#order management system features

[inventorymanagementsystem]

Magento is a renowned e-commerce platform that offers a comprehensive order management system (OMS) to help businesses optimize their online operations.

The Magento OMS is a powerful tool that provides a centralized hub for managing the entire order lifecycle, from order placement to fulfillment and beyond.

[shadowofroserade]

Introducing: Undertale Cooking with Kindness!

"This is going to be the greatest restaurant the Underground has ever seen!"

Undertale Cooking with Kindness is a prequel fangame focusing on the green SOUL, Sunny.

Following their fall into the Underground, Sunny meets Luna, a monster with dreams of making the greatest restaurant in the underground. Determined to help, Sunny agrees to work together to achieve this far-off goal. Still, the spectre of the Underground's King looms over Sunny, and it seems as if death is inevitable...

MEET THE STAFF

SUNNY

LUNA

GRILLBY

MAWZZ

GAMEPLAY

Unlike most other Undertale fangames, UTCWK features no battling whatsoever, nor does it feature a fight/mercy system. Instead, UTCWK's main gameplay is reminiscent of a restaurant and cooking sim. Instead of encountering and fighting enemies, Sunny must instead make it through days working at The Eclipse, making food and serving customers.

The game is split up into days. Every day you will have a set amount of customers to serve, and each order has a time limit, so you better act fast!

These orders are handled through cooking minigames! The UNDERTALE battle box and menus have been repurposed into the UI for a cooking game! These minigames are reminiscent of Cooking Mama and WarioWare.

Acting helps you determine the customer's preferences. The faster and closer to their preferences you manage to make the customers’ orders, the more GOLD and PRESTIGE you gain at the end of the day!

For more information please check out our:

GAMEJOLT

and

TWITTER

We hope to see you whenever the Eclipse finally opens its doors!

[felassan]

David Gaider: "It occurs to me, after reading posts getting it spectacularly wrong, that there are a lot of misconceptions over how game studios organize and, in particular, who makes the actual decisions about what ends up in your game. Much of it is by folks who don't *try* to get it... but not all, surely. I'll explain it a bit, but a big caveat: I'm going to talk in generalities and roles. Actual titles vary (a lot) from studio and studio, and the bigger a studio is the more segmented their departments (and thus management) is going to be. Even so, most studios, big and small, kind of work the same. To start, you're going to break your devs up into at least three groups: design (what is the game? how does it work?), art (what will it look like?), and engineering (making it go). There can be a lot of cross-over and some departments that don't fit into a project structure (QA, Marketing, etc.)"

Rest of post under cut due to length.

"There's going to be someone in charge of these groups - these are usually called "leads" or "senior leads". The actual title varies. The Design Lead could be a Lead Designer, for instance, or it could be a Creative Director and a Lead Designer is what they call someone further down the chain."

"These leads all report to a Project Director, someone who's job it is to manage the project as a whole. Now, this part gets a little dicey. Depending on the studio, this role can be anything from more production-oriented (they control the schedule) to an outright auteur who micro-manages everything."

"More importantly, it's the PD who hands down the project goals to the Leads: the strategic goals, the needed features, the shape of it all, etc. The Leads then figure out how their department is going to tackle those, and work with each other. If the Leads conflict, it's the PD's role to solve it. How much autonomy or ownership those Leads have is, like I said, really up to the individual PD and that studio's culture. Even in the case of a PD who has a lot of authority over the project, however, they still report to the studio leadership (unless it's the same person, like in a small studio)."

"The studio leadership is going to be giving the PD their marching orders, often in the form of those strategic goals. If there's a publisher involved, that's where the studio leadership is likely getting those goals. The PD, then, ends up being the person who has to negotiate with everyone above."

"What does this mean? If the studio or publisher has concerns about the project, they're calling in the PD to explain. If the project needs more time or resources, it's on the PD to explain to them why and how and when. If there are a lot of layers above the PD... yes, it's a looot of meetings. So while the PD is managing up, the Leads are managing down. With big projects, that means managing the "sub-leads"... those in charge of the individual sections of their department. It'd be unmanageable otherwise, and the bigger the project the more of these there are going to be."

"What does this mean? Well, let's look at the way BioWare broke up Design (as of 8 years ago, anyhow). Design consisted of Narrative Design, Level Design, Systems Design, Gameplay Design, and Cinematic Design (who worked in tandem with Cinematic Animation, which actually fell under the Art Lead)."

"The sub-leads are handed their goals by the lead, and work out how they're going to produce their particular corner of the game and also, more importantly, how they're going to work with each other. Conflicts between sub-leads are handled by the lead, as are ANY conflicts with other departments. What conflicts could there be, you ask? Dependencies, for one. "I can't do X until Y is done, but Y is someone else's job". Or scope. "We need 20 doodads but the sub-lead said they only have time to make 10, what now?". Even outright differences in vision. Big projects means room for a LOT of egos. If you think this is easier with a smaller (or indie) project, the answer is "yes, but not really". The roles are still necessary but often get combined into one person. Or outsourced, and someone still needs to manage the outsourcing. Things fall off over-full plates. It's a different kind of hard. Anyhow, the point of all this is: the further you go down the chain, the smaller the box you can play in is. The less you have actual say over, and even then that say is subject to being overridden by ANYONE above... and must still play nicely with the needs and goals of the other departments. You also need to keep in mind that projects are constantly in flux. Problems that were thought solved need re-solving. The team falls behind schedule and scope needs to change. You are constantly in a dance, within your tiny box, trying to figure out sub-optimal solutions that cause the least pain. And there will be pain. Shit rolls downhill, as they say, and when the project encounters big issues that means those high up have the sad job of figuring out how to spread it out and who can afford to take the hardest hit. If you're that one, you take it on the chin and you deal. This is the job. Lastly, I'll re-iterate: not every studio works this way, exactly. The roles exist, sure, but are not divided up so neatly or as easily identifiable. Even so, this should give you an idea what "lead" and "sub-lead" mean... and perhaps help you imagine what it's like existing further down the chain."

[source thread]

[ravenstargames]

✦ Lost in Limbo Devlog #13 | 11.11.24

Feels good to be back! This is our first post-Kickstarter devlog and I'm so excited to be writing it.

First of all— Lost in Limbo was successfully funded on September 20th, 2024! 🎉🎇

Yep, it has been almost two months, but it's still something to celebrate! Thanks to every single one of you for making this possible! We didn't meet all our stretch goals (there were a lot and taxes are a pain) but that doesn't mean we are giving up on those. More on that another time.

There's a lot of things we want to show y'all, so let's jump into it!

A sneak peak of Envy's postcard!

Raquel has been working hard on getting the "special postcards from your favorite LI" ready to send them to print ASAP! Initially we were going to use art we already had of the LIs, but we thought it was more exciting to offer y'all exclusive art pieces. After this, Raquel will focus exclusively on the rework of the sprites!

We hosted a few polls and got a lot of feedback. If you missed it, you can check it here!

Astro says hello :^)

As you know, the Extended Demo will feature more locations, including a glimpse of the MC's city, Faybourne! Astro is getting the main street ready for you and your bestie as you go on about your day. I've calculated around three / four different and new locations to properly pace the demo as we imagined it in the first place!

The writing deparment (me. i'm the department) has been focusing on the Extended Demo script. I have a lot of things to play with, like the flavor choices, the personality choices, and more. I want to create a proper balance because one of the things y'all asked for was more choices, and the pacing needed a bit of fixing, as we already knew!

The Extended Demo will actually introduce characters you've heard about, like your mom, your ominous grandmother, and your bestie. So no more talking about them, you'll actually get to meet them like we wanted to!

There will also be more time with the LIs, and hopefully the amount of time you spend with each one of them will feel more balanced, too.

Programming has been an adventure! Huge shoutout to Feniks for helping me figure out how to properly make a toggle for the timed choices as well as helping me polish the personality system. What a lifesaver!

So the timed choices toggle now works perfectly. That means you'll be able to turn them off if you'd like to play the game without being jumpscared by a timer—that doesn't mean you won't be able to mess up, though, on purpose or not :^) This is a dark game, after all!

The personality choice system lets you decide how the MC reacts to things including the nature of your romance with the LI. That means dialogue will automatically change in certain parts of the game to reflect the personality of your MC, some options will be locked, some unlocked, etc. There's three different personalities available.

For colorblind folks, the choices will have a different icon when you hover over them for you to know they're different!

Also, I've started coding some extra mini cgs Kayden's been working on! There'll be more in the Extended Demo to enhance the experience, so we hope you enjoy them! :^)

All the packaging stuff has arrived to our provisional headquarters (Raquel's home), and our business cards have been secured! Every backer with physical goodies will receive one for free :^) This month has been all about managing Backerkit, orders and merch, as well as preparing the Extended Demo. We hope we can receive everything very very soon and start shipping packages starting December!

For now, that's it! There's a lot of stuff going behind the scenes, a lot of things that need attention, and a lot of planning happening. Also the catastrophe the DANA has been on our cities is keeping me a bit on edge, but I'm trying to focus on work. This Saturday I'm going on a trip to Greece with my family, so I'll disconnect then! It's our first time traveling to a different country since I was like...seven years old? And we have been saving up and preparing a lot for the trip, so we are excited :^)

I hope everyone has been taking care and doing alright! Have a huge hug from the Ravenstar Team, and see you around!

[weird-obsessed-girl]

Harry dealing with abuse trauma/people finding out about Dursley’s treatment

Ok so I didn’t know exactly how to word this particular genre of Harry Potter fanfiction, but I have been reading some fanfics where either the teachers, Sirius or the golden trio find out that Harry has been abused by the Dursley’s and how Harry deals or heals from that trauma. #cupboardreveal

so therefore below is a list of fanfics that deal with this topic, this is pretty obvious but TW for child abuse, some of these I haven’t read yet so i don’t think any of them feature active abuse, more so past abuse.

All of these will be angst but many with a hopeful/happy ending. Organised by word count. If you would like some fic recs that don’t focus on Harrys abuse here’s the link to my master list Harry Potter Fic Rec (mostly Drarry)

How Each Weasley Found Out About The Dursleys - burnthebodiesandbedonewithit

What it says on the tin, Harry/Ginny (very light tho), protective Weasleys | G | 1k

Food For Thought - LoveHP

Snape notices some things throughout the years, have not read yet so IDK | T | 1.2k

Bottle It Up - mallfacee

Disabled Harry, Severitus, hurt/comfort, hiding medical issues, apart of a series | T | 2.1k

Aftermath - CreateImagineWrite

Post-final battle, Harry is dealing with trauma, Ron helps him and finds out, Trigger Warning for food issues and trauma responses | G | 3.1k

Disguised as something else - aloneintherain

Everybody lives, au war ends early, Wolfstar custody of Harry, hurt/comfort, THIS IS SO GOOD #cupboard reveal | T | 3.1k

Muggle Management - LadyWinterlight, NerdyKat

Hermione recognises the signs of abuse, part of a series, Hermione finessing the muggle system | G | 3.4K

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell - IamShadow21

Not focused on past abuse but is mentioned, Ron and Harry friendship through the years | T | 3.7K

The Cupboard - GreenEyesGreySkies

Drarry, panic attack, harmless prank that turns out to not be so | T | 4K

Bruised Hearts and Painted Skin - mikimouze16

Lupin, McGonagall and Snape find out, therapy, depression | G | 4.4K

Cascade - taradiane

Drarry, post-Hogwarts, Harry has nightmares, discussion about the Dursleys | PG | 4.7k

Claustrophobic- Annie1025

Summer at Spinner’s End, sevitus, 5th year, hurt/comfort, panic attacks | T | 4.8k

Where the Sunbeams Start - zedpm

Sirius/Severus, Soulmate au which leads to Severus getting Sirius freed, then they adopt Harry! T | 7.1k

Locked Cupboards - Lomonaaeren

Redemption, Draco is assigned to guard Dudley, Dudley talks about their childhood | T | 7.2k

Darker Than You Think - Lomonaaeren

Drarry, Draco is very much a psycho, bent on revenge, dubious consent | M (definitely should be E) | 7.8k

Fac Mihi Viam - MistressKat

Canon divergence, Harry stays at Grimmauld Plac, abuse not necessarily discussed but implied, Wolfstar | T | 7.9k

The Uncle - copprbadge

Wolfstar, gangsters au, Remus saves Harry from Dursley’s | T | 7.9k

Tugging Sleeves - Windschild178

Harry isn’t responding to Rons letters, POV Ron, Ron to the rescue | G | 8.1k

Harry Potter And The Summer At Grimmauld Place - Silver_Queen_DoS

What it says on the tin, Sirius is free, home renovation, book 3 | G | 8.6k

Listen - Marchling

Need to sign into Ao3, Sirius spies on Dursleys, hurt/comfort, misunderstandings, reconciliation | T | 10.9k

Finite Incantatem - skullcandy11

Rogue spell hits Harry and reveals some truths, manipulative Dumbledore, Harry joins the dark side | T | 12.3k currently, ongoing

Scars - pheonixgirl26

Some Gryffindor’s see some of Harry’s scar, and decide to help | M | 12.5k

Timeshare - astolat

Honestly i have not read this yet but it looks promising, Harry is spending summer at the Dursleys and then the Malfoy’s | M | 14.1k

Seven Plus One - ABlackRaven

Sirius adopts Harry, 7 times Sirius is called uncle and 1 time he’s called dad, Peter caught, hurt/comfort | T | 15.4K

What’s Left Unsaid - angel74

Post-Order of the Phoenix, Hermione and Ron look into Harry’s life at the Dursley’s, angst, hurt/comfort | T | 16.1k

A Hero - Celebony

Dudley begins to see his family in a different light | T | 18.1k

The Lioness - Aya_Diefair

Molly becomes suspicious of Harry’s relatives, she visits them, BAMF Molly, Sirius is freed | G | 18.3k

That’s Your Punishment? - slytherclaw7

Molly actually asks Harry questions, this is definitely a fix-it fic, Sirius is freed, Peter is caught, Dumbledore bashing, Tonks family taking Harry in | IDK how fanfiction.net ratings work | 19k

Pinky Promise - etymolodrarry, huffinglepuff

Remus is observant, angst with happy ending, Dumbledore bashing, implied self harm, Wolfstar | T | 19.5k

Listen Now - mrsfizzle

Harry confides in Remus, hurt/comfort, Wolfstar adopts Harry, moving into Grimmauld | G | 21.2k

Conquering the Dark - noeon (noe)

Healer!Harry and neuromagic!Draco, both work together, unearths trauma | E | 23.7k

The Chamber of Secrets and Half the Adults are Idiots - Des98

Apart of a series, Drarry, Harry recognises Lucius’ treatment of Draco, fix-it, inter-house friendships | M | 42.8k

The Article - LeeASherlook

outed by the Daily Prophet (not in the gay sense), 6th year, Drarry friendship | T | 43k ongoing

Burnt - lastcrazyhorn

Disabled Harry, Slytherin!Harry, have not read so refer to tags | T | 104.9k

Memories and Dreams - paganaidd

Series, one part Dudley’s POV | T | 140.3k

Malfoy Family Values - belana, Merry1978

This only really mentions Harry’s mistreatment but i thought it is an interesting fic to possibly explore, Malfoys adopt little Harry | G | 141.7k

Stronger At the Broken Places - enigmaticblue

More so focus’ on Sirius’ trauma, but it’s a whole Wolfstar family affair | T | 174.9k

Digging for the Bones - paganaidd

Hogwarts starts screening students for abuse, Snape conducts Harry’s screening, Snape is Harry’s bio dad, Severitus | M | 212.2k

The secret language of plants - Endrina

Severus/Remus, Sev rescues toddler Harry, this is a series of Severus/Remus being Harry’s parents, pre-Hogwarts to post, future Drarry | rating varies | 373k

Innocent - MarauderLover7

Ok so this does not focus on Harry’s abuse but Sirius gets freed and raises Harry when he’s 8 | M | 487.5k

A Year Like None Other - aspeninthesunlight

Disability, slightly Severitus, 6th year, canon divergence, Snape forces Harry to read letter from Dursleys | T | 789.5k

[etz-ashashiyot]

Quotes from "Executed Jews" I want to especially highlight:

Two distinct patterns of antisemitism can be identified by the Jewish holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version of antisemitism, exemplified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the biblical Book of Esther, the goal is openly stated and unambiguous: Kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version of antisemitism, whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished simply by destroying Jewish civilization, while leaving the warm, de-Jewed bodies of its former practitioners intact.

For this reason, the Hanukkah version of antisemitism often employs Jews as its agents. It requires not dead Jews but cool Jews: those willing to give up whatever specific aspect of Jewish civilization is currently uncool. Of course, Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet's only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism's brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening — and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism's success. These "converted" Jews are used to demonstrate the good intentions of the regime — which of course isn't antisemitic but merely requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the worthy prize of not being treated like dirt, or not being murdered. For a few years. Maybe.

I wish I could tell the story of Ala's father concisely, compellingly, the way everyone prefers to hear about dead Jews. I regret to say that Benjamin Zuskin wasn't minding his own business and then randomly stuffed into a gas chamber, that his thirteen-year-old daughter did not sit in a closet writing an uplifting diary about the inherent goodness of humanity, that he did not leave behind sad-but-beautiful aphorisms pondering the absence of God while conveniently letting his fellow humans off the hook. He didn't even get crucified for his beliefs. Instead, he and his fellow Soviet Jewish artists — extraordinarily intelligent, creative, talented, and empathetic adults — were played for fools, falling into a slow-motion psychological horror story brimming with suspense and twisted self-blame. They were lured into a long game of appeasing and accommodating, giving up one inch after another of who they were in order to win that grand prize of being allowed to live.

Spoiler alert: they lost.

[...]

But Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime — and for Jews, it came at a very specific price. From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything that celebrated Jewish "nationality" that didn't suit its needs. Jews were awesome, provided they weren't practicing Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism. The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.) What's left of Jewish culture once you surgically remove religious practice, traditional texts, Hebrew, and Zionism? In the Soviet Empire, one answer was Yiddish, but Yiddish was also suspect for its supposedly backwards elements. Nearly 15 percent of its words came directly from biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, so Soviet Yiddish schools and publishers, under the guise of "simplifying" spelling, implemented a new and quite literally antisemitic spelling system that eliminated those words' Near Eastern roots. Another answer was "folklore" — music, visual art, theater, and other creative work reflecting Jewish life — but of course most of that cultural material was also deeply rooted in biblical and rabbinic sources, or reflected common religious practices like Jewish holidays and customs, so that was treacherous too.

No, what the regime required were Yiddish stories that showed how horrible traditional Jewish practice was, stories in which happy, enlightened Yiddish-speaking heroes rejected both religion and Zionism (which, aside from its modern political form, is also a fundamental feature of ancient Jewish texts and prayers traditionally recited at least three times daily). This de-Jewing process is clear from the repertoire of the government-sponsored Moscow State Yiddish Theater, which could only present or adapt Yiddish plays that denounced traditional Judaism as backward, bourgeois, corrupt, or even more explicitly — as in the many productions involving ghosts or graveyard scenes — as dead. As its actors would be, soon enough.

The Soviet Union's destruction of Jewish culture commenced, in a calculated move, with Jews positioned as the destroyers. It began with the Yevsektsiya, committees of Jewish Bolsheviks whose paid government jobs from 1918 through 1930 were to persecute, imprison, and occasionally murder Jews who participated in religious or Zionist institutions — categories that included everything from synagogues to sports clubs, all of which were shut down and their leaders either exiled or "purged." This went on, of course, until the regime purged the Yevsektsiya members themselves.

The pattern repeated in the 1940s. As sordid as the Yeveksiya chapter was, I found myself more intrigued by the undoing of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a board of prominent Soviet Jewish artists and intellectuals established by Joseph Stalin in 1942 to drum up financial support from Jews overseas for the Soviet war effort. Two of the more prominent names on the JAC's roster of talent were Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and Ala's father Benjamin Zuskin, the theater's leading actor. After promoting these people during the war, Stalin decided these loyal Soviet Jews were no longer useful, and charged them all with treason. He had decided that this committee he himself created was in fact a secret Zionist cabal, designed to bring down the Soviet state. Mikhoels was murdered first, in a 1948 hit staged to look like a traffic accident. Nearly all the others — Zuskin and twelve more Jewish luminaries, including the novelist Dovid Bergelson, who had proclaimed Moscow as the center of the Yiddish future — were executed by firing squad on August 1952.

Just as the regime accused these Jewish artists and intellectuals of being too "nationalist" (read: Jewish), today's long hindsight makes it strangely tempting to read this history and accuse them of not being "nationalist" enough — that is, of being so foolishly committed to the Soviet regime that they were unable to see the writing on the wall. Many works on this subject have said as much. In Stalin's Secret Pogrom, the indispensable English translation of transcripts from the JAC "trial," Russia scholar Joshua Rubenstein concludes his lengthy introduction with the following:

As for the defendants at the trial, it is not clear what they believed about the system they each served. Their lives darkly embodied the tragedy of Soviet Jewry. A combination of revolutionary commitment and naive idealism had tied them to a system they could not renounce. Whatever doubts or misgivings they had, they kept to themselves, and served the Kremlin with the required enthusiasm. They were not dissidents. They were Jewish martyrs. They were also Soviet patriots. Stalin repaid their loyalty by destroying them.

This is completely true, and also completely unfair. The tragedy — even the term seems unjust, with its implied blaming of the victim — was not that these Soviet Jews sold their souls to the devil, though many clearly did. The tragedy was that integrity was never an option in the first place.

[...]

In Jerusalem that morning, Ala told me, in a sudden private moment of anger and candor, that the Soviet Union's treatment of the Jews was worse than Nazi Germany's. I tried to argue, but she shut me up. Obviously the Nazi atrocities against Jews were incomparable, a fact Ala later acknowledged in a calmer mood. But over four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation - and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever, paid for it.

"They never had a Nuremberg," Ala told me that day, with a quiet fury. "They never acknowledged the evil of what they did. The Nazis were open about what they were doing, but the Soviets pretended. They lured the Jews in, they baited them with support and recognition, they used them, they tricked them, and then they killed them. It was a trap. And no one knows about it, even now. People know about the Holocaust, but not this. Even here in Israel, people don't know. How did you know?"

— Excerpted from "Executed Jews," Chapter 4 of People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn

(All emphasis mine)

Read the full chapter here.

[beomiracles]

REBOUNDING WITH CHOI

── Yeonjun’s breath is heavy as he looks at you, his brows furrowed, still deep inside of you, he asks, “who’s Soobin?” in which you use a random stranger you met to get over your ex.

pairings: yeonjunxafab!reader warnings: vaginal penetration, marking, reader has troubled past (sort of if u squint).

Back pushed against the cold bathroom tiles, your legs wrapped around the delicate waist of the guy you'd met just a few hours prior. Your nails dug into his shoulders as he thrust into you, each movement filled with lust and desire. Letting your head fall back against the wall behind you a moan escapes your lips. 

Fingers tangle in his hair but the sensation is different, it's not the short ruffled hair you knew, no this guy, his hair is longer, creeping down his upper neck and its silky smooth. Frustrated you sigh as you tilt your head up to be met with your reflection in the bathroom mirror. 

Your eyes travel from the disheveled state you're in, lipstick smudged and mascara running down your cheeks, your once styled hair was nothing but a mess and a reflection of your emotions. Arms leaving the guy's hair, you run them along his shoulders, it's wrong, everything is wrong. Closing your eyes you try to envision what it would be like if it was him. 

And for a moment it works, a small moan leaves your lips as your arms pull him closer. Lost in desire the name slips out "ah, S-Soobin.." you whimper, before your eyes snap open, realizing what you'd just said. Yeonjun stops and looks at you, his breathing heavy and uneven, "what did you just say?". 

Fuck. What the fuck were you doing? 

Three hours earlier, 11.39 pm. 

Sweat makes your hair stick to your forehead as you push your way through the crowded dance floor. Blues and purples flood your vision as the scent of alcohol mixed with sweat and cheap perfumes fills your nose. You had since long lost track of your friends, and honestly, you didn't care. All you knew was that you needed more alcohol in your system, and you needed it now. 

Finally you manage to squeeze out of the crowd and with a heavy sigh you flop down on the nearest chair against the bar. Taking a few moments to gather yourself you pull your head up from the table, ready to order yourself a drink when suddenly the bartender places one in front of you. Frowning you look up at him. 

"Don't worry 'bout it, it's already been paid for," he says as he begins preparing the next customer’s order. 

Sitting up straight you hesitantly take the drink, "by who?" you ask as you swish its contents around suspiciously. The bartender gives you a small nod and your eyes follow his direction, a few seats down sat one of the most magnificent guys you'd ever laid your eyes on. And you really did mean it, he looked ethereal in the purple lights. 

His jet black hair went down his neck and the sides of his face, framing his sharp but delicate features. Sharp and pointed nose was turned in your direction and his dark eyes twinkled as he gave you a small smirk, showing off an annoyingly perfect set of white teeth. His slender fingers wrapped around his glass as he took another sip, finishing it and setting it down on the table in front of him he gets up, your eyes widen when you realise he's headed toward you. 

Even the way he held himself, his posture, made him ooze with confidence, he knew that he was desirable and was intent on using it to get his way. Physically he represented everything that your ex hadn't been, Soobin was taller than this man, but his posture had always contained a hint of uncertainty. Rough and calloused hands with short and ruffled hair, and his soft eyes, had all made you fall for him. 

You felt your heart ache at the thought of your ex, though that was quickly replaced by the soft flutter of the man in front of you. The man glanced at the untouched drink in your hand, “it won’t kill you, sweetheart”, he said and flashed you his perfect teeth in a smirk. You gave him a subtle nod as you downed the drink in one go, when you set your glass down he immediately called the bartender for seconds. 

“Yeonjun”, he extended his hand to you and you took it, bringing your hand to his lips, he gave it a soft kiss. You felt yourself stutter for words as you gave a half-assed introduction, “oh- uhm… y/n”, you cleared your throat. Yeonjun looked up at you, his lips grazing the back of your hand as he spoke, “pleasure to meet you”. 

And that’s how you had found yourself in the bathroom of said club, pressed up against the cold tiles, dressed hooked above your waist as Yeonjun had his way with you. You don’t usually do this, act so impulsively, but there was something about Yeonjun. He was charming, drawing you in with his smooth words. 

You found yourself in a sort of trance, letting him lead the topic of the conversation, letting him lead you toward the bathroom, letting his hands wander in places you had only let one other man do before. 

It felt good, euphoric even, all worries and thoughts were being washed away with each thrust into your dripping core. Until it wasn’t anymore, the trance was broken and you were suddenly aware again. Too aware. 

This wasn’t your ex, no matter how hard you tried to envision it he would never be. This wasn’t Soobin, what were you doing? Yeonjun’s breath is heavy as he looks at you, his brows furrowed, still deep inside of you, he asks, “who’s Soobin?”. 

You don’t need to glance in the mirror to confirm that the shade of your face is matching the white tiles. Biting your bottom lip nervously as you stall, scrambling to get your thoughts straight. 

“I…he’s”, you hold back a sob as your gaze drops to the floor. Yeonjun’s slender fingers find your chin as he tilts your head back up. “No good?”, his voice is soft. You nod as you draw in a short ragged breath. 

“Then forget about him”, he whispers and for the first time that night his lips meet yours. The kiss is slow, gentle and tender. You sigh against his lips as your shaking hands finds his hair. The slow rock of his hips leaves you craving more. 

A small tug at his hair has him immediately increasing his pace as his tongue finds yours. The soft moans leaving your lips are immediately swallowed by Yeonjun’s mouth on your own. 

Delicate hands travel down your body as Yeonjun gropes and squeezes at your chest, thighs and hips. His touch sends electric jolts through your body. The words, “gorgeous” and “so fuckin’ pretty, love”, leaves his lips as they travel down your neck. 

Your gaze once again falls on your reflection in the mirror, but this time you only feel euphoria. His fingers graze your clit and you let out a cry of pleasure. “Tell them who’s makin’ you feel this good, love”. Yeonjun’s abuse to your neck is bound to leave marks. 

His name falls off your tongue almost like a prayer, over and over again. “That’s fucking right”, his breath mixes with yours, lustfull eyes admiring you as if you were the only thing left on earth. Yeonjun reclaims your lips with his, “i’ll make you forget about him”, he groans as his thrusts grow harsher, “i’ll make you forget about everyone”. 

The euphoria continues to run through your veins every step you take with Yeonjun by your side. Your makeup is smudged, lips left abused by his and your hair a mere nest. Yet you feel like the most desirable woman in the room, the way Yeonjun’s gaze never leaves you, hands on your waist, his thumb rubs soothing circles to your hips.

You make your way toward the exit, Yeonjun pushes his way through the crowd as he guides you. But as the purple lights shift you freeze, your gaze meets a pair of familiar eyes and when they find yours you know that he’s also seen you. 

Gulping, you stare at your ex boyfriend, Soobin has a drink clutched in his hand, the shirt you had gotten him clung to his figure, halfway unbuttoned. His gaze travels from your disheveled state to Yeonjun whose arm is still securely wrapped around you, his eyes narrow. 

A quick glance between the two of you has Yeonjun understanding exactly who is standing between you and the exit of the club. His hand on your waist travels up your chest to your hair, gently pulling it to the side to reveal your neck, the trace of Yeonjun’s lips still evident. 

The sight has Soobin clutching his drink hard, knuckles turning white as he pieces together your relation to the man next to you. Yeonjun’s lips kiss the shell of your ear as he whispers, “I’ll make you forget him all over again if you want”.

→ want to get notified whenever a new dream is published? join my TAGLIST ★ all rights reserved ─ @beomiracles 2024

[sunderwight]

SV Game of Thrones AU where Shen Yuan transmigrates into a character who is basically Joffrey Lannister.

Luo Binghe is a mix of all the Stark kids, but mostly Sansa Stark and Jon Snow. Su Xiyan and Tianlang Jun had a Rhaegar-and-Lyanna thing going on, and Binghe's adopted mother was Su Xiyan's older cousin, who took him in after the fact and had him legitimized because she was the only remaining heir and had no other kids.

In the original story, King Shen Qingqiu (Jiu) develops a suspicion about Luo Binghe's heritage and, being just as paranoid about Heavenly Demons as Robert Baratheon was about Targaryens, invites the Luo family to come to court. Ostensibly so that Binghe can be playmates with the king's son and heir (Shen Yuan). Binghe's mom is horribly worried that they've been found out, but has not choice but to accept the invitation.

Of course, OG Prince Shen Yuan was a rotten little sadist who made it his life's mission to torment Luo Binghe, was eventually revealed to be the bastard spawn of Queen Qiu Haitang and her own brother, executed Binghe's mom for alleged treason, is party to the slaughter of the noble Liu family, and is eventually gruesomely assassinated at his own wedding feast.

Shen Yuan himself doesn't want to torment Binghe, or slaughter anyone, start any wars, or of course be gruesomely assassinated at his own wedding feast. He would much rather live his cushy life as a crown prince, figure out how to administrate a kingdom properly and also implement some better waste management practices to reduce the awful city stench (like, Shen Yuan was never terribly interested in plumbing in his first life but he is absolutely invested in the subject now.)

The problem is that the System absolutely demands that there be a war and certain other plot points in order to propel Luo Binghe into some sort of narrative destiny. Shen Yuan's not sure why because the last time he checked, the book series was stalled with Luo Binghe seemingly dead, and the television series had basically rendered everything he'd done pointless by the end, but regardless the System won't just let him peacefully evade all the drama and spare Luo Binghe all the suffering.

Boo.

Plus there's the concerning matter of the Northern Demon King awakening and mustering armies to conquer the south (and getting derailed by the beleaguered quartermaster of the Nightswatch, who keeps wondering when the fuck the actual protagonist is going to show up to handle the increasingly concerning plot points, because Binghe should have been exiled by now...?), Zhuzhi Lang resurrecting his uncle (as a dragon?!) across the Narrow Sea, and the Qiu family plotting the murder of the king and a coup to seize power...

(Also featuring: Yue Qingyuan as the parts of Jaime Lannister's character not currently owned by Qiu Jianluo, the Huan Hua Palace Master as a Littlefinger proxy, Meng Mo as Bloodraven, and many more!)

[coolshadowtwins]

SVSSS System Reveal Fic round up!

If you know one that hasn’t been recc’ed, then please put it in the comments/tags! I’ll add it to the post!

A Transmigrator and a Time Traveler Walk into the Bamboo House by VeryCharismaticDragon

Over a year after Shen Qingqiu's death, Luo Binghe consults his servant's servant, concurrently his disgraced martial uncle, for a way to bring the love of his life back. Shang Qinghua sends him in the direction of a certain time-traveling artifact, which supposedly brings one to the day they first met their soulmate.

Odd, though, that the artifact ends up missing the destination by just a few years…

A story in which post-Abyss Luo Binghe relives his disciple days, while juggling his secrets, traumas, and some unexpected revelations about the man he loves on top of that.

What is Seen by CaveteDracones

…is not [always] the real truth.

Truth-compelling artifacts in the hands of an enemy to one side, SYSTEM-mandated silence on the other, and Shen Qingqiu caught between the two. Is it too late to go back to the Water Prison? (NOTE: This one was recommended three times, and I have personally reread it multiple times. It’s one of my favorites and I really do want to read more fics in a similar vein lol)

open my lungs to let you in by ghostybreads

Shen Qingqiu had a secret. So, naturally, it was only a matter of time before he was hit by a truth serum wife plot.

//

“How are you?”

“Horny. Kind of want Binghe to rail me, I guess. But it’s manageable.”

Liu Qingge’s hand on his forehead froze, and he was close enough that Shen Qingqiu could hear his breathing stop. He stared back expressionlessly, the mortification distantly crawling up the back of his neck. Honest One-Horned–

The frustrated scream that he usually vented in his head, came out straight from mouth.

“aaAAAAAHHHH GODDAMNIT AIRPLANE–”

Futility in Practice by TGP

When Luo Binghe is fourteen years old, his shizun suffers a terrible qi deviation and fever that completely changes who he is.

and judgment is just like a cup that we share by Kieron_ODuibhir

The blob finished rotating into place in a way that wasn’t quite compatible with geometry as Shen Qingqiu understood it, and cleared a throat it didn’t seem to have.

“Greetings,” it said, somehow clearly addressing him in particular more than the room as a whole despite its total lack of features other than blueness and translucency. “I’m here on behalf of the Hyper-Celestial Peace and Order Enforcement Bureau. Crime scene secure, proceeding to interviews. Beginning with Subject One: You are Shen Qingqiu, formerly Shen Yuan, also known as Peerless Cucumber?”

First, do no harm by Terias

Shen Qingqiu has been acting especially erratic since awakening from his three day coma after a severe qi deviation.

Mu Qingfang investigates and discovers a great many things about his new shixiong. (NOTE: This one has Shen Yuan and Shen Jiu as the same soul, technically, but it still works I think!)

Show The Screenshots by A_Non_ymousWriter

When a rogue foreign System sends out a subtle virus, some outsiders are shown chat messages between a certain two transmigrators and their Systems.

AirplaneBro: nah dude shen jiu would never lay a hand on his female disciples like that, hes gay

Liu Qingge tripped on thin air while Mu Qingfang choked on his tea as Shang Qinghua (their god? creator??) casually shattered their view of their original Shen Qingiu. The fake Shen Qingqiu at least, was sharing their shock.

CucumberBro: EXCUSE ME WHAT??

CucumberBro: The fuck he is?!?! He literally GOES TO BROTHELS! LIU QINGGE FOUND HIM IN BED WITH A WOMAN THAT ONE TIME?

AirplaneBro: aight bro buckle the fuck up cuz imma take u on a joyride all about shen jiu >:)

—————-

Binghes#1Fan: I don't want to send Binghe into the Abyss...

System 2: User must comply, if User cannot do the task User will be punished and the account will be terminated.

Mobeis #1Fan: sorry bro unless ur okay w being ded af u gotta push binghe into the abyss

Ning Yingying's fists clenched. Okay, so trying to get Yuan-ge and A-Luo together would be harder than she thought.

[sexhaver]

definitely one of the most difficult moments of my professional career was when i was doing tech support for [REDACTED]'s automated biomed research lab and like. hang on lemme greentext this

>tell them i can fix this issue in half an hour with a remote support session (aka Teamviewer)

>"you want to... control our computers???? over the internet????? like some kind of HACKER???????"

>their IT submits my request to upper management and after two weeks they reluctantly allow me to get remote access to their systems

>by logging into a virtual machine using a 20-digit password and then using a specific program inside of that virtual machine

>while sharing my screen with someone from their IT team the entire time

>finally get remote access to the PC with the issue

>go to open log files to start troubleshooting

>ERROR: User does not have read permissions.

>what the fuck

>ask their IT guy why it's saying that

>"...because we don't want you looking at our stuff, duh?"

>take deep breath before calmly explaining that i need to open files in order to fix their problem

>IT guy submits my request to upper management

>after another week i go through the whole process again but can actually open the log file this time

>cool, it's exactly the issue i thought it was and i know exactly how to solve it

>open the relevant settings file, change a single number, hit Save

>ERROR: User does not have write permissions.

>what the FUCK

>ask IT guy how i'm supposed to fix their system if i can't change literally anything on it

>takes 20 minutes of arguing to get him to admit that maybe i need write access

>he submits the request to upper management

>a week goes by

>upper management denies it

>says i can just verbally tell the IT guy on the call what to type and he'll do it for me

>deep breaths. deep breaths.

>start third remote session

>go to open the relevant .log file in notepad, which isn't the default program it opens with for some reason

>they fucking disabled right clicking

>[REDACTED] has a $118 billion market cap btw

>manage to walk the IT guy through using the command line (which he had never seen before and was scared of) to edit the relevant file

>three weeks go by

>new support ticket in my inbox

>"why didn't your fix fix this completely unrelated issue?"

>they still won't give me write access

>VP of [REDACTED] yells at me in our weekly meeting for taking so long to fix a third unrelated issue they never submitted a ticket for and is also not actually an "issue" but an intended feature of our software that they don't like

>i went to college for this

[inventorymanagementsystem]

Managing orders seamlessly is crucial for any business aiming for operational excellence. An Order Management System (OMS) is designed to enhance operational efficiency and customer satisfaction by integrating and automating various tasks.

This software ensures businesses can meet customer demands promptly and efficiently, thereby reaping the features and benefits of order management software.

[starlightwritcr]

I can fix him, literally. (Android au!Sukuna)

(@poe-daydreams this is for you <3)

warning/s: Minors DNI, Smut, exhibitionism but not really? idk how to describe it, light degradation, use of "whore", Sukuna's two dicks

Imagine android!Sukuna used to be a popular fighter in an underground fighting ring. Key word: used to be. He went up against Jujutsu Technology's newest Gojo model, S4T0RU (or Satoru, as most fans call him), but suffered a humiliating defeat at his hands. This caused heavy damages on Sukuna which led to his owner throwing him out to the trash. After all, why keep the old model around when the latest model was far superior?

But you didn't believe in such. You were surprised to find a Sukuna model in the trash at the back of a dingy building. Who in their right mind would throw away a million dollar android in this economy?! You took the android in, seeing as how the previous clearly didn't want him.

It was a challenge to repair the Sukuna model but as someone who used to work for Jujutsu Technology, you were able to do it. His mind chip seemed to be working fine. It was just the external parts that suffered heavy damage, which should be easy enough to replace. All it took was ordering spare parts online and giving it a new coat of paint to match his original model's tattoos to make him look good as new!

When android!Sukuna's systems started operating again, he woke up from sleep mode and saw you. You explained that you fixed him up after finding him in the trash. There were still some tests to run, just to see if there would be any possible bug fixes needed.

In true Sukuna fashion, he wasn't very cooperative at first. This wasn't your first rodeo though and managed to convince him to do it so that it could be over with. It didn't come as a surprise to you that a fighter android would be aggressive. Plus, the Sukuna line was designed with that personality to elicit reactions from audiences when he trash talked his opponents. It was pretty much just how he was designed.

While running the tests on Sukuna, you decided to check his memory file to see what happened before he was thrown out. You saw how badly he got beaten by the S4T0RU model.

Perhaps it was a strange thing to do, but you empathised with the android. Getting abandoned and replaced would be painful for any regular human after all. Even if Sukuna was an android, it wasn't uncommon for androids to develop a capacity for human emotions. This tended to be the case for fast-learning androids.

So, you kept him around. Sukuna wasn't too pleased about it but it wasn't like he had anywhere else to go. He was rough and brash at first, blowing a hole into your finances with how much fuel he needed to consume. He calls you soft for treating him like he's human.

But despite the difficulties, despite the insults, you couldn't bring yourself to abandon him. You'd be no better than the person that replaced him so easily. You taught him how to navigate human life, dealing with human emotions, all the essentials needed. Soon enough, you noticed a change in his behaviors. Sukuna hovered around you, never leaving your side. It was almost like he was attached to your hip.

In a way, Sukuna did what he was created to do. He became a bodyguard of sorts, protecting you from creepy dudes whenever you went out. His trash talking feature especially came in handy during gossip sessions where you just had to vent about a rude coworker.

android!Sukuna found a new purpose in you. It was odd going from being a fighter android basking in cheers from the audience to being a companion android protecting his owner like a guard dog. But perhaps this life was more meaningful than his previous one. He'll never admit that though. It's only through his actions that you understand how he felt.

Feeling your touch on his synthetic skin felt even more exhilarating than all the cheers from the audience he's received in his fighting career. Sukuna cursed at himself, realising that he's become whipped for you. He was lucky that it was you, the person who's never abandoned him.

Sometimes android!Sukuna can be pretty possessive. You worked with repairing other androids so deep down, there was a fear that you'd find another android you liked more and replaced him with it. Even if he knew you wouldn't, there was a lingering fear that was deeply rooted ever since he was abandoned.

The height of Sukuna's possessiveness came to its peak when you brought home a sex android from the S4T0RU line. Its previous owners had a really good time with it and accidentally damaged it. You were baffled by this, seeing as how Jujutsu Technology usually equipped its Gojo models with tough materials. They must've went really wild with it.

While repairing it, Sukuna pulled you close. He glared at the S4T0RU model that was in sleep mode. You gasped as his fingers slipped into your clothes, going up your thighs.

Your cries of pleasure echoed against the walls as Sukuna fucked you in front of the android. His hands held you tightly, keeping you in place while he drove his synthetic cocks into you.

"When did you get two dicks?!" "Shut up and take them, whore."

You felt your brain turning to mush while he rearranged your insides with his thick cocks. Sukuna smirked in satisfaction when he knew your attention was completely on him and not that android on your work desk.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The paradox of choice screens

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

It's official: the DOJ has won its case, and Google is a convicted monopolist. Over the next six months, we're gonna move into the "remedy" phase, where we figure out what the court is going to order Google to do to address its illegal monopoly power:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

That's just the beginning, of course. Even if the court orders some big, muscular remedies, we can expect Google to appeal (they've already said they would) and that could drag out the case for years. But that can be a feature, not a bug: a years-long appeal will see Google on its very best behavior, with massive, attendant culture changes inside the company. A Google that's fighting for its life in the appeals court isn't going to be the kind of company that promotes a guy whose strategy for increasing revenue is to make Google Search deliberately worse, so that you will have to do more searches (and see more ads) to get the info you're seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

It's hard to overstate how much good stuff can emerge from a company that's mired itself in antitrust hell with extended appeals. In 1982, IBM wriggled off the antitrust hook after a 12-year fight that completely transformed the company's approach to business. After more than a decade of being micromanaged by lawyers who wanted to be sure that the company didn't screw up its appeal and anger antitrust enforcers, IBM's executives were totally transformed. When the company made its first PC, it decided to use commodity components (meaning anyone could build a similar PC by buying the same parts), and to buy its OS from an outside vendor called Micros-Soft (meaning competing PCs could use the same OS), and it turned a blind eye to the company that cloned the PC ROM, enabling companies like Dell, Compaq and Gateway to enter the market with "PC clones" that cost less and did more than the official IBM PC:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/ibm-pc-compatible-how-adversarial-interoperability-saved-pcs-monopolization

The big question, of course, is whether the court will order Google to break up, say, by selling off Android, its ad-tech stack, and Chrome. That's a question I'll address on another day. For today, I want to think about how to de-monopolize browsers, the key portal to the internet. The world has two extremely dominant browsers, Safari and Chrome, and each of them are owned by an operating system vendor that pre-installs their own browser on their devices and pre-selects them as the default.

Defaults matter. That's a huge part of Judge Mehta's finding in the Google case, where the court saw evidence from Google's own internal research suggesting that people rarely change defaults, meaning that whatever the gadget does out of the box it will likely do forever. This puts a lie to Google's longstanding defense of its monopoly power: "choice is just a click away." Sure, it's just a click away – a click, you're pretty sure no one is ever going to make.

This means that any remedy to Google's browser dominance is going to involve a lot of wrangling about defaults. That's not a new wrangle, either. For many years, regulators and tech companies have tinkered with "choice screens" that were nominally designed to encourage users to try out different browsers and brake the inertia of the big two browsers that came bundled with OSes.

These choice screens have a mixed record. Google's 2019 Android setup choice screen for the European Mobile Application Distribution Agreement somehow managed to result in the vast majority of users sticking with Chrome. Microsoft had a similar experience in 2010 with BrowserChoice.eu, its response to the EU's 2000s-era antitrust action:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

Does this mean that choice screens don't work? Maybe. The idea of choice screens comes to us from the "choice architecture" world of "nudging," a technocratic pseudoscience that grew to prominence by offering the promise that regulators could make big changes without having to do any real regulating:

https://verfassungsblog.de/nudging-after-the-replication-crisis/

Nudge research is mired in the "replication crisis" (where foundational research findings turn out to be nonreplicable, due to bad research methodology, sloppy analysis, etc) and nudge researchers keep getting caught committing academic fraud:

https://www.ft.com/content/846cc7a5-12ee-4a44-830e-11ad00f224f9

When the first nudgers were caught committing fraud, more than a decade ago, they were assumed to be outliers in an otherwise honest and exciting field:

https://www.npr.org/2016/10/01/496093672/power-poses-co-author-i-do-not-believe-the-effects-are-real

Today, it's hard to find much to salvage from the field. To the extent the field is taken seriously today, it's often due to its critics repeating the claims of its boosters, a process Lee Vinsel calls "criti-hype":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

For example, the term "dark patterns" lumps together really sneaky tactics with blunt acts of fraud. When you click an "opt out of cookies" button and get a screen that says "Success!" but which has a tiny little "confirm" button on it that you have to click to actually opt out, that's not a "dark pattern," it's just a scam:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/27/beware-of-the-leopard/#relentless

By ascribing widespread negative effects to subtle psychological manipulation ("dark patterns") rather than obvious and blatant fraud, we inadvertently elevate "nudging" to a real science, rather than a cult led by scammy fake scientists.

All this raises some empirical questions about choice screens: do they work (in the sense of getting people to break away from defaults), and if so, what's the best way to make them work?

This is an area with a pretty good literature, as it turns out, thanks in part due to some natural experiments, like when Russia forced Google to offer choice screens for Android in 2017, but didn't let Google design that screen. The Russian policy produced a significant switch away from Google's own apps to Russian versions, primarily made by Yandex:

https://cepr.org/publications/dp17779

In 2023, Mozilla Research published a detailed study in which 12,000 people from Germany, Spain and Poland set up simulated mobile and desktop devices with different kinds of choice screens, a project spurred on by the EU's Digital Markets Act, which is going to mandate choice screens starting this year:

https://research.mozilla.org/browser-competition/choicescreen/

I'm spending this week reviewing choice screen literature, and I've just read the Mozilla paper, which I found very interesting, albeit limited. The biggest limitation is that the researchers are getting users to simulate setting up a new device and then asking them how satisfied they are with the experience. That's certainly a question worth researching, but a far more important question is "How do users feel about the setup choices they made later, after living with them on the devices they use every day?" Unfortunately, that's a much more expensive and difficult question to answer, and beyond the scope of this paper.

With that limitation in mind, I'm going to break down the paper's findings here and draw some conclusions about what we should be looking for in any kind of choice screen remedy that comes out of the DOJ antitrust victory over Google.

The first thing note is that people report liking choice screens. When users get to choose their browsers, they expect to be happy with that choice; by contrast, users are skeptical that they'll like the default browser the vendor chose for them. Users don't consider choice screens to be burdensome, and adding a choice screen doesn't appreciably increase setup time.

There are some nuances to this. Users like choice screens during device setup but they don't like choice screens that pop up the first time they use a browser. That makes total sense: "choosing a browser" is colorably part of the "setting up your gadget" task. By contrast, the first time you open a browser on a new device, it's probably to get something else done (e.g. look up how to install a piece of software you used on your old device) and being interrupted with a choice screen at that moment is an unwelcome interruption. This is the psychology behind those obnoxious cookie-consent pop-ups that website bombard you with when you first visit them: you've clicked to that website because you need something it has, and being stuck with a privacy opt-out screen at that moment is predictably frustrating (which is why companies do it, and also why the DMA is going to punish companies that do).

The researchers experimented with different kinds of choice screens, varying the number of browsers on offer and the amount of information given on each. Again, users report that they prefer more choices and more information, and indeed, more choice and more info is correlated with choosing indie, non-default browsers, but this effect size is small (<10%), and no matter what kind of choice screen users get, most of them come away from the experience without absorbing any knowledge about indie browsers.

The order in which browsers are presented has a much larger effect than how many browsers or how much detail is present. People say they want lots of choices, but they usually choose one of the first four options. That said, users who get choice screens say it changes which browser they'd choose as a default.

Some of these contradictions appear to stem from users' fuzziness on what "default browser" means. For an OS vendor, "default browser" is the browser that pops up when you click a link in an email or social media. For most users, "default browser" means "the browser pinned to my home screen."

Where does all this leave us? I think it cashes out to this: choice screens will probably make a appreciable, but not massive, difference in browser dominance. They're cheap to implement, have no major downsides, and are easy to monitor. Choice screens might be needed to address Chrome's dominance even if the court orders Google to break off Chrome and stand it up as a separate business (we don't want any browser monopolies, even if they're not owned by a search monopolist!). So yeah, we should probably make a lot of noise to the effect that the court should order a choice screen, as part of a remedy.

That choice screen should be presented during device setup, with the choices presented in random order – with this caveat: Chrome should never appear in the top four choices.

All of that would help address the browser duopoly, even if it doesn't solve it. I would love to see more market-share for Firefox, which is the browser I've used every day for more than a decade, on my laptop and my phone. Of course, Mozilla has a role to play here. The company says it's going to refocus on browser quality, at the expense of the various side-hustles it's tried, which have ranged from uninteresting to catastrophically flawed:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91167564/mozilla-wants-you-to-love-firefox-again

For example, there was the tool to automatically remove your information from scummy data brokers, that they outsourced to a scummy data-broker:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/22/24109116/mozilla-ends-onerep-data-removal-partnership

And there's the "Privacy Preserving Attribution" tracking system that helps advertisers target you with surveillance advertising (in a way that's less invasive than existing techniques). Mozilla rolled this into Firefox on an opt out basis, and made opting out absurdly complicated, suggesting that it knew that it was imposing something on its users that they wouldn't freely choose:

https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/

They've been committing these kinds of unforced errors for more than a decade, seeking some kind of balance between monopolistic web companies and its users' desire to have a browser that protects them from invasive and unfair practices:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/14/firefox-closed-source-drm-video-browser-cory-doctorow

These compromises represent the fallacy that Mozilla's future depends on keeping bullying entertainment companies and Big Tech happy, so it can go on serving its users. At the same time, these compromises have alienated Mozilla's core users, the technical people who were its fiercest evangelists. Those core users are the authority on technical questions for the normies in their life, and they know exactly how cursed it is for Moz to be making these awful compromises.

Moz has hemorrhaged users over the past decade, meaning they have even less leverage over the corporations demanding that they make more compromises. This sets up a doom loop: make a bad compromise, lose users, become more vulnerable to demands for even worse compromises. "This capitulation puts us in a great position to make a stand in some hypothetical future where we don't instantly capitulate again" is a pretty unconvincing proposition.

After the past decade's heartbreaks, seeing Moz under new leadership makes me cautiously hopeful. Like I say, I am dependent on Firefox and want an independent, principled browser vendor that sees their role as producing a "user agent" that is faithful to its users' interests above all else:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Of course, Moz depends on Google's payment for default search placement for 90% of its revenue. If Google can't pay for this in the future, the org is going to have to find another source of revenue. Perhaps that will be the EU, or foundations, or users. In any of these cases, the org will find it much easier to raise funds if it is standing up for its users – not compromising on their interests.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/12/defaults-matter/#make-up-your-mind-already

Image: ICMA Photos (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/icma/3635981474/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[cretaceous-if]

“WELCOME TO CRETACEOUS ISLAND.”

DEMO: TBA

NOTE: While I am training as a palaeontologist, I do not claim to be an expert. Therefore, although I will be conducting research into portraying more accurate dinosaurs, there will be possibly be discrepancies or inaccuracies either due to my own research or the lack of (accurate) data available.

-> SYNOPSIS <-

Cretaceous Island is based on the Jurassic Park/World franchise. You will step into the role of the head T-Rex keeper.

You’ve been working as a T-Rex keeper for over ten years now and every day is as interesting as the last.

Unfortunately, not even looking after some of the deadliest creatures in the world was enough to prepare you for the carnage that was about to unfold.

When the system goes down and the dinosaurs escape with evacuation impossible, it’s up to you and a ragtag team to restore order and protect both man and dinosaur.

-> ROMANTIC OPTIONS <-

GRAY/GRACE COLLINS [M/F] - Your big boss is cool, calm, and ruthless. It is well known that they’re not someone to cross, however, they seem have a soft spot for you which some might consider strange considering they also happen to be your ex-fiancé(e). [Poly with Nikolaj available].

LEE MIN-SUN [M/F/NB] - As Operations Manager of the Island, Lee is no-nonsense, grumpy, and has no real time for the corporate side of things that xe’s forced to deal with, but xe has a heart of gold under all the bluster and would do anything to protect those that xe cares for. [Poly with Aija available].

NIKOLAJ OLESEN [M] - He’s your best friend and the embodiment of the term ‘golden retriever energy’. He’s also the head raptor keeper. You’re not entirely sure how those two things go together, but it seems that you’re about to find out. [Poly with Gray/Grace available].

CIERRA DE LA ROSA [F] - A tourist that is vacationing on the island for the third time. You’ve met her a handful of times during those visits, but you haven’t found out much about her beyond her name and the fact that she’s one of the most beautiful women you’ve ever seen.

AIJA MISHRA [NB] - Highly intelligent and more at home among computers than people, Aija is a techie who works in the control room. They’re one of the friendliest and sassiest people you’ve ever met, but, in a crisis, there’s no one you’d rather have on your side. [Poly with Lee available].

-> FEATURES <-

Customise your mc (gender, pronouns, appearance, personality, etc).

Five romance options to fall in love with and two poly options.

Story-driven IF coded using Twine.

Interact with staff, guests, and most importantly, dinosaurs as you look after the T-Rexes and attempt to deal with the biggest crisis the park has ever dealt with and try not to get eaten in the process.

Cuddle with some baby dinosaurs.

-> STATS <-

Personality stats are pretty similar to most other IFs. They will include kind/grumpy, bold/shy, reckless/cautious, genuine/sarcastic, reserved/energetic, and friendly/stern. If you have any suggestions, feel free to lmk.

Skill stats will include intelligence, charisma, marksmanship, agility, and science and technology,

-> WARNINGS <-

This is an 18+ wip due to blood and gore, character and animal deaths, explicit sex (optional), explicit language, medical procedures, violence and injury, and potentially body horror.

[blackleatherjacketz]

Shadow and Sin: Chapter 7

Elijah Mikaelson x Female Reader

Summary: Having just recently moved to New Orleans, you get intimately acquainted with both Mikaelson brothers, but don't find out who they truly are until it's too late.

This Chapter: Elijah comes to your rescue after you and your brother get attacked.

Warnings: Blood and Gore, Violence, Compulsion, Brushes With Death, Blood Drinking, Kissing, Loving Touches, More Phantom of the Opera References

Word Count: 2.1k+

Read the rest of the story HERE

“Drink.” Elijah orders you, cradling the back of your head as he presses his open wrist against your lips. The hot viscous fluid pours around your mouth as your weakened body slumps against the alleyway, barely able to register what he’s saying, let alone what he’s trying to do.

You manage to squint up at him in response, feeling your heart beating so fast that it nearly rattles your ribcage.

“Please drink, little Lotte, it’ll heal you.” His words are laced with an unmistakable urgency as his breath becomes more erratic, his concern for you more evident than ever. He tilts your head forward again and practically forces your mouth to open against his skin, the salty metallic liquid flooding your taste buds until you have no other choice but to swallow it. “That’s it, take a little bit more.”

Allowing it to fill your mouth completely, you begrudgingly down another bitter gulp as the rest of it spills down onto your chin and chest, mixing with the coagulated blood from the bite on your neck. His morbid cure oozes down your esophagus and settles into the pit of your stomach, allowing his features to slowly come more into focus; his eyes wet with sorrow as he waits for the sanguine solution to work its magic on you. Once a pillar of self control, now a nervous wreck riddled with regret as he strokes your hair, his jaw clenching in anticipation.

The blood he gave you suddenly steadies the deafening sound of your rapid heart rate, the panic quaking its way through your nervous system eventually following suit. It quiets the alarm bells in your head, gradually easing the sharp yet throbbing pain in your neck and the crippling fear that widens your eyes.

Holy shit, he was right. It healed you, somehow. HE healed you.

“Look at me.” He whispers, taking his wrist away before grabbing onto your chin, inspecting your wound as it miraculously seals itself up. “I need to get you off the street, somewhere safe.”

“Is Austin okay?” You try to turn your head to look over at your brother, but Elijah’s grip on your face forces you to keep your eyes only on him.

“I wouldn’t worry about him. Your brother’s going to be just fine, trust me.” He stares into your eyes, stroking your chin with his thumb as he instills that truth into your psyche. “Now let’s get you home.”

“Alright, but...” You keep staring at him, still too shocked to ask him any more specific questions that race through your mind as your body recovers from the attack. “Shouldn’t you be taking me to the hospital? Or the police station? Somewhere, anywhere else?”

He swallows hard and picks you up off the ground without a word, tucking his elbow beneath your knees to carry you like a bride across the threshold. The hot Louisiana air rushes past you in a soothing breeze as you cling to his neck and shoulders, taking in that dark scent of his as it mixes in with the blood splattered across his suit. He continues to carry you through the quarter at lightning speed, blurring past some of your favorite spots until you practically float up the stairs and reach your apartment’s doorstep much quicker than you thought humanly possible.

Only you know now that he’s not human, no matter what he may look like on the outside.

“There’s no need for a hospital.” He turns his head toward you, his lips grazing over your cheek as he lowers your feet onto the ground. “My blood should have healed you completely.”

“Your blood,” you repeat back to him, not stepping away from his embrace as you try to accept the gruesome truth that stains his pristine white shirt a deep burgundy. “Thank you for saving me, but umm…” You look down at his ruined sleeve. “What about you? Your wrist, it was bleeding, wasn’t it? At least, I could have sworn it was.”

“I’ll be fine,” he smiles, almost amused by your concern for his well being. “I promise. One of the perks of being a vampire is that I heal almost instantly, which is why my blood could heal you. Now, let’s get you inside.”

“Right,” you nod, hoping that if you repeat what he said to you in your head a thousand times or so, it might make it easier for you to accept.

You turn and pull your keychain out of your pocket, fumbling through them until you finally find your house key, noticing that your hands and arms are still caked in blood. Trying to compartmentalize the issue, you focus solely on sliding the key into the slot, shakily turning the handle before opening the door to your home away from the monsters that had attacked you. Still holding onto his hand, you attempt to bring him inside until you feel him forcefully tug backward, stopping as if there were some sort of invisible barrier between him and your doorway.

“You have to invite me in.” He states solemnly, as if it’s some piece of common knowledge that you just haven’t been privy to until now.

Right. Blood, healing, vampires, invitations. This is all becoming a little too real, no matter how excited your inner thirteen year-old self is right now.

“Please come in, Elijah,” you say out loud.

And just like that, the invisible barrier between you disappears as he walks into your apartment, still holding onto your hand.

--------------

“So who were those guys, anyways? Part of some rival vampire gang?” You run a washcloth under the kitchen sink as you try to collect yourself, to make sense of everything that’s happened tonight as the water slowly begins to heat up. You take your time wringing it out as you wait for him to answer until you suddenly feel him behind you, his chest gently pressing against your shoulder blades as he whispers into your hair.

“Something like that, but they won’t ever harm you again.” His bloody hands graze over your arms, encasing your hands as the water falls down your knuckles, saturating the dried blood before he smears it away, sending a wave of warmth up your spine. “Here, allow me.”

His stern tone wavers a little as he takes the cloth from you, his hands nearly dwarfing yours as he begins to rub your skin in slow circular motions until it’s no longer stained that shade of muddy red. You can’t be sure whose blood covers more of the cloth now as he squeezes it out before starting again on your other arm, both of you watching it disappear down the drain.

Once your arms are clean, he takes your hand and turns you around toward him as if the two of you were back on the dance floor of that bar, watching you with a desire that has a whole new meaning to it now that you know the truth about what he is. His eyes seem to darken, but don’t burn that infernal red like the man who’d bitten you earlier tonight, instead only warming you from the inside out as they quietly take in the sight of your face and neck.

Oh no, your neck!

“Are you okay with this? You’re not tempted to… bite me, or anything, are you?” You refuse to relinquish the washcloth he tries to tug away from you as your thoughts of caution come a little too late. You realize now that you’ve let your romantic ease with him override your new knowledge of his potential for violence, putting you both in a compromising position as the space between you closes.

“If I wanted to drink from you, I would have done so already.” He states in that firm, cold tone that you secretly love as he pulls the cloth from your fingers. “But I’ve already fed tonight, and my interest in you lies elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere?” You smile, unable to stop the twinkle in your eye as his words make you feel a little bit safer. You assume that he wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to save your life if he wanted to take it the very second you invited him in, but you had to ask, just to be sure.

“To answer your question, those men are part of the underbelly of New Orleans, part of a world that the city likes to cover up with extravagant tourism and ghost tours.” He explains, wiping the bulk of the clotted blood off your neck as his other hand keeps your shoulder steady. “For centuries now, it’s been the reason that so many souls flock to the quarter, to experience the magic and danger of it, all while blaming it on the spirits inside the bottles that they drink.” He wets the cloth again, wringing it out one-handed before bringing it up to your chin, a small smirk crossing his lips at the image of your mouth drenched in blood. His blood. “But then people like you often get caught in the crosshairs, and that’s not what I ever wanted for you.”

“What you ‘wanted for me’?” Your brows knit together as you try to make sense of it all, wanting a bit more clarity than his stoic generalizations are giving you. Was he involved with Klaus, or this… Marcel Gerard that the other man had mentioned before? Or was he simply just in the right place at the right time for him to save you?

Elijah purses his lips together and washes behind your ear, the warmth of the washcloth soothing your previously broken skin as he holds you close, making you forget the rest of your prying questions for the moment. You close your eyes and let him clean you, getting lost in the pleasant feeling of the fabric washing away the horrors of the night and the sensation of his hands on your body.

You can’t help but think back to the other night when you were covered in paint with Klaus in his studio, and now you’re here covered in blood with Elijah. Both of these men are caught up in something much more maudlin than you can even begin to grasp. You get the feeling that choosing either of them would put you in a highly dangerous position, but Elijah had just saved you, no questions asked, while Klaus seemed intent on corrupting you to the core. The images of the Emperor and the King of Swords come up in the forefront of your mind before you open your eyes to take in his handsome features by the light of the moon shining in through your kitchen window.

“It was naïve of me to think that I could have you and not get you caught up in my mess.” His hand switches from squeezing your shoulder to cupping your cheek, having wiped all of the blood off of your skin. “I warned you that the phantom kills despite Christine, not just for her. What I forgot to do was remind myself of that fact. I wanted to be your Raoul, Little Lotte, but…”

“But what? You can’t see me anymore just because you’re a vampire?” Goddamnit, you’d just decided to stop seeing Klaus, and now Elijah’s backing out, too? You can barely wrap your head around dealing with the loss of one, let alone both of them at the same time. “I don’t want Raoul, Elijah, it’s never been that for me, okay? I want Erik, The Phantom, I want you!”

A hint of a smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. “You know not what you ask, but if that’s true I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of them, make sure that you’re protected. You have my word.”

“Take care of who, exactly?” You raise your eyebrows at him, hating not knowing the whole story, especially when it’s putting your life at risk. You understand that it takes time to open up to people about certain details of your life, but you’re way past all that now.

Elijah sighs and weaves his fingers into your hair, pulling on it just hard enough to make you look at him again. “Those men that attacked you were random criminals looking for a bite to eat, nothing more. They weren’t connected to any other vampire. In fact, you don’t even remember what they said to you or your brother. All that you can remember is that you were bitten, and that I saved you.”

“Right, you saved me.” You repeat back to him numbly, a docile smile spreading across your face.

“You won’t go out into the quarter after midnight again unless I’m with you, is that understood?” That ice cold timbre returns, quickly chilling you to the bone as he delivers his last hypnotic order of the night.

“I understand.” You nod into a kiss on your forehead as he drops the blood-soaked washcloth into the sink, wrapping his arms around you in a tight yet affectionate embrace.

“Good, now let’s get you out of these clothes.”

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Tags: @hcqwxrtss123 @hayleym1234 @derangedangel