#radioactive software

[vgadvisor]

[gamemories]

[donutboxers]

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[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week

⚡ - Goodbye Fossil Fuels, Hello Renewables: The Energizing News You Need

1. Fungi discovered that can eat plastic in just 140 days

Australian scientists have successfully used backyard mould to break down one of the world's most stubborn plastics — a discovery they hope could ease the burden of the global recycling crisis within years. 

It took 90 days for the fungi to degrade 27 per cent of the plastic tested, and about 140 days to completely break it down, after the samples were exposed to ultraviolet rays or heat. We really see a solution within five years, according to environmental scientist Paul Harvey, an expert on global plastic pollution.

2. Topeka Zoo welcomes new African Lion as female sprouts mane

The Topeka Zoo has welcomed a new African Lion to its pride, a male, as one of its females started to sprout a mane following the 2021 passing of the pride’s last male.

The Topeka Zoo and Conservation Center announced on Thursday, April 13, that Tatu, a 4-year-old African Lion, has arrived in the Capital City. He comes to Topeka from the Denver Zoo and his arrival marks a time of growth for the zoo.

3. This barber opens his shop on his day off for children with special needs – and all of their haircuts are free

On his day off, Vernon Jackson still goes to work, opening up his Cincinnati barber shop, Noble Barber and Beauty, for VIP clients: children with special needs. 

It's something he's done since 2021. "I was hearing so many horror stories that parents were going through with other barber shops and just the barbers or stylists having no patience with their child," Jackson told CBS News. "So I figured I would compromise by coming in on my day off so there were there would be no other barbers or stylists in the shop and I could give them the full attention that they need."

4. Renewables break energy records signalling ‘end of the fossil age’

Experts are calling time on the fossil age as new analysis shows wind and solar power produced a record amount of the world’s electricity last year.

The renewables generated 12 per cent of global electricity in 2022, up from 10 per cent the previous year, according to the report from clean energy think tank Ember. Last year, solar was the fastest-growing source of electricity for the 18th year in a row, rising by 24 per cent from 2021.

5. New nuclear medicine therapy cures human non-hodgkin lymphoma in preclinical model

A new nuclear medicine therapy can cure human non-Hodgkin lymphoma in an animal model A single dose of the radioimmunotherapy, was found to quickly eliminate tumour cells and extend the life of mice injected with cancerous cells for more than 221 days (the trial endpoint), compared to fewer than 60 days for other treatments and just 19 days in untreated control mice.

To explain it in simple terms because this is so freaking cool: There is a radioactive atom attached to a drug. The target cell eats the drug and the energy coming off of the radioactive atom kills the target cell

6. Colorado passes first US right to repair legislation for farmers

Colorado farmers will be able to legally fix their own equipment next year, with manufacturers including Deere & Co obliged to provide them with manuals for diagnostic software and other aids, under a measure passed by legislators in the first U.S. state to approve such a law.

Equipment makers have generally required customers to use their authorized dealers for repairs to machines such as combines and tractors.

7. When a softball player falls after hitting a grand slam, this is how her opponents reacted

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That's it for this week :)

This newsletter will always be free. If you liked this post you can support me with a small kofi donation:

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Also don’t forget to reblog

[deadlifeseries]

You know a funny thing to think about is if cybertronians have some like, goofy ass software/hardware limitations.

Like those clothes designed to confuse ai image recognition, would they just not be able to comprehend what they're looking at like some eldrich monstrosity?

Or I've seen videos where someone is speaking polish but it's pronounced like it's english and I'm just imagining that shit messing with their translation software.

Would their vision bug out if they're near something radioactive like a camera would?

Feel free to add onto this if anyone has more thoughts.

[sciderman]

I swear I have read your big post regarding Peter Parker's neurodivergence and why it is best to avoid labelling him, but he definitely has a weird brain

Can't find it and feel kinda sad about it cuz I deeply related to it

i know exactly which post you're talking about and i can't find it either! i've raked through my archive, and it's just - nowhere to be seen. i think tumblr eated it (it happens.)

really, tumblr's search functionality is so so useless, i don't know what to tell you. there are plenty of keywords i can search to find it that post, but the search functionality actually just does not work!

undiagnosed audhd-addled peter parker, my darling, my light, my life, my everything.

i think peter parker's such an interesting creature to write, because a lot of people will point to a certain behaviour about him and say "this is an autistic thing, right?" but a lot of those behaviours are actually, in my head, tied to certain traumas in peter's life too.

people say "oh, the food thing, peter's a picky eater because he's autistic" and yes, absolutely. but also it's tied to his trauma with his parents.

peter gets overstimulated, and yes, it's an autism thing, but also he was bitten by a radioactive spider and his senses are dialled to 11.

it's a similar case i've found for myself, too – where a lot of friends i have kind of diagnose me because i have autistic traits, but actually - i'm hesitant to claim the label or pursue diagnosis because, actually, i know where these certain behaviours come from, and they come from certain traumas. there are events i can pinpoint in my life and say "yep. that's where this behaviour comes from."

so - i think there's a lot of overlap between trauma and autistic traits. the brain is very complex! i think the reason for that overlap is maybe as simple as the fact that people with autism and people with trauma are both doing the same thing - developing behaviours to protect themselves or soothe themselves. so - i think it's nice to be able to see a character like peter parker, who may or may not be autistic, but recognise behaviours in him and see yourself in him.

people who go undiagnosed for whatever reason - people who are really good at masking - so good, in fact, that they have no idea they might be on the spectrum - everyone and anyone at all can look at peter parker and recognise themselves. because i think we discredit the thought that every single brain does the same thing! develops certain behaviours in order to survive. every brain has that same software - we've just all been faced with different hardships that we need to overcome, and that's were all the differences come in.

autism is a spectrum, i guess - everyone falls into it to some degree. and i think events in your life probably push you along on it. but i don't know, i didn't study brain science. probably what i'm saying is very stupid and uninformed. of course there's brain chemistry involved. but i know people in my life living with autism and certain events in their life have exacerbated certain behaviours or made coping with it a lot more difficult. so maybe trauma is a catalyst.

[demifiendrsa]

Valve has released a 25th anniversary update for Half-Life.

Half-Life is free to own on Steam until November 20, 2023 10AM PT / 1PM ET.

Overview

BRAND NEW INTERVIEWS WITH THE HL1 DEV TEAM!

We got the band back together to celebrate this anniversary, and we invited the fine people at Secret Tape to film it all happening. Getting together after all this time was the perfect opportunity to revisit the game as it existed in its earliest forms, and to talk about how and why it eventually took shape the way it did. Check out the film to see what it was like to be a part of the team, way back then.

THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY UPDATE FOR HALF-LIFE INCLUDES:

HALF-LIFE UPLINK

Originally released as a CD exclusive for magazines and hardware manufacturers, this mini-campaign was built by the Half-Life team right after the game went gold. As this was many people's first experience with Half-Life, we thought it was finally time to bundle it with the main game—no sound card purchase necessary.

4 NEW MULTIPLAYER MAPS

Built by Valve level designers, these new maps push the limits of what's possible in the Half-Life engine.

CONTAMINATION

Two-foot-thick steel doors block off access to this contaminated waste facility, which has questionable scientific goals at best. Strap on a gluon gun and roast all intruders.

POOL PARTY

Enjoy a relaxing stay at this abandoned Xen outpost built around a cluster of soothing healing pools free-floating in space. How do you breathe here? It doesn't matter!

DISPOSAL

Processing Area 3, a massive radioactive waste plant gone quiet. Tons of room for you and your colleagues to do experiments with a Tau Cannon or some hand grenades.

ROCKET FRENZY

The creaking weight of this decaying orbital satellite launch facility somehow feels familiar… If we could switch on the oxygen lines, power, and fuel, we might just be able to light this candle.

UPDATED GRAPHICS SETTINGS

Play the game the way it looked in 1998, but on a modern monitor.

Widescreen field of view!

Option to disable texture smoothing on the GL renderer!

Lighting fixes including the long-lost GL Overbright support!

Software rendering on Linux! Crisp colors, animated water, and unfiltered textures!

CONTROLLER AND STEAM NETWORKING SUPPORT

A proper gamepad config out of the box!

Added support for Steam Networking! Invite your friends or join games instantly with no fuss.

STEAM DECK SUPPORT!

We finally put our game through our own “Verified” tests, and... we failed super hard. So we fixed it! After re-testing the game, Half-Life gets to officially wear the green checkmark.

Now you can play Half-Life on the best handheld gaming computer in the world in glorious 800p with improved controls and UI.

UI SCALING SUPPORT FOR HIGHER RESOLUTIONS

The entire UI has been reworked to scale at larger screen sizes. We built most of this stuff for 640x480 CRTs and apparently some of you have upgraded since then.

RESTORED CONTENT

We brought back the classic Valve logo video with its iconic music and reskinned the menu to match the 1998 build.

IVAN THE SPACE BIKER AND PROTO-BARNEY

After all this time we finally shipped the original heroes from the alpha builds of Half-Life, available as multiplayer skins!

AS WELL AS THESE RARELY-SEEN EXTRAS!

In 1999, Valve released a CD called Half-Life: Further Data at retail stores, and we're finally including much of that content.

THREE MULTIPLAYER MAPS

Double Cross

Rust Mill

Xen DM

TWO MP PLAYER MODELS

The Half-Life: Further Data CD also included some multiplayer skins made by the original team; we've brought back this incredible skeleton (now with tintable eyes!) and fan-favorite Too Much Coffee Man.

DOZENS OF SPRAYS

While playing a bunch of multiplayer matches we kept wanting more sprays... So we grabbed several megabytes of them from the Further Data release!

BUG FIXES AND CHANGE NOTES

New Content

Now Verified on the Steam Deck (and our native Linux runtime has been set as the default).

Half-Life: Uplink — the original standalone Half-Life demo — has been added to the game, and is accessible through the "New Game" menu.

Added four all-new Half-Life Deathmatch maps: contamination, pool_party, disposal, and rocket_frenzy

Added three old Half-Life Deathmatch maps formerly available only on the "Half-Life: Further Data" CD: doublecross, rust_mill, xen_dm.

Added Ivan the Space Biker, Prototype Barney, Skeleton, and Too Much Coffee Man as player models to Half-Life Deathmatch.

Added dozens of new sprays formerly available only on the "Half-Life: Further Data" CD.

Added support for Steam Networking, allowing easy multiplayer via Steam's Join Game and Invite features.

Added support for Steam Friends Rich Presence, allowing your friends to follow your journey through Black Mesa.

Nostalgia

Brought back the original Valve Intro video. Can be skipped with the "-novid" launch command.

Updated main menu to a design inspired by the game's original 1998 main menu.

Changed the default models to the original (non "HD") models.

Gameplay Changes

Improved physics for throwing grenades.

Improved randomness for initial spawn points in multiplayer.

Improved satchel charge controls: primary fire now always throws a new satchel, and secondary fire always detonates.

Fixed push-able entity movement being based on framerate.

Fixed players with high framerates freezing in place on death in multiplayer.

Fixed some cases where the player could get stuck in place on level transitions.

Fixed some cases where characters would interrupt important dialogue with their "greetings" dialogue.

Fixed weapon view-bob angles.

Fixed red barrels at the start of Surface Tension not launching as intended.

Fixed Snarks attacking FL_WORLDBRUSH entities (such as func_walls).

Fixed players sometimes failing to deploy a snark while crouching and looking down.

Fixed certain convars ("pausable" and "sv_maxspeed") being set to incorrect values when entering a singleplayer game after a multiplayer game.

Fixed singleplayer auto-aim setting being changed when entering a multiplayer game that disallows auto-aim.

Fixed the flashlight HUD showing empty after loading a savegame.

Fixed rockets in CONTENTS_SKY not always detonating.

Fixed incorrect bullet impact sounds for NPCs.

Fixed gauss gun making a loud static noise if it was charged across level transitions.

Fixed a crash in mods that display keybinds in their UI.

Fixed singleplayer weapons not auto-switching away when exhausted (grenades / snarks / satchels / etc)

Fixed interpolation artifacts when animated models are moved by other entities.

Fixed some buffer overflow exploits.

UI Changes

Main-menu background and buttons have been reskinned, and now scale based upon screen resolution without stretching, supporting background image layouts up to 3840x1600.

In-Game HUD now uses double or triple sized sprites when playing at higher resolutions.

UI dialogs and in-game fonts now scale to improve readability at high screen resolutions.

In-Game HUD HEV suit display has been shifted to the left of the screen, and no longer changes position at larger screen resolutions.

Added an "Enable texture filtering" setting.

Added an "Allow widescreen Field of View" setting to correct non-anamorphic FOVs, for widescreen and ultrawide displays.

Re-organized all the Settings screens to improve legibility, and support controller navigation.

Updated the Pause menu to be aware of the current gameplay mode.

The default server name and multiplayer player name are now based on the player's Steam Persona.

The Steam platform menu has been removed, now that all its features are in Steam itself.

Fixed application icon rendering incorrectly when using the software renderer.

Fixed player and spray images not updating their coloring on the settings screen.

Removed the now very unnecessary "Low video quality. Helps with slower video cards." setting.

Input Changes

Improved support for keyboard and controller navigation everywhere.

Added "Lower Input Latency" option: Synchronizes the CPU and GPU to reduce the time between input and display output.

Fixed issues that caused jerky mouse / joystick input.

(We basically rewrote it all - if you've got a custom Steam Input controller configuration, you should rebuild it from our newly published Official Configuration).

Multiplayer Balancing

Increased the 357 damage from 40 → 50.

Hive Hand reload time has been reduced from 0.5s → 0.3s per shot, and it will be selected at higher priority than the pistol on pickup.

MP5 now always starts it with full ammo when picked up.

Players no longer drop empty weapons, and any that are dropped are reloaded by what's in the dying player's backpack.

Improved client-side prediction to reduce "ghost shots". Like Counter-Strike, consider hitboxes and not just bounding boxes for hits on the client.

Fixed network predicted crowbar swing damage being incorrect.

Rendering

Added supported for UI Sprites and Texture files larger than 256x256.

Added support for UI Font special render modes: "blur" and "additive".

Added setting to turn off texture filtering when using the OpenGL renderer.

Default resolution is now based on the resolution of the desktop, instead of a 640x480 window.

Default gamma has been decreased from 2.5 → 2.2, now that we aren't all playing on CRTs.

Software renderer will now correctly filter out incompatible resolutions, unless there is only 1 resolution available on the display.

Restored OpenGL overbright support.

Fixed fullscreen software renderer crashing on systems that don't support 16-bit color.

Fixed software renderer being stretched when using widescreen resolutions.

Fixed skyboxes and sky color incorrectly carrying over when transitioning maps in multiplayer.

Fixed the game appearing too dark after modifying video settings.

Fixed MSAA in windowed mode.

Fixed mipmap rendering on studio models.

Fixed gluon gun sprite rendering in multiplayer.

Fixed gluon gun sinusoidal noise being incorrect.

Various optimizations to support the newly increased engine limits.

OpenGL optimizations for the Steam Deck.

Engine Improvements for Mod Makers

Increased maximum limit of dynamic sound channels from 8 → 32.

Increased maximum limit of sentences in the sentences.txt file from 1536 → 2048.

Increased maximum number of entities (MAX_EDICTS) from 900 → 1200.

Increased MAX_PACKET_ENTITIES increased from 256 → 1024.

Increased MAX_GLTEXTURES from 4800 → 10000.

Increased software renderer geometry limits: max spans 3000 → 6000, max surfaces 2000 → 4000, and max edges 7200 → 14400.

Cycler and func_button entities can now be the entity target for scripted_sentence entities, and are allowed to speak in multiplayer.

Incorporated func_vehicle entity support from Counter-Strike, for mod-makers to use. Full SDK update will come later, but level designers can use it now.

Native Linux Build

Added support for the software renderer.

Improved font rendering.

Many stability and behavior fixes.

Other

Localization files updated.

Miscellaneous security fixes.

Notes

The previous version of the game has been archived to a publicly visible Beta branch named "steam_legacy", with the description "Pre-25th Anniversary Build." If a mod or feature is behaving in an unexpected way, you may need to run this archived build until the issue is resolved in the default build.

We now consider this anniversary version of Half Life to be the definitive version, and the one we'll continue to support going forward. Therefore, we'll be reducing the visibility of Half Life: Source on the Steam Store. We know Half-Life: Source's assets are still being used by the Source engine community, so it'll remain available, but we'll be encouraging new Half-Life players to play this version instead.

WALLPAPERS

Celebrate 25 years of Half-life by decorating your desktop and mobile phone.

[codes]

your strawpage looks so good OMG how did you make it look so pretty and clean..it's the best one i've seen!!

thank you, you are my heart 💙

but srsly, thank you so much!!! this was the first time i ever messed around with strawpage so idk if i could give legitimate advice if ur looking for it but i treated it as a much more flexible carrd. the text editor is the most frustrating thing about it, hated every second using it but i had more fun with the layers and plopped pixels wherever it looked empty. for the other pictures, i made them transparent myself and just used transparent edge fading in lunapic so the edges looked fuzzy instead of a straight edge (also adjusted the opacity and brightness in strawpage itself). thats basically it.... i feel like you could do a looooot of interesting things with strawpage if the text editor wasnt a radioactive waste dump and if you were more savvy with editing software, which im not

[razzberrydazz]

📌Pinned post📌

Call me Razz! He/they, Mid-20s, American, BPD.

🔞This blog contains adult-themed content at times, viewer discretion advised 🔞

I am willing to do art requests for anyone who provides proof that they have donated to the fundraisers and charities I share.

Requests to share new fundraisers are currently closed due to the number of people reaching out to me - I will focus on the ones that I have already reached out to and shared previously.

My shared fundraisers use the tag #razz's fundraiser list

If I've unknowingly shared 'ai' (ie generative ai plagiarism software) art please let me know and I'll take it down! I'm very against the use of generative ai.

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Fandom, personal tag, and OC related miscellany under the cut.

Fandoms/media I enjoy include but are not limited to:

Dragon Age

Baldur's Gate 3

Dishonored

Elder Scrolls (Specifically Skyrim and ESO)

Dungeons and Dragons and other TTRPGs

Legend of Zelda

Splatoon

ATLA and Legend of Korra

Soul Eater

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood

Black Butler (manga)

Gangsta (manga)

Hatsune Miku (Vocaloid)

Hades (1 & 2) by Supergiant Games

Persona series (specifically Persona 5)

Cyberpunk 2077

The Magnus Archives (podcast)

Wicked (musical)

Sweeney Todd (musical)

Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 (Musical)

Hadestown (musical)

Arcane (TV series)

Hannibal (TV series)

Saw (movie franchise)

DC Comics (Specifically Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, and Wonder Woman)

My Ao3 (some of it is Explicit🔞)

My Bluesky (also may be Explicit🔞)

My tags

My art - #razz's art, #razzdazz art, #razz draws

My writing - #razz writes, #razz's writing

My rambles - #razz rambles #razz's unsolicited additions

Main OCs (Original Characters)

Tiffany - originally a D&D NPC in my first homebrew campaign (Heart of Atlantis my beloved), then I grew to love her too much to leave her alone.

Tiffany Mereign, ie Tiff, ie Theophania Athaliah Wilhelmina Fen’U-darah Mereign the Third, Queen of Atlantis, formerly Empress of the Atlantean Empire. Sea elf royalty, born on December 27th, took the throne with her father as Regent after the assassination of her mother Larethire II. She fully took the crown and throne in 1139-1140ce after killing her father Elias for his numerous crimes including the discovery that he was responsible for her mother's death.

The D&D campaign Tiff first appeared in took place in 1139-40ce where the player character party helped Tiff revive a dead goddess and use her power to kill the usurper king Elias and end a war that threatened their people. Said goddess cursed Tiff to die a thousand deaths (not by her own hand) before she can finally rest, all because Tiff rejected the offer of ascension to godhood.

Tiff handled her immortality curse... badly, to say the least. At least she met and married her loving supportive wives Cassie and Anya who help her with her chronic pain and substance addictions. Tiff is addicted to a substance known as heartstone, which is magically radioactive, which means Tiff has to wear protective clothing so that she doesn't irradiate everyone around her.

Rana - Ranarox La'Rouge, originally started as a Haunted One Bard/Rogue in a Curse of Strahd campaign, then got repurposed and fleshed out as my Dark Urge/Durge OC for Baldur's Gate 3. Raised in a circus and wooed by every pretty face they see, Rana does everything in their power to fend off the Red that swirls around their vision that brings the Urge to kill. If their eyes turn red and you are within melee range, it is already too late for you to run away.

Rana's 'canon' storyline has them falling in love with Shadowheart and Lae'Zel, finding a way to spare Minthara despite being tortured by her, rediscovering their past as the leader of the Bhaalist cult, and saving their daughter Mala from being sacrificed by Orin the Red. They found Mala (instead of Yenna) wandering around Rivington. Jaheira recognized her first as she had been acting as Mala's foster mother, since Rana had smuggled Mala away years prior to protect her from the cult (Rana was a victim of familial abuse and SA and Mala is a result of said abuse whom Rana vowed to protect from repeating the cycle of abuse). Rediscovering their progeny put them both in danger as Orin stalked the party and stole that which Rana only just got back.

Rana resorted to killing Orin to protect their child, and renounced Bhaal within the heart of his temple. Bhaal stole back their very blood and life force, disowning them. Rana only lives on because Jergal claimed them as his champion, and while the Red is never fully gone, they finally see clearly for the first time. Before disowning their murder god father, Rana's blood was black deathly ichor of the unholy god, but after Jergal claimed them, their blood became red full of life and vigor.

Ina - (Belongs to my friend Poe, I just happen to be obsessed with her and am the leader of Ina's fanclub) Ina the Kobold is a chaos entity, a zealous oath of glory paladin devoted to a deified Hatsune Miku. She came into existence after my friend rolled up a completely randomized character for a D&D game, and quickly speared her way into my heart with her wacky antics and hilarious zeal for murder.

A little known tidbit about Ina is that she's a sleeper agent, Ina is not her full name. Her true name is Ignition, which is the trigger word to temporarily switch her from chaotic stupid kobold to calculated smart dragonborn. Her Ignition alter ego is scarily competent compared to Ina. She was created in a secret magical experiment and hatched from a magically irradiated dragonborn egg. Ignition voluntarily switches back into Ina the minute whatever mission or danger she was dealing with is complete, as Ina takes far less mental energy to exist.

She is made as a contingency plan for Tiffany, so that in the case she as the queen ever goes off the rails and goes against her own morals, Ina will be there to kill her and bring her back to her senses.

Erinyes - My demonsona as it were, a self insert that morphed kind of into their own entity. They're a cheese-loving fury demon called Erin-yes. I often use them as a chaotic mini-me, and a personification of my silliness and rage. Sometimes I'll shove them into things with varied success. In D&D they'd be a tiefling or cambion as a player character, but as an NPC they've appeared as a literal erinyes devil that tried to sell cheese to the players and tormented them at various points.

Claire - My rage-filled mixed-drow religiously traumatized pyromaniac death cleric. She was raised in a cult to a goddess that stole the name of other gods - Adrestia Andraste, the Lady in White, a homebrew drow goddess of death and war and motherly retribution. Claire's drow mother was the high priestess of the Lady, and in order to become the next high priestess, Claire had to kill her mother in a ritual battle.

Claire walked over enchanted coals, was baptized in holy fire, and slayed a dragon to become the next high priestess of the cult; doing so made her fireproof to everything but her own goddess's flames. On her back they etched an intricate tattoo that brands her as her goddess's chosen, which also allows her goddess to cause her searing pain when she does something she doesn't like. A proverbial shock collar.

Claire is bitter and jaded and tries to escape the cult many times, and eventually discovers the truth of her goddess's identity theft and devotes herself to the goddess's sister Lotte (the victim of the identity theft) instead. Lotte is a drow goddess of fate, death, craftsmanship, and magic, and gives Claire the power to mend and tear the weave of magic itself. Claire is a chosen of both goddesses, one willingly, one unwillingly, and her mission is to break her ties to the Lady in White for good.

Frownless - Ah my favorite eldritch edgelord. Frownless, also called The Frownless or Freddie the Frownless or even Thotarella/Thot by my dnd group (an inside joke), is a shapeshifter known as a shadowless - he doesn't cast a shadow on the ground. Shadowless are akin to eldritch changelings that are descendants of fey celestials exiled to a demiplane. They appear as orange-tinged red haired elven people with four yellow eyes.

Frownless in particular is a notable specimen as he got exiled for killing his cousin in a fit of rage, then made a name for himself as an assassin and overall nuisance. He was hired by Tiff's father to kill her but failed miserably and ended up working for her in a weird toxic relationship instead. He tried dropping a chandelier on her and missed. He loves catfishing people since he's a shapeshifter. I love using him as a punching bag. He ends up Tiff's drug dealer at various points and brings out the worst in her.

OT - My old self insert that morphed into their own entity. This one in particular is tied to their dragon age dalish elf iteration as my main Inquisitor Lavellan. OT is a dalish mage Inquisitor and lover of Josephine Montilyet. Originally named Overtaker as a funny play on Undertaker, and then shortened it to OT for brevity, and even made it stand for different names involving the initials O and T. I even used them the first time I ever played D&D in a oneshot where they ended up dying via magic item enchanted to cast power word kill!

I have a lot of OCs but only a few I routinely use, which as of making this post consist of the above. Other OCs include Lyn, Vrei'Dara, Billie, Domi, Inanna, Dela, Johanna, Jorster, Francis, Lotte, Minaeve, Jamboree, Riff, Kestrel, Grimshaw, Veronica, Atlantea, Styx, Judith, and many others.

Others TBA

[edit 11/13/2024] - {I have streamlined this pinned post slightly, added some stuff, removed a few things}

Anyways enjoy my blog I guess? I'm so wordy at times, I know this is a whole ass wall of text to scroll through. You get an appreciative pat on the shoulder for reading through all this.

[yo-its-starblaze]

the references for my spidersona and her primary counterpart, Seafoam and Clash Spider respectively. more information about these two is under the cut

In Earth-92837, Peter Parker and the Symbiotes mysteriously disappeared following an intense confrontation in downtown New York. Following the cleanup of the event, crime began to steadily rise, and people wondered if a new hero would ever take the place of Spider-Man...

Morre couldn’t have cared less at the time about anything Spider-Man - she was just a tired reporter at the Daily Bugle outmaneuvering J. Jonah at every turn by looking into any leads far before he could suggest them.

Though brilliant, Morre was lonely. With no living family or any friends, she spent most of her evenings contemplatively wandering the beach…

…until a symbiote she’d mistaken for a sea slug changed her life.

Meanwhile, Morre was seeing Michael Malavia, a brilliant software engineer at Oscorp. Michael was once an easygoing and patient guy - but when the company was involved in a smuggling ring, a headline Morre wrote accidentally caused him to lose his job. Blamed for being involved in the smuggling ring, Michael was fired so Oscorp could save face. He was furious - and understandably so.

Sometime after losing his job, Michael was bitten by a radioactive spider. The spider’s venom reacted with his deep and bitter resentment, mutating him into the highly aggressive Clash Spider. Now, Michael is a vicious renegade hellbent on destroying Oscorp - and taking Morre down with the corporation...

[vgadvisor]

[mariacallous]

When Russian troops seized control of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant last year, following the invasion of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky called it “a declaration of war” against Europe. Others warned that Russia’s reckless seizure of the plant could trigger a nuclear disaster to rival Chernobyl’s 1986 radiological accident.

Their fears seemed well-founded when, on the night of the invasion, sensors began reporting sudden spikes in radiation levels in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ)—a 1,000-square-mile forested zone around the plant where radioactive soil from the 1986 disaster had settled.

Forty-two sensors recorded spikes that night and the next morning—some at levels hundreds of times higher than normal. The State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine (SNRIU) eased concerns that nuclear material had leaked from the plant, however, when it said the spikes were likely due to “resuspension” of radioactive soil stirred up by Russian military vehicles—an explanation widely accepted by many nuclear experts and the media.

But a group of environmental radiation experts disputes this conclusion. In a paper published in June by the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, they detail why there’s no way soil resuspension could have caused the spikes and speculate that interference from an electronic warfare weapon was behind the surge instead.

Now, in what is becoming a deepening mystery, noted cybersecurity researcher Ruben Santamarta says he believes something else was the cause—data manipulation, possibly through a cyberattack.

Based on patterns he found in the spikes—batches of sensors geographically distant from one another recorded spikes at the exact same moment, while sensors closer to them recorded no elevation—he thinks a remote hacker or someone with direct access to the server processing the data manipulated the numbers.

After an extensive review of the data and other materials, Santamarta says he finds it hard to believe the explanation about soil resuspension was ever considered plausible. And he is surprised that authorities never bothered to examine the data for patterns or, if they did, kept that information from the public. He thinks those patterns discount theories about interference from electronic weapons, and he plans to present his findings at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas next week.

“I have collected a significant amount of evidence by different means, including OSINT [open source intelligence], hardware and software reverse engineering, and data analysis of the radiation levels,” he says “I think it is enough to seriously consider the possibility that these radiation spikes were fabricated.”

If Santamarta is right, his finding could have far-reaching implications for radiation-monitoring systems around the world, says a former nuclear safety official who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely about the matter. If the data was manipulated, it could undermine trust in radiation-monitoring systems or change how data from them gets reported publicly. Data from radiation monitors is often distributed publicly in near real time so that governments and nuclear experts can actively monitor conditions in populated cities and around nuclear facilities. But this creates a risk that hackers or others could alter data to trigger public alarm before proper verification can occur.

Monitoring Networks

Russian troops entered the CEZ early on the morning of February 24 last year because it’s the shortest and most direct route from Russia-friendly Belarus to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital 80 miles south of the plant. But some feared Russia’s interest in Chernobyl was more than strategic. They worried the military could cause a disaster using radioactive waste at the plant or drum up false claims that Ukraine was building a dirty bomb there.

After a day-long battle with Ukrainian troops and three hours of negotiations to establish parameters for Russia’s occupation of the plant, Russia took control of Chernobyl’s facilities. At 8:40 pm local time, 10 minutes after the SNRIU indicated that Russia had formally taken control of the plant, seven monitoring stations in the CEZ suddenly began reporting elevated radiation levels. The readings ranged from two to five times the normal radiation rate each sensor had historically detected, but one station showed a level eight times higher than normal.

Ukraine has two networks of sensors to monitor radiation at Chernobyl. A set of 10 sensors inside the plant is operated by the state-owned nuclear energy company Energoatom. A second network, known as a radiation-monitoring and early-warning system (the Ukrainian acronym for it is ASKRS), consists of about 68 battery-powered GammaTracer detectors spread throughout the CEZ (with a few positioned outside it). This network is managed by the State Specialized Enterprise Ecocenter (Ecocenter, for short), under the State Agency for the Management of the Exclusion Zone.

These detectors continuously record ambient gamma radiation levels in the CEZ, process the readings to calculate an average, then transmit that figure once an hour (or every two minutes in an emergency) to a base station in the Ecocenter’s office in the town of Chernobyl, about 10 miles from the plant. The data is transmitted via radio over a dedicated channel using a SkyLink protocol.

The data then gets analyzed and processed with DataExpert software and a custom Ecocenter program before being posted to the Ecocenter’s website. It’s also distributed to the SNRIU, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—the UN body that monitors nuclear programs around the world—and other governments.

The data can be difficult to find on Ecocenter’s site, so a Ukrainian nonprofit called SaveEcoBot scrapes it and republishes the data on its own site for easier access. It’s these two sites that many people around the world were using to track radiological conditions at Chernobyl in real time on the day of the invasion, and that triggered alarm when people began posting screenshots of them on Twitter.

The Spikes

Radiation levels at Chernobyl are measured as “ambient dose equivalent” rates—essentially the amount of energy, due to ionizing radiation, that the human body would absorb if exposed to the level of radiation a sensor detects. Dose rates are reported as microSieverts per hour (aka μSv/h).

Following the first spikes at 8:40 pm on February 24, 2022, the next cluster of spike occurred at 9:50 pm, when 10 different sensors reported elevated radiation levels, as well as one that had been in the earlier cluster.

More cluster spikes occurred at 10:20 pm, 11:30 pm, and 11:50 pm, involving nine, six, and five sensors, respectively, and then the pattern switched. From 12:01 am to 12:20 am on February 25, there were several spikes involving just one or two sensors each time. Then at 9:20 am, 10 sensors spiked simultaneously, including one that increased nearly 600 times its normal radiation reading. At 10:40 am, nine sensors spiked. And at 10:50 am, the last spike occurred with a single sensor. This sensor spiked three times in all. Called Pozharne Depo, its baseline reading of 1.75 μSv/h spiked to 8.79 (at 8:40 pm), 9.46 (at 9:50 pm), and 32.2 (at 10:50 am the next morning). The sensors may have continued spiking, but the Ecocenter website stopped updating its data.

Like other European countries, Finland carefully tracks Ukraine’s radiation levels. According to Tero Karhunen, a senior inspector with STUK, Finland’s radiation and nuclear safety authority, if ambient dose rates rose above 100 μSv/h for more than 48 hours, it would generally trigger an evacuation of affected regions.

Two sensors nearly reached that threshold at 93 μSv/h, but then they and all the other sensors stopped reporting updates—or at least the Ecocenter stopped posting updated data to its website. It’s not clear why this stopped. The invasion caused internet disruptions in Ukraine, but this would not have prevented the sensors from transmitting their data to the base station; it would only have prevented the Ecocenter from publishing new data to its website.

Yet the Ecocenter did continue to publish new data for some sensors. Shortly after the sensors spiked, online updates of data from 30 of them stopped; but data for the remaining ones continued until they stopped updating at different times. Most of the sensor data was updating online again the following Monday, February 28—at which point all the sensors were reporting normal radiation levels. But by March 3, Ecocenter had stopped posting data altogether.

This may be because Russian troops began stealing and damaging equipment at Chernobyl—including the server and software Ecocenter used to receive and process sensor data. In a French TV news interview after Russian troops left Chernobyl at the end of March, Mykola Bespalyi, head of the Ecocenter’s central analytical lab, showed an empty cabinet that had housed the server, explaining that the center had lost its connection to the radiation sensors in the CEZ. Data transmissions only restarted in June when the IAEA and others helped Ukraine restore the radiation-monitoring system.

Official Response

The spikes were initially attributed to shelling. In a news story published about an hour after the spikes began, an unnamed Ukrainian official said Russian shelling had hit a “radioactive waste repository” and implied that radiation levels had risen as a result. Anton Herashenko, advisor to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, then warned that the attack could send radioactive dust into Belarus and the EU.

But the next morning, on February 25, the SNRIU said the cause of the spikes couldn’t be determined. Later it released a statement saying Ecocenter experts attributed the spikes to topsoil stirred up—or “resuspended”—by military equipment. At that point, media attention turned to ongoing battles elsewhere in Ukraine, and talk of the spikes dropped.

Not everyone bought the explanation, however. Karine Herviou, deputy director general in charge of nuclear safety at France’s Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety, told reporters there was no coherent explanation for the spikes, though her group later issued a statement saying they didn’t have any information “to confirm or refute” the SNRIU’s assertion about soil resuspension.

Bruno Chareyron, a nuclear physics engineer and laboratory director for France’s nongovernmental Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity, also scoffed at the soil explanation. Instead, he told reporters at the time that the spikes might be the result of interference—from a cyberattack.

If you look at a map showing the places where the results had been increasing, “there was no logic” to the soil suspension explanation, he now says. And given that Russia had been prolifically hacking Ukrainian systems at the time of the invasion, it was reasonable to wonder whether a cyberattack had resulted in false data.

Hours after the SNRIU’s statement, the IAEA released its own. Apparently accepting that the radiation spikes were real, the agency said the elevated radiation levels posed no threat to the public. Oddly, though, it referred to the spikes as topping out at 9.46 μSv/h—a figure it received from Ukraine’s nuclear regulator. But the agency only had to look at the Ecocenter’s website to see that some sensors were reporting levels magnitudes higher than this at 58 and 65 μSv/h.

Only some of the GammaTracers are considered “regulatory” sensors—meaning the SNRIU is required to submit data from them to the IAEA. At least three of these regulatory sensors were among those reporting exceptionally high data spikes. But it appears that the SNRIU didn’t provide data from those sensors to the IAEA. It’s not clear why; the SNRIU didn’t respond to inquiries from WIRED.

Notably, there was chatter on Twitter at the time, among nuclear and radiation experts, that the spike data might be erroneous. But if the sensor readings being reported by Ecocenter on its website were accurate, then contrary to the IAEA’s statement that the spikes posed no threat to the public, “this would have been a very dangerous situation for the people in the area,” Chareyron says.

Why did the IAEA only reference the lower radiation spikes in its statement and not the higher ones? The IAEA, after asking WIRED to submit questions in writing, didn’t respond to this or any of the other detailed questions submitted to it, including whether it attempted to investigate the veracity and cause of the spikes.

In the US, the National Security Council followed events in Chernobyl closely but did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the mystery around the radiation spikes.

Soil Suspension, Debunked

As noted, Mike Wood, a professor of applied ecology at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom who studies environmental radiation, including in the CEZ, examined the spike data with four colleagues and ruled out soil resuspension as the cause.

Wood says there isn’t enough radiation in the CEZ soil to cause the level of spikes that occurred—not to mention that military vehicles traveled primarily on asphalt and hardened dirt roads, not in places where loose soil would have been stirred up.

“Even with conservative assumptions, you cannot get anything like the rises that we’ve seen in those dose rate spikes,” he says.

What’s more, experts told WIRED that if soil resuspension were the cause, the radiation levels should have dropped gradually over days as the soil and dust resettled. Instead, many of the sensors were back to reporting normal levels within 30 minutes to a couple of hours after reporting a spike, despite heavy military traffic continuing in the region.

There was also no uniformity or expected patterns to the spikes. Instead of sensors spiking at different times as radiation levels near them rose, multiple sensors in different locations spiked at exactly the same time. Some sensors reported spikes 12 to 38 times their baseline level, others 300 times above baseline. The sensor that spiked nearly 600 times its base level was 18 miles southeast of the plant, located along what Wood calls a “minor” road where “there is no logical explanation as to why there would be significant military activity.”

Olegh Bondarenko, director of the Ecocenter until 2011, agrees with Wood’s conclusions and calls the air suspension explanation “fantastical.” But he doesn’t think Wood’s alternate theory—that the spikes were caused by interference from electronic warfare weapons—was the cause either.

Electronic Warfare

Electronic warfare weapons are used as jamming devices to hinder or block an enemy’s communications and signals.

But Karhunen says Finnish researchers conducted limited tests on the effects of electronic warfare weapons on radiation sensors and found that they could also cause sensors to report false readings up to 30 μSv/h—300 times the base levels for the test systems.

William Radasky, former chair of an International Electrotechnical Commission subcommittee on electromagnetic weapons and their effects, says interference can cause data spikes and, depending on a weapon’s strength, permanently damage sensors. If a weapon were close to a radiation detector when it was fired, “they would probably kill the electronics used with the sensor,” says Radasky, who has conducted research for the US government and military on effects of electromagnetic pulses on defense systems and the electric grid. The pulses wouldn’t interfere with the sensors’ ability to detect radiation, but they would affect the electronics that are used to translate the radiation signals from the sensor into saved data and then transmit that data to the Ecocenter. It’s worth noting that the IAEA visited Chernobyl after Russian soldiers left and reported that many radiation-monitoring stations were damaged and out of service. The agency never identified which sensors or explained the nature of the damage, however.

But if such weapons can produce spikes in the sensor data, that still doesn’t explain the anomalous nature of the spikes, Radasky and Bondarenko say. There were no reports of other equipment in the CEZ being affected by electromagnetic weapons. And radiation sensors in other parts of Ukraine where fighting occurred—and presumably where electromagnetic weapons would likely have been used—did not experience spikes.

Most significantly, sensors that showed spikes in their data were near sensors that didn’t record spikes, and the geographical distance between sensors that spiked defied logic. Many of the sensors that showed simultaneous spikes in the CEZ were more than 30 kilometers apart. Radasky says it would be possible to have a single weapon affect sensors geographically apart, but only at limited distances.

“The most powerful [electromagnetic weapon] I know about could create a high field over [only] a kilometer,” he says. “There is no way to simultaneously affect widely dispersed sensors … from a single weapon.”

If troops dispersed throughout the CEZ carried portable electromagnetic weapons and fired them at the same time, it would be possible to affect sensors far apart, Radasky says. “But … the likelihood that they would have set off those weapons at the exact same moment, causing simultaneous spikes, seems highly unlikely,” he says, noting that a pulse generally lasts for one microsecond.

This, plus patterns that Santamarta found in the spikes, “really does sound like … this is a hacking attempt and not an electromagnetic weapon attack,” Radasky says.

Bondarenko agrees. Every other explanation is “practically implausible or impossible.” It would have been easy, he says, to “write a script that causes certain sensors to elevate at a certain time and then to go back to normal at a certain time.”

Jan Vande Putte, a lead radiation specialist at Greenpeace Belgium, led a team that visited Ukraine last July to measure radiation levels in one part of the CEZ. He agrees that none of the other given explanations are plausible. But he cautions that Santamarta’s theory of data manipulation, while convincing, is still speculation without a forensic investigation to support it.

“I have seen so many examples of coming to wrong conclusions,” he says.

Data Manipulation

Santamarta began looking at the issue last year, after a non-Ukrainian nuclear engineer who has done research in the CEZ asked him to consider whether the sensors could have been hacked. Santamarta specializes in critical infrastructure vulnerabilities and in 2017 found unpatched flaws in radiation-monitoring systems that would let someone falsify data with the aim of simulating a dangerous radiation leak.

He studied the type of sensors used in Chernobyl—a model made by the France-based company Saphymo (later purchased by Bertin Technologies)—and obtained raw sensor data Ecocenter posted to its website, which contained time stamps identifying when each sensor spiked.

He identified 42 radiation sensors that reported spikes in four different patterns—patterns that he says support his assertion that the radiation spikes were fabricated. In the first pattern, 18 sensors reported spikes before going offline. In the second pattern, 17 sensors each reported spikes two times. The second spike was always incrementally higher than the first. For example, a monitoring station called Buryakovka showed a moderate spike on the night of February 24, from 2.19 to 3.54 μSv/h. But at 9:20 am the next morning, it shot up to 52.7 μSv/h.

The third pattern involved two sensors that each spiked three times. The fourth pattern involved five sensors that experienced two spikes—the first spike occurred at 8:40 pm and the second at 11:30 pm the night of the invasion. In each case, the second spike involved a lower value than the first spike—in other words, the second reading was still higher than the baseline level, but lower than the earlier spike. For example, a sensor station called Gornostaypol normally reported a baseline of .092 μSv/h, but during the first spike at 8:40 pm it shot up to .308 μSv/h and at 11:30 pm it reported a level of .120 μSv/h—about midway between the two.

Santamarta believes the patterns strongly suggest that someone wrote code to inject false data into the Ecocenter’s DataExpert database at intervals. The code then posted the false data to the Ecocenter’s website while suppressing legitimate data that came in from the sensors.

“After characterizing the spikes, which are clearly structured, it’s difficult not to assume some kind of human intervention behind them,” he says.

WIRED sent the State Agency for the Management of the Exclusion Zone a list of detailed questions about the patterns Santamarta found and asked whether it had conducted any investigation to determine the cause of the spikes. The agency declined to answer most of the questions and said it was unable to answer others because the events occurred when Russian forces controlled the CEZ and Ecocenter personnel weren’t in a position to know what occurred or to carry out “any corrective actions on the systems.”

Because Ecocenter staff weren’t present, “there is almost no information about the situation around the sensors and servers of Ecocenter in the described period,” Maksym Shevchuk, deputy head of the state agency, said in an emailed statement that his agency translated into English. He noted that any data transmitted by the sensors during that time was automatically received and “automatically transmitted in ‘as-is’ mode” to “various departments outside the exclusion zone,” suggesting that any data posted to the Ecocenter website and transmitted to the IAEA was automatically processed and sent without involvement from Ecocenter staff.

With regard to Santamarta’s findings, Shevchuk said his agency’s “competence does not include the assessment of hypotheses and assumptions on this topic coming from third parties,” and he therefore can’t comment on them.

Who and Why

Santamarta doesn’t speculate in his presentation about who was behind the manipulation if it occurred—he wanted to focus on finding a sound technical and plausible explanation of the cause. But there are two obvious suspects—Russia and Ukraine—both of which have means and motive.

Russia has repeatedly threatened a nuclear event to assert dominion in the conflict and, some argue, to warn NATO against getting involved. And Russian authorities have made numerous claims before and after the invasion that Ukraine was developing a radioactive dirty bomb. A Russian scientist told state media that Russian troops seized Chernobyl to prevent Ukraine from creating a dirty bomb, and the radiation spikes could have been used as “evidence” of illicit nuclear activity on the part of Ukraine.

What’s more, in an April 2022 report about the war, Microsoft revealed that Russian hackers affiliated with the FSB intelligence service had breached a Ukrainian “nuclear safety organization” in December 2021 and stolen data for three months with the aim of obtaining data that would support Russia’s disinformation claims about Ukraine, including claims that it was building a dirty bomb. The report didn’t identify the organization, but the breach shows that Russia had a particular interest in hacking nuclear organizations in Ukraine with the aim of supporting its disinformation campaign.

These suggest a potential method and motive for Russia. But there’s a hitch in this theory. After Ukrainian officials cited the spikes in their denunciation of Russia’s “reckless” seizure of the plant, Russian Ministry of Defense spokesperson Igor Konashenkov denied that any spikes had occurred. He didn’t say how he knew this, but Bondarenko believes Russian troops likely carried handheld radiation meters with them into the CEZ, where they may have gotten very different readings from those the Ukrainian sensors were reporting. A Russian scientist also told Russian media that once data from the CEZ sensors started being posted online again “it would be clear that the radiation situation at Chernobyl was under control.”

If Russia planned to use the spikes to bolster claims that Ukraine was building a dirty bomb at Chernobyl, why didn’t it seize the opportunity to further that claim, instead of disputing that the spikes were real.

As for Ukraine’s potential motives, on the day of the invasion and for days after, Ukraine was struggling to secure timely financial and military aid from Europe. Radiation spikes could have helped underscore the potential nuclear threat to EU leaders if they didn’t act quickly to help Ukraine expel Russian troops.

But there’s another possible motive as well. A Chernobyl worker may have inadvertently revealed it in an interview with the Economist after Russian troops left Chernobyl at the end of March.

He told the publication that during the occupation of the plant, Chernobyl staff had “exaggerated the threat of radiation” to Russian troops, identifying “problematic areas” that they should avoid—all as part of a “cheeky plan” to control where the soldiers went. He didn’t mention the radiation spikes, but they could conceivably have been part of this plan.

After Russian troops left Chernobyl, workers also told reporters that some of the troops had exhibited signs of radiation poisoning—they “developed huge blisters and were vomiting after ignoring warnings about digging trenches in radioactive soil.” Reporters have not been able to independently verify the claims. The IAEA conducted tests after the soldiers left and determined that the digging would not have posed a radiation threat to the soldiers, raising questions about whether the reports of radiation sickness were falsified to instill fear in Russian soldiers.

It may be noteworthy that, in June of this year, as tensions around the Zaporizhzhia plant heated up during Russia’s occupation of that facility, Moscow ordered its troops to halt the automatic transmission of data from the plant’s radiation sensors. The sensors continued to monitor radiation levels, but the data was manually collected from the sensors by IAEA staff.

Verifying Spikes

There were a number of ways to verify the veracity of the spikes when they occurred last year, but there’s no sign anyone in Ukraine questioned the integrity of the data or ordered an investigation. Vande Putte says this was never discussed when his Greenpeace group traveled to Ukraine.

More than two dozen wireless sensors in the CEZ have aerosol filters attached to them that detect radiation levels in the air. Karhunen says the filters are “a hundred million times more sensitive” to small changes in radiation than the digital sensors. Before the invasion, Chernobyl workers collected the filters once a week to test them in a lab. These could have been tested to see if they detected the same radiation levels as the digital sensors. But it seems this didn’t happen during the Russian occupation of the plant when the activities of Chernobyl workers were strictly curtailed, and it’s not clear if the filters were collected and tested afterward. Vande Putte says the Russians left land mines behind in the CEZ, and this may have made it too dangerous for workers to collect the filters after they left.

Once the occupation ended, it would also have been possible to conduct a forensic investigation. Even though the Ecocenter data server, and any digital evidence of manipulation it contained, was no longer available because the Russians stole the server, investigators could have extracted data from the memory of the digital sensors in the CEZ—land mines permitting—to see if data stored in the devices matched what was posted to the Ecocenter website. If it didn’t, this could have bolstered the theory that the data was manipulated on the Ecocenter server. It’s not clear anyone did this, however. Ukraine’s computer emergency response team would likely have been involved in such an investigation, but a source with knowledge of the CERT’s activities says the organization never received a request to investigate the Ecocenter’s systems, and the Ecocenter didn’t respond to WIRED’s inquiries.

It’s possible Ukraine and the IAEA didn’t investigate the spikes because they simply had other more pressing things to address—for example, an ongoing crisis at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. The State Scientific and Technical Center for Nuclear and Radiation Safety told WIRED that it did do a radiological survey after Russian troops left Chernobyl, but this was to determine if Russian forces had absconded with any nuclear materials or planted them in occupied regions to leave behind a nuclear hazard, according to Yuliya Balashevska, who headed the survey. The survey focused only on Kyiv and southeast border regions, and Balashevska said her organization has no access to the Chernobyl sensors and could not have examined them if it wanted to do so.

It may be the case that authorities simply never questioned the authenticity of the spikes and therefore saw no reason to investigate.

Santamarta, however, believes the IAEA and Ecocenter didn’t investigate because of the potential geopolitical implications if such an investigation reached “an inconvenient conclusion” that risked adding “more complexity to an already extremely complicated situation.”

Either way, he, like everyone else WIRED interviewed, says the truth about what occurred is more important than whatever the findings might reveal about who was involved.

Although it’s not clear whether, 18 months after the invasion, evidence still exists that could resolve the mystery of the radiation spikes. Greenpeace’s Vande Putte says an investigation is merited, and that Santamarta’s research is high-quality and “very valuable” as a starting point.

The implications, if the cause was intentional data manipulation, are global, given the potential precedent for manipulating sensors in other regions.

“The truth in these matters is really important. Where did it go wrong? Was it purely technical? Was it deliberate?” he says. “We need to get to the bottom.”

[lingshanhermit]

Lingshan Hermit: Will This World Become Better?

In September 2015, the United States Environmental Protection Agency accused the German Volkswagen Group of installing special software in the vehicles they manufactured in order to circumvent federal vehicle emissions regulations. Simply put, Volkswagen falsified vehicle emissions data - the actual pollutant emissions from the vehicles they produced were 40 times higher than the federal emissions standards. According to news reports, as many as 11 million vehicles were involved. Volkswagen will face enormous lawsuits and fines for this. Not long after the Volkswagen emissions scandal, Volkswagen's subsidiary Audi also issued a statement admitting that they had done similar things.

You may feel this has nothing to do with you, but this concerns everyone because we all need to breathe air. You need it, your children need it, even your cats need it. What Volkswagen did undoubtedly harms the health of every living being on this planet. Similarly, Japan's Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi recently stated that they will dump radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean because they have "no choice." I don't know how many companies like Volkswagen or governments like Japan's are secretly doing things that harm us, but based on my understanding of human nature, there must be many such cases—in America, in Europe, in Asia. What has been exposed is just the tip of the iceberg, with greater sins being concealed and unknown to us. In the past 200 years, rapid technological advances have seemingly made our lives more convenient than in the past, but at the same time, we have also paid a high price—animals and plants are going extinct every minute. When I was little, I could often see all kinds of insects on the window screens, but now most are gone. Some scientists predict that in 200-300 years, the largest land mammal will be cows. Those hippos, rhinos and other large mammals will be long extinct. Compared to 100 years ago, our transportation is much more convenient now, but at the same time, we have to endure breathing air polluted by vehicle emissions. With the support of modern technology, we have become very lazy—we can no longer go back to the days without cars. Perhaps we are acquiescing to these big companies earning our money while secretly damaging our health.

Whenever I see things like this (the Volkswagen scandal), it makes me lose faith in humanity. If we analyze why these big companies do such things, you can trace it back to their values. Perhaps in the beginning, they were people with the right values, people of integrity, but in the face of enormous profits and pressure, how long can their beliefs withstand? Cracks will soon appear, and it may not take long for their entire value system to start collapsing. When they start doing evil, they will give themselves ample justification—they may feel guilty at first, but gradually they will convince themselves, saying "Other companies are doing even worse things. Compared to ISIS who beheads people, we're just emitting some gases." They will make themselves believe they have done no evil. Slowly they will no longer feel they are doing evil, and eventually they may even feel that the people obstructing their evil-doing are the ones doing evil instead. In the past, they may have felt such actions were not good according to their moral system, but now they don't believe doing so will harm them personally—other than causing some slight unease. On the contrary, they believe it benefits them—it allows them to earn more money. Although statistics tell us 80% of the world's population has religious beliefs, the truth is the world has reached a point where most people only believe in this life—not the afterlife. Most people don't truly believe in their own faiths, even if they may seem devout, praying morning and night every day. For the sake of profit, they can betray anything. Without huge profits and pressure, many Western companies are still willing to pretend to have morals and principles, but under enormous business interests, they cast all that aside.

"Humankind is still progressing (though haltingly), and such progress is often driven by a minority. Without the calls and protests of animal rights groups and everyone's efforts, I believe the royal family living in Buckingham Palace may still not realize to this day what grave mistakes they made and how many lives they owe—just to maintain a fancy, majestic display, they killed a large number of black bears. Fortunately, they have come to realize this and are prepared to make corrections. Making mistakes is not frightening; what's frightening is making mistakes and refusing to change. Those who persist in their mistakes are the most hopeless people in the world." - Excerpt from Lingshan Hermit's 'Will This World Become Better?'

I wrote the above 10 years ago. Many things have happened in the world over the past decade: Donald Trump became president of the United States, the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union, ISIS rose and fell, smartphones have become ubiquitous, and people no longer read newspapers. I'm 38 now too. Over the past 10 years I've seen and experienced many things, a lot of which made me lose faith in humanity. 10 years ago I confidently declared I would do many things, and over the past decade I have indeed kept doing them. I will continue to do so in the future. Over the past 10 years I've experienced much success as well as setbacks. These 10 years have taught me many things, one very important fact being: No one can be changed unless they want to change themselves. It is absolutely impossible to change even the tiniest habit of another person. No one will admit they are wrong either, no matter how ridiculous their mistakes—they will not believe they are wrong. Humans are the best at finding excuses for themselves. Everyone loves themselves to the point of madness. They love their own perspectives with the same fierceness a mother tiger protects her cubs. Mark Twain said: "Convincing someone they've been duped is harder than duping them." The most unshakable thing in this world is a person's established perspectives—even harder to shake than the Earth itself. Compared to getting someone to abandon their perspectives, I believe it would be easier to cement together the 300 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy with concrete.

To change the world, we must change most people's values. According to 2019 statistics, there are now 7.7 billion people on this planet—a massive number. Let alone 7.7 billion, even changing one person is extremely difficult. If you truly want to practice Buddhist teachings, you have to overturn almost your entire worldview—Buddhist principles are a completely different world from what you learn in textbooks. From my years of experience, most people don't actually change their original perspectives. They just pretend to possess Buddhist values—even they themselves may not realize this. To change a person's ideas is tantamount to upending their entire world—they have to negate almost everything they were born with and grew up believing—negate their parents, teachers, the things they believed since childhood, negate the entire value system they built over 20-30 years. Not everyone has the courage to completely overturn everything and start over. In fact, only an extremely small number of people have such courage. To change the world requires rebuilding most people's values, which must start from rebuilding the values of a minority. Then that minority influences more minorities, until the minorities become a majority—an extremely lengthy process. From the Volkswagen emissions scandal, we see that the people making such decisions do not care if others' interests are infringed upon. They only care about immediate benefits. The Volkswagen board members are all such people. To avoid such things happening, most people's mindsets must change—to the point where most Volkswagen board members would not think this way, or even if some did, they would be the minority. This is very difficult. It is not an achievable short-term goal.

Will this world become better? Perhaps, who knows. But we must still continue doing the right things.

This article was first published on October 10, 2019.

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灵山居士：这个世界会变好吗？

[dispatches-from-the-lorecord]

But, like, what *are* the glitches?

[February 1 2023]

{Mitzi:}

time to talk about a recent revelation:

I Know What The Glitches Are

{Krizste:}

go on///

{Trollkitten:}

rubs hands together and chuckles evilly

{Mitzi:}

like, i should have asked this question before, shouldn’t i. they’ve been a big part of tpp for almost as long as i’ve been into tpp, but i never really thought about, like, what they were

where they came from, why they exist, why they’re Like That

i think i just unconsciously assumed they were errors in the construction of reality or something, and never paid them much heed

but then haji said a thing, and i started connecting dots

some metaphysical background. every universe has its own rules, yeah? works in slightly different ways, has slightly different game mechanics physical laws

glitchiness - the effect the glitches have on the world, as distinct from the glitchstuff itself - is what happens when you try to run software from universe a on universe b’s system, and that might not even be a metaphor

things just… don’t work quite the same way, and the glitchy entity/effect is constantly bashing into the universe, trying to work through its rules and just failing. it can be as minor as a weirdly-coloured object, but if the contrast is bad enough, you get missingno

so like, whenever someone goes out wandering the multiverse and visits a reality other than their own… they’re a little glitchy. odd numbers of fingers, wrongly-pitched voices, things like that

but it’s never, like, too bad, at least around the pokemultiverse where realities tend to run on pretty similar lines. and it usually wears off, too, as the universe and its visitor get used to each other

or if you’re bullshit omnipotent like the voices you could just whack the universe until it works the way you want it to, but they’re an exception to literally everything

so long as you’re coming from a world of your own, you can usually reach an accord

s o l o n g a s y o u ‘ r e c o m i n g f r o m a w o r l d o f y o u r o w n

because, see, here’s the thing about the void between the universes. it devours

it eats away at everything that passes through it - it eats away at the voices, that’s how overpowering it is. spend enough time in the void, and you’ll gradually slip away

all the rules that used to define you just… disappear. it gets harder and harder to fit into - any reality, there’s so much less of you than the world expects

{Trollkitten:}

ooooo

{Newbie:}

...i think i see where you're going with this 👀

{Mitzi:}

sometimes you can claw your way up the table of pokenuclides into an acceptable self again, but more often than not you get swept away by the tides of dex number radioactivity

it’s fairly easy to ward off void decay if you spend enough time in - any world, but your homeworld is best. you were made according to the rules of your native reality, and you’ll always fit into those best

but what if your world

doesn’t exist anymore?

the glitches are shadows of dead realities

seeping into others, they try desperately to take form, but more often than not, they just bring the void in with them

put too many glitches in a reality and it’ll break from the strain. another world will fall into nothingness, and whatever survivors will start to lose themselves too

all they can do is try to latch onto another world - and it’ll all happen again

different clusters of glitches have different sources. the initial bout of glitches in the tppverse - associated with OLDEN, made the glitchhaze - are the last remnants of wing and thorax’s world

the reality might still exist, but - like, even the atmosphere’s chemistry is totally different. they try to push in, to bring the world back to what they knew - and the oxygenated blue-skied world will not let them, fuck yeah the wing-and-thorax stuff is now relevant to tpp

(as to how they came back into quote-unquote existence… look. amber would never accept a world where the fossil gods were trapped in the pc forever)

(they let a few things slip to cyrus in s1!platinum and are thus personally responsible for 90% of their own problems all the way up to omega ruby)

but the current crop of glitches… they’re not from that collective

the last few seasons, my lore has been full of universes blowing up and being rebooted, culminating in the big multiversal reset in pla

the new multiverse is a much less… troubled place, on the surface, so far. but despite the best efforts of the hosts…

there are still traces

And That’s Why Forrest Is Like That (angry)

{Newbie:}

...i see

{Mitzi:}

for something i bashed together over the past couple of months this is fitting into my pre-existing lore surprisingly well

it’s tying things together. gives me a reason to still care about the glitches

thank you for bearing with me while i took over the channel

{Newbie:}

no problem :LUL:

this is... fascinating for me

{Trollkitten:}

I really like your theorem on what the glitches are and where they come from

{Mitzi:}

but seriously this is giving me… ideas about certain non-voice legacy characters

feels like a way to bring in The Consequences Of The Hosts’ Actions, which is where my lore’s been trending lately anyway

turns out, you can’t just overwrite your problems

{Trollkitten:}

yeah

{Haji:}

What did I say??? :OMEGALUL: I've been on a ramble most of the day, I honestly can't remember

{Mitzi:}

i think you asked me something weeks ago about wing and thorax’s legendaries, and it set fireworks off in my brain

{Haji:}

Ah :tppPika:

Oh my. Yeah I remember now

{Mitzi:}

i think i went, like, ‘actually that connection does make sense’ and then ‘hey wait what if all the glitches are remnants of wing and thorax’s world’ and then ‘that would explain so much of why OLDEN is like that’ and then i kept going from there

evan mourns for the happiness he lost, the god bits of OLDEN mourn for the world they destroyed

… did i ever say that OLDEN is a fusion between evan, the bits of wing and thorax that didn’t end up in amber, and a whole lot of glitchstuff that might well be the same thing actually? well, IT is

{Haji:}

Y'know? I don't think so

{Mitzi:}

it’s a story but i need to go to bed

yeah this was secretly a section of mitzi won’t shut up about the fossil gods, part 5 the whole time

coupla endnotes!

- ultra space isn’t the void between universes. it’s… more like a corridor? a path between worlds, not void itself, which is why necrozma could use it to build an interdimensional empire

- the distortion world, on the other hand…

- phancero is… one of those glitches that decayed into a real pokemon, with a little help from the voices. the last remnant of the glitchhaze, finally made real

{Haji:}

I've been playing with this…

"So let me get straight. The Glitches we've been facing were already a living, consistent problem we'll have to deal with in Abe's world?"

There were a few giggles at the Slowbro since they had left that subject a few subjects back. Still, Rhianna decided to indulge Rocket with an answer. "I actually don't know. Maybe? They seem to be related, but the Fae we dealt with were like a human catch-all term for anything they couldn't explain. Letter shaped creatures and stretches of number carvings you couldn't walk past, people getting trapped by sentient buildings, and that's not even getting into things like the walking skeletons. A lot of stuff was brushed off as hallucinations brought on by "Fae Magic" but I don't know much of anything about this "other world" business to know if any of this stuff happened in his world."

Gen I glitches are.... Fun

Somewhat related, I like to imagine Phancero came to Kay with intent (we faced it twice iirc?) that if he was brave and strong enough to master it, he's retained his powers over the Void to safely go wherever. He's the latest Glitch King because there must always be a Glitch King

Phancero itself is only a fraction of Olden's real power, but much like the Fossils often serves as a good consistent vessel

(because the gods aren't actually the Fossils we know, it's just how they most often appear)

{Mitzi:}

… damn i’ve really been neglecting What’s Phanchy Up To These Days as a lore plot thread

[And what does this mean for Kahuna Moon?]

{Trollkitten:}

So... if Kahuna Moon lost her world... is she glitched?

that could explain a lot

{Newbie:}

Moon has Zygarde and Necrozma with her so i think she's protected... for now

{Mitzi:}

personally i’m going with her starting to glitch and having a really anime plan to stop it from happening

‘i will resurrect my world!’ ‘doesn’t that literally always backfire’ ‘i’ll do it!’

{Newbie:}

so this goes from just manic grief to manic grief coupled with an underlaying self-preservation instinct 🤔

this probably explains the "shadow boys" we saw in Star

[salkryn]

I guarantee you that this will become *the* textbook case for every business, computer science, and engineering class "how not to" example for decades to come. This is the single most disastrous IT incident of all time at this point, and it's particularly damning how stupidly easy it would have been to prevent. The postmortem on this fucker is liable to be worth observing in its own right, but here's my speculation about what will be dug up about this:

Option A (the Hollywood version): This was deliberate sabotage on someone's part, possibly involving a massive short selling of stock. This is what would have happened if we lived in fiction, so it's almost certainly NOT what happened.

Option B (corporate greed version): At some point in the past five or so years, all of the controls that were put in place to prevent exactly this situation were removed, one by one, in the interest of "efficiency" and to cut costs. They've probably also laid off their entire QA staff, because they decided patching bugs later was cheaper than running tests before pushing the updates. Third, any person with enough common sense and technical background to prevent this has either been repeatedly overruled and ignored, if not outright replaced by someone without proper training or an automated system. To cut costs, they cut corners on basic safety, and it predictably bit them in the ass.

Two incidents in other industries where these same time/cost reduction measures caused disasters:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Removal of hardware safeties in favor of "foolproof" computer software turns out to be a bad fucking idea.

Company decided to make their nuclear reactor fueling process more efficient by cutting out the safety features. This resulted in untrained workers mixing radioactive materials in a bucket, and then making an extra large batch to save time, and getting fatally irradiated.

In every case, someone decided to cut costs and save time by removing the measures designed to prevent exactly the sort of fatal disaster that eventually happened. In every case, experts were ignored or fired for being an unnecessary expense by upper management. In every case, it could have been easily prevented, and the preventative measures had to be put into law, because the companies will always skimp on safety to make more money. It's been said before that "your regulations are written in blood", and this incident has almost certainly killed people.

idk if people on tumblr know about this but a cybersecurity software called crowdstrike just did what is probably the single biggest fuck up in any sector in the past 10 years. it's monumentally bad. literally the most horror-inducing nightmare scenario for a tech company.

some info, crowdstrike is essentially an antivirus software for enterprises. which means normal laypeople cant really get it, they're for businesses and organisations and important stuff.

so, on a friday evening (it of course wasnt friday everywhere but it was friday evening in oceania which is where it first started causing damage due to europe and na being asleep), crowdstrike pushed out an update to their windows users that caused a bug.

before i get into what the bug is, know that friday evening is the worst possible time to do this because people are going home. the weekend is starting. offices dont have people in them. this is just one of many perfectly placed failures in the rube goldburg machine of crowdstrike. there's a reason friday is called 'dont push to live friday' or more to the point 'dont fuck it up friday'

so, at 3pm at friday, an update comes rolling into crowdstrike users which is automatically implemented. this update immediately causes the computer to blue screen of death. very very bad. but it's not simply a 'you need to restart' crash, because the computer then gets stuck into a boot loop.

this is the worst possible thing because, in a boot loop state, a computer is never really able to get to a point where it can do anything. like download a fix. so there is nothing crowdstrike can do to remedy this death update anymore. it is now left to the end users.

it was pretty quickly identified what the problem was. you had to boot it in safe mode, and a very small file needed to be deleted. or you could just rename crowdstrike to something else so windows never attempts to use it.

it's a fairly easy fix in the grand scheme of things, but the issue is that it is effecting enterprises. which can have a looooot of computers. in many different locations. so an IT person would need to manually fix hundreds of computers, sometimes in whole other cities and perhaps even other countries if theyre big enough.

another fuck up crowdstrike did was they did not stagger the update, so they could catch any mistakes before they wrecked havoc. (and also how how HOW do you not catch this before deploying it. this isn't a code oopsie this is a complete failure of quality ensurance that probably permeates the whole company to not realise their update was an instant kill). they rolled it out to everyone of their clients in the world at the same time.

and this seems pretty hilarious on the surface. i was havin a good chuckle as eftpos went down in the store i was working at, chaos was definitely ensuring lmao. im in aus, and banking was literally down nationwide.

but then you start hearing about the entire country's planes being grounded because the airport's computers are bricked. and hospitals having no computers anymore. emergency call centres crashing. and you realised that, wow. crowdstrike just killed people probably. this is literally the worst thing possible for a company like this to do.

crowdstrike was kinda on the come up too, they were starting to become a big name in the tech world as a new face. but that has definitely vanished now. to fuck up at this many places, is almost extremely impressive. its hard to even think of a comparable fuckup.

a friday evening simultaneous rollout boot loop is a phrase that haunts IT people in their darkest hours. it's the monster that drags people down into the swamp. it's the big bag in the horror movie. it's the end of the road. and for crowdstrike, that reaper of souls just knocked on their doorstep.

[vgadvisor]