#the illusion of safety

[toca144]

Hey. I graduated.

[tomorrowillbeyou]

thrice - the illusion of safety cd booklet

[thepartyponies]

CLIP OF THE MOMENT FROM THIS POST THAT ME AND @tomorrowillbeyou WERE BOTH SEPARATELY THINKING OF

from the Thrice 20th Anniversary of the Illusion of Safety show at the House of Blues Anaheim

[punkrockmixtapes]

Thrice - In Years To Come 

I want to write the perfect song, and play it just for you While you're tangled up in sleep I need you more that I'll ever know

[erin-gilberts]

Prim's name wasn't the only one in the reaping bowl because the entire point of Prim being chosen is to show that life in Panem is random and cruel. These kids truly are selected and die for nothing, based on nothing, most of the time. There is often no grand cosmic plan or 4D chess conspiracy at play in awful circumstances unfolding, just systems of oppression working as they were designed. And you can do everything right to the letter - be the youngest eligible tribute from an unknown family whose name is only in the bowl once, not take out any tesserae - but it still won't save you.

[trans-jon-rights]

Honestly at this point I'd really like to know the fucking salary at the O.I.A.R.

Because while in Archives, it is stated at some point that there was a pay upgrade to work in the Archives, which incitated people to take the position to later be stuck unable to quit, on the Protocol side we have the O.I.A.R, which is civil service.

It doesn't pay well. Even though the Institute in TMA is technically a non-profit organisation, I'm still pretty sure any position there pays better than a civil service job. So why did Alice stay ?

She isn't stupid, and maybe has a degree -- and even if she didn't, there are still jobs that doesn't need a degree out there. And she knows that working there is dangerous, which is why she turns a blind eye and pretend not to care.

But here's the thing : many of her lines suggest that at some point she did care. She probably was exactly like Jon, looking for answers and trying to know what was behind those cases, why were there recurring names, places, everything !

But she stopped, she decided to shut it down and turn a blind eye. My question is : why ? Why not quit ? She knows it's dangerous, she knows there are things that could get her killed, so why stay when the safest option is to quit and leave it behind ? And why tell Sam to come work there ? I mean, I get that he needed help, but if I knew my job was dangerous and that my friend was overly curious, I wouldn't recommend them to come here.

So I'm really asking how my the government pays her to stay.

[dykedvonte]

Curly's attempt to prioritize the crew's happiness over safety is very in line with the internal struggles he is going through with wondering if he is happy in his life and path or should he forfeit that security.

It's upsetting cause while as understandable as that projection is, the want to be happy in something you don't feel secure in, he can't see past it and allows it to clog his judgement. This is no longer a matter of happiness but safety, but he in the end was the safest member of the crew in practically every aspect. It's not something he's going to understand the weight of from his position.

His current state is also a reflection and inversion of his mindset at the beginning of the game as well as a metaphor for the exact type of endangerment Anya felt. Where as with Jimmy, he gets to feel that "safety" Curly felt with the position but the lack of happiness he perceived he had.

[emdotcom]

Yeah, so while I was on my "I'm going to read into Vanny/Vanessa as much as possible" journey, I noticed an odd quirk in her animations in how she moves. At first, I thought it reminded me of a ballerina, 'cause she's kinda tip-toeing, & she has this way of keeping her head & chest in one place as she moves, but I looked again & realized --

That's not ballet! She's doing a tight-rope act. Like, look at this one:

This is like standing up on the wooden boards before you do the actual tight-rope walking, & the ring leader is hyping you up as you do some fun movement for the crowds. &, then, these:

These are all instances where she walks with one foot directly in front of the other. In that third, she's doing the "woaaah" wiggly-ass balance movements & everything, as if she's swaying up at the top of the tent, even though she's down on solid ground.

Idk, I feel like the way her feet are placed isn't accurate (pretty sure they should be pointed left & right, not both forwards...) doesn't make this 100% correct, but I like it. It also connects back with her first SB teaser, wherein she's up in the rafters.

[unbfacts]

[heretherebedork]

The fact that he can only sleep in the closet because it's the only way he's ever felt free!? HOW DARE. Finding freedom in a closet? Finding freedom in the one place he could be out of sight and out of mind? The one place he feels like he is himself is in the closet? DYING.

IT'S THE SIGN FOR FREEDOM. The second sign that Shao Peng ever taught him after his own name sign!? Destruction.

These two are going to be so good once they admit they're in love and find a place outside that closet for the freedom they can share and the love they have and the world that will love them so, so much.

[uncanny-tranny]

It's weird how people paint "daddy issues" and even "mommy issues" as, like, a joke or a failure on part of the person who has those issues, rather than recognizing that daddy and mommy issues stem, for so many people, from abuse. What this all is is just abuse apologia, and nobody seems to either notice or maybe even care.

When somebody with daddy or mommy issues opens up about the "why," I can't ever seem to shake the fact that they tend to have gone through a ton of abuse and bullshit as a child. It's just crazy that other people would look at that and see a joke or a failure of the once-child who was abused.

[firestorm09890]

"IENZO WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE LIGHT ARE YOU DOING" Ansem the Wise cries, bursting into the computer room just after Ienzo (age 8) ordered Tron to broadcast "10 hours of placid forest sounds occasionally interspersed by the call of a cuckoo" across all of Radiant Garden

..

...

actually. hey. shitpost cancelled. do you ever think about how it is Tron finding a buried file within the computer that miraculously caused the entire world to remember Hollow Bastion's true name through pillars of light and sparkles? until then, none of the citizens remembered that it was called anything other than Hollow Bastion. like. the computer is not only a massive city-wide defense system that can be twisted to instead summon Heartless within the city, it can wipe an entire world's memory and replace it with false ones, and it did. all controlled from the castle. easily. what else might they- Xehanort obviously, but also potentially Ansem the Wise- have done with that power? it can get so unbelievably dark so quickly

[pianokantzart]

What do you think the status of "nothing can hurt us as long as we're together" is for the bros? What I mean is- I see a lot of pre-canon fics use that line, and I love it, but based on the way Luigi's face slowly lit up when Mario said it to him as they were flying through the warp pipe, I think that might have been the first time either of them ever said it, and then it stuck after that as they pulled it out in different high-stakes situations lol

I'm with you. I think that moment in the warp pipe was the first time it was said.

That was, no doubt, the first time they were ever in a situation that bizarre and unpredictable. Nothing but a reassurance that sincere and heartfelt was going to help Luigi calm down.

Then there's Luigi's reaction, that look of utter surprise that slowly turns into a heartened smile.

That's not the face of someone whose heard that same sentiment a hundred times before.

[punkrockmixtapes]

Thrice - See You In The Shallows [Audio]

[bononstar]

ah armand there is a part of you that wants desperately to die but the part of you that wants proof that you can be lovable despite everything grows and grows and grows doesn’t it

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia.

I want to ask— do you backup your wips? How do you do it?

I know there are things like Cloud and Dropbox but those are practically at the mercy of big corporations and with ai scraping now being the norm it feels risky saving work with online backup.

Do you use a USB instead?

Unfortunately nothing is risk-free these days.

I once saved a story to three different USBs, all different brands, and they all corrupted. Not all at the same time, but they all eventually lost the data. This was over a period of ten years, but of course some people have been relying on USBs etc. for this long now. Same with CDs burnt with data (something we used to do before USBs were cheap).

In fact a new study shows that over half of all external hard drives and USBs over a certain age (I think around 5 years) are already corrupted and often not being checked enough to check if they're still containing/keeping the data necessary. (To say nothing of entire batches of like Seagate and other brands being notorious for literally just...losing data and corrupting at any point in time - which is an issue for actual hard drives within the computer as well).

USBs and external HDs aren't necessarily safer.

In general it's a good idea to back up in three places, though this still isn't enough to guarantee safety. Those three places should be: a) hard copy (i.e. USB or external hard-drive), b) cloud copy (i.e. Dropbox etc.), c) on the machine itself (if it's a desktop). You can sometimes do like, a + a + c or b + b + a etc.

It still doesn't guarantee preservation of data! I think that's the hardest thing about preserving data and back-ups overall.

I have an extra bonus 'back up' in that 99.5% of all my writing is already public. And that a lot of that writing has additionally been snapshotted into the Wayback Machine. If all my methods somehow corrupted or failed, I could literally copy/paste my stories from AO3 back into Word documents (in fact I've actually done this before because I frequently go back in and edit AO3 chapters for typos etc. but don't mirror those changes in the original documents, so sometimes if I want to update a story, I'll copy/paste the AO3 chapter and override the original document).

Anyway, I use Dropbox Business (cloud), hard external copy (though not as often as I should), desktop version, and then also the AO3 version. Dropbox Business has additional data recovery protections that general Dropbox accounts don't.

We are always at the mercy of big corporations, anon. Big corporations make USBs. They make faulty external hard-drives that we sometimes mistakenly trust. Like no, they're not scraping for AI the same way, but I no longer believe - unfortunately - that this is truly preventable. Short of going a grassroots Linux direction, which...I can't, lol.

(This is a reminder to all writers: Back-up your writing! The beginning of the year is a good time to remember to do it, if you're not doing it every 3 months).

(And also, check all your USB/external hard drives! And make sure they're not your only source for that content, because you would not believe how much they degrade over time.)

If I ever needed a 5th option, I host my own domain and have done so through the same company for over 10 years with very high fidelity, and I would just dump it all into a database there so I could pull it back if necessary. That's not ideal (it's probably the easiest way I could be hacked because I check into the cpanel the least often), but it's doable.

But yeah I've been Dropbox Business for a long time. I don't like everything about them, but I trust them a lot more than Microsoft OneDrive (which I refuse to use) and many other cloud networks.

As for AI scraping, since 99.5% of my stuff is on AO3, it's already been scraped, and it's delusional of me to think it hasn't been. I have already had the majority of my art scraped into Midjourney, so sadly I've reached a level of disgusted acceptance that the gormless unethical billionaires of the world will just do what they want. If it has an internet connection to it, it's probably been scraped or will be scraped and putting something on a USB isn't going to stop that, because it needs to come off a USB if I want to work on an ongoing story.