#proxy server list

[2af-afterdark]

Who does Solomon/MC actually have pacts with?

Original posting date: June 1, 2024

Most recent edit: October 20, 2024

I just realized something. Excuse my lack of screenshots in places but... I am not in the mood to go searching for everything at the moment. You're just going to have to trust me in some places.

Based on the order of events being established in the events, it's getting really questionable which devils Solomon made pacts with (and therefore which ones MC has to break and reforge).

Facts we know/Timeline:

Tartaros is established as a kingdom (it is confirmed to be the oldest of the seven kingdoms). How long ago this occured is unknown.

Leviathan escapes from Heaven.

Metatron starts a coup, kills Papa!Mammon, and imprisons Child!Mammon. Serveral years later, Mammon is an adult and breaks free to reclaim his kingdom. At this time, he also manages to imprison Metatron.

Satan tries to establish Gehenna. During this time, he managed to find Sitri and sent him off to train in Hades (meaning Hades must already be an established kingdom).

Solomon met Satan and hijinks ensued.

While in Hell, Solomon made pacts with the noble devils and kings. He also become friends with God.

God played favorites and gave Solomon (and his descendants by proxy) the right to touch or have anything.

Solomon disappeared at some point, leaving all of his pacts in tact and limiting the devils' powers.

God disappeared shortly after Solomon did

Lilith also disappeared around this time, meaning no devils could have been born since.

The (at the time) 5 kings of Hell got sucked into another space due to Metatron's machinations, seemingly leaving much of Hell defenseless. At this time, this event has not been fully explained and where it fits on the timeline is unknown other than it occurred before Lucifer's fall.

After God disappeared, Lucifer ripped out his own wings and fell to Hell where he met the dragon Gamigin.

Two Hell years after Lucifer ripped out his wings, he would officially fall and become a devil, taking his place as king of Paradise Lost.

Some nebulous amount of time after that, Belphegor wakes up in Niflheim and starts his campaign to become king.

Three years and one terrifying, world-destroying transformation later, Belphegor is officially the king of Niflheim.

Some time after that, MC is targeted by Gabriel and is saved by Satan. Thus begins their journey through Hell.

Given that timeline, there are some devils with questionable pacts status. I have broken this list into four sections: those whose pacts have been confirmed either through MC reforging them or the in-game dialogue referencing them, those who have not been confirmed by the game but most likely have a pact due to knowing Solomon when he was in Hell, those who (due to the timeline or other reasons) may or may not have made a pact with Solomon, and those who literally cannot have made a pact with Solomon.

Confirmed: Satan, Sitri, Leraye, Paimon, Zagan, Belial, Mammon, Bimet, Leviathan, Beelzebub, Marbas

Likely: Astaroth, Eligos, Valephor, Barbatos, Foras, Glassyalabolas, Orias, Asmodeus, Phenix, Dantalian, Ronove, Morax, Buer, Bael, Amon, Naberius, Gusion, Bathin, Andrealphus,

Questionable: Gamigin, Belphegor, Beleth, Vassago, Agares

Impossible: Lucifer

I will now explain the Questionable and Impossible status characters.

Lucifer cannot have a pact with Solomon given the current timeline because he did not fall until after Solomon was already missing and didn't officially become a devil until 2 years after his fall. This means he and Solomon, though they could have possibly met when Lucifer was still an angel, could not have formed a pact. Unless Solomon formed a pact with an angel somehow?

Gamigin has a questionable pact status because the Gamigin we know is a technically a dragon, but he inherited everything from the devil Gamigin. If the devil Gamigin had a pact with Solomon, the dragon Gamigin may have inherited that too.

Belphegor was technically around when Solomon was, but he was asleep for a very long time. We know that Belphegor is acquaintances with Satan, but we do not know when this happened (either in the three years he was awake to establish Niflheim or before that). It is unclear if Belphegor and Solomon met. EDIT (7/19/24): Belphegor (Selfie) confirms that Belphegor and Solomon have indeed met.

Beleth is, like Lucifer, a fallen angel. However, we do not know when he fell. He may or may not have met Solomon when he was already a devil depending on when he fell. Even if he was a devil already, he may not have formed a pact for reasons that will be refrenced in the next section.

Vassago and Agares are technically members of the 72 but the place they live was not a kingdom at the time Solomon was in Hell. If Solomon was able to journey to the trash kingdom and form pacts with the devils that lived there at the time is unclear. If Vassago and Agares would have even formed a pact is also questionable given they seem to have a lot of resentment for those who have power but were not there to protect their home during this unknown calamity. If this even happened before, during, or after Solomon vanished, we do not know.

Realistically, this is just me trying to think through how the timeline works and who MC even needs to reforge pacts with since I noticed some weird events on the timeline.

So, uhhhhh, yeah.... If I missed something or you have information that moves a character from one group to another, just let me know.

[raccoon-queer]

I am not a collection of pluralkit proxies. I am not a list of names. I am not a set of tumblr sign offs. I am not a pile of different clothing styles. I am not a group of different aesthetic pinterest boards. I am not a phenomenon

I didn't ask for this disorder and I don't want the expectations that come with having it. I won't switch for you. I won't proxy for you. I don't have an evil alter. stop asking if I have introjects. I'm sick of this choreographed dance of discord bots and emoji sign offs

maybe you, the system reading this, like all of it. that's fine. that's your choice. but you have to respect mine. I can't take joining one more discord server and being interrogated about why I don't use proxy bots. proxy bots do not a system make

let me heal in peace, away from the expectations and choreography

[ctrlsugar]

BACK BY REQUEST : MY PERSONAL SERVER TEMPLATE.

below is a guide for the channels, as well as tips and tricks for using this template and a few recommendations for bots. ( link & image heavy )

NOTE: this is an outdated template, and is not the server i currently use - if you would like to see an updated version of this ( my roleplay group or 1x1 roleplay servers, or others ), please let me know!!

GET THE SERVER | FREE ( tips appreciated !! )

BOT SUGGESTIONS.

tupperbox ( for proxying your muses for discord roleplay )

writerbot ( for writing sprints, goals & prompts )

reminder ( for reminders / birthday updates )

threadtracker ( for tracking threads on discord )

TIPS.

messletters ( for fancy text )

this entire tag by @dayslily ( for discord tips & tricks )

turn on community for the forum features ( linked to tutorial )

WELCOME CENTER.

ooc : updates / generally in large community servers you can subscribe to get updates sent to you personal server, this is a good place to send them. alternatively, you can utilize webhooks to send your tumblr notifications to your discord server in this channel. ( see tutorial here ).

ooc : emails / i use this channel to keep track of my logins for various tumblr blogs and other websites.

ooc : reminders / using a bot, i set this channel to have reminders for various things, such as personal reminders, roleplay to do list and even character & partner birthdays

ooc : todolist / you could use a bot, or just manually update this channel with your current todolist.

ooc : drafts / i will occasional leave drafts to replies here so i can come back for them at a later point

BOTS.

bot : writing / my preferred bot for this is writer bot - linked above, i use this channel to set/check my goals, set up writing sprints, and occasionally get prompts for writing.

bot : tupperbox / i like to set up all my tuppers in privacy, so i find having my own sever with a channel makes it easy to change my avatar and other tupper information quick and also to test them without spamming a group tupper channel. ( tupperbox - linked above )

bot : reminders / i will often set up a channel for reminders because i'm super forgetful and having a reminder bot helps me get to tasks in a timely manner ( when i remember to set up the bot!! lol ) ( reminder bot - linked above )

bot : tracker / i'm not sure if this tracker has the function to work cross server yet, you'd have to check with the makers on their github, but this is great for 1x1 and group servers. ( thread tracker - linked above )

DEVELOPMENT.

dev : names / a channel to store ideas for muse names, etomology, etc

dev : prompts / a channel to store ask memes, character & writing prompts, etc

dev : inspiration / a channel to store character/muse inspiration, photos, videos, posts, even just a list of words/aesthetics, etc

dev : brainstorm / a place to spitball ideas for new muses and/or plots, i like to utilize the voice message feature here and just talk out my ideas so i can listen back to them later when incorporating them into a new muse.

dev : headcanons / a channel to store headcanons ( if utilizing the community feature, you could make this a forum and separate the headcanons into posts for each muse : see image below for example ).

dev : faces / a channel to store resources for you muse face claims, i would store social media posts, photoshoots, gif set links, etc ( if utilizing the community feature, you could make this a forum and separate the faces into posts for each face claim : see image below for example ).

ROLEPLAY.

rp : masterlist / a channel to host your own character masterlist, you can format this however you like, or even use forums - you could link to other channels in the muse category.

rp : plots / a channel to post links and ideas for plots wanted for muses and roleplay groups.

rp : wishlist / a channel to post roleplay wishlist items, links, ideas, etc

rp : promotions / a channel to post links for roleplay promotions either to your own groups or groups that you'd like to keep an eye on.

rp : groups / i use this channel to store the links to my current roleplay groups, links to the main blog, any relevant sideblogs, as well as a list of muses i currently have active within them.

rp : partners / helpful for storing a list of mains (for indies), with names, pronouns, links to rules, muses, etc - or for 1x1 lists of partners.

RESOURCES.

all of these are pretty self explanatory, you can store resources you use for tumblr and other types of roleplay in these channels, gifs, icons, templates, themes, etc.

ACTIVE MUSES.

muse : name / you can basically store your muse information, biographies, links to blogs, musings, edits, and whatever else you like. ( if utilizing the community feature, you could make this a forum and separate items into posts : see image below for example )

CONNECTIONS.

ship : name • name / similarly to the muse section, you can store your ship dynamic and details here, links to you partner's blog, ship tag, edits, headcanons, etc ( if utilizing the community feature, you could make this a forum and separate items into posts : see image below for example )

[maxolotlmp3]

by the way, if any of you use PluralKit on discord to log information, please be aware that anyone can react to a proxied message with a ❓ and pk will dm you all the information that is on your bot. you can fix this by using the command "pk;s privacy [name/desc/icon/list/prns/front/fronthistory/groups/all] private. you can also go pk;m [name] privacy [name/icon/bday/prns/desc/meta/proxy/visibility] private

this is super important info to have. a couple of systems we had to cut off used that feature to stalk us and spread lies and misinfo about us and our system by taking descriptions out of context. please only have IMPORTANT general information in your pk bots (name, age, etc). do not list any negative front triggers, they can be used against you. please be safe. if there is information that you deem important that you dont want to have public, write it down in a private server.

alternatively, if you use SimplyPlural and don't want people to see specifc members but you'd still like to be able to log them in as a switch, go into that alters sp profile and set it to private.

please be careful.

-Linkoln

[bardic-inspo]

2024 Writing Retrospection

Tagged by the lovely @amoremagnificentbastard 💜

What's been your biggest learning point this past year?

Don't wait until you're done with X to write the Y thing you've been dying to get to. Don't kill your own joy by forcing yourself to earn the fun parts. Write the fun parts now. Write them whenever and however you want to. Start as many things as you want. You don't have to finish everything you write for it to be worthwhile. Some stories are stepping stones for you to find your footing to the things you've wanted to work on, deep down.

How has your writing developed this past year?

I've been steadily working on becoming more concise and building my dialogue skills. I do still like to wax poetic on the tangible aspects (and I often have a lot to say, case in point hehe), but I'm proud with my progress. I think Aeterna Nostalgia in particular is a good example of this, especially compared to other longfics I've written. I think it gives my writing a better balance than it had in the past. I plan to keep working on this!

Good writing habits?

I think I've gotten better at gauging when to hunker down and when to take a break! And about taking time between when I stop editing and when I do my final, pre-posting read-through.

Bad writing habits?

My inner editor never shuts up. I have a love-hate relationship with it, because I do think it makes me write at a painstakingly slow pace, but in some respects, it saves editing later. I do wish I could shush that instinct a bit more.

Favorite thing you wrote?

Both of my Ascended Astarion fics, Aeterna Nostalgia and Blood in the Mortar. I don't see many portrayals of Ascended Astarion in the vein I depicted him (and I pretty much instantly devour those fics anytime I do), and so with these fics, I felt sort of like a kid in a candy shop getting to write the exact sort of thing I wanted to read myself.

Favorite reads?

Oh god, so many! Too many to count!

Since I mentioned not seeing too many Ascended Astarion fics in the flavor of him I typically like to read, I thought I'd call out some amazing writers who've written a dark and devilish A!A who still loves Tav/Durge/his consort. These are fics that, in my opinion, handle the complexity of A!A very well, and don't shy away from his darkness while still honoring all of the elements that make Ascended Astarion very much still Astarion. Many also feature a consort/Tav/durge/main character who can go toe-to-toe with a power-tripping Ascendant.

Sonnet of the Lone Cardinal by @brain-rot-central

Death & His Maiden by @pinkberrytea

Hell & You by @ladymdc

How Far You've Come & No Good Deeds & Magic, Music, and Mazes by Garnett Gibson

By Proxy and Oblivion & Obsession by @alcetryx

(*This is no shade whatsoever to those who write a more corrupted A!A whose affection for Tav is twisted, I just personally prefer the flavor I described. This list is, of course, non-exhaustive, and just features some of the fics I happened to read that I wanna throw more love on!!)

Biggest win?

About a year ago, I was brand new to a new fandom. I hadn't written in ~6 months or so. I'd never written anything besides Fallout fanfic. I had a lot of self-doubt, and felt like probably no one would read anything of mine, anyway. I felt like I was already late to a party where everyone had already made friends/servers/connections and fanon had some well-rooted opinions.

But now here I am, a year later, having made some amazing friends and met so many kind people who inspired me and encouraged me personally and creatively. I'm not self-doubt free, but I feel like I've found a space where I can write what brings me joy, and I get to be giddy about that with others. That's huge to me. That's everything.

Goals for the new year?

To keep working on the things I strove for last year: write what brings me joy, write semi-regularly (3-5 days a week), work towards being concise, and to write lots more Aeterna Nostalgia!

Your favorite words of the year, aka the words you check each chapter for, making sure you didn't repeat them 788 times?

OOOF I have a lot of these hehe. Off the top of my head, some common offenders include breath (like stealing/holding/catching a breath), jaw clenching, and the words 'fleeting', 'briefly', and 'tender'.

What are you excited for in the new year?

Reading more good fic, writing more fic, and getting to be giddy with friends about it!!

Tagging in turn: @electricshoebox, @brain-rot-central, @ladymdc, @dismalzelenka, @wilteddreamsofbaldursgate,

@elinorbard, and @marlowethebard if you wanna do this, no worries if not! 💜

[toscrollperchancetomeme]

Is there a life after IwtV Season 2?

So, Interview with the Vampire Season 2 is over, you have already rewatched it a dozen times and don’t know what to do with yourself?

Here’s a list of suggestions!

Read the books

I might be biased because I have been a fan since the early 2000s, but they are genuinely worth a read. A lot of people struggle especially with the first book, which I understand – but you can absolutely skip it and start right away with The Vampire Lestat! Especially The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned are a great read and they are what is coming up next in the show. A lot of the plot of QotD happens at the same time as The Vampire Lestat, so I expect that material from both books will come up in the next season.

If you have a brain that enjoys audio books, they are actually available for free on youtube (though the narrator pronounces Louis’ name wrong). The version on the commercial audio book platforms read by Simon Vance is better though, if that’s an option for you. :)

The books after that are very much a mixed bag, but they all have some great and some downright crazy stuff in them, because Anne Rice’s writing was pretty unhinged at times. It’s a ride, but imho one worth taking.

Watch reaction videos on YouTube

I think I have by now watched all reactions that are available. For me it really brings a lot of joy to relive the experience of a first-time watch by proxy. Some are frustrating because people talk over important dialogue, some hold genuine galaxy brain moments by people who know nothing of the material. I will not recommend anyone, because vibes vary for everyone, but I’m sure there’s a reactor out there that YOU will vibe with.

Watch other shows/movies with the actors

Did you know that “Talk Radio”, written by and starring Eric Bogosian is available in full on youtube? I haven’t watched it yet, but I hear it’s really good.

For Sam Reid, I can’t recommend “Lambs of God” highly enough, and I hear great things about The Newsreader, which I sadly can’t get my hands on at the moment. “Belle” is also a beautiful movie, but his part is rather small as far as I remember.

Then of course there’s Hotel Portofino for Assad (but I’m not yet that desperate).

I actually haven’t watched anything with Jacob Anderson except Game of Thrones, which I will NOT rewatch, so I’m happy for suggestions there!

Watch the movies that have been namedropped by Rolin Jones

Hedwig and the Angry Inch – a phenomenal movie and stage show in its own right. It’s fun, it’s beautiful, it’s queer as fuck, the music is excellent and it’s an absolute must-watch.

Rocky Horror Picture Show – honestly, if you have never seen this movie, what are you waiting for?

The Dirt – Rolin Jones has mentioned the book, but there was actually a pretty decent movie made about Mötley Crüe a few years ago, that I really enjoyed.

Also, I have seen Amadeus mentioned several times, I’m not sure if that came up in an interview but it’s an excellent movie and the parallels to the relationship between Lestat and Armand are definitely there.

Honorary mention: Fight Club, not because anyone has mentioned it but… the parallels warrant an essay that I might one day have to write. (Themes: Queerness of male on male violence, imaginary boyfriends, idealization of toxic masculinity)

Read the books from Rolin Jones' reading list

I have now spent 10 minutes googling for that interview where he lists the books he’s reading for Season 3, but can’t find it. Someone please drop it in the comments?

Learn French

Want to feel closer to your favorite actors? Why not go through the same hell as them and get bullied by the Duolingo owl while at it? ❤

Discord servers

I’m not active there right now, but I have found several fandom servers that seem like great communities.

Read Fanfic

Honestly the reason this is down here is because it’s so obvious. :)

Get creative

Write fanfic, draw fan art, roleplay, edit videos, make unhinged memes!

And always: Support the content creators!

Everytime I scroll the tag I see new creators entering the fandom and let me tell you, after almost 20 years of drought, I am overjoyed. Same goes for fic writers, youtube reactors and reviewers! Leave them a like, a comment or whatever is available on the platform they are using.

Edit:

Watch the musical!

I completely forgot! There’s a Lestat musical by Elton John. Yes, you read that right. This lovely YouTube account has full bootlegs for you to enjoy some camp broadway fun!

[marveltrumpshate]

★ AUCTION WEEK INFO ★

We have less than 28 hours left of Auction Week, and bids are coming in fast. With the clock ticking down, we want to help bidders strategize for the final day.

If you can’t afford the auctions you want or you have a tight budget, here are three ways that you can still get or stay involved as a bidder:

Look at our golden needle auctions, many of which have affordable minimum bids. We have only 15 remaining, down from 39 in just two days. That’s amazing!

Use our "current bid: low to high" sorting feature on our Auction Listings page. You can access it by clicking the dropdown menu and narrow down your search even more by going through individual filter categories on that page. Doing this makes it easier to see auctions you're interested in that are within your budget and is extremely useful for smaller categories such as podfics and digital works.

Join a pod bid. For more information on how to start or get involved in a pod bid, click here. Many bidders have pooled their funds together to win a specific auction, and several creators have announced that they’re open to receiving pod bid requests for a variety of prompts.

If you haven’t done so already, come join our Discord server, where creators can promote their auctions and match with interested bidders and bidders can share ideas and check out auctions. Our Discord has been busy all week, and we know it’ll be a lot of (crazy) fun once we get into the final hours of bidding!

Forgot that you have plans during the last few hours of the auction? Enlist a proxy bidder!

Ask mutuals or friends who don’t mind helping you bid to bid on your behalf (keep in mind that the auction ends at 11:59:59 PM ET on October 26 (what time is that for me?). MTH mods will not proxy bid for anyone, but if you can’t find someone to help you, feel free to mention that you’re looking for a proxy bidder on our Discord server.

You can’t take back a bid once it’s placed and should you win the auction, you must donate the winning bid amount, so try to find someone you can trust as your proxy. Once you do, let your proxy know the highest amount you’re willing to bid on each auction.

To have someone bid on your behalf, you can use one of these methods:

Give your proxy your marveltrumpshate.com account login info, so they can bid under your name.

Have your proxy create their own account (e.g., “proxyforyournamehere”) to help you place bids.

Let your proxy bid on your behalf on their account.

Keep in mind that when you make an account, you'll get an email asking you to verify your account in order to access it. If you're making a new account for your proxy, you may wish to use your proxy’s email address instead of yours. This means the winner emails will go to your proxy, who'll need to forward them to you once the auction is over. You’ll then need to email us with your donation receipt and details on your proxy bid so that we’ll be able to put you in contact with your creator(s).

If your proxy already has an account and would rather use their own account to help you place bids, they must be very careful in keeping track of which bids they place for you and which bids are their own. Your proxy will need to forward winner emails to you if they use their own email, just like they would if they created a new account.

Good luck with bidding, everyone! Keep an eye on our countdown clock, figure out your bidding strategy, and be ready for the madness tomorrow. We hope you’ll win your favorite auctions!

____________________________________________

Read our daily update posts for more information:

Day 1 - Viewing Tumblr posts on mobile, using our auction watchlist feature, and changing your Discord DM settings

Day 2 - Bidder–creator matchmaking and group/pod bids

Day 3 - Commissioning gifts on a friend’s behalf (fanworks are great holiday gifts!)

Day 4 - Golden needle auctions

Day 5 - Creator auction promo tips

Auction spotlights:

Beta services, translation, and other fan labor

Craft or merch auctions

Digital, podfic, and vid auctions

Poly ships

Fanworks featuring POC

Fanworks featuring women

[actualwwerewolfz]

☆ The Empire

Hello and welcome to The Empire!

This server is open to Fictionkin, Otherkin, Therians, Alter/Nonhumans in general, Systems, and anyone else who supports us!

☆ As with any server, we do have a DNI list! Please be sure none of these apply to you:

Anyone bodily under 13, fujoshis, willogenics/pro willogenic, shotacon/lolicon, proship +, harmful paras, agere/petre sexualisers.

Server features:

┊A daily QOTD!

┊Bots for all your proxy needs

┊Spaces to talk about your kin/system/irl experiences

┊Welcoming and friendly staff!

☆ Come drop by! Make friends with people like you! We hope to see you soon!

[bluestjayy]

fic authors self rec! when you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. spread the self-love~<333333

I'm not going to tell you how long this sat in my inbox because I completely missed its existence - but I have seen it now!

And you know what, I have had a really hard time loving my own creations lately, so maybe it's time I exercise some hecking self love through the medium of some self-promo.

So here's my favourite five fics I've written (in no particular order):

won't be pretty, won't be sweet

Rating: Explicit

Chapters: 10/14

Word Count: 62,910

Summary:

"Oh. I'm sorry," Hands clasped before him, Fruit bows his head. Because that's what you’re supposed to do for an older Omega. You show respect. It scrapes against Pete’s nerves like sandpaper though, and he almost reaches out to pull Fruit back to standing and insist he never do that again, but he pops back up all on his own. "I thought you were– I've never smelt any Omega like–" Fruit's stuttering halts abruptly, and he bows again. "Forgive me, Kaan."

The boy hurries into the bathroom, cheeks bright pink, and Pete redirects his gaze to the wall opposite. He focuses on doing his job. On protecting. On searching for danger.

He does not think about how Fruit had mistaken him for an Alpha. Because Omegas don't smell like how Pete smells.

He does not think about the title that haunts him through his every waking moment. Kaan Pete.

I obviously had to put Kaan Pete on here. This is one of a few fics that I have been working on for well over a year. It initially started as a small idea, an older omega 'past their prime' and a young cocky alpha that wants them anyway and then it exploded into a whole AU. I love this fic for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I got to put my own spin on a lot of aspects of Omegaverse tropes and build a bit of evolutionary lore around why things are the way they are. Also, for anyone who doesn't already know, this fic is part of a much wider verse that covers multiple pairings from KinnPorsche, so even when this fic ends, I will still be writing for it!

take a hit and close your eyes (I know what you fantasize about)

Rating: Explicit

Chapters: 2/3

Word Count: 18,690

Summary:

The box means nothing.

And yet, it means everything. Representing the last remaining obstacle between Kim and his deepest desires. Dramatic or not, it’s the only way to frame it in Kim’s mind. A means to an end. A tool. A key that fits the lock currently strapped around Kim’s insides. Kim has been waiting so long for the right moment to take this step, because as much as he doesn’t buy into society’s twisted view on how one should measure the milestones in their life, this feels like something he will never be able to come back from. Things will not be the same once he goes through with this.

A stupid little box containing the makings of Kim's future. All that power in something so small.

Another long fic I continue to be obsessed with. This one was a gift as part of a winter exchange I ran in a discord server and the prompt involved the idea of the sex pollen trope and of course because I'm me, I immediately turned this into a character study. This is one of my favourite fics because of how I get to pick apart Kim and his issues with vulnerability, intimacy, and how he approaches those things with Chay. He's a person who wants so deeply to show every layer of his psyche to Porchay but doesn't know how to do that, so of course he goes to the most insane solution - aphrodisiacs! This fic I feel is a really nice balance of silly, angst, and smutty, but I'll let you judge that!

I've lost control and I don't want it back

Rating: Mature

Chapters: 1/1

Word Count: 13,938

Summary:

Pete and what he needs is at the bottom of the priority list. Vegas will always be at the top, and by proxy, Vegas’s little brother will come immediately afterwards. So Pete doesn’t voice how anxious it makes him to be banished to the sofa on the other side of the room where he can still see Vegas but his view of the window isn’t as clear and he’s a little too far away from the only exit. He doesn’t intervene when Macau climbs all over Vegas even if he can see how the man goes pale and winces, how his muscles tense like he might try to squirm away.

Pete doesn’t protest when he’s regularly and unsubtly shooed from the room so the brothers can spend time together alone.

He doesn’t say a damn thing even if he wants to. Even if he’s realising that he’s not entirely sure who he is anymore when he’s not in Vegas’s direct eyeline.

Another VegasPete fic! This one might be one of my favourite VP works I have ever worked on. I am a sucker for exploring the post cannon relationship between Vegas and Pete, and how they get from A to B. There's still so much for them to come to terms with about themselves and each other and it's such a crunchy topic to get into. So that's what this fic was, a whole 14k words of Pete figuring out who Vegas is, and who he himself even is and how that's something Vegas can love. Just a lot of angst and a hopeful ending for them both!

even diamonds here don't shine

Rating: Mature

Chapters: 1/1

Word Count: 7,759

Summary:

Chay is about to ask someone what’s going on when two policemen step through the door. Min suddenly reappears, rushing right to them and talking hurriedly and… and she’s pointing right at Chay. “Officers,” Chay bows his head in polite greeting, but doesn’t let his eyes leave the pair of them. He tries to stand tall, the way Big has been teaching him to do, to not look intimidated. But he knows his fingers are twisting together in front of him as he asks, “Is there something wrong?” The men look at each other. The one on the left, slightly taller, and who’s chest reads Port, frowns down at Chay sternly. “We’ve been made aware you’re in possession of a credit card that isn’t yours.”

This one (according to stats) is my most popular fic on my whole page, and I am so glad people love whumped characters as much as I do. I love this fic so much. I love hurting characters and then making them better after and that was the whole point of this fic. I also got to explore a little bit of a darker side of Kim, in the sense that, I think Kim can be an inherently violent and dark person, just because of the environment he was raised in, but I don't think he likes or wants to be that person. And Chay doesn't want him to be that either. So it's really fascinating to play with Kim who defaults to that mindset when his loved ones are threatened because that's who he has been taught to be, he has been taught that's the best way to keep people safe, and on the other side there's Chay enjoying being protected but hating the fact Kim has to resort to this mindset - like a cornered animal, and yeah it's just so crunchy and chewy and they're so nuanced as characters!

painting stars on our hearts

Rating: Teen

Chapters: 1/1

Word Count: 2,588

Series Link

Summary:

Historically, Raon does not do well with rules. They’re constricting, rigid, and in his experience, unnecessarily stunting. Rules are the reason he had found himself high-tailing it from the only home he’d ever known with Hachi squealing deliriously in the passenger side of his stolen ship, and a pocket full of currency he wasn’t even sure he’d be able to use where he was headed. Because rules have followed Raon wherever he has gone in life, from the moment he entered the world. “Don’t touch that!”

I may be cheating with this final one a bit. Because in actuality it's the whole series that I'm promoting.

This is my Wuju Bakery series. And it's one of the fics I'm most proudest of because it's really given me a chance to flex my imagination when it comes to lore and world building. This whole series started the day we had a couple of pictures leaked of Jeff and Barcode in their costumes filming, and shortly after my imagination went crazy. There's I believe 5 fics in this series in total already, with at least 3 more planned. I know none of what I've written will become cannon, but at this point since we don't HAVE cannon, I am calling it my version of the show!

And that's it. Sorry for the really long post, I hope you enjoy some of these fics if you haven't read them before, or if you have, enjoy them again. I'm working really hard on now just the wips on my account but also some really long form AUs that have been in progress since KP was actively airing so! Hopefully I can share all those soon!

[libertineangel]

Another "Introduction to Piracy" post

There's a few of these going round but they can be dense, spread different information through different reblog chains, and other such impracticalities, so here's a fresh, quick & simple one.

1) Necessary Software

You're going to want two things: a VPN* and a Torrent client. Personally I recommend Mullvad for the former - flat charge of €5/month pay-as-you-go, unlimited data and solid speed, very privacy-focused - and qBitTorrent for the latter.

Once you've installed both of those, you should open qBitTorrent and make sure it only runs through the VPN's internet connection: open Tools in the top bar, then Options->Advanced, and select Mullvad from the Network Interface drop-down box.

*For those unaware, a Virtual Private Network routes your Internet connection through a proxy server and then encrypts it, hiding your activity from your ISP and giving any sites you visit the impression that you're based in whatever country the proxy server is.

2) Finding your desired content

There are many sources of pirated content out there on the Internet, and you can find an awful lot of it on 1337x.to, but personally I always consult the FMHY.net directory, a site dedicated to cataloguing how to find different content by type - films, games, programs etc. If you're worried about the safety of downloading these things, risk of malware and such, honestly you don't really need to be these days - any of the dedicated sites & repositories listed on FMHY should be safe, and if you're going to a general-purpose one like 1337x then as long as the file you want lists a decent number of prior downloads it'll most likely be fine (just avoid The Pirate Bay these days, it is not the haven it was 20 years ago).

3) Downloads

Now, content generally comes in one of two forms: either a direct download, or a torrent. A direct download is exactly what it sounds like, you just receive a copy of the files you want (usually packaged in a ZIP file).

Torrents are a little different. With those, you download a .torrent file, then you open up your torrent client and add it there, then tell it where to save the actual content you want. Torrents are a peer-to-peer download system, meaning instead of downloading the whole file from a specific server you're downloading many parts from everyone else who's previously downloaded it (and is running their torrent client) - this means that how long it takes is entirely dependent on how popular the content in question is, so something obscure and old might take a very long time while a popular new release might be limited only by your internet speed. It also means that you should really keep the .torrent file once your download is finished to help everyone else, an act known as seeding; the alternative, to delete it once you've finished, is known as leeching, and it doesn't harm you but it's generally considered rather impolite.

I think that covers everything, if anyone has any questions or suggestions feel free to say so and I'll update this as needed, until then - hoist your black flag and have fun!

[dcvsv]

🌀 · 🌀 · 🌀

Welcome to Blüdhaven, a 15+ DC kin server made to reconnect you with all your old friends (and enemies)!

We offer...

× a wide range of profile customization options (reaction roles + color bots)

× bots such as Pokétwo + for proxying

× kin and IRL channels

× a quick-to-respond staff team

× a no doubles list (NDL)

Our rules are lax and centered around common sense.

We do NOT allow: KFF, factkin, endogenic systems, proshippers, or generally harmful beliefs and ideologies.

Join here. See you soon!

· 🌀 · 🌀 ·

[tolkienrsb]

TRSB 2024 Claims

Authors! If your read nothing else, please read this post!

Claims are tomorrow! They are at 17:00 (5pm) UTC. What time is that for me: link to event time conversion tool?

You should have received an email with the Claims instructions by now. PLEASE READ THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY 🙏. We want you to have a great claims experience. This will be the busiest night of the event so we ask for your patience and understanding - we may not be fully reachable shortly before and during claims.

Claims Link & Times

An email with the link to the Claims form will be sent out 12 HOURS before claims. If you think you should have received the link but you don't have it in your mailbox - please contact us at earliest 6 hours before claims but no later than 2 hours before claims if possible.

Proxies

You may use a proxy if you wish. You can ask a friend or ask in the Discord server to find someone willing to help you. You can forward them your claims link and give them a list of slides you want them to enter. We don't need to know who they are, they just need to enter the name you registered with correctly.

Other Questions

Please read this section of the FAQs for more information on claims: https://tolkienrsb.wordpress.com/faq/#claims. We won't be able to answer questions right before and during claims - so please review now!

Thank you and good luck tomorrow!

TRSB Mod Team

[zealouswerewolfcollector]

My 2023 Fic List

I posted 78,856 words this year! It might not seem much, but it's a record for me. So here's the list of my 2023 works sorted by date.

Four Ficlets

Written for the SWG server's instadrabbling challenge - Elwing and Idril's First Meeting (124 words, G), Elwing and the Silmaril (76 words, T), Gil-galad and Cirdan Clean Up After the Kinslaying (228 words, T), Ancalagon's Death (106 words, G)

Gifts and Favors and a Trip (3560 words, M, Maedhros/Fingon)

My 2023 entry for My Slashy Valentine. A bit of angst, a bit of sexual tension, lots of fluff and a great deal of pining. Idiots to lovers.

Angsty Ficlet (792 words, G, Maedhros & Maglor)

Maedhros wakes up in the middle of the night, panicking for reasons unknown to himself. Maglor helps. An angsty ficlet with a little twist in the end.

Alone in the Unknown (4752 words, T, Maedhros & Maglor)

The latest part of my canon divergence AU. Maglor and Maedhros wander all alone - Maedhros nearly catatonic and Maglor trying in vain to reach him. The angstiest thing I've ever written.

Helcaraxë Cannibalism Ficlet (500 words, T, warning for cannibalism and character death)

Fingon doesn't want his body to be consumed after his death.

Maiar Hate This Simple Trick (2234 words, T, background Celebrimbor/Narvi and Galadriel/Celeborn)

My entry for Tolkien Remix 2023 is based on @elentarial's Desperation and Defeat. A series of letters between the main figures of the Second Age, trying to solve the mystery of Annatar running away from Eregion. Humor.

Proxy (5912 words, E, Maedhros/Fingon, Maedhros/Maglor, warning for dubious consent and unhealthy relationships)

Maedhros's love for Maglor is unrequited, but luckily for Maedhros, Fingon is hopelessly in love with him and somewhat resembles Maglor. A terrible love triangle between three terrible people. A deviation from my usual themes and characterization (and ratings), but the prompt in the kinkmeme spoke to me. I wrote almost 6k in a couple of days, which is a rarity for me.

Orodreth's Letter to Fingon (307 words, G)

Orodreth does everything he can to eviscerate Fingon in his letter of refusal concerning the Union of Maedhros.

Maedhros and Fingon Talk Cannibalism (247 words, T, warning for cannibalism and self-cannibalism mentions)

Another cannibalism snippet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maedhros and Fingon share their experiences with the subject in a light-hearted tone a little inappropriate for the discussion.

Lady Makalaurë Fëanáriel Dying of Poison, Late Second Age, Artist Unknown (8671 words, T, past fem!Maglor/Maglor's wife, warning for death and suicide mentions)

One of my two fics for TRSB 2023. Based on @independence1776's edit. In her space wanderings, fem!Maglor comes across a planet and finds out things that force her to return to Eldarin civilization. I always wanted to write a sci-fi AU, and I'm really glad I got to do it.

Now a Quill, Now a Sword (11817 words, T, Maedhros/Fingon, warning for character death and implied suicide)

My second TRSB fic, written in collaboration with @melestasflight. See their beautiful art here. It's a canon-compliant fic (with a bit of post-canon at the end) that tells the story of Maedhros and Fingon's relationship from the beginning to the end.

Two Ficlets

In this one (735 words, T), Fingolfin and Fingon discuss if Maedhros can be trusted. In it's companion (1082 words, T), Fingon and Maedhros talk about the same subject.

The Hunters (2016 words, E, fem!Maedhros/Aredhel)

Another kinkmeme fill. Baby's first PWP. (Proxy doesn't count. It has a plot and I tried to make the sex horrible.) Aredhel and Maedhros - two princesses of the House of Finwë - are cousins with benefits. I really enjoyed writing it, but I don't know if it's any good because I haven't reread it since posting.

Kaleidoscope (1436 words, M, Fingon/Sons of Feanor - all of them but not at the same time except Amrod and Amras)

Inspired by @melestasflight and @polutrope's The Seven Trials of Fingon the Valiant but darker in tone. Fingon sleeps with all of the sons of Fëanor. Why? Who knows? Up to interpretation. The fic doesn't make much sense, but I still like it and I'm really glad I wrote it. The third kinkememe fill.

That's all for last year. In general, I'm more happy than not with my writing. Hopefully, it will continue this year.

Thanks to every single person who's read, liked, reblogged, left kudos and comments on my fics. You make me want to keep writing.

[eraepoch]

[Full Text] Emerging Media Companies, Tracking Cookies, and Data Privacy -- An open letter to Critical Role, Dropout, and fellow audience members

Summary / TL;DR

Both Critical Role (CR) and Dropout have begun exclusively using links provided by third-party digital marketing solution companies in their email newsletters.

Every link in each of the newsletters (even the unsubscribe link) goes through a third-party domain which is flagged as a tracking server by the uBlock Origin browser extension.

Third-party tracking cookies are strictly unnecessary and come with a wide array of risks, including non-consensual targeted advertising, targeted misinformation, doxxing, and the potential for abuse by law enforcement.

You are potentially putting your privacy at risk every time you click on any of the links in either of these newsletters.

IMO these advertising companies (and perhaps CR/Dropout by proxy) are likely breaking the law in the EU and California by violating the GDPR and CCPA respectively.

Even if Critical Role and Dropout are not directly selling or exploiting your personal data, they are still profiting off of it by contracting with, and receiving services from, companies who almost certainly are. The value of your personal data is priced into the cost of these services.

They should stop, and can do so without any loss of web functionality.

1/7. What is happening?

Critical Role and Dropout have begun exclusively using links provided by third-party digital marketing solution companies in their email newsletters.

[ID:  A screenshot of the Dropout newsletter alongside the page’s HTML source which shows that the target destination for an anchor element in the email leads to d2xR2K04.na1.hubspotlinks.com. End ID.]

[ID: A screenshot of the CR newsletter alongside the page’s HTML source which shows that the target destination for an anchor element in the email leads to trk.klclick.com. End ID.]

The domains attached to these links are flagged as advertising trackers by the uBlock Origin browser extension.

[ID: Screenshot of a Firefox web browser. The page displays a large warning icon and reads “uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading [...] because of the following filter: `||hubspotlinks.com` found in Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list. End ID.]

[ID: Screenshot of a Firefox web browser. The page displays a large warning icon and reads “uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading [...] because of the following filter: `||klclick1.com` found in Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list. End ID.]

In both cases, every link in the newsletter goes through the flagged third-party domain, and the intended endpoint (Twitter, their store page, etc.) is completely obscured and inaccessible from within the email itself. Even the unsubscribe links feed through the tracking service.

You can test this yourself in your own email client by hovering your cursor over a link in the email without clicking it and watching to see what URL pops up. You may have noticed this yourself if you use uBlock Origin as an ad-blocker.

I don’t know for certain when this first started. It’s possible that this has been going on for a year or more at this point, or it may have started just a few months ago. Either way: it ought to stop.

2/7. What is a tracking cookie?

A tracking cookie is a unique, universally identifiable value placed on your machine by somebody with the intention of checking for that value later to identify you (or at least to identify your machine).

Tracking cookies are used by companies to create advertising behaviour profiles. These profiles are supposedly anonymous, but even if the marketing companies creating them are not lying about that (a tough sell for me personally, but your mileage may vary when it comes to corporations with 9-figure annual incomes), the data can often be de-anonymized.

If this happens, the data can be used to identify the associated user, potentially including their full name, email address, phone number, and physical address—all of which may then be associated with things like their shopping habits, hobbies, preferences, the identities of their friends and family, gender, political opinions, job history, credit score, sexuality, and even when they ovulate.

Now, it is important to note that not all cookies are tracking cookies. A cookie is just some data from a web page that persists on your machine and gets sent back to the server that put it there. Cookies in general are not necessarily malicious or harmful, and are often essential to certain web features functioning correctly (e.g. keeping the user logged in on their web browser after they close the tab). But the thing to keep in mind is that a domain has absolute control over the information that has been stored on your computer by that domain, so allowing cookies is a matter of trusting the specific domain that wants to put them there. You can look at the outgoing information being sent from your machine, but its purpose cannot be determined without knowing what is being done with it on the other side, and these marketing companies ought not to have the benefit of your doubt when they have already been flagged by privacy watchdogs.

3/7. What’s the harm?

Most urgently, as I touched on above: The main source of harm is from corporations profiting off of your private data without your informed consent. However, targeted advertising is actually the least potentially harmful outcome of tracking cookies.

1/6. Data brokers

A data broker is an individual or company that specializes in collecting personal data (such as personal income, ethnicity, political beliefs, geolocation data, etc.) and selling or licensing such information to third parties for a variety of uses, such as background checks conducted by employers and landlords, two universally benevolent groups of people.

There are varying regulations around the world limiting the collection of information on individuals, and the State of California passed a law attempting to address this problem in 2018, following in the footsteps of the EU’s GDPR, but in the jurisdiction of the United States there is no federal regulation protecting consumers from data brokers. In fact, due to the rising interest in federal regulation, data broker firms lobbied to the tune of $29 million in the year 2020 alone.

2/6. De-anonymization techniques

Data re-identification or de-anonymization is the practice of combining datasets (such as advertising profiles) and publicly available information (such as scraped data from social media profiles) in order to discover patterns that may reveal the identities of some or all members of a dataset otherwise intended to be anonymous.

Using the 1990 census, Professor Latanya Sweeney of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School found that up to 87% of the U.S. population can be identified using a combination of their 5-digit zip code, gender, and date of birth. [Link to the paper.]

Individuals whose datasets are re-identified are at risk of having their private information sold to organizations without their knowledge or consent. Once an individual’s privacy has been breached as a result of re-identification, future breaches become much easier: as soon as a link is made between one piece of data and a person’s real identity, that person is no longer anonymous and is at far greater risk of having their data from other sources similarly compromised.

3/6. Doxxing

Once your data has been de-anonymized, you are significantly more vulnerable to all manner of malicious activity: from scam calls and emails to identity theft to doxxing. This is of particular concern for members of minority groups who may be targeted by hate-motivated attacks.

4/6. Potential for abuse by government and law enforcement

Excerpt from “How period tracking apps and data privacy fit into a post-Roe v. Wade climate” by Rina Torchinsky for NPR:

Millions of people use apps to help track their menstrual cycles. Flo, which bills itself as the most popular period and cycle tracking app, has amassed 43 million active users. Another app, Clue, claims 12 million monthly active users. The personal health data stored in these apps is among the most intimate types of information a person can share. And it can also be telling. The apps can show when their period stops and starts and when a pregnancy stops and starts. That has privacy experts on edge because this data—whether subpoenaed or sold to a third party—could be used to suggest that someone has had or is considering an abortion. ‘We're very concerned in a lot of advocacy spaces about what happens when private corporations or the government can gain access to deeply sensitive data about people’s lives and activities,’ says Lydia X. Z. Brown, a policy counsel with the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. ‘Especially when that data could put people in vulnerable and marginalized communities at risk for actual harm.’

Obviously Critical Role and Dropout are not collecting any sort of data related to their users’ menstrual cycles, but the thing to keep in mind is that any data that is exposed to third parties can be sold and distributed without your knowledge or consent and then be used by disinterested—or outright malicious—actors to de-anonymize your data from other sources, included potentially highly compromising data such as that collected by these period-tracking apps. Data privacy violations have compounding dangers, and should be proactively addressed wherever possible. The more of your personal data exists in the hands of third parties, the more it is to be de-anonymized.

5/6. Targeted misinformation

Data brokers are often incredibly unscrupulous actors, and will sell your data to whomever can afford to buy it, no questions asked. The most high-profile case of the consequences of this is the Facebook—Cambridge Analytica data scandal, wherein the personal data of Facebook users were acquired by Cambridge Analytica Ltd. and compiled alongside information collected from other data brokers. By giving this third-party app permission to acquire their data back in 2015, Meta (then Facebook) also gave the app access to information on their users’ friend networks: this resulted in the data of some 87 million users being collected and exploited.

The data collected by Cambridge Analytica was widely used by political strategists to influence elections and, by and large, undermine democracy around the world: While its parent company SCL had been influencing elections in developing countries  for decades, Cambridge Analytica focused more on the United Kingdom and the United States. CEO Alexander Nix said the organization was involved in 44 American political races in 2014. In 2016, they worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as well as for Leave.EU, one of the organisations campaigning for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.

6/6. The Crux: Right to Privacy Violations

Even if all of the above were not concerns, every internet user should object to being arbitrarily tracked on the basis of their right to privacy. Companies should not be entitled to create and profit from personality profiles about you just because you purchased unrelated products or services from them. This right to user privacy is the central motivation behind laws like the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA (see Section 6).

4/7. Refuting Common Responses

1/3. “Why are you so upset? This isn’t a big deal.”

Commenter: Oh, if you’re just talking about third party cookies, that’s not a big deal … Adding a cookie to store that ‘this user clicked on a marketing email from critical role’ is hardly [worth worrying about].

Me: I don’t think you understand what tracking cookies are. They are the digital equivalent of you going to a drive through and someone from the restaurant running out of the store and sticking a GPS monitor onto your car.

Commenter: Kind of. It’s more like slapping a bumper sticker on that says, in restaurant-ese, ‘Hi I’m [name] and I went to [restaurant] once!’

This is actually an accurate correction. My metaphor was admittedly overly simplistic, but the correction specifies only so far as is comfortable for the commenter. If we want to construct a metaphor that is as accurate as possible, it would go something like this:

You drive into the McDonald’s parking lot. As you are pulling in, unbeknownst to you, a Strange Man pops out of a nearby bush (that McDonald’s has allowed him to place here deliberately for this express purpose), and sticks an invisible bumper sticker onto the back of your car. The bumper sticker is a tracker that tells the Strange Man which road you took to drive to McDonald’s, what kind of car you drive, and what (if anything) you ordered from McDonald’s while you were inside. It might also tell him where you parked in the parking lot, what music you were listening to in your car on the way in, which items you looked at on the menu and for how long, if you went to the washroom, which washroom you went into, how long you were in the washroom, and the exact location of every step you took inside the building.

Now, as soon as you leave the McDonald’s, the bumper sticker goes silent and stops being able to report information. But, let’s say next week you decide to go to the Grocery Store, and (again, unbeknownst to you), the Strange Man also has a deal with the Grocery Store. So as you’re driving into the grocery store’s parking lot, he pops out of another bush and goes to put another bumper sticker onto your car. But as he’s doing so, he notices the bumper sticker he’s already placed there a week ago that only he can see (unless you’ve done the car-equivalent of clearing your browser cache), and goes “ah, it’s Consumer #1287499290! I’ll make sure to file all of this new data under my records for Consumer #1287499290!”

You get out of your car and start to walk into the Grocery Store, but before you open the door, the Strange Man whispers to the Grocery Store: “Hey, I know you’re really trying to push your cereal right now, want me to make it more likely that this person buys some cereal from you?” and of course the Grocery Store agrees—this was the whole reason they let him set up that weird parking lot bush in the first place.

So the Strange Man runs around the store rearranging shelves. He doesn’t know your name (all the data he collects is strictly anonymous after all!) but he does know that you chose the cutesy toy for your happy meal at McDonald’s, so he changes all of the cereal packaging labels in the store to be pastel-coloured and covered in fluffy bears and unicorns. And maybe you were already going to the Grocery Store to buy cereal, and maybe you’re actually very happy to buy some cereal in a package that seems to cater specifically to your interests, but wouldn’t you feel at least a little violated if you found out that this whole process occurred without your knowledge? Especially if you felt like you could trust the people who owned the Grocery Store? They’re not really your friend or anything, but maybe you thought that they were compassionate and responsible members of the community, and part of the reason that you shopped at their store was to support that kind of business.

2/3. “Everyone does it, get over it.”

Commenter: [The marketing company working with CR] is an industry standard at this point, particularly for small businesses. Major partner of Shopify, a fairly big player. If you don't have a software development team, using industry standard solutions like these is the easy, safe option.

This sounds reasonable, but it actually makes it worse, not better, that Critical Role and Dropout are doing this. All this excuse tells me is that most businesses using Shopify (or at least the majority of those that use its recommended newsletter service) have a bush for the Strange Man set up in their parking lot.

Contracting with these businesses is certainly the easy option, but it is decidedly not the safe one.

3/3. “They need to do it for marketing reasons.”

Commenter 1: Email marketing tools like [this] use tracking to measure open and click rates. I get why you don’t want to be tracked, but it’s very hard to run a sizeable email newsletter without any user data.

Commenter 2: I work in digital marketing … every single email you get from a company has something similar to this. Guaranteed. This looks totally standard.

I am a web programmer by trade. It is my full time job. Tracking the metrics that Critical Role and Dropout are most likely interested in does not require embedding third-party tracking cookies in their fans’ web browsers. If you feel comfortable taking my word on that, feel free to skip the next section. If you’re skeptical (or if you just want to learn a little bit about how the internet works) please read on.

5/7. Tracking cookies are never necessary

We live in a technocracy. We live in a world in which technology design dictates the rules we live by. We don’t know these people, we didn’t vote for them in office, there was no debate about their design. But yet, the rules that they determine by the design decisions they make—many of them somewhat arbitrary—end up dictating how we will live our lives. —Latanya Sweeney

1/3. Definitions

A website is a combination of 2 computer programs. One of the two programs runs on your computer (laptop/desktop/phone/etc.) and the other runs on another computer somewhere in the world. The program running on your computer is the client program. The program running on the other computer is the server program.

A message sent from the client to the server is a request. A message sent from the server to the client is a response.

Cookies are bits of data that the server sends to the client in a response that the client then sends back to the server as an attachment to its subsequent requests.

A session is a series of sequential interactions between a client and server. When either of the two programs stops running (e.g. when you close a browser tab), the session is ended and any future interactions will take place in a new session.

A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator. You may also sometimes see the initialism URI—in which the ‘I’ stands for Identifier—but they effectively refer to the same thing, which is the place to find a specific thing on the internet. For our purposes, a “link” and a URL mean the same thing.

2/3. What do Critical Role and Dropout want?

These media companies (in my best estimation) are contracting with the digital advertising companies in order to get one or more of the following things:

Customer identity verification (between sessions)

Marketing campaign analytics

Customer preference profiles

Customer behaviour profiles

3/3. How can they get these things without tracking cookies?

Accounts. Dropout has an account system already. As Beacon is a thing now I have to assume Critical Role does as well, therefore this is literally already something they can do without any additional parties getting involved.

URL Query Parameters. So you want to know which of your social media feeds is driving the most traffic to your storefront. You could contract a third-party advertising company to do this for you, but as we have seen this might not be the ideal option. Instead, when posting your links to said feeds, attach a little bit of extra text to the end of the URL link so: becomes or or even These extra bits of information at the end of a URL are query parameters, and act as a way for the client to specify some instructions for the server when sending a request. In effect, a URL with query parameters allows the client to say to the server “I want this thing under these conditions”. The benefit of this approach is, of course, that you actually know precisely what information is being collected (the stuff in the parameters) and precisely what is being done with it, and you’ve avoided exposing any of your user data to third parties.

Internal data collection. Optionally associate a user’s email address with their preferences on the site. Prompt them to do this whenever they purchase anything or do any action that might benefit from having some saved preference, informing them explicitly when you do so and giving them the opportunity to opt-out.

Internal data collection. The same as above, but let the user know you are also tracking their movements while on your site. You can directly track user behaviour down to every single mouse movement if you really want to—again, no need to get an outside party involved to snoop on your fans. But you shouldn’t do that because it’s a little creepy!

At the end of the day, it will of course be more work to set up and maintain these things, and thus it will inevitably be more expensive—but that discrepancy in expense represents profit that these companies are currently making on the basis of violating their fans’ right to privacy.

6/7. Breaking the Law

The data subject shall have the right to object, on grounds relating to his or her particular situation, at any time to processing of personal data concerning him or her [...] The controller shall no longer process the personal data unless the controller demonstrates compelling legitimate grounds for the processing which override the interests, rights and freedoms of the data subject or for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims. Where personal data are processed for direct marketing purposes, the data subject shall have the right to object at any time to processing of personal data concerning him or her for such marketing, which includes profiling to the extent that it is related to such direct marketing. Where the data subject objects to processing for direct marketing purposes, the personal data shall no longer be processed for such purposes. At the latest at the time of the first communication with the data subject, the right referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2 shall be explicitly brought to the attention of the data subject and shall be presented clearly and separately from any other information. — General Data Protection Regulation, Art. 21

Nobody wants to break the law and be caught. I am not accusing anyone of anything and this is just my personal speculation on publicly-available information. I am not a lawyer; I merely make computer go beep-boop. If you have any factual corrections for this or any other section in this document please leave a comment and I will update the text with a revision note. Before I try my hand at the legal-adjacent stuff, allow me to wade in with the tech stuff.

Cookies are sometimes good and sometimes bad. Cookies from someone you trust are usually good. Cookies from someone you don’t know are occasionally bad. But you can take proactive measures against bad cookies. You should always default to denying any cookies that go beyond the “essential” or “functional” categorizations on any website of which you are remotely suspicious. Deny as many cookies as possible. Pay attention to what the cookie pop-ups actually say and don’t just click on the highlighted button: it is usually “Accept All”, which means that tracking and advertising cookies are fair game from the moment you click that button onward. It is illegal for companies to arbitrarily provide you a worse service for opting out of being tracked (at least it is in the EU and California).

It is my opinion (and again, I am not a legal professional, just a web developer, so take this with a grain of salt) that the links included in the newsletter emails violate both of these laws. If a user of the email newsletter residing in California or the EU wishes to visit any of the links included in said email without being tracked, they have no way of doing so. None of the actual endpoints are available in the email, effectively forcing the user to go through the third-party domain and submit themselves to being tracked in order to utilize the service they have signed up for. Furthermore, it is impossible to unsubscribe directly from within the email without also submitting to the third-party tracking.

[ID: A screenshot of the unsubscribe button in the CR newsletter alongside the page HTML which shows that the target destination for the anchor element is a trk.klclick.com page. End ID.]

As a brief aside: Opening the links in a private/incognito window is a good idea, but will not completely prevent your actions from being tracked by the advertiser. My recommendation: install uBlock Origin to warn you of tracking domains (it is a completely free and open-source project available on most major web browsers), and do not click on any links in either of these newsletters until they change their practices.

Now, it may be the case that the newsletters are shipped differently to those residing in California or the EU (if you are from either of these regions please feel free to leave a comment on whether or not this is the case), but ask yourself: does that make this any better? Sure, maybe then Critical Role and Dropout (or rather, the advertising companies they contract with) aren’t technically breaking the law, but it shows that the only thing stopping them from exploiting your personal data is potential legal repercussions, rather than any sort of commitment to your right to privacy. But I expect that the emails are not, in fact, shipping any differently in jurisdictions with more advanced privacy legislation—it wouldn’t be the first time a major tech giant blatantly flaunted EU regulations.

Without an additional browser extension such as uBlock Origin, a user clicking on the links in these emails may not even be aware that they have interacted with the advertising agency at all, let alone what sort of information that agency now has pertaining to them, nor do they have any ability to opt out of this data collection.

For more information about your right to privacy—something that only those living in the EU or California currently have—you can read explanations of the legislations at the following links (take note that these links, and all of the links embedded in this paper, are anchored directly to the destinations they purport to be, and do not sneakily pass through an additional domain before redirecting you):

7/7. Conclusion

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence. —Hanlon’s Razor

The important thing to make clear here is this: Even if Critical Role and Dropout are not directly selling or exploiting your personal data, they are still profiting off of it by contracting with, and receiving services from, companies whom I believe are. You may not believe me.

I do not believe that the management teams at Critical Role and Dropout are evil or malicious. Ignorance seems to be the most likely cause of this situation. Someone at some marketing company told them that this type of thing was helpful, necessary, and an industry standard, and they had no reason to doubt that person’s word. Maybe that person had no reason to doubt the word of the person who told them. Maybe there are a few people in that chain, maybe quite a few. I do not expect everyone running a company to be an expert in this stuff (hell, I’m nowhere close to being an expert in this stuff myself—I only happened to notice this at all because of a browser extension I just happened to have installed to block ads), but what I do expect is that they change their behaviour when the potential harms of their actions have been pointed out to them, which is why I have taken the time to write this.

PS. To the employees of Critical Role and Dropout

It is my understanding that these corporations were both founded with the intention of being socially responsible alongside turning a profit. By using services like the ones described above, you are, however unintentionally, profiting off of the personal datasets of your fans that are being compiled and exploited without their informed consent. You cannot say, implicitly or explicitly, “We’re not like those other evil companies! We care about more than just extracting as much money from our customers as possible!” while at the same time utilizing these services, and it is my hope that after reading this you will make the responsible choice and stop doing so.

Thank you for reading,

era

Originally Published: 23 May 2024

Last Updated: 28 May 2024

[syscultureis]

plural culture is feeling like you can't auto proxy due to your name *context: a server were in has a black list and were not sure if we have to censor our *cf fictives* last name* and just AAAAAAAAAAA O-O

I would ask about that, see if it's okay or not

And honestly the idea of someone having to censor their name is so weird to me. Like that's just your name

[gacha-incels]

Do you think that there is a possibility of Hypergryph splitting from Yostar for global publishing of Arknights and moving it to Gryphline instead? The traditional Chinese server got moved from Long Chen to Gryphline recently, and the new ambience synesthesia concert merch is on the Gryphline store rather than yostar’s. It may just be wishful thinking as yostar and hypergryph both own large shares of each other, but if there is a planned split from yostar would it potentially be a reason why Hypergryph hasn’t made a statement condemning Yostar Korea’s actions? Is there any precedent for publisher changes for a sort of legal clause preventing them from hurting each others’ image prior to the split being announced?

Gryphline is situated in Singapore, having what I guess you could call a “proxy” company for global business in Singapore is something a lot of companies in China have done for a while, increasingly within the past couple of years, for a multitude of reasons. Last time I checked Mihoyo had “Cognosphere” in Singapore, and when you buy gachabux in that game on servers outside China I believe your bill is from Cognosphere. The slave labor fast fashion site Shein has been operating under the Singapore-registered “Roadget Business” which some have speculated makes it easier to list in the USA. Yostar has HQ in Hong Kong which used to be the proxy location but according to this FT article-“Traditionally, Hong Kong was the choice for many such companies, said Kia Meng Loh, a senior partner at Dentons Rodyk. But with Beijing “flexing its muscles” in the semi-autonomous rival finance hub, Singapore is the obvious next choice, he said.” Hypergryph has multiple games coming out in the near future, I believe a regular (non-gacha) 3D anime mobile game and a 3D Arknights spinoff that will have a weapon gacha, and I think another game that’s TBD? They could be rearranging their internal structure due to this expansion if they’ve switched around their Chinese server already, but I’m unsure if this means they will completely split with Yostar who I believe publishes the US, Japanese and Korean servers.

Admittedly I can’t say I’m super well versed with this type of business and therefore it’s harder to really predict what they will do in the future, but I’ve been watching the situation since AK KR posted that notice to see what happens. I don’t have anything against the game itself, if it comes out that somehow their hands are completely tied in the situation or something I’ll post about that as well but I’m not holding my breath. In terms of my read on the situation, I think a huge message has ready been sent to the fans as to whom the company deems most profitable to listen to, regardless of any future handwringing over the situation. I would think between a woman posting extremely basic feminist thoughts on her personal twitter (equal pay etc) and enjoying the woman’s day google doodle years ago, and the Arknights KR/Yostar employee liking extremely violent fanart on the official twitter account and hanging out on extremist, misogynistic chat boards, that the employee would be seen as more of a problem and should have been the one disciplined. In reality, not only was the woman punished by having her work deleted but the official KR account posted that diatribe calling basic feminism a “dividing force” or whatever. This action and the following statement are absolutely not neutral, especially during a time a which violent misogyny has been increasingly ripping through South Korea as a whole but also gacha games specifically. In terms of PR I do think this is something Hypergryph could address, if HG doesn’t want to rock the boat with Yostar so to speak because of some upcoming split, it seems Yostar has already rocked the boat quite a bit with this action to begin with…

in terms of a main developer punishing the publisher, one example I can think of is Fate/Grand Order’s DelightWorks (after the sakura wars fuckup FGO is developed by “Lasengle” now, but when this happened it was DW) changing an in-game reward that FGO’s Korean publisher Netmarble gave out. In terms of them splitting as well, I’m still looking into it 👍 If anyone knows anything else feel free to reply or send me stuff and I’ll post it, sometimes I feel if I wait too long to reply to messages it comes across as rude lol so I’m not getting lost in like thesis tier research