#which made understanding systems a LOT easier when i first learned abt it

[meteoritesystem]

(trying to explain being a system and failing) So like. how familiar are you with the concept of the holy trinity

[queenlua]

hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue.  see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP.   and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP.  so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on.  there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc.  you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

[justanothersyscourse]

just need to vent, ig, but the whole endos/pg are cult like thing is making us rethink a lot of our past interactions with them, we found out we were a system through kin communities years ago, before syscourse grew into. whatever it is now, and we learned abt did/osdd and have come a long way with accepting our trauma/parts since. but something that has always been an issue for us has been our parts wanting to be completely seperate. this caused breakdowns and splits and all sorts of trouble. only recently through blogs like yours did we learn that that's Solely an endo thought process, that most did/osdd systems are like "yes, parts are different but are still part of a whole" and we're slowly beginning to accept that now, because we realize its important to acknowledge that to heal, and its already helping which is fantastic! i guess my point is that endos/pg and their whole "we are completely seperate people sharing a body" mentality is so so harmful, and its taken us Years to find this out?? and we Dont Even Engage with endogenic systems, we havent in years!! i feel like thats definitely a dangerous thing, cult like or not, to have their more dangerous ideals spreading beyond their specific communities? idk if this makes sense lol, again i just wanted to vent, and to also thank you for running this blog, it has been an immense help in our healing lately <3

This absolutely does makes sense! And venting is perfectly fine, I'm glad you reached out and I'm glad my blog helps!

It can be so, so harmful for people with trauma and dissociation to be exposed to misinformation like this. Agree or not, the fact of the matter is that people with DDs are highly susceptible to manipulation and misinformation (a lot of people are, not just DDs, but this is where I'm most comfortable commenting).

The parts/separate people argument is a really tough one. I don't even know that I'd say it's endo-specific. For people with DID/OSDD, before they realize they're a system, when they first realize it, and sometimes for years into their journey, alters can feel so separate and real and so different that it can shock almost everyone to be presented with the fact that they're parts of a whole. It's only the last few years that even I started to accept it.

I think people with DID/OSDD are more open to the concept overall. Endos, specifically spiritual ones, seem to reject the concept from start to finish, and they're so loud about it that it bleeds into DID/OSDD spaces in really harmful ways that can hinder recovery and healing.

Point is, don't feel bad if it's a concept you struggle with. I think everyone does, at some point, and many never stop struggling.

One of the best therapists we had didn't even try to bring this up in the beginning. I don't know if she sensed that we wouldn't be receptive to it, or if it was how she treated all her clients, but she basically told us, "Whatever term you prefer, alters, parts, people, personalities, souls, WHATEVER term, whatever you believe, the fact remains that this is the hand you've all been dealt. You're all here, now, in that body, and you'd best learn to start working together. Any single one of you could ruin it for yourself and the others, destroying the only life you have with one stupid decision. Like it or not, you need to learn to work as a whole, keeping each other in check and supporting each other."

It hit hard, and I think we really needed that firm hand at that point in our lives. She didn't argue with us over something we weren't ready to accept, instead kind of working around the truth in a way that made more sense for us and helped us start our journey willingly.

You can heal and break down those barriers without acknowledging the fact that you're not separate. It can certainly speed things up and can help people understand their disorder better, but sometimes you need to work backwards. Once you all start working together, it can be a bit easier to accept that you're parts of a whole-- which is how it happened for us, once we started acknowledging each other's trauma as being our trauma so we could support and understand each other better.

Hopefully my response made sense!

[blueskittlesart]

i am in a sad. how about some hc characteristics for link and zelda

this is so long because i have so many feelings and half of this is more analysis of their canon characters than headcanons but its IMPORTANT so i cant omit any of it but i dont want to make a super long post analyzing video game characters so it’s under the readmore hgfdfghj

SO link was always a very quiet kid even before the sword and everything. He wouldn’t speak unless spoken to and was shy enough that he had trouble socializing with the other kids in his village. However i dont think it really would have bothered him that much?? he found his own ways to have fun, climbing trees or shield surfing down the hills around hateno. Even as a kid, he was very independent and had a tendency to want to resolve problems on his own without going to anyone else for help, so he’d come home with two skinned knees insisting that he was fine and he didn’t need his mother’s help bandaging them up. (yes this drove his mother crazy, yes mipha also had to deal with this shit and that’s what made that cutscene between them so intimate, it was her telling him that he’s allowed to trust her enough to let her help and that she will always be there to heal him as many times as it takes. dont talk to me) Through his memories we see that zelda thinks, or thought, that he unquestioningly accepted his duty as the hylian champion and never had any struggles with his place in the world, but zelda tends to take things at face value and i find it hard to believe that link never had any regrets about his position. He was put into training as young as twelve years old, essentially taken away from his family and his life in order to serve a higher destiny. I think it probably lead to link placing all his value on how he can serve others. As far as he’s concerned, his only worth is contingent on his ability to protect and serve zelda and the other champions, which is why we see so much of him getting hurt or being reckless in order to protect others; he believes on some level that if he fails to be a good soldier he will not matter to anyone anymore. his only worth in his mind is based on how he can be “useful.” On a less depressing note tho i think hes very good with animals, espc horses! he finds them easier to interact with than people. dogs are the same, theres a reason it only takes like a minute of him standing in front of a dog for it to follow him wherever he goes. He also likes to cook and that’s not even a hc have you seen the little graphics for all the different food he can make? the PRESENTATION. he’s very deliberate in little things like that because it MATTERS to him that what he makes looks good! not for any particular reason, not to impress anyone but because he’s made it for himself and he wants to take pride in what he’s made. thanks for coming to my ted talk 

Ok now on to zelda. She has a lot more canon personality than link which like. she’s an npc and link is the player character so that’s to be expected BUT i still have a lot to say about her character. She’s headstrong and stubborn and emotional and it gets her into trouble. She has a tendency to take things at face value and she lets her emotions take over very quickly, which puts a strain on her relationships with others. Due to her status and the prophecy she was supposed to fulfill she was incredibly isolated as a child. she hardly ever interacted with anyone her own age, which is why she treats link the way she does at first; she doesn’t have any experience with anyone who isn’t required to be around her. She’s used to being condescended to while simultaneously being expected to be perfect in everything she does, and it’s made her... mean. she deliberately pushes people (read: link) away because she believes that no one really cares about her outside of her status and her supposed power, and what we see of her father’s actions only reinforce that perspective. she and link are very VERY similar in that regard, in that they place all their self-worth on their importance as hyrule’s prophecized saviors. the difference between them is that zelda fails, she is unable to be the perfect princess she is expected to be, and she has a support system in urbosa (and link, and as far as im concerned mipha too even tho they aren’t shown to be friends in canon) that allows her to recover from the trauma that forced her into that mindset. she learns to be more empathetic, she stops pushing people away and begins to consider how her actions affect others. she doesn’t necessarily lose the idea that she has to be useful completely, but she becomes aware of it and makes an effort to not take out her frustrations with herself on other people. Ok thats most of my Thoughts out of the way so onto the less depressing stuff, Zelda is INCREDIBLY smart. like child prodigy level intelligence. Her mind is very mathematically oriented, which is partially why she’s so drawn to sheikah tech. it’s something she understands very easily and can break down to its most bare functions in a matter of minutes. she was instrumental in getting literal ANCIENT TECH to work again and was respected by sheikah scholars. She is also very very curious, which helps her out in certain situations, but can be... problematic in others. she doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. shes essentially always turned up to 11. She’s interested in animals, like link, but her interest is from a much more scientific standpoint than his. She has trouble with animals that require a more empathetic approach, like horses, because she prefers to think of animals and plants in terms of their benefit to her: a horse is transportation, a frog could be used in an elixir or a dish, etc etc. her curiosity and willingness to learn help her out a lot post-calamity when she finds herself traveling hyrule with link. though not very adept with weapons, at least at first, her quick thinking makes her a good strategist. she’s adept at finding weaknesses in enemies that may be less obvious to a common soldier (cough cough she literally highlights ganon’s weaknesses in the final battle of botw and i want them to keep that motif in botw2 because it makes so much sense for her nintendo PLEASE)

HELP THIS IS SO LONG AND IT CAN BARELY EVEN BE CONSIDERED HEADCANONS IM SO SORRY I JUST. HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABT BOTW LINK AND ZELDA DONT TALK TO ME

[r0h1rr1m]

rambly inception thoughts p.3

bc it got too big in this post i’m gonna start another one of these, ostensibly about my unified theory on what will or won’t fly in dreamshare, tho i’m almost guaranteed to go a little off-topic

the movie says the tech was originally developed as a training tool for the armed forces, and i don’t want to pretend any real knowledge of the american military but i’ve always thought that there’s no way they were there from the beginning unless the very genesis of the idea was already intertwined w the notion of eventually using it to train soldiers. and the tech is so outlandish in premise and would take so much time (even by accelerated movie standards) to become viable and like, there’s an easier way. in the history of dreamshare that i js made up right now, there are 3 main eras. pre-military, where the scientists figured out how not to send ppl directly to limbo immediately upon putting them under (we’ll get there), military, where a lot of the roles/frameworks were discovered and solidified (i will explain what i mean by this, too), and post-military

the last thing i want to add before diving in is a disclaimer. the precise details of how exactly dreamshare works are almost entirely irrelevant to understanding the movie, and so they weren’t included! which means that the beginnings of this will be based in canon, but as i go on, the logic of my worldbuilding increasingly depends on context i js.... made up. so if u wanna go on, js buy into it and bear with me if u like worldbuilding i hope it’s worth it

so i said that before anyone had the genius idea of using dreamshare to let soldiers kill each other over and over and over, it had to exist. which like, duh, but the reason i bring this up is tied into my thoughts abt what limbo is, why it’s possible to go more than one level down in a dream, and why dying would wake u up. come yell at me for refusing to learn anything about lucid dreaming/sleep science, but i’m gonna say that limbo as dreamsharers kno it is the closest a pasiv will get u to natural dreams. “unconstructed dreamspace,” pure subconscious. and it seems like the movie was treating it as an actual place? that would be the same for every dreamer? and u could access it and alter it like a public minecraft server. here my thoughts diverge a little bit into 2 possible scenarios

scenario A) Minecraft Server Limbo: it is an actual, internally consistent entity and not dependent upon each dreamer. which means that the pasiv technology for accessing it isn’t even about shared or lucid dreaming at all, but accessing another sort of other plane/dimension beyond the physical. think cognitive realm a la cosmere, if that reference means anything to you (if not, i’d love to hear what ur analogy would be). this idea is a lot of fun, but doesn’t rly allow for the levels between waking and limbo, or explain why those have to be created new every time.

scenario B) Actually the Subconscious: the way i think about limbo kind of begins w the ideas in this fic, where limbo is unique to everyone. i’m gonna start here in era 1 of my history of dreamshare, by saying that the first experiments w whatever prototype eventually became the pasiv went v poorly bc scientists were js immediately chucking ppl into limbo. like, that’s the default state of dreams w the pasiv, and all the rest came later. so. in a natural dream, ur brain rationalizes anything, and u get the most vividly detailed backstories and explanations for stuff that makes so much sense until u wake up, which is all also true for limbo. this is the reason limbo is so dangerous, is because ur brain’s working overtime to make u forget u’re dreaming and dying to wake up doesn’t work unless u’re absolutely sure u’re dreaming. so the 1st major breakthrough in dreamshare was being able to remember that u were dreaming when u went under.

the first thing the scientists figured out how to do was hold a setting in their head as they were going under so that they could go there in the dream. at this point, they don’t distinguish between settings out of memory and completely original settings bc it hasn’t occurred to them yet. they just knew that trying to imagine a place instead of diving right under puts limits on the dream that help to keep u from getting dragged under and away by ur own subconscious.

to some ppl, the natural thing to do is access a memory. this does interesting things to the makeup of the dream, because memories of places, depending on the person, are constructed from a bunch of different combinations of sounds, smells, visuals, and indefinable ‘feel’ of the dream. to other ppl, the natural (most interesting) thing to do was invent an imaginary setting--mbe a place from a book/movie/tv show (if u don’t watch them closely u js get star trek all the time. so much star trek) if they’re a little creative, or a brand-new fantasyland if they’re a lot creative. these dreams tend to be mostly visual in makeup, since their inspiration is mostly visual. it takes a lot more effort to add details like sounds and smells bc those aren’t instinctively/automatically part of the way the dreamers are used to experiencing, say, the bridge of the enterprise. It’s harder to make imaginary settings feel real, and this is why it’s comparatively more dangerous to dream from memory. the problem is that the way ur brain interprets and stores select information about a place is more concerned with gathering a coherent narrative of the place than with retaining any objective details. recalling this narrative is a subconscious act/uses ur instinctive mental processes while building a new scenario requires ur higher functions. letting ur subconscious run the show instead of staying consciously in charge urself runs the risk of lapsing into natural-dreaming confusion and falling into limbo.

this is the early days of the technology, where scientists didn’t have the expertise to make dreams stable, and the somnacin formula was still crude enough that u could drop from a structured dream into limbo pretty easily, no sedation required. dying in a dream, for example, had about a 50/50 chance of waking u up or sending u to limbo. the brain has no frame of reference for how to experience dying, so it’s completely disruptive to the plot of the dream--it has to end. so depending on how much the subconscious--as opposed to active cognition--was in charge of the dream, either u wake up or ur subconscious takes over completely to smooth over the confusion and u’re lost in limbo. dying wasn’t the only thing disruptive enough to destabilize a dream in those days either, tho. shock--ranging from injury to just surprise at something bizarre--and high emotion could also do it. this happened a lot bc those early dreams were still p close to natural dreams and rly weird shit happened all the time.

as somnacin got more sophisticated, it got better at suppressing the rampant subconscious and putting the rational mind in charge. constructed dreams left some of the psychedelic weirdness behind and started playing by logical rules, but that was still the given value of ‘logical’ that meant whatever the dreamers understood to be true, regardless of how that matched up w real-world physics. also, dying became the only thing disruptive enough to throw u out of a dream, because the somnacin, by reassigning the lion’s share of the mental processing work to the slower, more effortful systems of reasoning, dampened emotional responses a little. it forced the mind to extrapolate how the situation--usually an injury or smth--would play out instead of js panicking and slamming the eject button. the last major effect of the new somnacin was that waking up was now almost the guaranteed effect of dying, and u only went into limbo if waking up wasn’t an option. almost guaranteed, bc it wasn’t perfect yet, and how could it ever be when it comes to messing around w brain chemistry. but almost was enough for the military and they offered funding and soldiers as test subjects in return for use of the technology as a training tool.

this is the end of era 1! and the post is getting big enough and it’s been in my drafts long enough that i want to end this here. i’ll finish later, probably by reblogging this instead of making a new p.4 post, so check the notes!

[littlebabycrybtch]

oh my god im sorry but i HATE reading analysis discourse so fuckgin much. its so annoying and unnecessary and cruel bc per usual ableists just Scream over everyone and manipulate the view by focusing on the wrong points. disrespect towards this issue is never gonna work and yall would get that if you actually listened to the way the (usually nd) people felt about it and why, but ur too busy mocking them so you look good for consuming the Proper Medias tm. i mean you literally have to know this isnt productive, yall keep going bc you get a kick out of laughing at ‘unintelligent’ people.

‘uu ur teachers didnt oppress u by making u read to kill a mockingbird instead of the hunger games” ok listen 1. media you dont personally care abt can still definitely hold depthful value and be analyzed. oh my god lmao. the people who prefer ~that kind~ of media arent stupid and dont prefer easy thinking, its your own fault for Not looking into it yourself and just assuming its worthless, literally judging a book by its cover. LITERALLY avoiding the analysis skills you claim to have by assuming anything you read in highschool = smart, valuable and anything mainstream = stupid and useless. most books inherently contain symbolism and morals, a lot of these people CAN understand it, theyre just criticizing the inaccessibility of the writing that was forced on them academically. the people analyzing those medias instead of your favs are still taking in lessons even if they prefer to do it in a different format, i mean for instance THG is literally about fucking classism and racism and war you dumb hypocritical tunnel vision bitch, young adult media usually has a Lot of real world parallels in it that very much pertains to how teens see the world, thats the literal POINT, just cuz ur too elitist and dont respect children enough doesnt mean some books are ‘too stupid’ to analyze with any real social value, and 2. A BOOK NOT BEING EXCITING... OR EASY TO UNDERSTAND... IS LITERALLY SMTH VALID TO CRITICIZE IN MANY CASES, ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE GIVING IT TO CHILDREN.... if a kid says “this is boring/too long/uses words that i dont know, so i cant make any sense of it” that doesnt always mean theyre lazy or w/e, if its not a book made for kids (bc kids can understand mature themes but that doesnt. mean you can just throw all the other skills they arent experienced with yet at them, they still need writing tailored to them), Thats your first problem, but sometimes ur book is just fucking boring all together. a book can have as much symbolism as it wants, if its not there to open the mind and provide necessary depth, but to feel self important and make you feel self important for getting it, thats not a good book. and with books i do respect now like TKAM i remember outright saying, “i literally cannot read this and dont get it at all” at like 10 yrs old, and my teachers didnt do shit to explain it or help me or give me any skills at all, they were just like. :) keep trying!! according to your scores we know you can do it!!! so, i did not keep trying, i gave up, and i guarantee if it had been a few years later it would have been easier. if i had been given the opportunity to read stories with similar morals that were made for my age range that i WANTED to read, i guarantee i wouldve gotten so much more out of that. but i was literally DISALLOWED, bro if i grabbed a book that actually interested me, i was told i couldnt check it out at ALL unless it was in the ‘range’ i was assigned, which was college level since i was in 4th grade. so if you think i shouldve kept reading, im being unironic rn, you need to go get a degree, become a teacher, and if a kid or teen says to you what i said, sit them down and TEACH THEM without shame, and fight for better regulations of what reading levels can be pushed on what age groups. if lit analysis is this important to you, FUCKING TEACH IT PROPERLY, that is literally the ONLY REAL SOLUTION to the problem you have, NOT SHAMING the people who were ALREADY FAILED BY THE SYSTEM.

the problem is not ‘idiots think symbolism is stupid’ the problem has ALWAYS been ‘the education system is flawed and how and when children are taught certain skills is so corrupted and damaging, the children growing up with it cannot Help but struggle later in life, and your issue should be with the system”. like can i be real. learn how to Emotionally ~analyze~ posts from sad kids with mental illnesses saying smth as basic as “i wish i wasnt forced to read mature books as a child without any themes pertaining to me at all bc it hurt my already fragile motivations for learning :/” without your ass getting defensive over the classics. bitches stan ‘the door is red to symbolize anger’ but think thg is just a stupid dystopia love triangle book................ ur not even that smart like yall are just elitist like LITERALLY just elitist if you mock the values ppl see in other books and claim theyre too stupid to understand ~real books~. a fucking mickey mouse cartoon could hold the exact same moral lesson as a 1200 page novel written by a college professor of 30 years, like the Exact Same Conclusions CAN be drawn no matter how many words and analogies and metaphors are thrown on top!! for many those fancy details make it more enriching but its literally possible to get the same concepts from “EASIER” material, that is not Lesser it is ACCESSIBLE and it should be ENCOURAGED all the same. yall are gatekeeping and its stupid, if you actually want ppl to analyze media then you’d applaud how they analyze their passions even when you dont share it, not shame them for struggling with understanding other stories. this rly boils down to either ‘i hate ppls preferences and wanna make them feel stupid’ OR the ever so lovely ‘i hate whiny disabled ppl and kids who were pressured to the point of burnout, and wanna make them feel stupid’. its fucking exhausting. idc how you guys feel, you talk to hear yourselves talk and its all just talk and nothing helpful, your disrespect doesnt work bc its an echo of the root problem. for gods sake shut up already lmao

[rhodesmystery]

Omgg I have so many questions abt Natasha but to begin with - 7,8, 16. 27 because I was always curious about her magic. And 29 - about that breakup... Sorry if it's too much and take as much time as you need, tbh I'd like to send you the whole list haha 🌸

YOU ARE TOO KIND and I am VERY embarrassed but thank you SO MUCH!!!!!!

7. Socioeconomic background – and how it affects their behaviour.

So, her family is pretty well off. Both sides. Her father’s side has sketchy kind of results of money, as no one can confirm or deny if they’re tied up with illegal business but they’re also involved with like advertising and music so who honestly knows. Natasha doesn’t question it, obviously, also because like the more she spends away from her dad and that home, it’s just not really her problem? At least that’s how she sees it (unfortunately). Does make travel easier for her though.

As for her mother’s side, the Urquhart family does well on their own, even without connections to other pureblood/halfblood families through marriages. The Urquhart family raises and trains Sainglens - which are slightly smaller Abraxans, with solid black coats similar to Friesians (I made them up for something ages ago but am still fond of them so they stay even though the idea doesnt count anymore lol). Even with like generous gifts from her grandparents on holidays and birthdays, Natasha was very comfortable.

In saying all that, it’s really obvious it does skew her kind of. Understanding. Of everything. Natasha can catch herself a lot before saying anything but sometimes it gets out. She can buy gifts, and eats well, dresses nice, in both muggle and wizard society. Can casually buy Charlie a new wand. She’s not quite that level of “what does one banana cost? $10?” but there are times when yeah, she lets the ball drop, and there’s a bit of ire. Money doesn’t buy her happiness, though. Aquila, her uncle, at least encourages regular donations and activities here and there to keep her grounded.

8. Their family house – how does it look like? What’s the interior like, is there garden outside? Trinkets, furniture, books? 

The Rhodes family home consists of an apartment in Manhattan, that’s honestly a little isolating and cold, plus the family manor that’s outside the city limits, that is older than most people, and makes Natasha feel out of sorts. Both of her rooms in those places are actually surprisingly sparse, with the bare minimum of clothes, maybe a few plants, blue sheets on her bed. The walls have clear discolouration from posters being taken down, and some chips in the paint because of blutack. 

The Urquhart manor is pretty much her home. Her room is bright yellow and open windows with a squishy old armchair in the corner that belonged to her great great grandmother. There’s a few bookcases shoved up against the walls, the red wood clashing with the white vanity sitting next to it, that’s covered in beaded jewellery and stickers and photos that are laughing and dancing. There’s a footstool that Natasha is pretty sure walks on it’s on when she’s not looking, and she’s got her posters there now, papering one whole wall. Stuff is hanging and there’s paper cranes flying around her ceiling and there’s so many little things to find, from the crystal ball to the little dog figurine to several brooms and exactly twelve pairs of odd socks lying on the ground.

16. What’s their taste like re: interior design, art, gadgets? If they have (had) money - antiques or modern design? Ikea or whatever? Art collecting, fashion, wine? Pokemon cards in the 90s? 

Natasha is honestly pretty messy havoc with making things work if only because they have to exist. Her mother’s insistence on having minimalism didn’t take, because surprisingly it was her father who encouraged her to pick up and collect things, so she’s very fond of picking up rocks and feathers. As far as collecting goes… clothes, definitely. And magazines. Lots and lots of magazines. 

27.  MC’s magic – white, black or some shades of grey? Are they mainstream or do they push the envelope with niche stuff? Are they showy or subtle, systems oriented or intuitive? What’s their strong and weak points? Can they go wandless or wordless? Do they do tarot, divination or alchemy? NECROMANCY???

For the most part, Natasha has the white magic, except when its something like red sparks, of course. Very controlled and tight, however, with not overly large brushstrokes (thanks, Lyra). It works well for her, at least, because she isn’t throwing heaps of energy into her work either, so it gives her a little more stamina to work with too. Maybe it has her looking like she isn’t trying, which can be a serious downside when Natasha is seriously trying to duel, but people take it as her being slack.

Natasha likes the mainstream stuff, don’t get her wrong, but she completely has looked into other magics available. Whilst she’s not the most creative, or at least, not the most dedicated to creating, there have been a few spells made by her. Mostly in the form of waypoint stuff, just to help friends when exploring. Niche stuff that’s kind of whispered about, and she has delved into fancy hexes and jinxes that are frowned upon, especially some that were made by people unknown and just passed down through the years. Those are the showier magics though, the flashy bangs and noises that she gets into when she lets herself go. Which is why they’re very rare for her to perform, not because she can’t, but Natasha just hears her mother’s voice and disapproval.

She’s a strong dueller, by a long shot, with nice footwork and a good centre of balance. But she fights too tightly to her core. It can lead to her being exposed, especially if there is someone to defend. Suddenly having to throw out her barriers isn’t a strong suit, as Natasha has a long line of learning to defend number one, first. Not anyone else. 

There are some things she can do wordlessly, but they’re more lower level charms. As for being wandless, she can’t do it. At all. Natasha relies on her wand like crazy as that focal point. If anything, the only thing she could potentially do wandless is legilimency, but that’s a stretch. I’ve said before that if someone is open with strong emotions, she can skim them, especially with eye contact. But when it’s the spell and actually directed vocally, it’s a helluva lot stronger. And divination runs through her blood. She jokingly makes up stuff to freak out Trelawny, but sometimes she’s honestly not wrong. On certain days it’s a sneaking suspicion. On others, a heavy dream that plays out part by part. Natasha tells only her great great grandmother, and no one else. 

Don’t ask her to do potions. She’s absolutely shite at it. Charms and transfigurations are her strongest points, with defence against the dark arts pulling up the rear.  

29. MC’s close people dynamics – it can be anything from aromantic soulmates to romantic dynamics, the special people for your MC and how these relationships change over time? 

Bill is her life long nonromantic partner. Nothing will ever break them up. Ever. At one point, they joked about if they weren’t married by 30, they’d marry each other for tax benefits. Natasha is largely influenced by Bill, and doesn’t know who she would be without him. Even when Natasha seems to have disappeared from the world for a time, Bill always receives letters, updates. They keep in constant, almost regular, contact, and their letters are pages long, so that neither of them miss out on anything. 

Penny is a very solid point of origin for Natasha. It might’ve taken a while for them to get to that point, but Penny is a hallmark in the history of Natasha. Since first meeting, it’s just been a solid friendship, with lots of tears and late nights and like Natasha is open with very few people, and even deeper again with others… but Penny knows her. They may mess around and Natasha might be her guinea pig for potions, but if you need to find out something about Natasha, where she is, what she’s doing? Penny. Find Penny.

Tulip is another unlikely friend. For the most part, they seem the opposites. Tulip comes across as the perfect, ambitious, conniving Slytherin, and Natasha the studious, wise, careful Ravenclaw. Tulip’s parents are law abiding, hard on everything, please follow suit. Natasha’s parents flaunt the law where they can, only encourage strictness when it comes to protecting oneself, but let Natasha grow.They have joked more than once that maybe they were switched at birth. They fit each other’s jigsaw pieces. Their rough edges match, forming a softness only they understand. They don’t really talk much, but honestly they don’t need to. 

Talbott kind of influenced a shift in Natasha though. With him, not only did she awaken her animagus form, but it helped her reconcile a lot of her internal struggles with being in Slytherin, and who she should be as a person to her parents (especially so, when her form was that of a great eagle, which honestly broke her heart a lot more than she let on). Whilst they didn’t really solidify a friendship until later in their education, Natasha treasures Talbott. There might’ve always been a sneaking suspicion, of her telling herself to leap, but she doesn’t. Not that it stops them from being friends. Natasha made sure to friend Talbott hard.

And as for Charlie… it took a lot for them to get to a point, where they finally understood each other, and there wasn’t anymore confusion and stalled conversations and awkwardness. It took them breaking up more than once, going months without speaking, then spending a whirlwind six months together, but they got there. Charlie is her best friend, confidante, lover. Natasha doesn’t bother working out the math, of how they got from point a to point b, because it would be difficult to map out, let alone make people understand. Both her and Charlie are open, just as much as they are closed. Private people, who also crave a certain sort of company. And having to go from close quarter living, to their own spaces, letting themselves breathe, really helped. Might’ve helped them get level headed about what was actually happening, and how their lives crossed over. 

[hopemcilroy]

Sketching Interfaces.

After practicing a few sketching techniques and trying to ‘own the line’, Chris gave us an exercise to sketch out a few interfaces, using the different pens with different thickness to enhance the user experience and how the screen is designed. This exercise was timed which encouraged us to really focus on what was important and what process we would take.

1. Calculator.

We started simply with a calculator, the format was basic of the calculator so it was looking at the design around that. Using the Tombow ABT pens, I was able to capture the different sections by adding shading and depth to the screen.

2. Application

We then looking at a system that looked at near by cafes, so there was a lot of content to look at here. Chris made a good pint that when drawing out the interface to not draw all the details in the one design, but instead draw an arrow and enlarge the features so it’s easier to understand - both for the designer and potential developer you are handing it over to. I used different shades of grey to set the tone and hierarchy in this application.

3. Booking system

This was the last and the most complex design we sketched out. There were many components to consider, so I sectioned out the main areas first and then began to add detail and colour to distinguish between each. Again I didn't write any words. actual content but I think it is clear where the titles and body copy are. Because of the limited time, this example helped me to get clear in my head what elements I would draw first.

Outcome.

I really enjoyed this exercise, even though it was simple enough I learned some key principles:

To own the line.

To get stuck in and don’t hesitate. 

To break down the interface in my head to get a rough idea. 

I am going to practice drawing a few more, because my job will include me drawing loadsss of interfaces so why not start now?