#*epically stores this*

[ary11y]

Hello

Welcome to the blog I made without thinking for reblogging cool stuff

Call me either Blu or Ari

I have a very (un)healthy obsession with chonny jash's music (/j)

I'm a minor so don't be a creep

I speak both English y español (viva México 👍)

I am a very confused person so I might not understand stuff right

Asks are fine :]

I'm a huge fan of ducks

Btw if you have a My Singing Monsters account add me mayhaps /nf (98554729KH)

Accounts:

@blu00u

@allgoodthingscomeinthrees

DNI list:

-NSFW accounts

-usual DNI stuff (homophobic, terfs, pedophiles, that stuff)

You're on VERY thin ice if...

-you support controversial people (joe Hawley, Juno, tap, Wilbur Soot, those people) (I do not want to be a part of anything controversial, you're not on the DNI list because I can't blame you for having a point of view, however, that doesn't mean I'm on your side or that I support you)

Tags I use often:

#woahh Ari's not reblogging for once - posts where I...don't reblog, it's probably going to be me talking about something a lot, probably in a single post

#*epically stores this* - posts that I don't want to lose in my 2763+ posts

#someone actually asked a fool something - asks

#art that makes me go skdndjsksnzjl - art I liked so much that I decided to store it

#in which a fool joins a picrew chain - picrew thingies I made because of a chain I was (probably) tagged in

#songs that rotating in Ari's brain - a song I can't get off my mind (LEAVE ME ALONE! GAH! /ref) or songs that I'm listening to and that I like the lyrics of

#you used to call me on my cellphone - oc lore (please make me use this tag please make me use this tag ple-) (tag shared with the blu00u account)

#wth Ari habla español? - posts in Spanish

#loki being a silly guy who's lokito - you should look at my dog Loki... NOW! (Aka photos/videos of my dog) (actually I think it's gonna be my dog in general)

#Artemisa being the chillest cat in the world - posts related to Artemisa :D

#the legend of Satoru and Warrior - Artemisa's kittens!!!!!!!!

#i LOVE aart - art tips!!!

#draw your ocs like this you fool (tag to draw my ocs) - images I found funny or epic and I want to draw my ocs like this (added the (tag to draw my ocs) because I realized it's not the best idea to have a tag named like this)

#collecting tee fanarts - ........HE'S VERY SILLY OK

#fun Ari facts: fun facts about me because I'm full of myself like that 🕶️ /j

#Blu's OC facts - fun facts about the sad lives of my OCs!!!! /Silly (I add trigger warnings on the tags btw

#Artemisa being the chillest cat in the world - stuff about my cat Artemisa B]

#the legend of Satoru and Warrior - rata 1 y rata 2 /aff (Artemisa's children)

#besties tag 💜🩵 - memories with my besties B]

#Ari's DrinkingBuddies Stash - LOOK TEE AND DEVIL WOULD TOTALLY BE FRIENDS CHAT ARE YOU HEARING ME

Silly stuff I've done:

Built a robot (#in which a fool that knows nothing about building a robot tries to build one)

Vibe checked people (#blu vibe checks people)

Created a writing blog (#ari writer arc)

Tried to music (#who the hell made blu think she can make music)

GOT HACKED BY A CLUCKING CHIMERA WHO WOULD NOT STOP REBLOGGED G BAGUETTES AND ONE (1) IMAGE OF HER SAYING LAUNCH THE MISSILS????????????? (#Teto speaks!!!)

K I think that's all, bye -runs away-

[ary11y]

I like this idea a lot

HEY WHOLE WANNA SEE HOW FAR I CAN FLY

<ICARUS I SWEAR TO HARMONIA I WILL GET YOU BANNED SOMEHOW IF YOU DO THAT AGAIN I'VE ALREADY PATCHED UP THREE OF THE HOLES YOU LEFT ON THE CEILING FROM DOING THAT.>

-and they have a very short lifespan with it being up to a week only

<Apollo. That's great but. This is a Starbucks. You're holding the line.>

"-cane and pointed. ' Did you ever remark that door ? ' he asked; and when his companion had replied in the affirmative, ' It is connected in my mind, ' added he, ' with a very odd story.' ' Indeed ?' said Mr. Utterso"

<Announcer, this is still not a library. Go read your novels out loud somewhere else please.>

PUT ALL THE MONEY IN THE BAG RIGHT NOW.

<Listen man you can't do that here but you can go to the bank maybe. The most I can give is three dollars.>

So yeah I'm a very popular influencer well actually micro influencer technically bu

<Ego. Order. Now.>

Hellooooooo how are you??? I hope you're fine :D haha that's coincidentally my name! Well, nickname actually, I'm just fine like that ahahaha!

<FINE JUST SAY YOUR DAMN ORDER.>

Wassup bbg ;}}}}}}}}}}}}}

<Devil get out of here you're scaring the clients. Also how did you even get drunk. There aren't any alcoholic drinks here.>

Ughhhhhhgghhhhhhhhhghh I'm so tireddddddddd

<And why is that? Did you go to the gym and do the things you always repeat but that I can't be bothered to remember?>

Look at him! His name's Jouse and he's my pet rat :3

<MORI WHAT THE FdUCK GET THAT AWAY FROM ME

ALSO NO PETS ALLOWED>

...

<...>

...

<...

Well??? What's your order?????>

Hey-

<ABSOLUTELY NOT, GO AWAY. EVERY TIME YOU AND YOUR GROUP ENTER SOMETHING EITHER EXPLODES OR CAUSES A FIRE>

Oh

Ok :(

[After a few minutes, the power goes out]

<FDUCK>

yeah ok sure . said this on twitter already but green tfftt is like a marble hornets character to me he just wanders into the woods for like days at a time & comes out with no idea where he is

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND TODAY (May 2), and in WELLINGTON TOMORROW (May 3). More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Epic, makers of the wildly popular Fortnite video-game, have waged a one-company war against the "app tax" – the 15-30% rake that the mobile duopoly of Apple/Google take out of every penny we spend inside of apps.

Epic's own digital practices are hardly spotless: just this year, the company was caught cheating players – many of them children – with deceptive practices and had to refund over $72m:

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/fortnite-refunds

But in this fight, Epic is on the side of the angels. The 30% that Apple/Google sucks out of the mobile economy is a brutal tax, and not just on app makers. Patreon performers recently raised a stink when the company announced that it would be clawing back 30% of the money pledged by their supporters – that 30% surcharge is passed straight through to Apple/Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/12/24218629/patreon-membership-ios-30-percent-apple-tax

From independent news outlets to crafters selling their work out of small storefronts, all the way up to massive entertainment services like Disney Plus and Fortnite, the mobile cartel takes 30% out of every dollar, a racket they maintain with onerous rules that ban apps from using their own payment processors, or even from encouraging users to click a link that brings them to a web-based payment screen.

30% is a gigantic markup on payment processing. It's ten times the going rate for payments in the USA, already one of the most expensive places in the world to transfer money from one party to another. In the EU, payment processing typically runs 1%…or less.

But crafters, Patreon podcasters and small-town newspapers are in no position to fight Google and Apple. Instead, we get Epic, a multi-billion-dollar company that's gone to the mattresses to fight these multi-trillion-dollar companies. Personally, I dote on billionaire-on-trillionaire violence.

Epic was wildly successful. It mopped up the floor with Google, securing an especially punitive award from a judge who was furious that Google had destroyed evidence:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

Epic also won against Apple, though not as thoroughly as it had with Google, because Apple had the commonsense not to get up to the kind of shenanigans that make federal judges very, very mad. In the Google case, the court found that Google had acted as a monopolist and ordered it to open up the payment system in Google Play, a direct blow to the Android app tax.

In the Apple case, the judge did not find that Google had acted as a monopolist, but did rule that the App Store's payment processing racket violated the law, and ordered Apple to end its own app tax:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/30/epic-games-just-scored-a-major-win-against-apple/

That's where things get gnarly. Apple is addicted to corrupt sources of income – like the tens of billions it illegally receives every year in bribes from Google make it the default search:

https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-verdict-apple-319a61f20fb11510097845a30abaefd8

And it really, really loves the app tax. When the EU ordered Apple to allow third-party app stores (as a way of killing the app tax), the company cooked up a malicious compliance plan that was comically corrupt:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

So, the mere fact that a federal judge had ordered Apple to open up its app store to competing payment processors was not going convince Apple to actually do it. Instead, Apple cooked up a set of rules for third-party payment processing that would make it more costly to use someone else's payments, piling up a mountain of junk fees and using scare screens and other deceptive warnings to discourage users from making payments through a rival system:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-apple-executive-lied

That's the kind of thing that is apt to make a federal judge angry – and, as noted, angry federal judges can make life very hard for tech monopolists, a lesson Google learned when it destroyed key evidence in its Epic case. But Apple didn't just flout the court order – they lied about it to cover it up, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is furious. She held that Alex Roman, Apple's Vice-President of Finance, "outright lied under oath," and she has raised the possibility of criminal contempt penalties for Apple:

https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/05/01/pacer_epic_vs_apple_injunction_judgement.pdf

The judge further wrote:

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases

In other words, any junk fees, any impediments to opening up third party payments, will be switfly and harshly dealt with. As of right now developers can start to build third-party payments into their apps and Apple cannot block them. It's the end of the app tax, a source of about $100b/year for Apple:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/apple_epic_lies_possible_crime/

The world is on fire and everything is terrible, but we are also living through the most consequential season in the history of the war on corporate tech power. Google has been convicted three times of being a monopolist and is almost certainly going to have to sell off Chrome, most of its ad-tech stack, and possibly Android. Meta just put up a pathetic showing in an equally serious antitrust case that could see it forced to sell off Instagram and Whatsapp:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete

Countries around the world have passed big, sweeping, muscular antitrust laws specifically aimed at smashing corporate tech power, like the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act:

https://www.eff.org/pages/adoption-dsadma-notre-analyse

Most importantly, all of this is happening from the bottom up. There is no dark money campaign to fuck up the tech companies. The politicians and enforcers who are taking on Big Tech are being shoved from behind by billions of everyday people who are furious and refuse to take it any longer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

I am deeply grateful for the public servants who have championed this cause, but I also know that these people are the effect of our movement, not the cause. When Kier Starmer fires Britain's brilliant and effective top competition enforcer and replaces him with the former head of Amazon UK, that does nothing to tamp down the political outrage that Britons feel towards America's tech giants:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

All over the world, countries that passed IP laws to protect US tech interests in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets are grappling with the end of free trade with America. This represents a generational opportunity to pass laws that enable local technologists to jailbreak US tech exports and liberate their people from the extractive practices of Big Tech forever:

https://archive.is/CiBIz

There is nothing harder to stop than an idea whose time has come to pass.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annelid_worm,_Atlantic_forest,_northern_littoral_of_Bahia,_Brazil_%2816107326533%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

--

Hubertl (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2015-03-04_Elstar_%28apple%29_starting_putrefying_IMG_9761_bis_9772.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[daftpatience]

i lov planning outfits the same way i love drawing diagrams for rearranging furniture. its plotting and scheming

[daredevil-vagabond]

"You are far too nice // Mercy has a price"

[Ruthlessness; Jorge Rivera-Herrans]

Nautilus Jason.

[tunguszka20]

Athena: He's still a threat, until he's dead. Finish it. Odysseus: No. Athena: ... Athena: Are we gonna have a problem?

[jazzy-a]

After Ody gets home and, of course, slaughters all the suitors and reunites with his wife and son, that man absolutely sat down with a council and immediately pulled out schematics, like:

"Cool, cool. So, first things first: We're building new temples for Athena and Hermes. What? Placement? Oh, yeah... Just knock down the Poseidon one. It's fine. I stabbed that God, like, 20 times into submission. Pretty sure that means the ocean is my b*tch now....And f*ck that guy anyways, am I right? So, for Athena's temple, I'm definitely thinking blue✨-"

[curioud-epic]

finished the ithaca saga and HES FINALLY HOME GUYS. there was a lot of murder and that ending made me cry so hard i needed to stop sketching.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Thank you for posting about your fallen London oc, it made me dust off my old account which I haven't played since- *checks journal* omg since 2021 😭 do you play any of their other games, like sunless skies?

Thrilled to hear you got back into the Flondon-verse! I played a bit of Sunless Skies last summer - these were my favourite officers B*)

[demifiendrsa]

MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls | Announce Trailer

Developer Diary: From Japan to the World

MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls will launch for PlayStation 5 and PC (Steam, Epic Games Store) in 2026.

Screenshots

First details

PlayStation Studios, Arc System Works, and Marvel Games have joined forces to realize the latest in tag team fighters, MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls! Experience the Marvel Universe like never before with reimagined characters and stages, a heart-pounding soundtrack, intuitive gameplay mechanics, and jaw-dropping visuals that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Whether this is your first fighting game or you are a veteran of the genre, Arc System Works has incorporated gameplay controls and mechanics that are easy to pick up and play, and yet still offer the depth and versatility for high level competition.

“From the beginning, we aimed to make MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls a title that could be enjoyed by a wide variety of players,” explains game director and lead battle designer, Kazuto Sekine.

“Generally, a team VS fighting game requires the player to learn multiple characters, but for MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls, you only need to master one character in order to play the game. We have designed the mechanics in such a way that you can perform a variety of actions with either traditional fighting game inputs or simple inputs. With the press of a few buttons, multiple characters can appear on screen to provide backup or attack together—creating a new and exciting team VS battle experience.”

“Since day one, our long-time and trusted collaborators at PlayStation and the team at Arc System Works have poured incredible amounts of talent and passion into reimagining the Marvel Universe in a way that only they can,” said Michael Francisco, Senior Product Development Manager, Marvel Games. “MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls demonstrates that they are absolute masters of their craft and are true Marvel fans at heart. Players are in for a wild ride.”

Characters

Enter the fray with iconic Marvel heroes and villains such as Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Doctor Doom, Storm, Ms. Marvel, Star-Lord, and Ghost Rider (Robbie Reyes)—each with Arc System Works’ unique twist on their character designs and gameplay styles.

Arc System Works Producer, Takeshi Yamanaka, states, “There are so many amazing Marvel characters that it was quite a struggle to choose our roster, but we did have some criteria for the selection process. First and foremost, we wanted to include characters who we feel to be the ‘face’ of Marvel. At the same time, we also needed to select characters that would give us a balance of battle types and styles. Lastly, we wanted to sprinkle in a few surprises and leave room for characters who have never been playable in a fighting game before.”

Yamanaka-san continues, “Early on in the project, we experimented with a shader to recreate a more western comic-book visual style, but the Marvel team expressed a desire for us to lean into something more [Arc System Works]-like. It was then that we switched our approach to the game’s visuals and began to lean more into the Japanimation style [Arc System Works] is known for.”

Gameplay Mechanics

From short-ranged jabs to the cinematic Ultimate Skills, each character features a bespoke set of Normal, Special, and Unique attacks inspired by their abilities and powers in Marvel lore. Arc System Works has gone to great lengths to ensure that gameplay style, movement, and feel of these legendary characters is fresh, new, and wholly unique to MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls.

But it’s not just the individual gameplay of the characters that has been enhanced; significant dedication has gone into reimagining and redefining what it means to be a tag team fighter.

“Team VS fighting games have a long tradition of two-versus-two or three-versus-three team formats, so this is something we discussed in-depth within the development team. We went back and forth many times, from thinking we might be better off making a one-versus-one game or sticking to the established three-versus-three format.”

Sekine-san continues, “At its core, we felt that the appeal of team VS fighting games is the intensity of battles with multiple characters on screen at once. Additionally, one of the appeals of Marvel comics is seeing the vast cast of characters coming together to create all kinds of unique team-ups.”

“With these two ideas in mind, we concluded that creating a four-versus-four team VS system would be the best way to not only create those over-the-top moments, but to further evolve the tag fighting genre.”

Stages

The stages come to life in MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls, filled with easter eggs for eagle-eyed fans to find. Most stages also feature multiple areas. These transitions between areas are not just action-packed and stunning to witness, but they also play a strategic role. Check out the screenshots from Marvel’s New York City to see what you can find.

More to Come

Today’s announcement is just the beginning of our journey. From characters and stages to gameplay modes and the online experience. There’s so much more we can’t wait to share with you!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

An Epic antitrust loss for Google

A jury just found Google guilty on all counts of antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with Epic, maker of Fortnite, which brought a variety of claims related to how Google runs its app marketplace. This is huge:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/technology/epic-games-google-antitrust-ruling.html

The mobile app store world is a duopoly run by Google and Apple. Both use a variety of tactics to prevent their customers from installing third party app stores, which funnels all app makers into their own app stores. Those app stores cream an eye-popping 30% off every purchase made in an app.

This is a shocking amount to charge for payment processing. The payments sector is incredibly monopolized and notorious for its price-gouging – and its standard (wildly inflated) rate is 2-5%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

Now, in theory, Epic doesn't have to sell in Google Play, the official Android app store. Unlike Apple's iOS, Android permit both sideloading (installing an app directly without using an app store) and configuring your device to use a different app store. In practice, Google uses a variety of anticompetitive tricks to prevent these app stores from springing up and to dissuade Android users from sideloading. Proving that Google's actions – like paying Activision $360m as part of "Project Hug" (no, really!) – were intended to prevent new app storesfrom springing up was a big lift for Epic. But they managed it, in large part thanks to Google's own internal communications, wherein executives admitted that this was exactly why Project Hug existed. This is part of a pattern with Big Tech antitrust: many of the charges are theoretically very hard to make stick, but because the companies put their evil plans in writing (think of the fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, whose top execs all conferred in a groupchat called "Wirefraud"), Big Tech keeps losing in court:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Now, I do like to dunk on Big Tech for this kind of thing, because it's objectively funny and because the companies make so many unforced errors. But in an important sense, this kind of written record is impossible to avoid. Any large institution can only make and enact policy through administrative systems, and those systems leave behind a paper-trail: memos, meeting minutes, etc. Yes, we all know that quote from The Wire: "Is you taking notes on a fucking criminal conspiracy?" But inevitably, any ambitious conspiracy can only exist if someone is taking notes.

What's more, any large conspiracy involving lots of parties will inevitably produce leaks. Think of this as the corollary to the idea that the moon landing can't be a hoax, because there's no way 400,000 co-conspirators could keep the secret. Big Tech's conspiracies required hundreds or even thousands of collaborators to keep their mouths shut, and eventually someone blabs:

https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-moon-landing-you-d-need-400000-conspirators

This is part of a wave of antitrust cases being brought against the tech giants. As Matt Stoller writes, the guilty-on-all-counts jury verdict will leak into current and future actions. Remember, Google spent much of this year in court fighting the DoJ, who argued that the company bribed Apple not to make a competing search engine, paying tens of billions every year to keep a competitor from emerging. Now that a jury has convinced Google of doing that to prevent alternative app stores from emerging, claims that it used these pay-for-delay tactics in other sectros get a lot more credible:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case

On that note: what about Apple? Epic brought a very similar case against Apple and lost. Both Apple and Epic are appealing that case to the Supreme Court, and now that Google has been convicted in a similar case, it might prompt the Supremes to weigh in and resolve the seeming inconsistencies in the interpretation of federal law.

This is a key moment in the long project to wrest antitrust away from the pro-monopoly side, who spent decades "training" judges to produce verdicts that run counter to the plain language of America's antitrust law:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

There's 40 years' worth of bad precedent to overturn. The good news is that we've got the law on our side. Literally, the wording of the laws and the records of the Congressional debate leading to their passage, all militate towards the (incredibly obvious) conclusion that the purpose of anti-monopoly law is to fight monopoly, not defend it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

It's amazing to realize that we got into this monopoly quagmire because judges just literally refused to enforce the law. That's what makes one part of the jury verdict against Google so exciting: the jury found that Google's insistence that Play Store sellers use its payment processor was an act of illegal tying. Today, "tying" is an obscure legal theory, but few doctrines would be more useful in disenshittifying the internet. A company is guilty of illegal tying when it forces you to use unrelated products or services as a condition of using the product you actually want. The abandonment of tying led to a host of horribles, from printer companies forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon to Livenation forcing venues to sell tickets through its Ticketmaster subsidiary.

The next phase of this comes when the judge decides on the penalty. Epic doesn't want cash damages – it wants the judge to order Google to fulfill its promise of "an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants." They've asked the judge to order Google to facilitate third-party app stores, and to separate app stores from payment processors. As Stoller puts it, they want to "crush Google’s control over Android":

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-v-google-trial-verdict-a-win-for-all-developers

Google has sworn to appeal, surprising no one. The Times's expert says that they will have a tough time winning, given how clear the verdict was. Whatever this means for Google and Android, it means a lot for a future free from monopolies.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

[plushgoreheart]

WENT TO A FUCKING CONVENTION 🔥

mask!!!!! i took ver long to make

>w<

and the fit i wore with it!!!! :D

EEEEEEEEEEEE its an oc cosplay based on SELF-iSH btw :3

[witless-winion1]

found the perfect pins for Telemachus and Odysseus at Kinokuniya

Telemachus would wear that. Fight me.

[todayisafridaynight]

[susielesbianism]

Oh my god i just know orchestral remixes of GUARDIAN are going to go so so so so fucking HARD

[monomew]

I have a red bubble💫💫💫

Here's some design(more in store)