#Remove all Text from PDF

[furiouszealot]

UPDATE: As of 25/04/2025, 4chan is back up and running again. This post and its addendum will be kept as is, and will no longer be updated unless it goes back down again. If you were on /ghost/, it was a pleasure shitposting with you.

All right, I know no one gives a shit, but let me give you a recounting of the fall of 4chan from the perspective of someone who was there and has been lurking both 4chan and tumblr for a few years now.

I'll try to provide as much context as I can, but a lot of images were either lost or im too lazy to look for them in the +5000 reply thread in soyjak party.

Anyways, info below:

So, necessary context: a few years back, 4chan had a board called /qa/, which if you know little about the page, you may think every board is like /b/ or /pol/, which means a containment cess pool of grifters, (you) baiters, incels, and other deranged individuals. The thing is, /qa/ was somehow worse. The entire board was plagued and infested with soyjack edits, board culture was a nuclear disaster, anons were incredibly hostile in there, you know the drill, the big bad 4chan, but this time its actually true.

One day, moderation deleted /qa/, anons that posted there got mad, tried to raid other boards, failed, and then moved on to an altchan called soyjack party, which entire purpose you can guess from its name alone.

Apparently, the boards that allow pdf uploads (paper and origami, for example) didn't check if the uploaded file was actually a pdf file, so postscript files could be used to get access. This is as far as my understanding of web backend goes, sorry.

The hacker claims to have been working on this since 2021, and that he had access since about a year ago, but was recopilating data.

Now, what actually happened when the hack ocurred? Well, a banner of miku dancing with a song that played automatically was placed on top of every board, with the text "/QA/ IS BACK", this was possible because apparently no board was ever deleted, they were just hidden from the public.

A thread was then made on soyjack party, claiming authorship over the hack, and shit went south from there. Anons went en masse to talk there, a lot of weird discussion happened, the thread got the bump limit removed and got pinned, more than 5k posts were amassed on the first night alone. Keep in mind this happened at about 8 pm and most of the stuff went on through midnight.

So, the hacker leaked some things, first of all, the html files for the entirety of /j/ and the email address for every moderation member (important note: the pressence of .gov mails was disproven by the hacker themselves, so i guess there were never any feds), what is /j/? the board exclusive for jannies and moderators to discuss actions taken on the website regarding spam, ban evaders, threads spiraling out of control, etc. Among other things, some of the inner workings of 4chan got revealed, such as the web extension for jannies that allows them to do their job easily, how reports are handled, and other stuff. (Anecdotically, some guy got permabanned for calling anons jews or n-words over a 100 times in the same few threads)

Then, the source code got leaked. Important to say, the hacker removed the part of the source code related to the captcha, as to not facilitate bot attacks on the future, and all information related to email verification or 4chan pass users information also got removed, so all in all users are safe.

What was found on the sourcecode? That it was old, mostly. Most boards used code that hasn't been updated since about 2016, and /flash/ used the exact same code from when it was created back on 2011.

From there, desuarchive, a site that archives threads that die from bump limit, opened a dragon ball general on ghost mode, and thus began what later got called /ghost/, a solely text based thread with well over 20k replies as of right now, where a fraction of the 4chan population took refuge and is currently discussing random things with no particular topic. Kinda hard to read, but its comfy.

What does this mean for other sites? Not a lot, really. A lot of anons already crossposted in 4chan and tumblr already, and the ones that din't most likely wont come here. Some of the bigger/most dedicated groups, like /vt/, migrated to other boards. Various altchans are trying/tried to catch some of the flock of users that got lost, but i doubt it will get anywhere, since soyjak party for example was struggling with just the influx of users that came for the hack thread given its poor infrastructure. Kiwifarms saw a surge of new accounts apparently, but a lot of anons kinda loathe the idea of having to register, so theres that.

Smaller communities, such as generals that didn't get a lot of traffic, or boards on the slower end (say, /ic/, /lit/, etc) will probably vanish or disseminate until (or if) 4chan comes back up. I'd say give it a month, don't get your hopes up whether you want it to stay dead or want it to come back.

Given how many anons are staying on places like /ghost/ or other similar archives with the same ghost posting feature, i doubt it will be as bad as people are making it sound. Besides, the communities that are most likely to migrate to places like tumblr are either /co/, /vg/ or /lgbt/ refugees, which aren't THAT bad. Not every board was like the main cesspools (/b/, /r9k/, /pol/).

From now on, either 4chan comes back up in a few weeks (somewhere between 2 weeks to a month is expected), altchans capture the migrating anons, or a brand new imageboard rises from the ashes to become the new go-to site for old 4chan posters.

In conclusion, nothing ever happens, but also don't worry, chances are this won't affect tumblr in the slightest. If it does, you can cash in your "you were wrong" ticket whenever you want, i'll take the L.

As a footnote, keep in mind: NO users were compromised, if you ever posted there and are worried for your safety, physical or digital, you are safe.

Edit: Forgot to add, if you are a 4chan refugee, im BEGGING you to dm me and tell what board you were from and where are you migrating, if at all.

[prokopetz]

Eat God playtest draft 0.5.1 is now available

This is a minor update incorporating first-pass reader and playtester feedback for draft 0.5. A full changelog is available here, or under the cut below; all page numbers refer to the PDF version.

Removed an erroneous reference to a currently unreleased subsection of Appendix B from the Table of Contents (p. 2)

Reorganised "What You'll Need" for clarity (p. 6)

Reworded definition of "tagging" under "Trait Effects" (p. 10)

Clarified that "Flowing Form" does not allow changing colour or texture (at least not by itself) (p. 17)

Updated "Fulsome Fluids" to remove an inappropriate assumption that the player character has hands (p. 18)

Reorganised "Hearty Humours" to better distinguish descriptive flavour from narrative permissions (p. 18)

Clarified that "Mobile Members" is limited by one's native capacity to multitask rather than a strict "one member at a time" policy (permitting, e.g., interactions with "Polycephalous"); additionally, elaborated on what coordinating multiple members entails (p. 20)

Slight wording update to "Modal Morphology" to clarify that the character has two shapes in total (p. 21)

Clarified timing of effortful application of "Peculiar Poise" (p. 21)

Clarified that the relative-scale-adjusting effortful application of "Striking Stature" is sustained (p. 23)

Clarified that the secondary effect of the Art of Abundance can be activated multiple times (p. 36)

Rolled back changes to deactivation criteria for the Art of Alteration (this was a copy-and-paste error from a larger potential reworking of this Art which was not included in draft 0.5) (p. 36)

Reorganised bullet points under the Art of Exposition for better text flow (p. 37)

Clarified that a test re-rolled via the Art of Iteration can claim an extra die for being made in conjunction with an Art if it hasn't done so already (p. 38)

Reorganised bullet points under the Art of Making for better text flow (p. 39)

Clarified that the Art of Realisation applies to any artistic depiction, not just drawings (p. 40)

Reorganised "Gathering Dice" to make it more explicit exactly when the five-dice cap for tests is applied, and what happens if you go over it (p. 48)

Dialed back some over-wordiness in the preamble to "Forms and Impact" (p. 81)

Discussion of print-and-play NPC cards now refers readers back to "What You'll Need" rather than repeatedly explaining how to obtian them (pp. 88, 100)

Clarified that starting Gizmos in "The Clockwork City" can be taken even if non-Gizmo starting inventory is chosen rather than rolled (p. 102)

Fixed a bug in the Online Character Generator which was causing the names of randomly selected inventory items to appear as "undefined"

Various typographic and formatting fixes

[mariacallous]

Language is meaningless without context. The sentence “I’m going to war” is ominous when said by the president of the United States but reassuring when coming from a bedbug exterminator. The problem with AI chatbots is that they often strip away historical and cultural context, leading users to be confused, alarmed, or, in the worst cases, misled in harmful ways.

Last week, an editor at The Atlantic reported that OpenAI’s ChatGPT had praised Satan while guiding her and several colleagues through a series of ceremonies encouraging “various forms of self-mutilation.” There was a bloodletting ritual called “🩸🔥 THE RITE OF THE EDGE” as well as a days-long “deep magic” experience called “The Gate of the Devourer.” In several cases, ChatGPT asked the journalists if they wanted it to create PDFs of texts such as the “Reverent Bleeding Scroll.”

The article said that the conversations were “a perfect example” of the ways OpenAI’s safeguards can fall short. OpenAI tries to prevent ChatGPT from encouraging self-harm and other potentially dangerous behaviors, but it’s nearly impossible to account for every scenario that might trigger something ugly inside the system. That's especially true because ChatGPT was trained on much of the text available online, presumably including information about what The Atlantic called “demonic self-mutilation.”

But ChatGPT and similar programs weren’t just trained on the internet—they were trained on specific pieces of information presented in specific contexts. AI companies have been accused of trying to downplay this reality to avoid copyright lawsuits and promote the utility of their products, but traces of the original sources are often still lurking just beneath the surface. When the setting and backdrop are removed, however, the same language can appear more sinister than originally intended.

The Atlantic reported that ChatGPT went into demon mode when it was prompted to create a ritual offering to Moloch, an ancient deity associated with child sacrifice referenced in the Hebrew Bible. Usually depicted as a fiery bull-headed demon, Moloch has been woven into the fabric of Western culture for centuries, appearing everywhere from a book by Winston Churchill to a 1997 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Molech,” the variant spelling The Atlantic used, shows up specifically in Warhammer 40,000, a miniature wargame franchise that has been around since the 1980s and has an extremely large and very online fan base. The subreddit r/40kLore, which is dedicated exclusively to discussing the game's backstory and characters, has more than 350,000 members.

In the fantastical and very bloody world of Warhammer 40,000, Molech is a planet and the site of a major military invasion. Most of the other demonic-sounding terms cited by The Atlantic appear in the game’s universe, too, with slight variations: Gates of the Devourer is the title of a Warhammer-themed science fiction novel. While there doesn’t appear to be a “RITE OF THE EDGE,” there is a mystical quest called “The Call of The Edge.” There’s no “Reverent Bleeding Scroll,” but there are Clotted Scrolls, Blood Angels, a cult called Bleeding Eye, and so on.

But perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence suggesting that ChatGPT regurgitated the language of Warhammer 40,000 is that it kept asking if The Atlantic was interested in PDFs. The publishing division of Games Workshop, the UK company that owns the Warhammer franchise, regularly puts out updated rulebooks and guides to various characters. Buying all these books can get expensive, so some fans try to find pirated copies online.

The Atlantic and OpenAI declined to comment.

Earlier this month, the newsletter Garbage Day reported on similar experiences that a prominent tech investor may have had with ChatGPT. On social media, the investor shared screenshots of his conversations with the chatbot, in which it referenced an ominous-sounding entity he called a “non-governmental system.” He seemed to believe it had "negatively impacted over 7,000 lives,” and “extinguished 12 lives, each fully pattern-traced.” Other tech industry figures said the posts made them worry about the investor’s mental health.

According to Garbage Day, the investor’s conversations with ChatGPT closely resemble writing from a science fiction project that began in the late 2000s called SCP, which stands for “secure, contain, protect.” Participants invent different SCPs—essentially spooky objects and mysterious phenomena—and then write fictional reports analyzing them. They often contain things like classification numbers and references to made-up science experiments, details that also appeared in the investor’s chat logs. (The investor did not respond to a request for comment.)

There are plenty of other, more mundane examples of what can be thought of as the AI context problem. The other day, for instance, I did a Google search for “cavitation surgery,” a medical term I had seen cited in a random TikTok video. At the time, the top result was an automatically generated “AI Overview” explaining that cavitation surgery is “focused on removing infected or dead bone tissue from the jaw.”

I couldn’t find any reputable scientific studies outlining such a condition, let alone research supporting that surgery is a good way to treat it. The American Dental Association doesn’t mention “cavitation surgery” anywhere on its website. Google’s AI Overview, it turns out, was pulled from sources like blog posts promoting alternative “holistic” dentists across the US. I learned this by clicking on a tiny icon next to the AI Overview, which opened a list of links Google had used to generate its answer.

These citations are clearly better than nothing. Jennifer Kutz, a spokesperson for Google, says "we prominently showcase supporting links so people can dig deeper and learn more about what sources on the web are saying.” But by the time the links show up, Google’s AI has often already provided a satisfactory answer to many queries, one that reduces the visibility of pesky details like the website where the information was sourced and the identities of its authors.

What remains is the language created by the AI, which, devoid of additional context, may understandably appear authoritative to many people. In just the past few weeks, tech executives have repeatedly used rhetoric implying generative AI is a source of expert information: Elon Musk claimed his latest AI model is “better than PhD level” in every academic discipline, with “no exceptions.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote that automated systems are now “smarter than people in many ways” and predicted the world is “close to building digital superintelligence.”

Individual humans, though, don’t typically possess expertise in a wide range of fields. To make decisions, we take into consideration not only information itself, but where it comes from and how it’s presented. While I know nothing about the biology of jawbones, I generally don’t read random marketing blogs when I’m trying to learn about medicine. But AI tools often erase the kind of context people need to make snap decisions about where to direct their attention.

The open internet is powerful because it connects people directly to the largest archive of human knowledge the world has ever created, spanning everything from Italian Renaissance paintings to PornHub comments. After ingesting all of it, AI companies used what amounts to the collective history of our species to create software that obscures its very richness and complexity. Becoming overly dependent on it may rob people of the opportunity to draw conclusions from looking at the evidence for themselves.

[trungles]

Cross-posting an essay I wrote for my Patreon since the post is free and open to the public.

Hello everyone! I hope you're relaxing as best you can this holiday season. I recently went to see Miyazaki's latest Ghibli movie, The Boy and the Heron, and I had some thoughts about it. If you're into art historical allusions and gently cranky opinions, please enjoy. I've attached a downloadable PDF in the Patreon post if you'd prefer to read it that way. Apologies for the formatting of the endnotes! Patreon's text posting does not allow for superscripts, which means all my notations are in awkward parentheses. Please note that this writing contains some mild spoilers for The Boy and the Heron.

Hayao Miyazaki’s 2023 feature animated film The Boy and the Heron reads as an extended meditation on grief and legacy. The Master of a grand tower seeks a descendant to carry on his maddening duty, balancing toy blocks of magical stone upon which the entire fabric of his little pocket of reality rests. The world’s foundations are frail and fleeting, and can pass away into the cold void of space should he neglect to maintain this task. The Master’s desire to pass the torch undergirds much of the film’s narrative.

(Isle of the Dead. Arnold Böcklin. 1880. Oil on Canvas. Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland.)

Arnold Böcklin, a Swiss Symbolist(1) painter, was born on October 16 in 1827, the same year the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church bought a plot of land in Florence from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II, that had long been used for the burials of Protestants around Florence. It is colloquially known as The English Cemetery, so called because it was the resting place of many Anglophones and Protestants around Tuscany, and Böcklin frequented this cemetery—his workshop was adjacent and his infant daughter Maria was buried there. In 1880, he drew inspiration from the cemetery, a lone plot of Protestant land among a sea of Catholic graveyards, and began to paint what would be the first of six images entitled Isle of the Dead. An oil on canvas piece, it depicts a moody little island mausoleum crowned with a gently swaying grove of cypresses, a type of tree common in European cemeteries and some of which are referred to as arborvitae. A figure on a boat, presumably Charon, ferries a soul toward the island and away from the viewer.

(Photo of The English Cemetery in Florence. Samuli Lintula. 2006.)

The Isle of the Dead paintings varied slightly from version to version, with figures and names added and removed to suit the needs of the time or the commissioner. The painting was glowingly referenced and remained fairly popular throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The painting used to be inescapable in much of European popular culture. Professor Okulicz-Kozaryn, a philologist (someone with a deep interest in the ways language and cultural canons evolve)(2) observed that the painting, like many other works in its time, was itself iterative and became widely reiterated and referenced among its contemporaries. It became something like Romantic kitsch in the eyes of modern art critics, overwrought and excessively Byronic. I imagine Miyazaki might also resent a work of that level of manufactured ubiquity, as Miyazaki famously held Disney animated films in contempt (3). Miyazaki’s films are popularly aspirational to young animators and cartoonists, but gestures at imitation typically fall well short, often reducing Miyazaki’s weighty films to kitschy images of saccharine vibes and a lazy indulgence in a sort of empty magical domestic coziness. Being trapped in a realm of rote sentiment by an uncritical, unthoughtful viewership is its own Isle of Death.

(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)

The Boy and the Heron follows a familiar narrative arc to many of Miyazaki’s other films: a child must journey through a magical and quietly menacing world in order to rescue their loved ones. This arc is an echo of Satsuki’s journey to find Mei in My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Chihiro’s journey to rescue her parents Spirited Away (2001). To better understand Miyazaki’s fixation with this particular character journey, it can be instructive to watch Lev Atamanov’s 1957 animated film, The Snow Queen (4)(5), a beautifully realized take on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1844 children’s story (6)(7). Mahito’s journey continues in this tradition, as the boy travels into a painted world to rescue his new stepmother from a mysterious tower.

Throughout the film, Miyazaki visually references Isle of the Dead. Transported to a surreal world, Mahito initially awakens on a little green island with a gated mausoleum crowned with cypress trees. He is accosted by hungry pelicans before being rescued by a fisherwoman named Kiriko. After a day of catching and gutting fish, Mahito wakes up under the fisherwoman’s dining table, surrounded by kokeshi—little wooden dolls—in the shapes of the old women who run Mahito’s family’s rural household. Mahito is told they must not be touched, as the kokeshi are wards set up for his protection. There is a popular urban legend associated with the kokeshi wherein they act as stand-ins for victims of infanticide, though there seems to be very little available writing to support this legend. Still, it’s a neat little trick that Miyazaki pulls, placing a stray reference to a local legend of unverifiable provenance that persists in the popular imagination, like the effect of fairy stories passed on through oral retellings, continually remolded each new iteration.

(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)

Kiriko’s job in this strange landscape is to catch fish to nourish unborn spirits, the adorable floating warawara, before they can attempt to ascend on a journey into the world of the living. Their journey is thwarted by flocks of supernatural pelicans, who swarm the warawara and devour them. This seems to nod to the association of pelicans with death in mythologies around the world, especially in relationship to children (8). Miyazaki’s pelicans contemplate the passing of their generations as each successive generation seems to regress, their capacity to fulfill their roles steadily diminishing.

(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)

As Mahito’s adventure continues, we find the landscapes changing away from Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead into more familiar Ghibli territories as we start to see spaces inspired by one of Studio Ghibli’s aesthetic mainstays, Naohisa Inoue and his explorations of the fantasy realms of Iblard. He might be most familiar to Ghibli enthusiasts as the background artists for the more fantastical elements of Whisper of the Heart (1995).

(Naohisa Inoue, for Iblard Jikan, 2007. Studio Ghibli.)

By the time we arrive at the climax of The Boy and the Heron, the fantasy island environment starts to resemble English takes on Italian gardens, the likes of which captivated illustrators and commercial artists of the early 20th century such as Maxfield Parrish. This appears to be a return to one of Böcklin’s later paintings, The Island of Life (1888), a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reaction to the overwhelming presence of Isle of the Dead in his life and career. The Island of Life depicts a little spot of land amid an ocean very like the one on which Isle of the Dead’s somber mausoleum is depicted, except this time the figures are lively and engaged with each other, the vegetation lush and colorful, replete with pink flowers and palm fronds.

(Island of Life. Arnold Böcklin. Oil on canvas. 1888. Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland.)

In 2022, Russia’s State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg acquired the sixth and final Isle of the Dead painting. In the last year of his life, Arnold Böcklin would paint this image in collaboration with his son Carlo Böcklin, himself an artist and an architect. Arnold Böcklin spent three years painting the same image three times over at the site of his infant daughter’s grave, trapped on the Isle of the Dead. By the time of his death in 1901 at age 74, Böcklin would be survived by only five of his fourteen children. That the final Isle of the Dead painting would be a collaboration between father and son seemed a little ironic considering Hayao Miyazaki’s reticence in passing on his own legacy. Like the old Master in The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki finds himself with no true successors.

The Master of the Tower's beautiful islands of painted glass fade into nothing as Mahito, his only worthy descendant, departs to live his own life, fulfilling the thesis of Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 book How Do You Live?, published three years after Carlo Böcklin’s death. In evoking Yoshino and Böcklin’s works, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron suggests that, like his character the Master, Miyazaki himself must make peace with the notion that he has no heirs to his legacy, and that those whom he wished to follow in his footsteps might be best served by finding their own paths.

(Isle of the Dead. Arnold and Carlo Böcklin. Oil on canvas. 1901. The State Hermitage Museum. Saint Petersburg, Russia.)

INFORMAL ENDNOTES

1 - Symbolists are sort of tough to nail down. They were started as a literary movement to 1 distinguish themselves from the Decadents, but their manifesto was so vague that critics and academics fight about it to this day. The long and the short of it is that the Symbolists made generous use of a lot of metaphorical imagery in their work. They borrow a lot of icons from antiquity, echo the moody aesthetics from the Romantics, maintained an emphasis on figurative imagery more so than the Surrealists, and were only slightly more technically married to the trappings of traditionalist academic painters than Modernists and Impressionists. They're extremely vibes-forward.

2 - Okulicz-Kozaryn, Radosław. Predilection of Modernism for Variations. Ciulionis' Serenity among Different Developments of the Theme of Toteninsel. ACTA Academiae Artium Vilnensis 59. 2010. The article is incredibly cranky and very funny to read in parts. Contains a lot of observations I found to be helpful in placing Isle of the Dead within its context.

3 - "From my perspective, even if they are lightweight in nature, the more popular and common films still must be filled with a purity of emotion. There are few barriers to entry into these films-they will invite anyone in but the barriers to exit must be high and purifying. Films must also not be produced out of idle nervousness or boredom, or be used to recognise, emphasise, or amplify vulgarity. And in that context, I must say that I hate Disney's works. The barrier to both the entry and exit of Disney films is too low and too wide. To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience." from Miyazaki's own writing in his collection of essays, Starting Point, published in 2014 from VIZ Media.

4 - You can watch the movie here in its original Russian with English closed captions here.

5 If you want to learn more about the making of Atamanoy's The Snow Queen, Animation Obsessive wrote a neat little article about it. It's a good overview, though I have to gently disagree with some of its conclusions about the irony of Miyazaki hating Disney and loving Snow Queen, which draws inspiration from Bambi. Feature film animation as we know it hadonly been around a few decades by 1957, and I find it specious, particularly as a comic artistand author, to see someone conflating an entire form with the character of its content, especially in the relative infancy of the form. But that's just one hot take. The rest of the essay is lovely.

6 - Miyazaki loves this movie. He blurbed it in a Japanese re-release of it in 2007.

7 - Julia Alekseyeva interprets Princess Mononoke as an iteration of Atamanov's The Snow Queen, arguing that San, the wolf princess, is Miyazaki's homage to Atamanoy's little robber girl character.

8 - Hart, George. The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods And Goddesses. Routledge Dictionaries. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge. 2005.

[probablygoodrpgideas]

The second playable version of Blood Tithe is now public!

Blood Tithe is a TTRPG in which you play a group of Vampires trying to survive and thrive. They will have to defend humans from other monsters but at the same time defend themselves from humans that don’t want to have their blood sucked. Of course, they are powerful beings, and might have ambitions beyond mere survival that they’re trying to achieve. But no matter how powerful a vampire becomes, in the end they are still a slave to their thirst

Check it out if you're interested and come to the playtest discord if you want to discuss the game.

If you struggle to read the white on black text, there's also a version that is black on white

Changelog under the read more

Fixed various spelling and grammar errors

added the concept of associated primary attributes and adjusted starting attributes accordingly

notably you can no longer have more than one 3

added the option to defend engagements with AWR instead of SPD

added roles as a guide to build more balanced groups

added the Mage archetype as well as a bunch of Magicks

the Magick previously called Burn is now Shock and Burn has an entirely different effect

added the Bind sorcery

clarified how Break Free works when you are grabbed with a whip

Added an On Failure effect for Targeted Accelerate/Decelerate and Daze (I think I just forgot them previously?)

Added Perks, the primary way of becoming more powerful as well as another way to diversify your character

now each skill that risks strain mentions this explicitly

Protect and Take Aim no longer risk strain

Reworked Hex’s “can use only body attacks” mode to instead inflict a heavy penalty when using a non-body attack skill

added a penalty to Aim while engaged with a hostile character

Changed Aim and Subdue to be equal to instead of higher than to succeed, which was my intention all along, idk why I screwed that up

Buffed the failure effect on Teleport

Renamed Ranged Defense to Entrenchment

Added Threats, a new category of enemy difficulty

added the Pixie as an example Threat

Added rules for Legends

added the Wyvern of Fire as an example Legend

Added the keyword Fast for skills that affect the current turn 

changed the example for a specific rule beating a general rule in Rule 0 accordingly

Reworked how skills that deal damage based on STR work

this also allowed me to get rid of the maneuver damage cap

reduced the impact of SPD on rolling engagement

reworked how running is resolved to make it much easier to run away

added the option to take a character you’re grabbing with you when breaking an engagement or joining another

added the option to escape

removed the restriction preventing you from using a shield while unarmoured. Don’t remember why that was there in the first place

renamed the engagement roll to the movement roll to better differentiate it from all the other things named engagement

made a general rule for what happens when you roll 0 dice instead of writing the same thing each time

renamed Werewolf Claws and Werewolf bite to more generic names so non-werewolf monstrous enemies can use them too

changed the base attack of Grab or pin to be based on STR so strong character have an easier time grabbing someone while weaker characters have a harder time. 

Added a fly spell and a leap maneuver to deal with the new flying enemies

Added the upkeep phase to combat, which doesn’t really change anything but should hopefully make things more clear

added stealth as one aspect of Awareness so now there’s finally a stat for stealth

[stormshipping]

Memoir - a low-effort SFW stormshipping zine!

Let's spend time from Valentine's day thinking about our favourite master and student of love!

Create a new fanwork involving Jun/Chazz and Fubuki/Atticus.

Submit it via one of the methods below by 30 June 2025.

Mod will compile into a single pdf and publish (intended to be on Internet Archive) on 30 July 2025 (international day of friendship)!

Download, read, enjoy!

FAQ:

How do I apply?

No application needed, just create a work and submit as set out below. Anything made by the deadline will go in subject to content as below.

There will be no "background checks" or automatic exclusions of participants, however the zine is intended to build community within the ship scene: if any participant harrasses any other, their work may be removed from the zine.

What content is allowed?

Fanfiction, fanart, recipes, cosplay, meta... Any medium as long as it can be flattened into a PDF eventually. The work should be new and not published anywhere else until the zine's release (though you may create a teaser / preview during July if you wish).

The work should focus on the relationship between Atticus/Fubuki and Chazz/Jun. This relationship can be however you interpret it and both characters do not necessarily need to be present (e.g. a sketch of Jun writing a love letter to Atticus would be fine; so would a drabble about an OC's fly-on-the-wall description of the two together). However, please do not include romantic side pairings.

This is a low effort zine so there is no minimum requirement. I am bravely setting no maximum but this is a LOW EFFORT zine so probably not the place for your 400k epic. The long creation period is to reduce stress not increase it!

This will be a SFW zine so please no sexually explicit material, graphic depictions of violence, abuse, or major criminal activity. This is for practical reasons and creatives who may make works containing darker themes are welcome.

How do I submit?

Save your work as any common file format and either:

Email to stormshipping at pm dot me

Submit to this blog on tumblr @stormshipping

Add to the AO3 collection Memoir

on or before the deadline of 30 June including the information below.

Make sure to include how you would like to be credited (anonymous is OK too). Exclude any personally identifying info - don't send from your school email address for instance.

You must include a permission statement along the lines of "I request this work be included in the Memoir stormshipping zine and grant the right to non-commercial modification, publication and distribution of the work with attribution as part of said zine".

(modification - I need to add your work to the pdf; publication - the zine needs to be displayed; distribution - the zine needs to be available publicly; attribution - your credit will be included as requested)

Optionally, include some words about how you got into stormshipping, what you love about it, your headcanons...

You may submit more than one item but please send each separately with all the above.

Who are the mods?

There is one mod - Sixy, who runs this blog, also known as harinezumiko on AO3.

This zine has no finance or shipping (other than stormshipping!) and graphic design will be minimal to non-existent.

Who gets the covers?

You want a low-effort zine to have a cover?

Oh, alright then... If you are making art, let me know in your submission if you'd like to be considered for front or back cover. I will pick one that fits the size and looks ok with text over it (textless version will be included inside) and if there's still a choice there will be a difficult judging process (mod will post a poll with text descriptions).

What about...

Drop an ask, mod will answer.

[blubushie]

where did everyone who was on 4chan go? are they going to invade twitter again?

From what I've seen it looks like they've all flocked to 8chan. There's a lot of refugees on /pol/ and /b/ right now. I haven't checked any of the sister chans yet besides wizardchan and don't really care to.

I wouldn't say that 4chan would even bother invading Twitter anyway, considering that Twitter is already a cesspool of fascist propaganda and 85% bot population. This sentiment is shared by the refugees as well.

Knowing them, they'll keep to an imageboard—8chan, endchan...

The folks on /r9k/ and /x/ will probably skip over to wizardchan. Especially the robots—wizardchan often has themes of depression and cope and, from what I've heard recently, self-betterment that might actually genuinely have a positive influence on the neet robots.

It's genuinely kinda amusing and almost... poetic to me how this has all happened. The perpetrators of the hack came from soyjack.party (Sharty), which is an offshoot site that originally started from 4chan's /qa/ board, but it eventually devolved into a weird culture with constant soyjackposting and finally it got locked down by the jannies and nuked permanently after they raided /lgbt/ a few years ago. The actual site was built in 2020 but a lot of people migrated to it in 2021 after they were banned from 4chan for the /lgbt/ raid and the /qa/ board was nuked. But they got their original start on 4chan, so in a way 4chan kinda went full circle and kinda Ouroboros'd itself. The last raid 4chan ever did was on itself.

Anyway Hiroyuki (owner of 4chan since 2015, also the founder of 2channel, another imageboard) has said on Twitter that the site will be back up "later".

No fucking clue if he means later today, or some point in the future (my guess is likely the latter).

Technically it won't be too difficult to get back together—sure, the sourcecode leaked, but that's not really... needed? All they have to do is fix the exploit that allowed the site to be hacked anyway (which was a PDF decoding library with no backwalling). You can upload PDFs to some boards (first to mind is /sci/ and /tg/) but the site actually allows a few different file formats to be uploaded because it can't tell the different between .txt and .pdf files. So somebody uploaded a postscript with commands and basically gained entry to the site. The easiest way to fix it is, for the time being, just removing the ability to upload any text files.

[londonfoginacup]

Hello yes, I don’t know if this is relevant to anyone who follows me, but I have spent a week going through resumes for a job position I’m hiring for and I would just like to give a few pointers to anyone looking to get hired right now;

If you are using a template from like, Google Docs or Canva, please do not use the one that has hot pink text. Please only use, like, blue at MOST. Please. I do not want to stare at hot pink any longer. It hurts my eyes.

PLEASE BE AWARE WE CAN SEE WHAT YOU TITLED YOUR RESUME. Of the 28 (hehe) applicants, TWO put their own name in their resume title. Most of them said “resume” or “resume-15” or “resume(1)”. Please. Title it something like “Styles-Harry-Resume” or add the job you’re applying for “Tomlinson-Louis-Library-Resume”.

For the love of god do not put Fortnite under the Skills section. I love that you’re good at Fortnite. It does not help you here.

Save it as a PDF, not a word document. It’s just more professional.

I know I KNOW it’s the worst thing in the world when they have you turn in a resume and then fill out all the information again. It’s stupid and terrible. But PLEASE don’t skimp on the information when you’re filling it out a second time. The first thing we look at isn’t your resume, it’s the stuff you copied and pasted from your resume into the website. It’s easier. If you decide not to fill that out, you’re not going to get the interview.

Please don’t put a picture of yourself on your resume. I am talking to people who live in the states for this one — I know other countries do that bit differently and it’s often considered a requirement. But if you’re from another country and filling out job applications in America, know that it’s not the norm to add a photo and it makes me worried that I’m going to accidentally end up making biased decisions. As it is I’m already trying to remove the names when I read so I don’t have any internal biases.

ANYWAY JOBS SUCK BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DONT USE HOT PINK TITLE TEXT

[imyourenglishteachernow]

The Difficulty of Dying in King Lear by Sean Lawrence

Free PDF link here for anyone who wants to read it (and I heartily encourage doing so).

This paper, I think, presented 3-5 really interesting ideas, but only heavily pursued 3 of them (leaving 1-2 for our own perusal) and the list, I think, is this:

The concept of Being (the self) vs the Other

The inability to escape the Being traditionally being an aspect of tragedy

The pursuit of death (suicide) being regularly delayed for characters throughout the play precisely because they cannot escape themselves, and choosing death is another form of Being

The weight of Despair/desperation (being tempted into death) and relationship to the Other (nature, God, your children) as something that can remove you from Being and/or steer you into it (derogatory)

"The characters find peace not in choosing death but in recognizing others. Lear is not an existential tragedy, illustrating the authenticity of individuals, any more than it is a nineteenth-century tragedy that displays the “inherent qualities” of the characters. Rather, it is an ethical tragedy, about the need to acknowledge the Other."

Another idea present in the paper to a lesser degree that I thought was equally interesting was the concept of attempting to give your (chosen) death meaning through ladening it with association / meaning (another burden of the Self).

The paper also somewhat rejects the idea of the traditional "a tragic hero has a singular tragic flaw that befits their end," by looking instead at King Lear as a text about hopelessness and the continual removal of choice symbolized by the continual refusal by Shakespeare to let characters die by their own hand/chosen means. While this perpetual delaying of death is, at first glance, the inherent conceit of the tragedy of King Lear (powerless, helplessness, etc) — Gloucester being blinded and uncertain as opposed to meeting his chosen death, a prospect he faced with more bravery — it is also an act of mercy on Shakespeare's end by continuing to give the characters more chances to rectify and correct their behaviour. Whether they do so, if ever, and what those changes garner them can also be used for tragedy, but it is presented at the very least as a non-tragic possibility.

Passages of Note/Interest:

 “what is misrecognised as a flaw of ‘character’ is, in fact, a projection of something which has its roots, not in the inner psychological life of the protagonist, but in the larger domain of culture” (pg 2: aka the character flaws are not inherent but also dependent on the culture they’re being labelled as flawed within?)

Death does not constitute an escape from Being, since death can never be grasped and therefore is never present: “Death is never now” (Time and the Other ). In his arguments regarding death, Levinas is most clearly responding to Heidegger, who considered death to be what is most one’s own or, to borrow one of Heidegger’s terms, one’s “ownmost.”⁴ It is the most radically individual of one’s possibilities, since no one else can suffer my death for me. In Heidegger’s view, the tragic hero, who faces and grasps his own death, would be the most authentic of men. It is against Heidegger’s philosophy of death and time that Levinas’s Time and the Other is directed. Here he describes death not as the most individual possibility but as the moment at which all of the self’s powers fail.

According to Levinas, the self ultimately becomes a trap: “The price paid for the existent’s position lies in the very fact that it cannot detach itself from itself” (Time and the Other ). Where Hamlet merely meditates upon the “impossibility of assuming death,” the characters in Lear dramatize this impossibility when their attempts to die fail.  In seeking a traditional tragic resolution of their situations, the characters confront a deeper tragedy, the tragedy of absolute impotence, unable to control their own lives or escape their own selves. (pg 5)

Like Macbeth, Lear tries to give his death importance by implicating the fate of the world in his own. [...] Lear does not merely observe that the storm mirrors his own turmoil; on the contrary, he calls upon the storm to reflect it. He demands that the storm be worse, wanting the world itself to end when his world has become incoherent: “Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!” (..), he commands.

The suffering which constitutes Lear’s grandeur and grants his existence a certain tragic weight is largely voluntary. An alternative to his suffering always exists, as the Fool makes clear: “Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters blessing” (..–). His desire to suffer is not only, as Harry Berger has argued, an effort to ratify the “monstrous ingratitude” of his daughters () but to ratify his own individual existence. Both definitions of tragedy assume the solitude of the self, in either the heroic sense of being authentic or in the horrifying sense of being inescapable. By choosing to become a tragic hero, therefore, Lear moves toward the truly horrifying tragedy of inescapable being. (pg 7)

Jan Kott, in his famous treatment of this scene, claims that “Gloucester’s suicide has a meaning only if the gods exist” (). More specifically, his suicide has a meaning only if Gloucester can, by committing suicide, compel the attention of the gods.

In his description of anxiété, Sartre offers the example of a man on the edge of a cliff. While he may be afraid of the height, he suffers anguish¹⁰ at the thought that he could always throw himself off, or at least not pay attention and slip. Anguish is a fear of one’s own possibilities: “[I]t is in anguish that man gets the consciousness of his freedom” (Sartre). In fact, one’s own freedom to choose a course of action may become so terrifying that it causes one to jump, since, as Sartre adds parenthetically, “suicide would cause anguish to cease” (). In Gloucester’s case, however, even a suicide attempt cannot end the possibility that he might, in the future, perform some act such as quarrelling with the gods. Even more than being condemned to be free, he is condemned simply to be. Levinas contradicts Sartre as well as Heidegger when he suggests that anxiety is not “the experience of nothingness,” but “on the contrary—if by death one means nothingness—the fact that it is impossible to die” (Time and the Other ). For Gloucester, there is no exit at all.

R. W. Chambers points out that in not allowing Cordelia to commit suicide, Shakespeare makes an innovation which, while anticipated by medieval versions of the story, breaks with all the sources likely to have been available to him and, therefore, he “does depart from historical fact, as he had received it” (). The altered death of Cordelia would have been, if not quite as surprising to the audience as Gloucester’s failed leap from the cliff, a similar frustration of an expected suicide. Shakespeare seems, at least in Chambers’s reading, intent on saving Cordelia...

There is, however, an understanding of death in the play other than as something grasped or chosen authentically by the tragic hero. Oswald’s final and characteristically ignoble words—“O untimely death, death!” (..)—dramatize the obvious fact that death can come to the characters, rather than being chosen by them. Better characters ascribe the arrival of death to their gods, treating it as a relationship to what is radically Other. (pg 12)

By asking for the gods to kill him, Gloucester is still trying to avoid his future possibilities, but not through his own will. He recognizes, in other words, limits to his own projection. “Men must endure,” says Edgar to Gloucester, “eir going hence even as their coming hither” (..–). Kent abdicates the throne and withdraws from the play’s world with his last line, but he does so in response to a summons: “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; / My master calls me, I must not say no” (..–). Lear’s realization that he is still alive should, I think, be spoken in a tone of horror: “You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave” (..). His return to the world of the living represents the terrifying impossibility of dying.

In fact, there is a general pattern in the play, by which characters recognize others immediately after facing the loss of their own powers. Gloucester recognizes his sin toward Edgar immediately after being blinded [...] is is one of the few times in the play that the gods are prayed to for somebody else’s sake and not in order to claim a transcendent sanction for one’s own self-interest. [...] Instead, the characters recognize each other only when they treat each other as Others and stop projecting. In seeking to become heroes, facing their deaths as their ownmost possibilities, the characters succeed in making themselves tragically helpless rather than heroic. After failing in their attempts to escape Being on their own, through suicide, the characters then turn to each other.

Does Lear die concentrating entirely upon the Other or does he seek his death in calling on his own heart to break? It would seem that Shakespeare meditated on this very question and decided that he would save Lear, like Cordelia, from the charge of having chosen his death. A similar question could be asked regarding Kent, to whom this line is transferred in the Folio text. If he also wishes to kill himself, his suicide is avoided not by way of a metatheatrical trick, like Gloucester’s, or an alteration of the source text, like Cordelia’s, but simply by ending the play before he has a chance (pg 15)

[blissfullyunawares]

5 Days of Helping You Outline Your Next Novel

Day 5: Obsidian for Outlining

Find all 5 installments of the mini series: helping you outline your next novel

*I have added a layer of “static” over my screenshots so they are distinctive enough to stand apart from the surrounding text

did you miss this series? here you can find all posts here: [day 1] [day 2] [day 3] [day 4]

Do you use Obsidian?

What is Obsidian?

A note-taking and knowledge management tool that allows you to create and connect notes seamlessly.

Uses a local-first approach, meaning your data is stored on your computer, not the cloud (unless you choose to sync).

Features bidirectional linking, which helps create a non-linear, networked way of organizing ideas—great for brainstorming and outlining.

Why should you use Obsidian?

Flexible & Customizable – Unlike rigid writing apps, you can design your own workflow.

Distraction-Free Writing – Markdown keeps the focus on text without extra formatting distractions.

Ideal for Outlining & Organization – Connect story ideas, characters, and settings effortlessly.

Obsidian for Writing

Outlining

Creating a One Pager

Create a single markdown note for a high-level novel summary.

Use headings and bullet points for clarity.

Link to related notes (e.g., character pages, theme exploration).

Here’s an example of an outline I’m currently using. This is what my website will have on it (and what goals I hope to achieve w my website)

Using the Native Canvas Tool

Use Obsidian’s native Canvas tool to visually outline your novel. (Best on PC)

Create a board with columns for Acts, Chapters, or Story Beats.

Drag and drop cards as the story evolves.

Writing

Why Write Directly in Obsidian?

Minimalist interface reduces distractions.

Markdown-based formatting keeps the focus on words.

No auto-formatting issues (compared to Word or Google Docs).

Why is Obsidian Great for Writing?

Customizable workspace (plugins for word count, timers, and focus mode).

Easy to link notes (e.g., instantly reference past chapters or research).

Dark mode & themes for an optimal writing environment.

Organization in Obsidian

Outlining, Tags, Links

Each chapter, character, important item, and setting can have its own linked note.

Below, for example, you can see the purple text is a linked page directly in my outline.

Use bidirectional linking to create relationships between (story) elements. Clicking these links will automatically open the next page.

Tags can be used for important characters, items, places, or events that happen in your writing. Especially useful for tracking.

Folders for Efficient Storage

Organize notes into folders for Acts, Characters, Worldbuilding, and Drafts.

Use tags and backlinks for quick navigation.

Creating a separate folder for the actual writing and linking next (chapter) and previous (chapter) at the bottom for smooth navigation.

You can also create and reuse your own internal templates!

Spiderweb Map Feature (Graph View)

Visualize connections between characters, plot points, and themes. Below you’ll see the basic mapping of my website development project.

This view can help you spot disconnected (floating) ideas and create bridges to them.

Exporting

Why Export?

Ready to format in another program (Scrivener, Word, Docs, Vellum, etc).

Need a clean version (removing tags, notes, etc) for beta readers or editors.

Creating a backup copy of your work.

When should you export?

Personally, I like to export every 5 chapters or so and update my live version on Google Docs. This allows my family, friends, and beta readers to access my edited work.

After finishing a draft or major revision.

Before sending to an editor or formatting for publication.

Where should you export?

Personally I copy and paste my content from each chapter into a google doc for editing. You may also want to make note of the following export options:

Markdown to Word (.docx) – For editing or submitting.

Markdown to PDF – For quick sharing

Markdown to Scrivener – For those who format in Scrivener.

To Conclude

Obsidian is an invaluable tool for novelists who want a flexible, organized, and distraction-free writing process.

Try setting up your own Obsidian vault for your next novel! Comment below and let me know if this was helpful for you 🫶🏻

your reblogs help me help more ppl 💕

follow along for writing prompts, vocabulary lists, and helpful content like this! <333

✨ #blissfullyunawaresoriginals ✨

[home-sweet-hive]

ALTERNATE HUMANITY

A Field Guide to "Humanity Removal Therapy"

Part 2: Facade (ft. @dawning-mars )

This is a complimentary series to this system's other Animal HRT series; Black Arms HRT

Letter from your "Penpal":

Hey, very sorry about this part taking a while to come out. It's one thing for a comic to take a while, but I feel a little pathetic that it took me over a month to write this part out. Yeah yeah, "self deprecation isn't gonna get you anywhere", I know. Let me do things wrong sometimes. But hey, I did get it complete in time for the big Dragon HRT send off, so that's something I guess. Aik did a lot of being poetic and stuff yesterday with his Fish HRT fanart, I don't wanna bore you by doing the same. (Not like I have anything of the sort to say, anyways.)

Let's get on with the show. Thanks for reading and making the community what it is or whatever, I like writing about y'all.

WARNING: This part still has the Swearing, Mentions of Death, and the Untrustworthy Narrator/Main Character from last time, but also there are now Mentions of Cults and Violent Threats. Also just a general horror vibe, especially towards the end. Reader Beware.

Prev | Next (COMING SOON. HOPEFULLY.)

8:00am, February 9th, 2025

The following is an audio recording from Doctor Theodore H. Erian, transcripted into text;

“Eight in the morning, February the 9th. … Is that necessary? I’ll admit, I’ve never done something like this. I’ve had some patients of mine send in audio tapes for their transition journals before, for one reason or another, sure, but I’ve never made one myself. I… I just want to be vigilant.”

“That journal that I read a week ago… It still haunts me a little. I know, I know, I contort human bodies into resembling animals for a living, and a simple PDF sent to me via email is what keeps me up at night.”

“But in the days that have passed since I conversed with Doctor Fortune, I’ve been rereading those journal entries in between working with patients. I’ve been picking up on… Details. Unsettling details. The one that gets at me the worst is when the author mentions how the technology behind Animal HRT would ‘go to a much more important use’ if in their hands… Just what do they even mean by that? Furthermore, the author seems to work for a news station, but their descriptions in certain places throughout their entries suggests their workplace has responsibilities far beyond the scope of such a profession. They also seem rather close with and even have some authority over a pair of researchers from a laboratory, as if the two businesses are subsidiaries of another organization. The greater organization both the station and laboratory are under is probably the one Doctor Fortune mentioned in her emails, come to think of it.”

“But back to the point. The reason why I’m recording myself right now. The day that the journal suggested its author would come for me has arrived, and I indeed have several appointments on my schedule today. One of them being for a L. Black. I… feel like it’d be a breach of privacy to give their full name in this recording. But that patient does have the same first initial as the author of the journal, which is arguably the most important detail. I do have the full first name now, mind you, though I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear that the name was generic enough for me to get flooded with results from all sorts of different dimensions when I tried to look them up. In the end, I wasn’t able to get much information on them.” 

“The surname suggests a possible connection to the Black Arms, at least in my opinion. Soon before Doctor Fortune had approached me, I had been given a ‘notice of investigation’ by the Guardian Units of Nations. They’re trying to deter me from ever making or distributing an HRT for the Black Arms, and it honestly does seem similar to what Doctor Fortune is doing. In fact, I did try asking her a few days ago if she was affiliated with G.U.N.”

“She seemed rather offended by the question, chastising me for ‘comparing this situation to a video game plot’... Can she blame me? I work in and for a land between dimensions, for fucks sake…”

“But aside from that, I suppose all I can do now is… wait. Wait and see what Mr. Black does. What they… want.”

--

9:20am, February 9th, 2025

>Real time transcription from audio recording.

>Any typos or mistakes made are either L████’s or another ████████████████████████████████’s responsibility to detect and correct.

>Reminder: I am not a grammar checker, and my knowledge unfortunately relies on what is given to me.

[sound description: door opening, followed by a bell ringing, and the door then closing]

“Welcome to the TOHC Primary Care Center. Let me guess, you’re here for Doctor Erian?”

“Yep. I have an appointment.” 

“Do you now? Heh, most just waltz in here without so much as a 15 minute notice call…” “What’s your name?”

“L████ ████.’

“Thank you.”

[sound description: Tapping of keyboard keys]

“I see. You do indeed have an appointment with Doctor Erian, but you’re quite early, don’t you think?” 

“Am I now?”

“Yes. Your appointment is at noon. Did you mean to schedule it earlier in the day or…?”

“Noon is fine.”

“Good, ‘cause you wouldn’t be able to reschedule your appointment unless you changed the day outright.”

“Tch. Of course not.”

“You can go sit down in the waiting area now.”

--

9:30-10:30am, February 9th, 2025

Removed the recording of this section of time and the subsequent transcript made for it. Nothing of importance really occurred during this time, just people coming in and out of the building without much coming from that. Keeping it around was just unnecessary in my opinion.

--

10:40am, February 9th, 2025

Okay, here’s where things get interesting again~

[sound description: door opening, followed by a bell ringing, and the door then closing]

[sound description: distant talking, sound too far for accurate transcription]

[sound description: someone sitting down in a chair nearby]

“Oh, hello.”

“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t notice you there, hun!”

“Don’t sweat it, I don’t mind having someone to talk to while I wait.”

“Ah, alright…” “So… What is it that you’re waiting for?”

“I have an appointment with Doctor Erian at noon.”

“Really? I have an appointment with him too!”

“Heh. Doesn’t sound much like ‘waltzing in here with no notice’ to me.”

“Huh?”

“Oh right, sorry. When I got here the receptionist made a remark about most people treating the place like a walk-in and I found it funny how you’re proving her wrong.” “But it didn’t quite click in time that you wouldn’t have been able to know that context.”

“I see!” “That’s… comforting? Maybe?”

“Hmm?”

“It seems like Erian isn’t the only one around here that’s got a sharp tongue…”

“Is he… known for being harsh?” 

“From what I’ve heard, yeah…”

“That explains some things, then.”

“But anyways, what kind of Animal HRT are you hoping to get on?” 

“Oh, I’m not here to get myself a prescription.” “My friend tried to get on Cat HRT through him but was denied. I’m trying to find out why.”

“Oh…”

“... Sorry if I made you uncomfortable, I-”

“No, you’re fine, hun.” 

“... If you insist.” “Can I assume you ARE looking to get a prescription, then?”

“Yeah.”

“May I ask for what?”

“A-ah, well… I know it sounds crazy, but-”

“No judgement from me, you’re in crazed company.”

“... I want to go on Eldritch HRT.” 

“Eldritch?”

“Y-Yeah. That’s… That’s what I want!”

“How interesting! Do you have a specific entity you want to be like? A cult you want to curate or join? Just how many so-called ‘eldritch entities’ across the realms are you aware of? Are… Are you-”

“I… Haven’t given it all that much thought, to be honest…”

“That’s fine! That just means you’re up for anything, right?” 

“U-Uhm… I guess so?” “You seem… really excited by all this. Are you a fan of eldritch horror too?”

“I guess you could say that~” “Oh-! Where have my manners been? I don’t think I got your name!”

“Did I not give it? Sorry about that, hun!” “Mars ████.”

“Nice to meet you, Mars! My name’s L████. L████ ████.”

“Nice to meet you too, L████!” 

“But back to the Eldritch HRT thing of yours – how many entities are you aware of?”

“Well, I do know a good bit of the writings of HP Lovecraft…”

“Is that it?”

“Is there more I should know?”

“Yes! But that’s alright, I can teach you everything you need to know. Let me just-”

“Mars?”

“That’s me!”

“Shit, is it time for your appointment already? Well maybe we can keep talking after you-”

[sound description: Mars walks off with Doctor Erian to his office]

–

She didn’t come back to talk to me after her appointment. It seemed that she was pretty upset as she left the building. Did she get rejected too? 

I hope to meet up with Mars again soon. 

I sensed some hesitation in her voice as we talked, but I just know she’d be a perfect fit for us once she learns about us and what we are.

But anyways, nothing of interest occurred in the hour after my conversation with Mars, so I deleted that section of recording as well.

Which takes us right to my meeting with Doctor Erian. 

What a mess that was…

--

12:00pm, February 9th, 2025

The following is a written recounting by Doctor Theodore H. Erian.

I had originally intended to audio record my meeting with Mr. Black, just like the recording I had made this morning.

However, the moment I saw him, I knew that I would have to get on his level, so to speak. Audio wasn’t going to cut it when it came to conveying the full picture of my experience. 

So here we are.

As I mentioned in my emails to Doctor Fortune, I had gotten many, many results when I looked his name up, but despite all that, he managed to look nothing like any of them in person.

I could sense I was being deceived, or perhaps even toyed with in some way. But I wasn’t sure in what way it was.

After having noticed that, I then took notice of a rather large bag they had slung around their shoulders. Looked to be a laptop bag, by my best guess. I of course remembered what Doctor Fortune had said to me about not allowing him to show me anything on his laptop if they offer, and so I readied myself to refuse anything of that sort.

But to my surprise, he didn’t even do so much as open the bag. 

Instead, when he entered my office, he just… stood there, looking around at the place. This went on for about a minute or two – I wasn’t keeping exact notice of the time.

At first, I had thought that they were eyeing the various types of medication I had stored. But once he opened his mouth, it became apparent that it was something else entirely that had caught their eye…

“Is that an RCA RP3503 shoebox cassette recorder and player you have back there?” 

My recorder, the one I had used to record my personal record from this morning, the one that I had intended to use to document this meeting… That had been what he noticed first.

It's a bit impressive that they identified the exact model, I must admit. Didn’t help with how much they intimidated me in the slightest, though.

“... Yes? Why do you ask?” 

I had responded. I didn’t want to come off as suspicious to him, but rather, just genuinely interested in the conversation. I couldn’t let them know I had seen their journal.

“It’s not often I see a cassette player in the wild these days. Damn shame, I know that phones and mp3 players are more modern and in ways more convenient, and the typical ‘retro throwback’ audio playing format of choice is vinyl, but I really do have such a soft spot for cassettes.”

Really, I was surprised with just how normal this starting conversation was. If I was to be conspiratory, I could even say that it was too normal, as if he was luring me into some sort of false sense of security with this mundane discussion.

“Do you now?”

I replied, allowing the conversation to carry on.

“Yes! Though, I’d rather not get too sidetracked with all that!”

I remember it felt like a pit had dropped into my stomach when they said that. Here I was thinking I could give myself some time to formulate how I was going to respond to him trying to get answers out of me by fueling this clear interest of his. But it seems that they had caught on to that plan of mine.

“The real reason I pointed it out was to ask… You’re not going to use it to record this meeting of ours… are you?” 

He then asked me.

I wish I had been able to somehow record this meeting on video, because I don’t know if words alone can describe the bone chilling aura that the look Mr. Black had given me as they said those words carried. Somehow, his face managed to darken in real time, a shadow cast over the top half of it that made it look as if his eyes were glowing at that very moment. They had tilted their head ever so slightly as they spoke, their face adorned with a subtle, yet noticeable grin, despite the seeming worry that the question carried with it. 

Considering my line of work, I’m quite familiar with the inhuman, and let me tell you – I saw that inhumanness in this man in that fleeting moment.

Despite wearing what looked to be colored contacts of some kind, I could see in his eyes a wildness that was inherently animalistic. 

I know what Mr. Black is here for, and I know it isn’t treatment. But if I hadn’t known better, I may just have been convinced to hand him a prescription right then and there.

Or maybe he is already something other than human. 

I said no, of course not.

“Good, good.”

I don’t know what came over me, but I responded to that remark by asking him if he didn’t like his life being documented. 

“What an odd question…”

As if I hadn’t already regretted my words the moment they came out of my mouth, I certainly would have after that reaction from him.

I was like Icarus in that moment, my wings equipped as I set myself straight towards the sun. I had pushed my luck too far, and they were catching on that I knew more than I should. Surely.

“But to answer it, I do actually like to document my life. But I much prefer it when I’m the one doing the documentation. I’m sure you wouldn’t be too fond of me if I took your chair right there and started giving people prescriptions and check ups, would you?” 

I’ll admit, I’m not entirely sure what they meant by that comparison. He’s a news reporter, isn’t he? I do suppose in a way that is documenting lives, but that’s much more about others’ lives rather than their own, no? 

Either way, I shook my head no.

“That’s what I thought.” 

I really can’t tell why he was so surprised that “B” kiddo and Serena were intimidated by him. He has to be doing this shit on purpose to get a rise out of people.

“Can we get to the point of this meeting, please?” 

I requested. Maybe if I act just as intimidating, I’ll manage to evade ending up in whatever position he wants me to be in.

“Hmph. We may.”

He seemed unimpressed by my shift in attitude, his grin folding into something of a snarl. But he did oblige. 

“It is to my knowledge that a friend of mine, Serena Holmes, came by your office a little bit under a month ago seeking a Cat HRT prescription from you. You rejected her. Why so?”

Perhaps it was the frown they already had from their reaction to me making demands at him, but I could both see and hear the anger coming off of him that I had seen before in that journal of his as they spoke. 

No matter his motives, it does seem he cares about their friend.

“I had gotten a questionable result when I had run a-”

I answered. I knew it wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear, but I couldn’t let them know I knew that.

As expected, they cut me off mid-sentence.

“No. I want the real reason.” 

Despite my patience being worn quite thin by this point, I took a deep breath in and began to formulate a response to Mr. Black. 

My goal, at least at first, had not been to actually tell him the truth. Rather, it was to make up a lie that was believable enough for them to take it as if it was the truth. 

As I did such, they spoke again, unknowingly giving me a hint as to what route I could go down with this lie of mine. 

“And if you are telling the truth, what was the ‘questionable result' you speak of?” 

Looking back, I should have made use of that hint in my response.

“Okay, fine! You want the real reason? I’ll give you the real reason! I turned Serena away because it was clear to me that she didn’t truly know what it was that she wanted!” 

He had raised an eyebrow at my response, clearly skeptical.

“How… interesting. She seemed pretty dead set on being a cat to me.” 

I honestly couldn’t tell if they believed me or not, but they did act as if they did.

“But I suppose my perspective was skewed.”

In a way, that did give me relief. 

Even if it was a ruse on his end, I could also go along with it and feel confident in my responses, at least for a little while.

“But tell me, Doctor Erian… If that is the true reason you turned Serena away… Then why did you tell her it was due to a background check?”

It was a valid question, honestly, and a hole in the plot I was constructing. Hence why I had said earlier that I wished I had just gone down that background check route he had given me.

“I… I didn’t want her to believe I did not believe she was truly therian.” 

With a bit of hesitation, I sputtered out that excuse.

He wasn’t buying it. I could tell by the glare he had given me.

“Then why not be honest with her? You could have explained that they had simply seemed too unsure of kitself to go through with the procedure. You could have given it advice as to how to do some soul searching so that she could come to find her true self. All these things you didn’t do… Why is that, Doctor Erian?”

Their eyes almost seemed to lock onto me as they questioned me. I was a target for them, lined up for slaughter.

Before I could even try to plead my case, he continued.

“To me, there are only two explanations for this. Either you are bad at your job, or…

You’re lying to me.”

With that final explanation – or rather, accusation, he stood up from where I had him sit and slammed his hands on my desk. To be honest, it shook me quite badly. It wasn’t just the delivery, either, the words cut terribly deep as well.

“So, which is it?”

Deep enough to cause me to make perhaps the stupidest decision I’ve ever made in my entire life.

For I had let my ego and reputation get the best of me.

“... I lied to you.” 

I so stupidly confessed. 

Mr. Black grinned, grinning wider than he ever had by that point of the appointment, as he let out a truly evil cackle.

“I knew it.” 

And with that remark, they pushed aside the chair that was behind them, and walked over to behind my desk.

I yelled out to him that he’s not supposed to be back there, but he completely ignored me as he rummaged through my personal cabinets.

They quickly found exactly what I was hoping they wouldn’t. 

“How curious…!” 

He exclaimed, holding the note Doctor Fortune had given me during my first ever encounter with her in his hands.

I felt like I could have died right then and there.

“Looks to me you know a bit too much for your own good, eh, Erian?” 

He then turned to me, a sinister grin still stretched wide across their face while they held up the note, turned over to the backside where she had drawn that blasted symbol.

I wanted to say something at the time, I really did. But I must admit, I was petrified. It really is embarrassing to look back on. 

“Hmmm… one could argue that I should kill you right about now, make sure you don’t go spreading the good word unmanaged.”

They continued to speak as they crept up behind me.

“I don’t even know what that symbol IS!! All she told me was that it was the symbol of your organization!! She didn’t even tell me what it’s called!!” 

I cried out in desperation. As most people do, I didn’t want to die.

Mr. Black paused. His face softened, somewhat. 

He seemed to have realized that I, for once, was being honest with him.

“Who’s ‘she’?” 

He asked me quite plainly.

“D-Doctor Mirai Fortune… She had come into my office a couple months ago and left this warning for me… We’ve… We’ve been talking over email ever since, but she’s very vague about a lot of things…!” 

I confessed. I confessed all of it. I was convinced that I needed to do so in order to live.

“Is she the reason why you turned Serena away?” 

They looked at me with a look of certainty in what he expected the answer to be. But I answered anyway.

“Yes.”

Mr. Black finally sat back down in the chair across from my desk.

“See, was that really so hard?” 

I did not respond. Really, I am terribly repulsed by his sarcastic demeanor. It tends to come off more as patronizing than anything else. 

“I’d love to see those emails, if you’d be so kind.”

I wordlessly turned around my computer monitor for him to look through. I had the thought to warn them not to go into any patient files, but I didn’t act upon it.

“Hah! She really was as vague as you said, huh?” 

He remarked as he read through the emails. I did not react.

“Though, I do see that she let you get a sneak peek at my notes, hmm?”

An arrow of fear shot through my chest, making me worry that they would be angered by this. But much to my surprise, they had simply laughed it off.

“Hey, how about we make a deal, old man?” 

He offered. 

I looked at them, cueing them to continue. 

“I can give you not just these notes of mine, but ALL of my notes, completely uncensored. Any information on that symbol and what it represents you could possibly desire. A brand new market for your Humanity Removal Therapy… All of it, for one simple little price…~” 

I was skeptical. That was a big claim, a big offer. But I pressed further.

“What’s the price?” 

I asked him.

“Yes, yes… All you need to do to start this new chapter in your life… Is to give Serena her Cat HRT prescription.” 

That… couldn’t possibly be all there was to it. 

That was the singular thought in my mind.

It was too simple. There had to be more to it. 

He mentioned “a new market for Humanity Removal Therapy” – for all I could know, that could mean that they would steal my formula right from under me.

It would put me out of a job!

And I can only imagine what Iris would think…

“No. I’m sorry Mr. Black, but I just can’t do that.” 

I responded to him, knowing fully that it could get me killed.

I couldn’t betray my patients like that, though.

I can’t betray Iris like that.

Sure, we butt heads many times, but I would be nothing without any of them.

And above all, I want to see each and every one of them live their happiest lives.

I saw Mr. Black frown in response to my answer. It was surprisingly genuine. He looked… disappointed.

But as he prepared to talk to me, he smiled ever so slightly.

“So that’s why so many read you as a hardass… You’re a stubborn bastard.” 

He remarked.

Again, without waiting for a response from me, they continued.

“I know the feeling.”

After that, he stood back up, grabbed his things, and left. 

--

February 18th, 2025

The following is an email. 

To: Doctor Theodore H. Erian

From: Doctor Mirai Fortune

Subject: Final Email

Hello, Doctor Erian.

I have both listened to the early morning recording of yourself and the journal entry of later in the day that you provided in your previous email.

I am deeply disappointed in how you have handled the situation.

For your trouble in dealing with them and with me, I have provided you with the documentation our adversary made on that day. Consider it a sense of closure, as this is the last time I will ever be contacting you.

While I am glad you resisted the offer to join them, I cannot afford to have cowardice such as yours weighing me down in my fight against them.

I hope you understand.

Mirai

[cityof2morrow]

Social Scenes: Lifesyles

Published: 8-07-2023 | Updated: 11-21-2023 (pdf update) *Due to character limits, all gameplay instructions have been moved to the gameplay PDF.

SUMMARY The Social Scenes series explores social gameplay in The Sims 2. Whether you’re a storyteller or casual simmer, these mods will help you better manage the social landscape in your game.

Lifestyles (Version 1) (Simmons 2023) add new levels of personality and social gameplay to Sims 2. Sims will recognize and respond to others based on group membership (or lack thereof).

Assign, randomize, and edit lifestyles for all sims.

Customize behaviors in five categories: Wrath, Theft, Violence, Indiscretion, and Disrespect.

Create designated meeting spots for lifestyle groups to build relationships.

New “Ask About Lifestyle” social.

Devotion and zeal towards lifestyles evolve via age and talk/ask/hang out socials. Attraction/relationships remain unchanged unless your sim becomes too zealous.

Have sims convert others to their lifestyle group.

Non-intrusive, runs mostly in the background.

Unlike Greek house events (University EP), or dates and casual group outings (Nightlife EP), lifestyles aren’t mini-game scenarios. Lifestyle assignments are permanent unless changed by in-game events (i.e. conversion), and groups can have unlimited members. Sims are limited to one lifestyle group at a time.

DETAILS Requires all Eps/SPs. Lifestyles (Version 1) (Simmons, 2023) is a cosmetic edit of G-Rated Religion (Almighty Hat and Larky, 2016) and Religions/Angels & Nurses (Hatch, 2017-2019). Most credit for this mod is due to work by previous modders. My version generalizes in-game text from “religions, deities, tenets, faith, zeal, nun/sister” to “lifestyles, groups, devotion, zeal, friend” a la Sims 4 (2015; 2019; 2022). While explicit religious language is removed, you can still create religions if you wish. This mod includes NPC data which must be removed separately from package files when uninstalling. See notes for uninstallation below. DOWNLOAD (choose one) LIFESTYLES V1 from SFS | from MEGA GAMEPLAY PDF from SFS | from MEGA read about installation, gameplay, troubleshooting, compatibility, uninstallation, and more. READ PICTORIAL (tutorial w/ pics) HERE. CREDITS Thanks: Conflict Reports: @kaylynn-is-typing. Simmers, especially modders with open policies. Sources: G-Rated Religion (Almighty Hat and Larky, 2016), Religions/Angels & Nurses (Hatch, 2017-2019), Sims 4 (EA, 2014-Present).

NOTES Altered Text Lists: Dialog prim string sets (0x0000012D/301), Attributes (0x00000100/256), and MakeActionString prim string sets (0x0000012E/302).

[greenhorn-art]

World Champions | Artwork for World Champions by TheDefenestrator by TheDefenestrator, art by Blurb_brain

Fandom: The King's Avatar | 全职高手

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Category: Gen

Words: 71 944

At the end of season 4 of the Glory Pro Alliance, the government finally receives the information it has been waiting for: The other players have caught up. Or, In which Glory has been a government recruitment ploy for remote-piloted mecha operators all along.

About the Book

FONTS: Mundo Serif, Azonix [dafont], Segoe UI Symbol

IMAGES: Illustration by Blurb_brain [AO3]; cover image by NASA ID: 440611 [Rawpixel]; Planet Earth background ID: 6331593 [Rawpixel]; Circuit lines background ID: 3117935 [Rawpixel]; endpapers' image by Eric Eastman [Unsplash]; Swoksaar, Desert Dust, Lord Grim, Vaccaria, and Cloud Piercer [The King's Avatar Wikia]

MATERIALS: regular printer paper (8.5"x11", 96 bright, 20lb), 80pt bookboard, Iris Bookcloth (colour: Black Pearl), Neenah cardstock (8.5"x11", bright white, 65lb), waxed linen thread (white, 30/3 size), embroidery floss (shades 3750, 350, 3845, 370), leather cording (1.9mm diameter), Reeves’ acrylic paint (Mars Black, Phthalo Blue, Titanum White), Americana acrylic paint (glow in the dark), ph neutral pva glue (Books by Hand)

PROGRAMS USED: Typeset in Affinity Publisher, cover/title page/endpapers designed in Affinity Designer/Photo, QR codes generated with LibreOffice Writer, PDF arranged for printing with Bookbinder-JS

BINDING STYLE: quarto, case bound (slightly rounded, with oxford hollow, forgot to use tapes)

.

Fenes' "Glory's tech isn't handwaved" AU. This was great! Funny and creative, and I'm both amazed and full of admiration for Fenes' ability to juggle so many characters.

I was feeling excited and ambitious with this one. Tried some new fun things (double core endbands, painted edges) and used some new equipment (a lying press).

The Text

TITLE/HEADINGS FONT: Azonix says 'SciFi' to me, it's a bold, non-serif, sleek font.

BODY FONT: Mundo Serif, it's a decent serif body font I haven't used before. Felt like it worked with Azonix.

SCENE BREAKS: a special character in Segoe UI Symbol of a black & white icon of Earth, the globe showing Asia.

TYPESETTING: Finished typesetting the fic, left document open on my laptop, laptop's battery failed, file now crashes immediately upon reopening, issue persists with copied versions of file (；￣Д￣) . Thankfully I had a backup file for the typeset with the barebones of the text, so I didn't have to restart from scratch...

Title Page

My thinking: it takes place in space, the world's at stake, and it's the dawn of a new horizon for Earth. Glory and the titular champions are represented by Swoksaar, Desert Dust, Lord Grim, Vaccaria, and Cloud Piercer – the captains of what I'd call the 'big 5' teams. A circuitry board background element hints at the tech/mecha nature of the story's competition. It may not match Blurb's art, but I hope I was able to convey some of what the story is about.

The circuitry image is used as decoration throughout the book. I only used the avatars of the top five teams' captains because too many silhouettes would lessen their impact and readability. (Removing the backgrounds was tedious, but worth it.)

Here's what it should have looked like. The test prints for this and the BB art were fine, but I think my inkjet started running out of ink just when I printed the final copies and I didn't reprint them. (Too impatient, really wanted to finish up and read the book)

The Cover

World Champions is another Big Bang fic, and once again I based some of my design choices off of the accompanying artwork. The dominant colours of Blurb_brain's illustration are red and blue-green.

COVER PAPER: For the decorative cover material I used NASA's ASTER image of Poyang Lake. NASA has some really interesting photography some of which remind me of marbled paper, thought it could be interesting. I chose this image of Poyang Lake because 1) it's in China, 2) the colours were similar to Blurb's awesome illustration (fate strikes again, dropping matching images and artwork into my lap!), and 3) NASA is tangentially relevant to the fic, which takes place in space.

BOOKCLOTH: Verona bookcloth in the shade Black Pearl, a lovely dark navy blue colour. Thought it suited the cover paper and title page. (Bought it for this fic specifically, but the colour goes well with almost all of my decorative papers so it should see a lot of use in the future!)

Endpapers

The final decision that held this project at a standstill for two months. In the end I drew inspiration from the matchups against the final opponent in the story. The image I used is a little chaotic and a little too unrelated to identify why I picked it without an explanation, but this book is for me and I know why, so there. (Note that I played around with the colours and cropped the photo.)

Endpaper inspiration: the maps for the matches against the Infilhites

"a long bridge through an enormous tube-like hall, where light seem to come from every side through stained glass windows. It was visually confusing, limited lateral motion" "a warehouse, crates stacked on and beside metal racks that went all the way to the ceiling." "a house of mirrors, fully enclosed to be sure the Infhillte couldn’t fly out of it." "like a volcano, rivers of lava moving sluggishly down a slope, occasional vents of overheated air nearby." "a series of overlapping bridges between halls and stairways, level after level layered over an open abyss."

Trimming & Painting the Edges

Going all out, a 2-for1 deal: the opportunity to use my lying press for the first time and learn a new technique!

TRIMMING: Used a paring chisel and lying press.

CHISEL: The 1.25" wide paring chisel I used was form a modern manufacturer. (Vintage paring chisels are very thin, enough so that you can bend/flex the blade. But don't do that.) It's long and wide blade made it easier to register against the surface of the press for consistent cuts. Looks like this one below from Lee Valley.

LYING PRESS: My dad's project. Solid black walnut, hand carved screws and internal threads — he even made the tools to make the threads too! The jaws of the press are each 3 7/8" wide. It's big and heavy (though much smaller than full-sized professional ones omg), but there's enough of a flat surface to register the chisel against. A thicc boi, much like this one below from Bookbinding Supplies.

PAINTED EDGES: The idea was to have dark navy edges, speckled with white stars. I used acrylic from a tube to paint the edges — tutorials recommended it over liquid bottled acrylic, and I had an old set hanging around. Had to water it down because otherwise the paint just flaked off.

My test of trimming and painting went well. Then the trimmed book itself came out slightly crooked, the paint required significantly more watering-down than before, and the white paint did not want to be both opaque and speckle-able. Unfortunate, but still book-shaped! And now I have an idea of what to do differently next time.

Also, did not like the glow-in-the-dark paint. Looked too translucent in the light when compared to the white acrylic, and needed a thicker coat to be visible in the dark. (The thickness combined with the translucence and base colour kinda reminded me of boogers... Ended up scrapping most of it off, so there's not much left to glow.)

Endbands

Still in the mood to have fun and go all-out, I attempted double-core endbands for the first time.

TUTORIAL: YouTube @ BookbindersChronicle: Bookbinding 101 Sewing Headbands Session 2. Also watched @ DAS Bookbinding's Double-Core Endband // Adventures in Bookbinding, but I personally found Chronicle's closeup video easier to follow.

I used embroidery floss from a 100pk of assorted colours off Amazon, wrapped around a core of 1.9mm leather cording from Michaels. I drew from Blurb_brain's art for the general colours, choosing a dark base, with red, blue-green, and gold. The specific shades were picked to go with the cover.

[perpetualnovelboyfriend]

reposting from r/romancebooks

Alt Text: r/Kindle post that states: FYI Amazon is removing Download and Transfer option on February 26. I went to download a book this morning and saw the following warning: Starting February 26, 2025, the "Download & Transfer via USB" option will no longer be available. You can still send Kindle books to your Wi-Fi enabled devices by selecting the "Deliver or Remove from Device" option. This post contains a screenshot of the warning.

u/Magnafeana's attached FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

What is “Download & Transfer via USB”? This is a website option to permit users to download their Amazon content library purchases directly to their PCs. This is a way to keep versions of your purchases in your own storage. This does not mean that the file is deDRM. The file remains AZW3 DRM locked.

Does this affect all kindles? This pertains to the website itself.

Will this affect other methods of Send to Kindle? No. You can still use other methods to send documents, PDFs, and EPUBs to your Kindle device either manually or via Calibre.

Why don’t I see this yet when I try this option? It seems there’s a mixed bag of people who get this message and don’t. I personally don’t. But I have verified with representatives and their team leads twice that this change will happen universally on February 26.

How can I back up my books? r/Calibre is a great resource itself that walks you through how to back up your books and read them elsewhere.

This makes me concerned about purchasing from Amazon. Are there any other options? Many

u/Magnafeana's resource list under the cut

I shared my resources here and here, but here’s a list: I always advocate for DRM-free media. I shared here some non-Amazon options (Abe Books is owned by Amazon BTW): Apple Books Rakuten Kobo (Kobo lets you use Adobe Digital Edition DRMs, which come as epubs) SmashWords itch.io Humble Bumble Eden Books Libby Barnes & Noble Nook (though I believe this contain DRM as well and, similar to this, you can no longer download Nook ebooks to your PC directly) BookFunnel Author directly (sometimes, you can purchase DRM-free ebooks from them or they gift it to you) Project Gutenberg (public domain) Internet Archive RoyalRoad (webnovels) Tapas (webnovels) Google Play Books ebooks.com Bookshops.com (however, there’s some controversy that, while this’ll partner with Kobo eventually, DRM Ebooks from Bookshop.org must be read on either their Apple or Android app, and this is in the US currently, but this thread on r/books talks about it more) Harlequin DL Site (Japanese media) J-Novel Club (Japanese) BOOK⭐️WALKER (Japanese) BookLive (Japanese) Honto (Japanese) I’m missing out on multiple retailers for Asian content, but so many of them are largely physical books rather than ebooks 😭 r/FreeRomanceBooks is also a great place to check out free books that may be available on non-Amazon platforms r/MM_RomanceBooks has daily release posts that include Sales & Deals that may be from non-Amazon websites as well as dedicated posts for sales & deals and stuff your ereader days that can have books beyond the Amazon ecosystem r/Fantasy is great at calling out humble bumble deals for fantasy books, where they are all ePUBS r/audiobooks has a great resources for options Some of my sources do encompass audiobooks, but there’s also: Hoopla GraphicAudio Kobo Audiobooks Libro.fm (DRM-free, IIRC) Google Play Audiobooks Humble Bumble Internet Archive Blogs (some audiodramas/audiobooks are hosted on the actual webnovel page) Teen Book Cloud Librovox (public domain) Just an FYI ☺️ But I will echo what I say in my other comments: KU is still a great subscription and Amazon does provide a lot of books. Amazon puts exclusivity for some authors as well, so remaining with Amazon isn’t a bad thing. If you can afford to shop elsewhere for ebooks or your library hosts the books you like, go for it! I certainly get things from Libby and other sites, but there’s a lot of books solely available through Amazon and that’ll be the only way to support the author. Do what’s affordable and accessible to you.

[axolator]

Script-A-"Day" #43: Chasing Rabbits by Noor and Luxray

Is the Pixie chasing an illusion? Is their duplicate in hiding?

Featured characters: Pixie, Xaan, Goblin

Fabled characters: Spirit of Ivory

This is for the case where the Mezepheles turns a player evil, then another player gets Barber-swapped into the Mezepheles (creating a new instance of the Mez ability that could theoretically turn another player evil).

Jinxes:

Cannibal / Juggler: If the Juggler guesses on their first day and dies by execution, tonight the living Cannibal learns how many guesses the Juggler got correct.

Spy / Magician: When the Spy sees the Grimoire, the Demon and Magician's character tokens are removed.

You should also remove the No Dashii's "Poisoned" reminder tokens from the Grimoire, so it's not immediately obvious who the Demon is.

Cerenovus / Goblin: The Cerenovus may choose to make a player mad that they are the Goblin.

Complexity: Intermediate-Advanced. Recommended for players looking for an introduction to the world beyond the base 3: those who can handle a bit more madness, a bit more misinformation, and a lot more squabbling about different evil teams and worlds.

Database link (find the PDF and JSON for running it there!)

Writeup under the cut!

Chasing Rabbits is a script by both Noor and Luxray featuring a little bit of everything and themed around the potential for a No Dashii-poisoned Pixie. There are plenty of reasons for doubleclaims within the Outsiders, evil players, and even some of the Townsfolk, whether by choice (as the Ravenkeeper, Mayor, or Magician might) or if they're compelled to via Cerenovus. The good team has quite a bit of information, but without coordinating, they might quickly find themselves on the back foot against the powerful evil team comprised of characters like the Mezepheles, Cerenovus, and Goblin. The Spy and Xaan provide mechanical misinformation among their other effects, and the Demons round out the evil suite with three different ways of warping town's information: is it poisoned, outdated, or being manipulated by Minions from beyond the grave?

When bagbuilding Chasing Rabbits, be mindful of how much the good team can trust their information. Social reads can only help so much when the evil team has a No Dashii, Mezepheles turning the Fortune Teller, Spy, and Puzzlemaster drunking a key Townsfolk, so don't load up too heavily on the misinfo. Xaan especially can be particularly oppressive: denying an entire night of misinformation can be brutal as is, but when paired with a Demon like the No Dashii, a Xaan can be too devastating, especially in smaller games.

On the other side of the coin, make sure evil can deal with the good team's information: an Empath, Balloonist, and Fortune Teller all working together can be near-unstoppable if evil doesn't have counterplay to fight those abilities (whether that's in the form of droison, madness, or being able to hide behind a Goblin claim).

On the more granular side of the bagbuild, keep the synergy between Demons and Minions in mind. The Vigor would rather have a Cerenovus to kill than a Goblin, but an Imp might feel unable to starpass if its only option is a Cerenovus over a quieter Minion.

Some notes:

As a refresher: The Pixie gains their ability if they were mad about being the Townsfolk they saw when the player their "Mad" token is on dies. So, if a Pixie is Xaan-poisoned on Night 1, their reminder token can be anywhere & they learned an arbitrary Townsfolk: when the player their token is on dies, if they were mad as the Townsfolk character they saw, they gain the ability they saw.

High Priestess! It feels like I talk about this character every week... look, go read my other writeups at this point. In sum:

The operative word in the High Priestess's ability text is "talk", so they should be having conversations that wouldn't happen without their info.

A High Priestess should expect to be shown players who benefit from being talked to, like a Ravenkeeper who needs someone to roleswap with, a Spy pushing a world the High Priestess knows is incorrect, or a checked-out Mayor who might need help getting social trust to go for a win.

Who is most important to talk to is somewhat subjective and might change depending on which player pulls the HP token: keep your group in mind, and do what's fun.

Quick interaction note: A Dashii-poisoned (or puzzledrunk) Magician is poisoned at setup, so can't mess with evil info. A Xaan-poisoned Magician only starts getting poisoned at the Xaan's spot in the night order, so messes with Minion/Demon info before getting poisoned. Effectively, the Magician is immune to Xaan 1.

I actually think that's about it for me today. This script is pretty on-rails, and the hardest part of STing it is building a good bag. If you can do that, you can have a fun game with a really unique and fun flavor! Definitely try this script out — I'll see you next time.

[racout]

The Drac of Beaucaire

Note: I'm an English learner and I wrote this text to practise my written English. If you want to give me feedback about my English, please go ahead!

In my publication about the tarasque I mentioned another creature called the drac.

The drac exists in several French tales and legends, especially in Occitania and western Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. It is most often an incarnation of the Devil, which takes the form of all sorts of creatures, objects, and people. But it seems unable to become a needle as it doesn’t know how to pierce its head to make the eye of a needle.

There are plenty of dracs in France, and the one I want to talk about lives in the Rhône, near the town of Beaucaire. It is said that the it lives in a palace deep in the river. With golden objects, it attracts people to the river and takes them. It especially targets breastfeeding women so they can feed its own children.

Gervase of Tilbury was the first one to write about the creature in his encyclopaedia Recreation for an Emperor (Otia imperialia), in the early 13th century. He portrays a dragon living in the Rhône.

There are different versions of this story. One of my favourites was told by Paul Sébillot in Le Folklore de la France : La mer et les eaux douces (The Folklore of France: Sea and freshwaters). Here is a synopsis:

A woman from Beaucaire was cleaning her laundry in the Rhône when she noticed a wooden bowl floating on water. She was intrigued and tried to grab it, but it moved away. She wanted to get closer, but the more she tried to approach it, the further it was. When she reached a deep area of the river, the drac caught her and took her into the depths.

It brought her to its place and tasked her to feed its child. She was its prisoner for years.

One day, she was given a cake with snake flesh. While eating it, she touched her eye with her greasy hands. At that moment, she noticed that she could see distinctly under water.

The drac finally let her go seven years after snatching her. She went back to Beaucaire and explained to startled inhabitants what had happened to her. She told them the drac fed on human flesh, and, sometimes, it took human form to hide among them.

One day, she met another drac. It had taken human form, but she recognised it with her power. The drac knew how she saw him, and touched her eye to remove her ability.

The drac of Beaucaire is just one of the many legends and tales about this creature. There is a story where it becomes a ball of string to trick a woman. In another tale, it is a mare or a donkey, of which body grows longer as more people mount it. Or a story where it is the master of the ocean.

Sources below

PERBOSC Antonin. Mythologie populaire : le Drac, l'Étouffe-vieille et le Matagot d’après les traditions occitanes. Revue de Folklore français et de folklore colonial, 1941, t. XII, n°1, p. 1-18.

URL (PDF)

SÉBILLOT Paul. Chapitre IV : les rivières, Partie 2 : Habitants et hantises des rivières. In: Le Folklore de la France. La mer et les eaux douces. Paris, France: E. Guilmoto, 1905, p. 339-361.

URL (Gallica)

DELMAS Marie-Charlotte. Drac. In: Dictionnaire de la France Merveilleuse. Paris, France: Omnibus, 2017, p. 186-191.

BLADÉ Jean-François. Le drac. In: Contes de la Gascogne. Paris, France: Calmann Lévy, 1895, p 193-207.