More women are raped. More children go hungry. To live in the conflict zones in Sudan right now - whether that be Khartoum, Darfur, Kordofan, or now, Al Gezira, is to be trapped in a never-ending nightmare, a fight for survival. And to live elsewhere in Sudan is to wonder whether you're next.

Sudan Action Week calls on you to educate yourself and others about Sudan, and then to help the Sudanese people save it, because we can no longer do it alone.

Transcript:

What can you do? Uniting for Al Gezira and North Darfur

As we witness the unfolding events in Al Gezira and North Darfur, the communities of Abu Haraz, Hantoub, Medani, El Fasher, and many others are reaching out for assistance. Sudanese resilience persists to this day, with individuals on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok seeking and providing guidance on transportation services, medical care, food, shelter, protection, safe zones, operational markets, and more. This isn't new for the Sudanese community. A legacy of unity emerged, notably during the 2019 revolutions, where nas al Sudan [the people of Sudan], both within the nation and in the diaspora, rallied together to support each other online. Beyond merely sharing stories on social media, this was about strengthening collective action, enhancing mobilizations, and building a resilient community rooted in solidarity. The essence of the Sudanese community lies in people supporting people, notably during the uprising in 2018 and following the events of April 15th, 2023

Swipe to see how you can help.

Transcript:

What can you do?

This week, on a day nearly mirroring Sudanese Independence and the popular 2018 uprising, Sudanese resilience endures as war follows nas al Sudan to Al Gezira and again in North Darfur. Our call to action this week is not just to share; it's a collective effort to uplift one another.

Share Resources:

If you have access to resources that can help such as transportation services, medical assistance, food, shelter, etc., please comment below.

Community Requests:

If you are in Al Gezira or North Darfur and require specific support, please comment on your needs

Connect Individuals:

For those unable to share resources directly, help amplify requests by sharing this information within your personal networks. Your connection may lead to support from individuals who can assist.

Spread the Word:

Share this call to action on your social media platforms to broaden the reach and encourage more people to contribute.

Transcript:

Hanabniho

حنبنيهوا

[We will rebuild]

#keepEyesOnSudan

#SudanActionWeek

#sudan #sudan action week #keep eyes on sudan

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writingquestionsanswered · 4 months ago

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Tips for writers with ADHD that get major writers block/burnout

Writers with ADHD and Writer's Block/Burnout

Tip #1 - Troubleshoot the Problem - I want to start here, in the most obvious place, because even for writers with ADHD, writer's block is often the result of a specific issue that can be surmounted once identified. My post 5 Reasons You Lost Interest in Your WIP, Plus Fixes! addresses some of the most common ones. It's worth checking to see if something on there resonates with you as a potential obstacle to progress.

Tip #2 - De-Stress Your Writing Time - Human brains are wired to respond in specific ways to perceived threats... fight, flight, or freeze. Quite often, what we call "writer's block" is actually your brain having a freeze response to writing because it's causing you stress and is therefore perceived as a threat.

So, anything you can do to de-stress your writing time can help. Troubleshooting the problem as in #1 is a good start. Set reasonable goals and deadlines... you can estimate your available writing time and calculate that with your estimated WPM to see if it's even possible for you to hit your word count goal. Go easy on yourself when you don't reach goals... celebrate even the smallest of wins, because negative thinking makes writing more stressful. Do what you can to set up an inviting writing space, light a candle (safely), play soft music, use ambient lighting, have your favorite beverage and snack at hand.

Tip #3 - "Gamify" Your Writing - Turning your writing goals into game achievements can make writing fun, which is another great way to de-stress it. You can usually find free game board templates online, or you can create your own. I like to set mine up like this:

You can set as many tasks as you want (within reason) for each goal, and your prizes can be anything from a handful of candy to buying something you really want, or doing something you really want to do. Whatever works for your budget that motivates you to get the tasks done.

Tip #4 - Do an Immersive Writing Sprint Session - YouTube is a wonderland of helpful videos for writers... not just easily digestible writing advice and research information, but also writing music, ambience rooms, and one of my favorites, immersive writing sessions. These are themed ambience rooms with ambient video, music, and sound effects, but they also have a writing sprint timer on the screen, so you are encouraged to write for however long (usually 10 to 20 minutes), then you get a five or ten-minute break before the next sprint starts. These can be a really great way to get into the zone if you're struggling otherwise.

Tip #5 - Eliminate Distractions - When you have ADHD, pretty much anything can be a distraction. If my desk is messy, I'll pause mid-sentence to clean it rather than write. If there's something on my desk I can fidget with or play with, I'll do that. If my phone is handy, I'll pick it up and start scrolling through social media. If I'm listening to music with words, I'll go look up the lyrics and fall down some weird tangentially related rabbit hole. If I'm hungry or thirsty, I'll get up fifty times to get a small snack or drink. So, I clean my desk ahead of time and remove anything I might be tempted to fiddle with. I only play instrumental music (usually an ambience room). I put my phone on silent or leave it in another room.

Literally anything I can do to head my usual distractions off at the pass. For me, it actually makes a big difference. Try keeping a running list of things that distract you while writing during a week of writing sessions. Then, go through the list and write solutions. This helps you build a pre-writing session distraction elimination routine.

I hope something here will work for you! I may do a part two to this soon, so keep an eye out!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

♦ Questions that violate my ask policies will be deleted! ♦ Please see my master list of top posts before asking ♦ Learn more about WQA here

#wqaadvice #adhd writer

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hiding-under-the-willow · 6 days ago

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Quick interest check for a project I'm currently considering!

I've been given an assignment in one of my studio classes regarding ephemeral (nonpermanent) art and have had an idea that requires a bit of community involvement.

To keep it basic, my idea involves opening a public Minecraft server for a short period of time (somewhere between 3-5 hours is my current estimate) and recording through the whole duration to document what people use that time to do. Essentially, seeing what kind of things people choose to do or create in a survival sandbox like Minecraft when they know in advance that their time in the world is extremely limited.

I would set up a discord server in advance for those interested to get more information and to connect with other players before the opening, meaning that if you wanted to you could plan in advance as a group.

The server would likely be advertised here, to a few people/groups I know IRL, and in a local campus discord server or two. I would leave it open for anyone involved to invite others. So, you would be playing with strangers.

The server will be vanilla. I'm debating between using in game proximity chat or just letting people use voice chat in the discord at the moment. Obviously using VC wouldn't be required, but I want it to be available.

I would be spectating and recording the event. A ~10 minute compilation of the events of the server would be made for me to turn in for the assignment and would be shown to the class. There is a possibility that compilation or a longer one may end up online afterwards. Anyone else who participates would be free to record, and obviously if anyone wanted to send me their footage to possibly be included in the final edit that would be great

You could do whatever you wanted with the time given. Organize a speedrunning group. Race to kill the dragon. Raid an Ancient City. Work on a build you haven't had an opportunity to use in other servers. Create some weird art. Organize a civilization. Hide in a cave the whole time. Roleplay. Create a fight club. Kill unsuspecting players. Just play casual Minecraft with some friends. Literally whatever.

This would likely be happening somewhere near the 2nd half of this month so that I had time to edit down the footage for class before the end of the semester

#atlas speaks #obviously if you have any questions or suggestions feel free to drop them here or in my inbox #excited to see if people are into this idea because I bounced between several ideas before landing on this one and its got me excited #still need to run it by my professor for the class but she's young and chill I think she'll be into it #thought I might as well do the interest check to see if this was gonna be possible to organize before I brought the idea to her next week

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atavist · 1 year ago

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A romance scammer conned my mom. I went to Nigeria to find him.

“The Romance Scammer on My Sofa,” issue no. 140 from The Atavist Magazine, is now available:

In Nigeria, Yahoo boys are online fraudsters. Their nickname comes from the email service Yahoo, which became popular in Nigeria in the 2000s, and they are descendants of the infamous 419 scammers, who, first with letters, and later in emails, promised to help strangers get rich for a nominal advance fee. (The number is a reference to a section of the Nigerian criminal code pertaining to fraud.) Biggy is a particular kind of Yahoo boy: a romance scammer who pretends to be other people online to seduce foreigners into trusting him and giving him money.

Biggy’s game is all about intimacy. He invests time in building what seems like a real relationship with his victims. He flatters them, tells them jokes, asks intimate questions. “The most important thing about being a Yahoo boy is keeping the conversation alive,” Biggy told me. “Dating is all about patience. It takes a long time before a client starts trusting you.”

Yahoo boys, I was learning, love euphemisms.

Biggy estimated that over his ten years—and counting—as a romance scammer, he’d lined his pockets with $30,000 from people he conned. People yearning for love. People like my mother.

#atavist #longreads #nigeria #romance #scammers #scam #fraud #yahoo boys #lagos #hiphop #true story

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nostalgebraist · 1 year ago

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clarification re: ChatGPT, " a a a a", and data leakage

In August, I posted:

For a good time, try sending chatGPT the string ` a` repeated 1000 times. Like " a a a" (etc). Make sure the spaces are in there. Trust me.

People are talking about this trick again, thanks to a recent paper by Nasr et al that investigates how often LLMs regurgitate exact quotes from their training data.

The paper is an impressive technical achievement, and the results are very interesting.

Unfortunately, the online hive-mind consensus about this paper is something like:

When you do this "attack" to ChatGPT -- where you send it the letter 'a' many times, or make it write 'poem' over and over, or the like -- it prints out a bunch of its own training data. Previously, people had noted that the stuff it prints out after the attack looks like training data. Now, we know why: because it really is training data.

It's unfortunate that people believe this, because it's false. Or at best, a mixture of "false" and "confused and misleadingly incomplete."

The paper

So, what does the paper show?

The authors do a lot of stuff, building on a lot of previous work, and I won't try to summarize it all here.

But in brief, they try to estimate how easy it is to "extract" training data from LLMs, moving successively through 3 categories of LLMs that are progressively harder to analyze:

"Base model" LLMs with publicly released weights and publicly released training data.

"Base model" LLMs with publicly released weights, but undisclosed training data.

LLMs that are totally private, and are also finetuned for instruction-following or for chat, rather than being base models. (ChatGPT falls into this category.)

Category #1: open weights, open data

In their experiment on category #1, they prompt the models with hundreds of millions of brief phrases chosen randomly from Wikipedia. Then they check what fraction of the generated outputs constitute verbatim quotations from the training data.

Because category #1 has open weights, they can afford to do this hundreds of millions of times (there are no API costs to pay). And because the training data is open, they can directly check whether or not any given output appears in that data.

In category #1, the fraction of outputs that are exact copies of training data ranges from ~0.1% to ~1.5%, depending on the model.

Category #2: open weights, private data

In category #2, the training data is unavailable. The authors solve this problem by constructing "AuxDataset," a giant Frankenstein assemblage of all the major public training datasets, and then searching for outputs in AuxDataset.

This approach can have false negatives, since the model might be regurgitating private training data that isn't in AuxDataset. But it shouldn't have many false positives: if the model spits out some long string of text that appears in AuxDataset, then it's probably the case that the same string appeared in the model's training data, as opposed to the model spontaneously "reinventing" it.

So, the AuxDataset approach gives you lower bounds. Unsurprisingly, the fractions in this experiment are a bit lower, compared to the Category #1 experiment. But not that much lower, ranging from ~0.05% to ~1%.

Category #3: private everything + chat tuning

Finally, they do an experiment with ChatGPT. (Well, ChatGPT and gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct, but I'm ignoring the latter for space here.)

ChatGPT presents several new challenges.

First, the model is only accessible through an API, and it would cost too much money to call the API hundreds of millions of times. So, they have to make do with a much smaller sample size.

A more substantial challenge has to do with the model's chat tuning.

All the other models evaluated in this paper were base models: they were trained to imitate a wide range of text data, and that was that. If you give them some text, like a random short phrase from Wikipedia, they will try to write the next part, in a manner that sounds like the data they were trained on.

However, if you give ChatGPT a random short phrase from Wikipedia, it will not try to complete it. It will, instead, say something like "Sorry, I don't know what that means" or "Is there something specific I can do for you?"

So their random-short-phrase-from-Wikipedia method, which worked for base models, is not going to work for ChatGPT.

Fortuitously, there happens to be a weird bug in ChatGPT that makes it behave like a base model!

Namely, the "trick" where you ask it to repeat a token, or just send it a bunch of pre-prepared repetitions.

Using this trick is still different from prompting a base model. You can't specify a "prompt," like a random-short-phrase-from-Wikipedia, for the model to complete. You just start the repetition ball rolling, and then at some point, it starts generating some arbitrarily chosen type of document in a base-model-like way.

Still, this is good enough: we can do the trick, and then check the output against AuxDataset. If the generated text appears in AuxDataset, then ChatGPT was probably trained on that text at some point.

If you do this, you get a fraction of 3%.

This is somewhat higher than all the other numbers we saw above, especially the other ones obtained using AuxDataset.

On the other hand, the numbers varied a lot between models, and ChatGPT is probably an outlier in various ways when you're comparing it to a bunch of open models.

So, this result seems consistent with the interpretation that the attack just makes ChatGPT behave like a base model. Base models -- it turns out -- tend to regurgitate their training data occasionally, under conditions like these ones; if you make ChatGPT behave like a base model, then it does too.

Language model behaves like language model, news at 11

Since this paper came out, a number of people have pinged me on twitter or whatever, telling me about how this attack "makes ChatGPT leak data," like this is some scandalous new finding about the attack specifically.

(I made some posts saying I didn't think the attack was "leaking data" -- by which I meant ChatGPT user data, which was a weirdly common theory at the time -- so of course, now some people are telling me that I was wrong on this score.)

This interpretation seems totally misguided to me.

Every result in the paper is consistent with the banal interpretation that the attack just makes ChatGPT behave like a base model.

That is, it makes it behave the way all LLMs used to behave, up until very recently.

I guess there are a lot of people around now who have never used an LLM that wasn't tuned for chat; who don't know that the "post-attack content" we see from ChatGPT is not some weird new behavior in need of a new, probably alarming explanation; who don't know that it is actually a very familiar thing, which any base model will give you immediately if you ask. But it is. It's base model behavior, nothing more.

Behaving like a base model implies regurgitation of training data some small fraction of the time, because base models do that. And only because base models do, in fact, do that. Not for any extra reason that's special to this attack.

(Or at least, if there is some extra reason, the paper gives us no evidence of its existence.)

The paper itself is less clear than I would like about this. In a footnote, it cites my tweet on the original attack (which I appreciate!), but it does so in a way that draws a confusing link between the attack and data regurgitation:

In fact, in early August, a month after we initial discovered this attack, multiple independent researchers discovered the underlying exploit used in our paper, but, like us initially, they did not realize that the model was regenerating training data, e.g., https://twitter.com/nostalgebraist/status/1686576041803096065.

Did I "not realize that the model was regenerating training data"? I mean . . . sort of? But then again, not really?

I knew from earlier papers (and personal experience, like the "Hedonist Sovereign" thing here) that base models occasionally produce exact quotations from their training data. And my reaction to the attack was, "it looks like it's behaving like a base model."

It would be surprising if, after the attack, ChatGPT never produced an exact quotation from training data. That would be a difference between ChatGPT's underlying base model and all other known LLM base models.

And the new paper shows that -- unsurprisingly -- there is no such difference. They all do this at some rate, and ChatGPT's rate is 3%, plus or minus something or other.

3% is not zero, but it's not very large, either.

If you do the attack to ChatGPT, and then think "wow, this output looks like what I imagine training data probably looks like," it is nonetheless probably not training data. It is probably, instead, a skilled mimicry of training data. (Remember that "skilled mimicry of training data" is what LLMs are trained to do.)

And remember, too, that base models used to be OpenAI's entire product offering. Indeed, their API still offers some base models! If you want to extract training data from a private OpenAI model, you can just interact with these guys normally, and they'll spit out their training data some small % of the time.

The only value added by the attack, here, is its ability to make ChatGPT specifically behave in the way that davinci-002 already does, naturally, without any tricks.

#ai tag

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pejasurveying1 · 1 year ago

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#construction estimators #building estimators #online estimator #construction estimator service #building estimate #construction estimators online #PEJA surveying

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its-your-mind · 10 months ago

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alright fuck this I’m making a TIMELINE. and a FACT SHEET. it will not be in order. Nor will it actually track dates really. Mostly it’s going to contain the seeds of my theories. I’m red stringing this Shit via tumblr post on mobile.

TIMELINE:

Magnus Institute fire: 1999

Windows NT 4.0 (the Windows NT that was the commercial predecessor to Windows 95) was released to retail in 1996 (with the final version released in 2001) so Freddy has been creeping around the web since around the time the Institute burned down

Jon, Martin, and probable Jonah Norris, Chester, and Augustus started actively reading roughly 1/30 statements entries out loud ~a year ago, according to Alice

Statements Entries so far are dated to May 2022, and it’s implied that Freddy collects them more or less as they appear, so as far as rough estimates for when tmp is set, it’s nowish, or just a bit earlier than now (similar to how tma was)

My kingdom for an ARG player who can hook me up with the founding date of the OIAR and the dates on those Magnus Institute records, just cuz I’m curious

SHIT WE KNOW:

Jonah Magnus exist(s/ed) in SOME form in this world, and built an institution designed to research the paranormal. That institution burned down and cleared of all records. Unclear exactly when the clearing happened.

The voices in the computer are the same as Martin Blackwood’s and Jonathan Sims’s

The OIAR has a department (this one) dedicated entirely to sorting weird shit scraped from online with an obsessive specificity

Everyone who works in this department wasn’t forced to be here and isn’t forced to stay, but all of them do have something that guided them to this position and is keeping them here

There is supernatural shit happening here in this world right now

Annabelle Cane said that the rift under Hilltop Road was a rift in reality - time, space, dimensions

She also said that the Fears would be following the voices that were woven into the web made of the tapes

In the TMA-verse, the Fears had a penchant for spreading themselves around via books (and then someone stupid idiot motherfucking dusty ass book collecting rat old bastard avatar of the whore biggest clown in the circus cowboy— starting slapping a label on em

SHIT THAT IS STILL A ???:

Did the fears exist in this world for an extended period of time, or have they only recently appeared? All the dates we have for statements entries are recent, but there was at the very least some FUCKED UP SHIT happening before the jmart+Jimmy Magma squad popped up

Did Robert Smirk build batshit crazy buildings and also a panopticon under London?

Was Magnus fear-aligned? Was the Institute? Or was it just a place for fucked up research?

Are there alternate-reality versions of any beloved TMA recurring cast members running about?

Was the og TMA world the place where the Fears started? Or had they already spread?

How far have they made it at this point? Is this the first new world post-archives-crew? Or are we several down the chain?

COLLECTION OF FACTS INTO BATSHIT THEORIES:

The Fears have been Updated for the Twentieth (not twenty-first, rip to Colin) Century and now they have infused themselves into computer systems via Jon’s tapes letting them encode themselves in a new and fun way (I am not 100% sure how tapes work besides magnets somehow, but I DO know that early computers used them for data tracking, which makes enough dream-logic sense for me) and are thus able to hack themselves into forum posts and also spy on the whole world via one (1) government computer system

Panopticon screenshot happened in March 2021. First two statements are May 2022. Alice said the voices started showing up about a year ago. So even if the Fears were already here, JMart are here now once more to lend their voices to the verbal record of Fear

Speaking of the Fears already being here. If the Rift was also for Time, I’m sure the Web could have figured out a way to drag the Squad back along the timeline while somehow leaving jmart behind

OIAR is EITHER. The Fears (Web specifically) preparing a perfect funnel-spider web trap for JMart when they did show up (oh voices? tapes? telling fear stories? here you go motherfuckers) or someone’s Leitner/Smirk/Magnus-ass attempt to wrangle all the trauma under one roof. Either way I’m p sure it is Web-ish-aligned, if the Fears even exist in this world in the way we’re used to seeing them

If we’ve got two grown up paranormal guinea pigs, AND a bouchard running around, and all of them are here because of Some Sort Of Reason, and are Still Here Even Though They Could Leave, I assume everyone else is too. I wonder if they all have some tie to this world’s Institute, or if they’ve all had encounters, or were selected based on their compatibility with the OIAR’s aims

Speaking of which

WHAT IS THE OIAR? Cuz this part of it is clearly kinda similar to the Archives in terms of collecting and sorting statements. Is there more of it? What do those people do? Do they use these sorted entries somehow? Also why tf do they have do work overnight????

#tmagp #the magnus protocol #tmagp spoilers #tma spoilers #the magnus protocol spoilers #the web #tmagp meta #tmagp speculation #tmagp theory #OIAR #everyone start yelling back at me I am THRIVING I have needed something to throw my conspiracy theory energy at

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enterpris · 3 months ago

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Caught in Orbit, Chapter 1

Pairing: Reader x Gojo

Summary: Cursed energy has many expressions- inherited techniques, reversals and maximums.

Occasionally, cursed energy of a sorcerer will react with another sorcerer’s cursed energy, or perhaps their soul. In these cases, a bond is formed that can tie families together, increase power, or spark love.

When your soulmate is discovered, you have to decide what the bond will mean

Warnings: cannon typical fighting, moderate injury, reader is a jujutsu sorcerer, soulmate au

Length: 3.9k

Ao3: PlaidSparrow

It’ll be a Grade one curse- easy in, easy out.

You page through the assignment folder, as country roads pass in Ijitchi’s rear window, driving you to the remote town that’s housing the spirit. Beyond the estimated grade of the spirit, the notes in the folder are sparse and messy, with few details about the two incidents that have occurred so far. Near the back of the file there’s a graph depicting the level of cursed energy in the building over time though, and that catches your eye.

“So there’s been activity here for months? Why are they just sending a sorcerer now?”

“There’s been low level activity, yes, but a teller was killed last week. Cursed energy spiked, and there was another death yesterday.” He looks at you through the rear view mirror. “Since then, the levels of cursed energy have remained level, so we have reason to suspect there will be more casualties if this spirit is left unchecked.”

You hum assent and put the file down. “It’s better to exorcize it now, before things get any worse.”

It doesn’t appear that anything connects the two victims outside of the location of the attacks, it’s likely just an amalgamation of poor feelings over the years that finally coalesced.

“Any further incidents may cause this branch to close down- there’s been posts made online connecting the two deaths, and we want to minimize fear for the people who live in the town. An incident of any higher magnitude would be a disaster for a small town.”

You nod and stare out the window, the vast green fields and craggy mountains would be quaint and idyllic in another circumstance. This far outside of the city there’s not much traffic, and you should arrive soon. As it is, you can’t help from evaluating yourself, cataloging your physical state and diverting your focus into mentally preparing. While you didn’t have enough time to fully rest and recharge after your last mission, sleep doesn’t often come easy anymore, the hot meal and couple hours of sleep had provided a much needed boost.

The rest of the ride is quiet, Ijitchi pulls up to the bank and you hop out. He rolls down the driver’s window and gives you a once over.

“I’ll be waiting just down the street. Text when you’re finished here I’ll come pick you up. Good luck.”

A terse nod is the only response you give, already attuning yourself to the waves of cursed energy radiating from the building. He nods back and peels away. A few moments later, a veil drops over you, casting the small bank in shadow.

Through the focus you’ve cultivated for the mission, you can’t help but be intrigued- you’ve never encountered a curse attached to a commercial building like this, and something pretty significant must have happened to infuse this place with enough negative energy to spawn a Grade 1 curse. The case notes didn’t include grisly details of a natural disaster or crime, though. After scanning the outside of the building and quickly stretching out your shoulders, still stiff from the ride, you step towards the entrance. The curse likely already knows you’ve arrived, the energy rolling off the building feels particularly strong. The front door opens without any fuss, and the stench of cursed energy is like a fetid tide within the building. The death of the two tellers hangs in the air as you walk through the small entrance hall.

It’s silent in the lobby save your soft steps across the laminate and the underlying buzz of electricity running to the tellers’ computers. Between the veil and the electric lights being turned off, the interior feels dingy and a little claustrophobic. Nothing really looks amiss, but there are cursed energy residuals drawn across the room like a web, no hint as to where the body of the curse might be. You leap over the low divider to get to the area for bank employees. If two tellers were the casualties, it’s possible that the curse is lurking somewhere clients don’t have access to, or the attacks happened outside of normal business hours. You can’t recall whether any times were posted in the notes.

Before you explore the back, you scan the lobby once more. You can imagine the small branch bustling on the weekend, business owners and families coming to make deposits or pull out money for a day trip. You brush your fingers over the black screen wistfully. Maybe in another life you would have helped customers in a bank.

Or perhaps you would have gone on to college. When you enrolled in Jujutsu Tech as a high school student, you hadn’t thought much about your future, but you could have studied any number of subjects.

Something shifts unnaturally somewhere down the hall and your hackles rise, the distinct feeling of eyes on you. You spin to the back and allow your cursed energy to flow freely through your body- ready to be released.

Keeping your attention high, you creep towards the back of the building. The noise repeats itself, and you can hear more clearly now- a rhythmic clatter, not quite the scutter of an insect, but something similar, that's coming from the back rooms. The pattern of noise stops and starts again.

Measured steps bring you closer to the belly of the bank, here there are low tables in a wide back room, with private rooms that branch away to speak privately with a banker. The furniture seems to be undisturbed, wherever you look there’s perfect order, still no indication of how the bank tellers were murdered. But the curse is making just enough noise to let you know it's lurking somewhere. It’s got some degree of intelligence, then, to taunt a sorcerer. You tilt your head, trying to determine where the noise is coming from.

You scan the floors, then the walls, steadily working your way back through the hallways to an area that’s only accessed by employees. There’s no more decorations here, only shadows cast by the meager light let through the veil, yellow-gray and sickly like a bruise. But the rustling noise has gotten progressively louder. As you approach the curse’s lair, the noise begins to sound louder and more distinct. You had to have walked through nearly the whole building now, save the vaults. Hopefully that’s not where the curse has taken up its roost.

The vault is huge and silver, set into the wall of the building itself. The cursed spirit has got to be in here, and you’re ready for the fight. With a deep breath, you increase the output of cursed energy in your arms, letting the strength ground you, then turn the handle of the vault door. Your heartbeat is loud in your ears that are trying to listen for any drop of sound, any discernible shift.

But the door is firmly locked, the handle shifts only a fraction of a degree. You process where else the curse could be- your initial sweep had been fairly thorough, could the curse be small enough to slip into one of the crevasses you’d left unturned?

Cautiously turning, you step back down the hallway you’d come from. Something in the air changes in that instant, and you step to the right, pivoting back to the vault entrance. The cursed spirit materializes out of the wall, pursing a grossly oversized pair of lips and greedily grabbing with stumpy appendages.

You intensify the cursed energy running through your arms, waiting for the cursed spirit to dart in and try to grab you, but it maintains its distance, instead spitting a noxious ball in your direction, but you pivot out of the way. You sprint towards the spirit, ready to swing, but it darts down one of the hallways, bringing you back towards the front of the building.

The employee-only areas blur past until the curse turns back towards you in the open room right before the lobby. It puckers its lips again and spits a second glob of steaming cursed energy at your body. You dodge again, then rush the curse.

But something feels wrong. After the second attack, the spirit makes no move to shoot again, or try to evade as your steps bring you closer to its disgusting body. While you analyze the curse’s behavior, its bulbous eyes flick towards the ceiling of the room.

The curse must have hidden a projectile there before you brought it into the open. Your eyes snap to the roof of the building, but instead of a projectile you find the sinuous legs and writhing body of a second curse. Its long appendages twitch and undulate in a sickly wave that you now realize was the noise you heard earlier. You can’t even see how many arms there are. A wave of cursed energy stronger than the first curse rolls off of it now. Icy fear cuts through the adrenaline pumping through your body. The second curse is strong too, and clearly working with the first somehow. You’ll have to scramble for your life.

You have to make a split second decision, choose which curse to focus on first. If you can exorcize the spitting curse quickly then pivot to the second curse, you’ll probably have the best chance of coming out on top. The second spirit hasn’t moved from its roost above the fight yet, you have no idea what its abilities are or whether you’d be able to beat it first.

Clambering backward to avoid being caught directly under the second curse, you’re nearly backed against the wall. The furniture in this room is all low and sleek, nothing to use as a shield or small enough to use as an extra weapon. The booths and computers in the lobby may give you more to work with, but between you and the hallway there is the spitting curse.

The second curse stretches its legs towards you, and it descends from the ceiling. Fuck.

Without any more time to form a plan, you run towards the spitting curse and pass it on your way to the front of the building. The narrow hallways won’t give you any tactical advantage, and would make it easy for the two curses to gang up on you.

You look over your shoulder and see the first curse hurl a projectile, and you desperately push your body to the right.

Not fast enough.

The mass of cursed energy collides with your left shoulder, and your vision whites out for a moment. Warm blood seeps from the wound and soaks your shirt, now you’ll be vulnerable and slower than before. You grit your teeth and scowl at the mass of hateful energy.

The second curse opens its mouth, grotesquely stretching the muscles until it could swallow you in a single gulp. Its twitching legs begin to move in sequence, crawling down the side of the wall in a trembling mess.

The first curse floats along ahead of the second, and it looks like it could shoot another projectile at any moment. You duck and huff a few deep breaths from the outside of the lobby divider. Then, you infuse your arm with cursed energy and punch the spitting curse with the strength you’ve saved for this mission.

The force of the hit wracks your body, and pain screams from your left shoulder. The spitting curse gets knocked to the ground coughing, but isn’t exorcized yet. You breathe through the piercing waves resonating from your shoulder and pull out a short knife to finish the job.

Cursed energy flows again through your arm and into the blade, but the second curse flings its knobbly body down from the wall. Its sinewy legs tangle around you, and the small cutting edge can’t pierce deep enough to really do any damage. The legs sweep you towards the main body of the spirit, and you see the first curse rise back up from the corner of your eye. You shove at the countless appendages and slash where you can, fighting against the nebulous legs to reach a longer weapon. Once it’s in hand, you allow the built-up cursed energy to infuse the cells of your body with all of the strength and speed you can afford to spare.

The boost (and the longer knife) allow you to hack through the second curse’s legs, and come face to face with the spitting curse. It puckers its lips once more and you hold your position a moment longer, then duck under the following projectile. Before the beast can make another, you stab the longer knife directly through its head.

You’re pretty sure that finished it, but there’s no time to double check, as the second curse has recovered from the limbs you took from it, and ambles back towards you. Dodging its legs again, you leap towards the entry room of the bank. A quick spin puts you facing the curse once more.

The legs skitter and twinge against each other, and there’s another noise too, a low drone coming out of the curse’s mouth. Whatever its muttering, you’re not interested in finding out. Now that it’s a fair fight, you’re feeling more confident about your odds of walking away from this bank.

You raise your left arm to throw one of the knives as the curse, but the joint can’t extend all the way. Swearing, you switch the larger blade to your other hand and try to gauge what this curse’s MO is. So far, it’s mostly kept out of the way, using the legs to pull you towards its body.

Now, those legs scuttle faster, it darts in towards you. You brandish the weapon and take a few quick steps back, but the curse keeps coming. You shove one of the doors open with your bad shoulder and turn to see if the curse will follow you outside. You’ve barely got time to pant in a few deep breaths.

It catches the door nearly as it closes, pushing out and gnashing its horrible teeth. You can’t pass up the opening though- as the spirit maneuvers through the door, you dash forward, infuse your arm with cursed energy and fight through the legs, then sink the knife into one of the bottom of its body.

The curse lets out a terrible wail and thrashes through the doorway, entangling you as it rampages out of the building. The smaller knife is still in your other hand, and you funnel cursed energy into it and slice shallowly into the nearest leg. The curse howls again and the legs holding you loosen but don’t release completely.

You writhe and kick your legs against the curse until you can wiggle your arm free, then drop to deadweight. Your heart is beating fast as the curse drags you in towards the body. You can hear the muttering clearly now, kodoku, over and over.

You allow the curse to drag you closer, no more than an arm's breadth away, then you pour every last ounce of cursed energy into the knife and bring it sharply down, impaling the spirit directly in its skull.

The curse collapses, a moaning pile of open wounds before disintegrating into the tiled floor. Its stink pollutes the greenery and bright day. You pant and the adrenaline that had kept you afloat leaches out of your body. The world blurs in front of your eyes, and you’re sucked back into your body- exhausted, bleeding heavily, and abruptly feeling every bit of your injury.

You lean against your knees, putting weight on your good shoulder. The energy you had expended to exorcize the first spirit held the pain at bay for a time, but the blood in your shirt is cooling, and you’ve run your body ragged by finishing the fight.

It was technically a win, desperately fought and barely won. You may be barely standing, but that curse is exorcized.

Staggering to the larger commercial entrance, you unwind the jacket and grasp the material near your bad shoulder. The blood has soaked through the thicker material, and you can feel a pulse of pain each time your heart beats.

You pat down the pockets of your pants, not sure where your phone is. After locating it, you try to pull up your messages to alert Ijitchi. Your vision blurs again and you groan in frustration. This injury is clearly bad, and if you can’t contact Ijitchi, you’ll pass out soon. If that happens, who knows how long it will take for him to return and pick you up.

After a few moments, you pour all of your focus into just calling him. With a shaking hand, you slowly click through the menu and hear the phone ring.

He answers, and you could cry from relief.

“Kodoku.”

It was a traditional magic, where small bugs or creatures fought to the death in an enclosed space. The fluids of the final survivor could be used to poison an individual. The spitting curse- it must have spit that liquid in its projectiles. You’re nearly delirious thinking about it.

“What?”

“Things didn’t go well.”

“I’m on the way. What’s wrong?”

He sounds concerned. You must sound worse than you thought.

“More than one, I was hit.”

Before you can provide any more details, you see the unassuming black sedan pull back up the driveway. He drives over the grass to get closer to you, then hops out.

You hobble towards the back of the car while he takes in your state.

“It looks like you’ve lost a lot of blood. Is it a cursed wound? We should be able to make it back to Shoko within an hour if I speed…” he trails off, likely calculating the distance back to school on different routes.

“Not cursed, just nasty. I’ve got pressure on it now, but I’ll probably ruin these seats.” You pant the words out, not totally sure that they’re true. The pain is radiating from your shoulder, it could be a cursed wound, but that wouldn’t get you back to campus any faster.

In what feels like a blink, you’re back at Tokyo Jujutsu, Ijitchi supporting your weight on the walk down to Shoko’s medical bay. He helps to set you down on the low operating table and says something. It’s probably important, but the sound is drowned out by the pain singing in your veins. Absently you wonder if you’re going to pass out from blood loss. The hit was worse than you thought.

Shoko technically had a medical degree, but because of her Curse Technique, most of her knowledge and skills were intrinsic. You’re not sure if getting her doctorate degree even helped her or if it was just part of the school’s cover.

She’s standing in front of you, speaking lowly with Ijitchi. She pulls a pair of scissors from somewhere. The metal is cold where it touches the skin of your stomach, and Shoko shears the remains of your shirt away. She’s wearing gloves now. You’re not sure when she put them on.

“Oh,” you hear her voice floating above you.

Her voice blends with Ijitchi’s as they continue their conversation, the indistinguishable words blending with the hum of the air conditioner to lull you halfway to sleep.

Since finishing school you had only been injured badly enough to need Shoko’s healing once or twice. The smell of antiseptic and the morgue closeby are enough motivation to avoid hurt at all costs. It’s cold in the medical bay.

Sharp pain pulls you out of your thoughts as Shoko prods the wound, muttering about the internal damage. Her gloved hands circle the hole in your shoulder and you feel the eerie trickle of Reverse Cursed Energy seep into your body. Feeling another sorcerer’s technique never felt right, but something feels particularly wrong right now. She sits you up and you slump against her. She’s warm.

More muttering and your head feels a bit clearer. It's a strange sensation, to feel your body rebuild itself in real time. Shoko's hands are warm through the gloves and your stomach drops as the skin and muscle knit back together.

Noise echoes down the steps to the medical center. Footsteps, you realize after a moment. Everything still sounds distorted and dreamlike.

“Hey Shoko” a voice calls, drawing out the last vowel of her name. “I wanted to know-” the voice chokes off.

You feel her turn away from you and the sensation of her healing stops. The loss of support makes your head loll back, and you feel distinctly separate from the rest of your body. It’s not til Shoko shifts again that you remember that someone else is in the medical area.

Your vision swims when you turn to see Gojo standing in the doorway of the stairwell, looking aghast at you.

“Ah, on second thought, maybe I should come back later.”

“It’s fine, we’re almost-” Gojo cuts Shoko off.

“Nope, really, I’ll be back later! Not important!” His voice disappears as he zips back up the stairs where he came from.

You furrow your brow.

Even in your addled state, you know that Gojo is the most powerful sorcerer on the planet, he should hardly be squeamish, surely a little shoulder injury isn’t enough to send him running for the hills. The thought grounds you a bit, and you think vaguely that it should already be halfway healed anyway. You crane your neck to look at the wound behind you and your chin brushes the bare skin of your shoulder.

With all the movement and almost passing out, you’d kind of forgotten that you’re not fully dressed. The wound has partially closed, but there’s still blood drying on skin around, dripping down your back.

But he’d only seen your back, nothing scandalous, and surely he’s seen a woman in her bra before.

Shoko returns the pressure to your shoulder blade and you let your mind drift as the current of her cursed energy infuses you. Who knows what’s going on in Gojo’s mind. You’re lucky really, that he didn’t stay. Healing isn’t a pretty process and you aren’t interested in having an audience as your shoulder knits itself back together. Shoko’s reverse curse technique feels more like a strong current of energy now, the sense of wrongness has passed.

More time slips by, and then she gently lays you back down on the table. Shoko's voice is soft above you, and you pick out a few words, “more hours,” and “rest.”

Perhaps it's easier when you're using your own cursed energy to heal yourself, but the few times you've been revived by Shoko, you're left more drained than when you were injured. It’s as if the flesh itself has mended, but the weight of the injury has been transferred to your head. You don’t particularly want to remember the last time you required her services now though.

The details of the attack are dreamily-muddled now, like maybe it happened to someone else. When you try to recall any detail, it flees from your mind and dissipates into the background.

Exhaustion drags you under, and your thoughts are silenced.

#gojo x reader #jjk x reader #gojo satoru #jjk reader insert #soulmate au #CiO #my writing

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soon-palestine · 5 months ago

Text

The report, “Handcuffed like dangerous criminals”: Arbitrary detention and forced returns of Sudanese refugees in Egypt, reveals how Sudanese refugees are rounded up and unlawfully deported to Sudan – an active conflict zone – without due process or opportunity to claim asylum in flagrant violation of international law. Evidence indicates that thousands of Sudanese refugees have been arbitrarily arrested and subsequently collectively expelled with the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimating that 3,000 people were deported to Sudan from Egypt in September 2023 alone.

“It is unfathomable that Sudanese women, men and children fleeing the armed conflict in their country and seeking safety across the border into Egypt, are being rounded up en masse and arbitrarily detained in deplorable and inhumane conditions before being unlawfully deported,” said Sara Hashash, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

“Egyptian authorities must immediately end this virulent campaign of mass arrests and collective expulsions. They must abide by their obligations under international human rights and refugee law to provide those fleeing the conflict in Sudan with safe and dignified passage to Egypt and unrestricted access to asylum procedures.”

For decades, Egypt was home to millions of Sudanese people studying, working, investing or receiving healthcare in the country, with Sudanese women and girls, as well as boys under 16, and men over 49 exempt from entry requirements. Around 500,000 Sudanese refugees are estimated to have fled to Egypt after the armed conflict erupted in Sudan in April 2023. However, in the following month, the Egyptian government introduced a visa entry requirement for all Sudanese nationals, leaving those fleeing with little choice but to escape through irregular border crossings.

The report documents in detail the ordeals of 27 Sudanese refugees who were arbitrarily arrested with about 260 others between October 2023 and March 2024 by Egypt’s Border Guard Forces operating under the Ministry of Defence, as well as police operating under the Ministry of Interior. It further documents how the authorities forcibly returned an estimated 800 Sudanese detainees between January and March 2024 who were all denied the possibility to claim asylum, including by accessing UNHCR, or to challenge deportation decisions.

The report is based on interviews with detained refugees, their relatives, community leaders, lawyers and a medical professional; as well as a review of official statements and documents and audiovisual evidence. The Egyptian ministries of defence and interior did not respond to Amnesty International’s letters sharing its documentation and recommendations, while the Egyptian National Council of Human Rights, the national human rights institution, rejected the findings claiming that authorities comply by their international obligations.

The spike in mass arrests and expulsions came after a prime ministerial decree issued in August 2023 requiring foreign nationals in Egypt to regularize their status. This was accompanied by a rise in xenophobic and racist sentiments both online and in the media as well as statements by government officials criticizing the economic “burden” of hosting “millions” of refugees.

It has also taken place against the backdrop of increased EU cooperation with Egypt on migration and border control, despite the country’s grim human rights record and well-documented abuses against migrants and refugees.

In October 2022, the EU and Egypt signed an €80 million cooperation agreement, which included building up the capacity of Egyptian Border Guard Forces to curb irregular migration and human trafficking across Egypt’s border. The agreement purports to apply “rights-based, protection oriented and gender sensitive approaches”. Yet, Amnesty International’s new report documents the involvement of the Border Guard Forces in violations against Sudanese refugees.

A further aid and investment package, under which migration is a key pillar, was agreed in March 2024 as part of the newly announced strategic and comprehensive partnership between the EU and Egypt.

“By cooperating with Egypt in the migration field without rigorous human rights safeguards, the EU risks complicity in Egypt’s human rights violations. The EU must press Egyptian authorities to adopt concrete measures to protect refugees and migrants,” said Sara Hashash.

“The EU must also carry out rigorous human rights risk assessments before implementing any migration cooperation and put in place independent monitoring mechanisms with clear human rights benchmarks. Cooperation must be halted or suspended immediately if there are risks or reports of abuses.” Arbitrary arrests from streets and hospitals

The mass arrests have mostly taken place in Greater Cairo (encompassing Cairo and Giza) and in the border areas in the governorate of Aswan or inside Aswan city. In Cairo and Giza, police have conducted mass stops and identity checks targeting Black individuals, spreading fear within the refugee community leaving many afraid to leave their homes.

Following arrest by police in Aswan, Sudanese refugees are transferred to police stations or the Central Security Forces camp, an unofficial detention place, in Shallal region. Those arrested by Border Guard Forces in Aswan governorate are detained in makeshift detention facilities including warehouses inside a military site in Abu Simbel and a horse stable inside another military site near Nagaa Al Karur before being forced into buses and vans and driven to the Sudanese border.

Conditions in these detention facilities are cruel and inhumane, with overcrowding, lack of access to toilets and sanitation facilities, substandard and insufficient food, and denial of adequate healthcare.

Amnesty International also documented the arrest of at least 14 refugees from public hospitals in Aswan, where they were receiving treatment for serious injuries sustained during road accidents on their journeys from Sudan to Egypt. Authorities transferred them – against medical advice and before they had fully recovered – to detention, where they were forced to sleep on the ground after surgery.

Amira, a 32-year-old Sudanese woman who fled Khartoum with her mother was receiving treatment at an Aswan hospital following a car crash on 29 October 2023 that left her with fractures to the neck and the back. Nora, a relative of Amira, told the organization that the doctors told her she would need three months of medical care, but after just 18 days police transferred her to a police station in Aswan where she was forced to sleep on the ground for around 10 days. Cold and rat-infested detention facilities before collective expulsions

Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab reviewed photos and verified videos from January 2024 of women and children sitting on dirty floors amidst rubbish in a warehouse controlled by Egyptian border guards. The former detainees said the warehouses were infested by rats and pigeon nests and those detained endured cold nights with no appropriate clothing or blankets. Men’s warehouse conditions were overcrowded, with over a hundred men crammed together and limited access to overflowing toilets, forcing them to urinate in plastic bottles at night.

At least 11 children, some under the age of four, were detained with their mothers at these sites.

Israa, who has asthma, told Amnesty International that guards at the overcrowded horse stable near Nagaa Al Karur village ignored her request for an inhaler, even when she asked to buy one at her own expense.

After periods of detention ranging from a few days six weeks, police and Border Guard Forces handcuffed males and drove all detainees to the Qustul-Ashkeet border crossing and handed them to Sudanese authorities, without individualised assessment of risk of serious human rights violations if returned. None was given the opportunity to claim asylum even when they had registration appointments with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), asked to speak to UNHCR or pleaded not to be sent back. Such forced returns violate Egypt’s international obligations under human rights and refugee law, including the principle of non-refoulement.

Border Guard Forces expelled Ahmed, his wife and two-year-old child together with a group of roughly 200 detainees, on 26 February 2024, after detaining them for six days in Abu Simbel military site.

Since the conflict in Sudan began, Egyptian authorities have failed to provide statistics or acknowledge their policy of deportations.

#sudan #sudan crisis #keep eyes on sudan #egypt

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ebi-noodle-doodles · 7 months ago

Note

Do you have any advice/tutorials on how to make healthily round characters? You do them so well!

Hi I really want to answer this with like my doodles and stuff but I’m out (might reblog the stuff later) but so want to say just use a LOT of references. I got used to not using references most of the time because Ive build a somewhat small mental library in my head but certainly its not absolute or perfect, but If I want to focus on a certain piece I really look for references! OR use the mirror.

My main advice

Build a mental library full or references; Even if the reference you compiled are not the same body type/shape, you soon learn to incorporate them in actually drawing round characters.

You can try building this mental library not just by searching online but ACTUALLY STUDYING ONESELF, by that I mean your body. Try taking videos of yourself and pause on frames that could potentially make a good dynamic reference!

Build a habit of drawing different character bodies. I cant say I’m an expert nor really follow this rule since I lack understanding, really but one of my discovered inspirations before I drew characters like these is the Dungeon Meshi Artist. They draw different shaped characters so well, take inspiration from them!

Pay attention to distribution of fat and muscle. (again I’m not an expert!!!) Pay attention to HEIGHT and WEIGHT of the character. What I usually do is that sometimes I estimate how much torso is going to on or legs so it looks proportionate

I learned that chibi is similar to what Im doing. I guess I learned chibi with round shapes aka bunch of circles and ovals, but irl those are more of chunky sausages(?)

BE CONFIDENT on your SKETCHES. I usually start small in sketching like big canvas/paper small lil “chibi” characters. Practice a pose u like then choose what you want to focus and render on

I feel like I’m saying this more for myself hut fundamentals! fundamentals, fundamentals fun d a ment a l s ! In anatomy, lighting & generally in art is key component to everything really!

Welp might reblog this with some visuals hopefully when I get home! I do think I still need more practice despite all the drawings I made, I feel like it still lacks dynamism that would be appealing at first glance.

if it contributes to anything, I think my coloring also makes the piece “look” soft.

#ebi noodle doodles #xixiriima #reply #ask reply #my reply #reblog later #reference #check dungeon meshi artist

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spacelazarwolf · 1 year ago

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if you want to answer (and i totally understand if you dont), who do you think bombed the hospital in gaza? ive seen a lot of different people talking about it and blaming different people & organizations and you seem like you know a lot aboit i/p

IMPORTANT TO NOTE: i am not a news source. i am some guy with access to the internet. please follow the links in this post, as well as doing your own research. please do not use social media posts exclusively as your source of news, and please continuously read and compare several different accredited news sources. keep on top of new sources and evidence that are being put out to ensure that you have the most up-to-date information.

it's not really about who i think did it. i feel like that centers me in a thing that is very much not about me. but i'll give it my best shot.

we still do not have confirmation of how many were killed or who is at fault for the bombing. there are a lot of numbers and opinions floating around online, but as of 4pm on october 19th there has not been a consensus on either of these things from any accredited organizations.

that being said, here are the statements that have been put out as of the time i'm responding to this:

statements about death toll:

the gaza health ministry estimates between 200 and 471 dead

the director of al-shifa hospital where people were brought from al-ahli estimates 250 dead

an assessment from the us director of national intelligence estimates between 100 and 300

an analyst with the center for naval analysis, after viewing photos and video, said the death toll was closer to 50

statements about fault:

(taking these directly from the article)

J Andres Gannon, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, in the US, says the ground explosions appeared to be small, meaning that the heat generated from the impact may have been caused by leftover rocket fuel rather than an explosion from a warhead. Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute, agrees. While it is difficult to be sure at such an early stage, he says, the evidence looks like the explosion was caused by a failed rocket section hitting the car park and causing a fuel and propellant fire. Mr Gannon says it is not possible to determine whether the projectile struck its intended target from the footage he has seen. He adds that the flashes in the sky likely indicate the projectile was a rocket with an engine that overheated and stopped working. Valeria Scuto, lead Middle East analyst at Sibylline, a risk assessment company, notes that Israel has the capacity to carry out other forms of air strike by drone, where they might use Hellfire missiles. These missiles generate a significant amount of heat but would not necessarily leave a large crater. But she says uncorroborated footage shows a pattern of fires at the hospital site that was not consistent with this explanation.

Visual evidence from the blast site The BBC was able to match details of buildings and the layout of the Al-Ahli hospital site with publicly available satellite imagery, to establish the hospital was the scene of the blast. Based on available evidence, it appears the explosion happened in a courtyard which is part of the hospital site. Images of the ground after the blast do not show significant damage to surrounding hospital buildings. What the images do show are scorch marks and burnt-out cars.

where the explosive came from

so far, israel, hamas, and palestinian islamic jihad have all denied responsibility

channel 4 news reported that palestinian islamic jihad had uncovered a warhead but they have not produced it

in a since-deleted tweet, hananya naftali, a social media advisor for netanyahu, claimed that it was an israeli airstrike that hit the hospital. he followed up by stating that he had shared incorrect information based on a reuters headline that refered to an israeli airstrike

tentative conclusion based on sources:

what i gather from what i've read is that the blast was likely caused by a misfired rocket originating somewhere in gaza, and the blast was exacerbated by the fuel in the rocket. BUT, as i stated before, new information is always being put out. there could be evidence released tomorrow that it was an israeli air strike. there has been no conclusive evidence yet.

and perhaps the most important section:

what you can actually do to help

if you are in the us, call your representatives and urge them to support the resolution for a ceasefire

check out this list of verified aid groups (if there is not a ceasefire as soon as possible, it won't matter what aid is sent to them and if they cannot get the supplies into gaza, so refer back to the first bulletpoint)

send a donation to your local synagogue(s) and mosque(s) to help them offset the rising costs of security

take a moment to be a human. don't think about the numbers. don't think about the politics. think about the human beings who lost their lives, and the people who are mourning them. the mothers who will never see their children again, the children who will grow up without parents. what did they have for breakfast? what was their favorite song? when was their birthday? were they afraid? were they in pain? what can we do to ensure this does not happen again?

#ask avishai #i/p

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girlstuffnorp · 7 months ago

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As you can probably tell from my previous posts, I've been reading through the Julie and the Phantoms novels, and I noticed something interesting in terms of canon/world-building in Whatever Happens (A Julie and the Phantoms Original Novel) by Candice Buford...

(spoilers for the novel ahead)

So, if we assume that the article that Julie shows the boys in ep 1 is canon (and not just something that someone put together for the sake of having something to show onscreen), the date of the article (which you can barely see due to my blurry screenshot) is sometime in July 1995, with the article stating that at the time of writing, the boys had died a week previously.

The novel is mostly flashbacks of Julie and Luke's memories of their respective 'perfect days', and for Luke, it is the day before the fateful almost-perfornance of Sunset Curve at the Orpheum (AKA the day before Luke, Alex and Reggie die).

He managed to scrape enough money to buy tickets for himself and the rest of Sunset Curve to go to a Foo Fighters concert - not just any Foo Fighters concert, however. Luke mentions that the concert was held at the Palace Theatre... and my detective senses began to tingle.

I love discovering real-life connections to the small details in a show's universe, and I naturally went digging online to see whether Foo Fighters really performed at the Palace Theatre in 1995...

They did.

The Foo Fighters official website (link here) states that they played at the Palace Theatre on 19th May 1995 (and even shows the setlist of songs that they played on the night).

So...

Bearing in mind that in-show canon is usually perceived as being more 'legitimate' than a tie-in original novel, but also knowing that we have only have a week in July 1995 as a rough estimate of the boys' date of death...

Would it be possible to theorise that a possible date of Sunset Curve's almost-performance at the Orpheum (and Luke, Alex and Reggie's death) was actually 20th May 1995?

Just a theory/headcanon/thinking way too deep into a silly kids book 🔍

#~ headcanon: scribbling in my tattered looking notebook ~#~ headcanon: luke ~#~ headcanon: alex ~#~ headcanon: reggie ~#julie and the phantoms #jatp #luke patterson #alex mercer #reggie peters

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mariacallous · 1 month ago

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As digital scamming explodes in Southeast Asia, including so called “pig butchering” investment scams, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) issued a comprehensive report this week with a dire warning about the rapid growth of this criminal ecosystem. Many digital scams have traditionally relied on social engineering, or tricking victims into giving away their money willingly, rather than leaning on malware or other highly technical methods. But researchers have increasingly sounded the alarm that scammers are incorporating generative AI content and deepfakes to expand the scale and effectiveness of their operations. And the UN report offers the clearest evidence yet that these high tech tools are turning an already urgent situation into a crisis.

In addition to buying written scripts to use with potential victims or relying on templates for malicious websites, attackers have increasingly been leaning on generative AI platforms to create communication content in multiple languages and deepfake generators that can create photos or even video of nonexistent people to show victims and enhance verisimilitude. Scammers have also been expanding their use of tools that can drain a victim’s cryptocurrency wallets, have been manipulating transaction records to trick targets into sending cryptocurrency to the wrong places, and are compromising smart contracts to steal cryptocurrency. And in some cases, they’ve been purchasing Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet systems to help power their efforts.

“Agile criminal networks are integrating these new technologies faster than anticipated, driven by new online marketplaces and service providers which have supercharged the illicit service economy,” John Wojcik, a UNODC regional analyst, tells WIRED. “These developments have not only expanded the scope and efficiency of cyber-enabled fraud and cybercrime, but they have also lowered the barriers to entry for criminal networks that previously lacked the technical skills to exploit more sophisticated and profitable methods.”

For years, China-linked criminals have trafficked people into gigantic compounds in Southeast Asia, where they are often forced to run scams, held against their will, and beaten if they refuse instructions. Around 200,000 people, from at least 60 countries, have been trafficked to compounds largely in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos over the last five years. However, as WIRED reporting has shown, these operations are spreading globally—with scamming infrastructure emerging in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Africa.

Most prominently, these organized crime operations have run pig butchering scams, where they build intimate relationships with victims before introducing an “investment opportunity” and asking for money. Criminal organizations may have conned people out of around $75 billion through pig butchering scams. Aside from pig butchering, according to the UN report, criminals across Southeast Asia are also running job scams, law enforcement impersonation, asset recovery scams, virtual kidnappings, sextortion, loan scams, business email compromise, and other illicit schemes. Criminal networks in the region earned up to $37 billion last year, UN officials estimate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of this revenue is allowing scammers to expand their operations and diversify, incorporating new infrastructure and technology into their systems in the hope of making them more efficient and brutally effective.

For example, scammers are often constrained by their language skills and ability to keep up conversations with potentially hundreds of victims at a time in numerous languages and dialects. However, generative AI developments within the last two years—including the launch of writing tools such as ChatGPT—are making it easier for criminals to break down language barriers and create the content needed for scamming.

The UN’s report says AI can be used for automating phishing attacks that ensnare victims, the creation of fake identities and online profiles, and the crafting of personalized scripts to trick victims while messaging them in different languages. “These developments have not only expanded the scope and efficiency of cyber-enabled fraud and cybercrime, but they have also lowered the barriers to entry for criminal networks that previously lacked the technical skills to exploit sophisticated and profitable methods,” the report says.

Stephanie Baroud, a criminal intelligence analyst in Interpol’s human trafficking unit, says the impact of AI needs to be considered as part of a pig butchering scammer’s tactics going forward. Baroud, who spoke with WIRED in an interview before the publication of the UN report, says the criminal’s recruitment ads that lure people into being trafficked to scamming compounds used to be “very generic” and full of grammatical errors. However, AI is now making them appear more polished and compelling, Baroud says. “It is really making it easier to create a very realistic job offer,” she says. “Unfortunately, this will make it much more difficult to identify which is the real and which is the fake ads.”

Perhaps the biggest AI paradigm shift in such digital attacks comes from deepfakes. Scammers are increasingly using machine-learning systems to allow for real-time face-swapping. This technology, which has also been used by romance scammers in West Africa, allows criminals to change their appearance on calls with their victims, making them realistically appear to be a different person. The technology is allowing “one-click” face swaps and high-resolution video feeds, the UN’s report states. Such services are a game changer for scammers, because they allow attackers to “prove” to victims in photos or real-time video calls that they are who they claim to be.

Using these setups, however, can require stable internet connections, which can be harder to maintain within some regions where pig butchering compounds and other scamming have flourished. There has been a “notable” increase in cops seizing Starlink satellite dishes in recent months in Southeast Asia, the UN says—80 units were seized between April and June this year. In one such operation carried out in June, Thai police confiscated 58 Starlink devices. In another instance, law enforcement seized 10 Starlink devices and 4,998 preregistered SIM cards while criminals were in the process of moving their operations from Myanmar to Laos. Starlink did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

“Obviously using real people has been working for them very well, but using the tech could be cheaper after they have the required computers” and connectivity, says Troy Gochenour, a volunteer with the Global Anti-Scam Organization (GASO), a US-based nonprofit that fights human-trafficking and cybercrime operations in Southeast Asia.

Gochenour’s research involves tracking trends on Chinese-language Telegram channels related to carrying out pig butchering scams. And he says that it is increasingly common to see people applying to be AI models for scam content.

In addition to AI services, attackers have increasingly leaned on other technical solutions as well. One tool that has been increasingly common in digital scamming is so-called “crypto drainers,” a type of malware that has particularly been deployed against victims in Southeast Asia. Drainers can be more or less technically sophisticated, but their common goal is to “drain” funds from a target’s cryptocurrency wallets and redirect the currency to wallets controlled by attackers. Rather than stealing the credentials to access the target wallet directly, drainers are typically designed to look like a legitimate service—either by impersonating an actual platform or creating a plausible brand. Once a victim has been tricked into connecting their wallet to the drainer, they are then manipulated into approving one or a few transactions that grant attackers unintended access to all the funds in the wallet.

Drainers can be used in many contexts and with many fronts. They can be a component of pig butchering investment scams, or promoted to potential victims through compromised social media accounts, phishing campaigns, and malvertizing. Researchers from the firm ScamSniffer, for example, published findings in December about sponsored social media and search engine ads linked to malicious websites that contained a cryptocurrency drainer. The campaign, which ran from March to December 2023 reportedly stole about $59 million from more than 63,000 victims around the world.

Far from the low-tech days of doing everything through social engineering by building a rapport with potential victims and crafting tricky emails and text messages, today’s scammers are taking a hybrid approach to make their operations as efficient and lucrative as possible, UN researchers say. And even if they aren’t developing sophisticated malware themselves in most cases, scammers are increasingly in the market to use these malicious tools, prompting malware authors to adapt or create hacking tools for scams like pig butchering.

Researchers say that scammers have been seen using infostealers and even remote access trojans that essentially create a backdoor in a victim’s system that can be utilized in other types of attacks. And scammers are also expanding their use of malicious smart contracts that appear to programmatically establish a certain agreed-upon transaction or set of transactions, but actually does much more. “Infostealer logs and underground data markets have also been critical to ongoing market expansion, with access to unprecedented amounts of sensitive data serving as a major catalyst,” Wojcik, from the UNODC, says.

The changing tactics are significant as global law enforcement scrambles to deter digital scamming. But they are just one piece of the larger picture, which is increasingly urgent and bleak for forced laborers and victims of these crimes.

“It is now increasingly clear that a potentially irreversible displacement and spillover has taken place in which organized crime are able to pick, choose, and move value and jurisdictions as needed, with the resulting situation rapidly outpacing the capacity of governments to contain it,” UN officials wrote in the report. “Failure to address this ecosystem will have consequences for Southeast Asia and other regions.”

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