#how to create web source codes

[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.

[novella-november]

Well. I have a feeling I'm about to have a million new followers. (March 31st, 2025; not an April Fool's joke, unless Nanowrimo has very poor taste and timing)

Here's a link that explains in long video format the whole entire thing in detail:

and to sum it up:

This blog was made as an Anti-Generative AI to Nanowrimo, as well as a way to actually build a friendly, low-pressure, helpful community of aspiring writers, without the hard-fast-do-it-or-die pressure brought on by nanowrimo.

There is no official "contest" -- only a community coming together to inspire each other to write, help out with motivation by setting community goals, keeping participation motivation via Trackbear.app, etc!

The most popular writing challenge is still November for most people, but I myself have also started to keep a year-round, daily writing goal of 444 via the website 4thewords, which has been an extreme help in getting me to write a little at a time.

This year has been very hectic for everyone what with the election results so I haven't been very active on tumblr (I think everyone can understand that) but I was originally planning on also having each month of the year being a different themed writing / art challenge but got a bit distracted real life.

So, what is the Novella November Challenge?

It's a fun challenge where writers come together to write 30,000 (or your own personal writing goal!) words in 30 days, sharing tips, writing advice, plot ideas, accessibility aids, and committing to having fun while explicitly fighting back against Generative AI by using our own words and disavowing the use of scraping and generating to take away the livelyhoods of artists of all spectrums, and proving everyone who insists "generative AI is an accessibility tool" wrong by committing to our creative visions and making it easier for everyone to find the tools they need to succeed by sharing tips, free programs, and finding a like-minded community to support you! 💙

There is no official website, there is no required place to show your participation, this is a community initiative that will never be monetized by predatory sponsors or dangerous moderators abusing their power.

This blog is here to inspire everyone, regardless of experience level, to write and create the story they want to tell, in their own words, while striving to remain a fun, low-pressure challenge that doesn't turn into a stressful spiral, like often happened with Nano.

Want to start writing but not sure how? Don't have money to spend on expensive writing programs? Have no fear!

LibreOffice: An always free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Word (and Microsoft's other office suits)

4Thewords: A website (both desktop and mobile web browser) that syncs your writing cross platform to the cloud, with built-in daily word goals, streak tracking, and you can fight monsters with your word count to game-ify writing!

Trackbear: A website dedicated to tracking your writing, setting custom goals, and creating leaderboards for community participation; you can join the year-long community leaderboard with the Join Code "f043cc66-6d5d-45b2-acf1-204626a727ba" and a November-limited one will release on November 1st as well.

Want to use Text to Speech to dictate your novel?

Most modern phones have a built-in option available on your keyboard settings which can be used on any writing program on your phone, and most modern PCs that allow a microphone (including headphone) connection has some kind of native dictation function, which you can find by opening your start panel and searching your computer for "Speech to text" or "voice to text".

Want to write while on the go, but don't want to / can't use the small phone keyboard to type, or speech to text?

You can, for as cheap as $40, buy a bluetooth keyboard that you can pair with your smart phone or tablet and use to write in any and all writing applications on your phone -- this allows you to write on the goal (especially using cross-platform websites or services, like 4thewords or google docs) , and the small screen can also help minimize distractions by muting notifications in your writing time.

[codingquill]

Welcome back, coding enthusiasts! Today we'll talk about Git & Github , the must-know duo for any modern developer. Whether you're just starting out or need a refresher, this guide will walk you through everything from setup to intermediate-level use. Let’s jump in!

What is Git?

Git is a version control system. It helps you as a developer:

Track changes in your codebase, so if anything breaks, you can go back to a previous version. (Trust me, this happens more often than you’d think!)

Collaborate with others : whether you're working on a team project or contributing to an open-source repo, Git helps manage multiple versions of a project.

In short, Git allows you to work smarter, not harder. Developers who aren't familiar with the basics of Git? Let’s just say they’re missing a key tool in their toolkit.

What is Github ?

GitHub is a web-based platform that uses Git for version control and collaboration. It provides an interface to manage your repositories, track bugs, request new features, and much more. Think of it as a place where your Git repositories live, and where real teamwork happens. You can collaborate, share your code, and contribute to other projects, all while keeping everything well-organized.

Git & Github : not the same thing !

Git is the tool you use to create repositories and manage code on your local machine while GitHub is the platform where you host those repositories and collaborate with others. You can also host Git repositories on other platforms like GitLab and BitBucket, but GitHub is the most popular.

Installing Git (Windows, Linux, and macOS Users)

You can go ahead and download Git for your platform from (git-scm.com)

Using Git

You can use Git either through the command line (Terminal) or through a GUI. However, as a developer, it’s highly recommended to learn the terminal approach. Why? Because it’s more efficient, and understanding the commands will give you a better grasp of how Git works under the hood.

GitWorkflow

Git operates in several key areas:

Working directory (on your local machine)

Staging area (where changes are prepared to be committed)

Local repository (stored in the hidden .git directory in your project)

Remote repository (the version of the project stored on GitHub or other hosting platforms)

Let’s look at the basic commands that move code between these areas:

git init: Initializes a Git repository in your project directory, creating the .git folder.

git add: Adds your files to the staging area, where they’re prepared for committing.

git commit: Commits your staged files to your local repository.

git log: Shows the history of commits.

git push: Pushes your changes to the remote repository (like GitHub).

git pull: Pulls changes from the remote repository into your working directory.

git clone: Clones a remote repository to your local machine, maintaining the connection to the remote repo.

Branching and merging

When working in a team, it’s important to never mess up the main branch (often called master or main). This is the core of your project, and it's essential to keep it stable.

To do this, we branch out for new features or bug fixes. This way, you can make changes without affecting the main project until you’re ready to merge. Only merge your work back into the main branch once you're confident that it’s ready to go.

Getting Started: From Installation to Intermediate

Now, let’s go step-by-step through the process of using Git and GitHub from installation to pushing your first project.

Configuring Git

After installing Git, you’ll need to tell Git your name and email. This helps Git keep track of who made each change. To do this, run:

Master vs. Main Branch

By default, Git used to name the default branch master, but GitHub switched it to main for inclusivity reasons. To avoid confusion, check your default branch:

Pushing Changes to GitHub

Let’s go through an example of pushing your changes to GitHub.

First, initialize Git in your project directory:

Then to get the ‘untracked files’ , the files that we haven’t added yet to our staging area , we run the command

Now that you’ve guessed it we’re gonna run the git add command , you can add your files individually by running git add name or all at once like I did here

And finally it's time to commit our file to the local repository

Now, create a new repository on GitHub (it’s easy , just follow these instructions along with me)

Assuming you already created your github account you’ll go to this link and change username by your actual username : https://github.com/username?tab=repositories , then follow these instructions :

You can add a name and choose wether you repo can be public or private for now and forget about everything else for now.

Once your repository created on github , you’ll get this :

As you might’ve noticed, we’ve already run all these commands , all what’s left for us to do is to push our files from our local repository to our remote repository , so let’s go ahead and do that

And just like this we have successfully pushed our files to the remote repository

Here, you can see the default branch main, the total number of branches, your latest commit message along with how long ago it was made, and the number of commits you've made on that branch.

Now what is a Readme file ?

A README file is a markdown file where you can add any relevant information about your code or the specific functionality in a particular branch—since each branch can have its own README.

It also serves as a guide for anyone who clones your repository, showing them exactly how to use it.

You can add a README from this button:

Or, you can create it using a command and push it manually:

But for the sake of demonstrating how to pull content from a remote repository, we’re going with the first option:

Once that’s done, it gets added to the repository just like any other file—with a commit message and timestamp.

However, the README file isn’t on my local machine yet, so I’ll run the git pull command:

Now everything is up to date. And this is just the tiniest example of how you can pull content from your remote repository.

What is .gitignore file ?

Sometimes, you don’t want to push everything to GitHub—especially sensitive files like environment variables or API keys. These shouldn’t be shared publicly. In fact, GitHub might even send you a warning email if you do:

To avoid this, you should create a .gitignore file, like this:

Any file listed in .gitignore will not be pushed to GitHub. So you’re all set!

Cloning

When you want to copy a GitHub repository to your local machine (aka "clone" it), you have two main options:

Clone using HTTPS: This is the most straightforward method. You just copy the HTTPS link from GitHub and run:

It's simple, doesn’t require extra setup, and works well for most users. But each time you push or pull, GitHub may ask for your username and password (or personal access token if you've enabled 2FA).

But if you wanna clone using ssh , you’ll need to know a bit more about ssh keys , so let’s talk about that.

Clone using SSH (Secure Shell): This method uses SSH keys for authentication. Once set up, it’s more secure and doesn't prompt you for credentials every time. Here's how it works:

So what is an SSH key, actually?

Think of SSH keys as a digital handshake between your computer and GitHub.

Your computer generates a key pair:

A private key (stored safely on your machine)

A public key (shared with GitHub)

When you try to access GitHub via SSH, GitHub checks if the public key you've registered matches the private key on your machine.

If they match, you're in — no password prompts needed.

Steps to set up SSH with GitHub:

Generate your SSH key:

2. Start the SSH agent and add your key:

3. Copy your public key:

Then copy the output to your clipboard.

Add it to your GitHub account:

Go to GitHub → Settings → SSH and GPG keys

Click New SSH key

Paste your public key and save.

5. Now you'll be able to clone using SSH like this:

From now on, any interaction with GitHub over SSH will just work — no password typing, just smooth encrypted magic.

And there you have it ! Until next time — happy coding, and may your merges always be conflict-free! ✨👩‍💻👨‍💻

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Humans are not perfectly vigilant

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

These "hallucinations" are a stubbornly persistent feature of large language models, because these models only give the illusion of understanding; in reality, they are just sophisticated forms of autocomplete, drawing on huge databases to make shrewd (but reliably fallible) guesses about which word comes next:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Guessing the next word without understanding the meaning of the resulting sentence makes unsupervised LLMs unsuitable for high-stakes tasks. The whole AI bubble is based on convincing investors that one or more of the following is true:

There are low-stakes, high-value tasks that will recoup the massive costs of AI training and operation;

There are high-stakes, high-value tasks that can be made cheaper by adding an AI to a human operator;

Adding more training data to an AI will make it stop hallucinating, so that it can take over high-stakes, high-value tasks without a "human in the loop."

These are dubious propositions. There's a universe of low-stakes, low-value tasks – political disinformation, spam, fraud, academic cheating, nonconsensual porn, dialog for video-game NPCs – but none of them seem likely to generate enough revenue for AI companies to justify the billions spent on models, nor the trillions in valuation attributed to AI companies:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

The proposition that increasing training data will decrease hallucinations is hotly contested among AI practitioners. I confess that I don't know enough about AI to evaluate opposing sides' claims, but even if you stipulate that adding lots of human-generated training data will make the software a better guesser, there's a serious problem. All those low-value, low-stakes applications are flooding the internet with botshit. After all, the one thing AI is unarguably very good at is producing bullshit at scale. As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

This means that adding another order of magnitude more training data to AI won't just add massive computational expense – the data will be many orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire, even without factoring in the additional liability arising from new legal theories about scraping:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

That leaves us with "humans in the loop" – the idea that an AI's business model is selling software to businesses that will pair it with human operators who will closely scrutinize the code's guesses. There's a version of this that sounds plausible – the one in which the human operator is in charge, and the AI acts as an eternally vigilant "sanity check" on the human's activities.

For example, my car has a system that notices when I activate my blinker while there's another car in my blind-spot. I'm pretty consistent about checking my blind spot, but I'm also a fallible human and there've been a couple times where the alert saved me from making a potentially dangerous maneuver. As disciplined as I am, I'm also sometimes forgetful about turning off lights, or waking up in time for work, or remembering someone's phone number (or birthday). I like having an automated system that does the robotically perfect trick of never forgetting something important.

There's a name for this in automation circles: a "centaur." I'm the human head, and I've fused with a powerful robot body that supports me, doing things that humans are innately bad at.

That's the good kind of automation, and we all benefit from it. But it only takes a small twist to turn this good automation into a nightmare. I'm speaking here of the reverse-centaur: automation in which the computer is in charge, bossing a human around so it can get its job done. Think of Amazon warehouse workers, who wear haptic bracelets and are continuously observed by AI cameras as autonomous shelves shuttle in front of them and demand that they pick and pack items at a pace that destroys their bodies and drives them mad:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

Automation centaurs are great: they relieve humans of drudgework and let them focus on the creative and satisfying parts of their jobs. That's how AI-assisted coding is pitched: rather than looking up tricky syntax and other tedious programming tasks, an AI "co-pilot" is billed as freeing up its human "pilot" to focus on the creative puzzle-solving that makes coding so satisfying.

But an hallucinating AI is a terrible co-pilot. It's just good enough to get the job done much of the time, but it also sneakily inserts booby-traps that are statistically guaranteed to look as plausible as the good code (that's what a next-word-guessing program does: guesses the statistically most likely word).

This turns AI-"assisted" coders into reverse centaurs. The AI can churn out code at superhuman speed, and you, the human in the loop, must maintain perfect vigilance and attention as you review that code, spotting the cleverly disguised hooks for malicious code that the AI can't be prevented from inserting into its code. As "Lena" writes, "code review [is] difficult relative to writing new code":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

Why is that? "Passively reading someone else's code just doesn't engage my brain in the same way. It's harder to do properly":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773780355708764665

There's a name for this phenomenon: "automation blindness." Humans are just not equipped for eternal vigilance. We get good at spotting patterns that occur frequently – so good that we miss the anomalies. That's why TSA agents are so good at spotting harmless shampoo bottles on X-rays, even as they miss nearly every gun and bomb that a red team smuggles through their checkpoints:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

"Lena"'s thread points out that this is as true for AI-assisted driving as it is for AI-assisted coding: "self-driving cars replace the experience of driving with the experience of being a driving instructor":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773841546753831283

In other words, they turn you into a reverse-centaur. Whereas my blind-spot double-checking robot allows me to make maneuvers at human speed and points out the things I've missed, a "supervised" self-driving car makes maneuvers at a computer's frantic pace, and demands that its human supervisor tirelessly and perfectly assesses each of those maneuvers. No wonder Cruise's murderous "self-driving" taxis replaced each low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged technical robot supervisors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

AI radiology programs are said to be able to spot cancerous masses that human radiologists miss. A centaur-based AI-assisted radiology program would keep the same number of radiologists in the field, but they would get less done: every time they assessed an X-ray, the AI would give them a second opinion. If the human and the AI disagreed, the human would go back and re-assess the X-ray. We'd get better radiology, at a higher price (the price of the AI software, plus the additional hours the radiologist would work).

But back to making the AI bubble pay off: for AI to pay off, the human in the loop has to reduce the costs of the business buying an AI. No one who invests in an AI company believes that their returns will come from business customers to agree to increase their costs. The AI can't do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway – that pitch is the most successful form of AI disinformation in the world.

An AI that "hallucinates" bad advice to fliers can't replace human customer service reps, but airlines are firing reps and replacing them with chatbots:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

An AI that "hallucinates" bad legal advice to New Yorkers can't replace city services, but Mayor Adams still tells New Yorkers to get their legal advice from his chatbots:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/03/nycs-government-chatbot-is-lying-about-city-laws-and-regulations/

The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software – everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus. A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur – they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant.

But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit." They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed.

Reverse centaurism is brutal. That's not news: Charlie Chaplin documented the problems of reverse centaurs nearly 100 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)

As ever, the problem with a gadget isn't what it does: it's who it does it for and who it does it to. There are plenty of benefits from being a centaur – lots of ways that automation can help workers. But the only path to AI profitability lies in reverse centaurs, automation that turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot:

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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Jorge Royan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munich_-_Two_boys_playing_in_a_park_-_7328.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

--

Noah Wulf (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thunderbirds_at_Attention_Next_to_Thunderbird_1_-_Aviation_Nation_2019.jpg

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

[a-d-nox]

web of wyrd: goals you should set to become your best self

this is just a theory of mine because these bubbles of the matrix should represent your higher self. i feel like it could work for the outside numbers too that changes yearly... anywho - this is not to say that you can't accomplish goals/resolution not listed in your category / under your energetic number nor that your efforts not listed in your selection don't make you a better person. this is simply what i believe people with these numbers would benefit from doing and how they can gain new found confidence in themselves.

paid reading options: astrology menu & cartomancy menu

enjoy my work? help me continue creating by tipping on ko-fi or paypal. your support keeps the magic alive!

1 - the magician

start a garden, work on passion project(s), read or write a business/self-help books, get a tarot/astrology/mediumship reading, study more tarot/astrology/mediumship, complete an art project, make your own soap or candles, start taking vitamins daily, declutter, learn to cook, learn to code, get car detailed, start journaling, do a paid class or certification course, start learning a new language, learn more about heritage, learn how to do nails at home, start a side hustle, learn to knit or crochet, learn how to manage a bonsai, or go to a concert

2 - the high priestess

delve deeper into spiritual practices, eat to support hormones, learn to bake, take a mixology course or find your signature drink (if you are of age), start or restructure a self-care routine, take a beach/cruise vacation, play brain games, learn to makes candles, go to a fondue experience, reset closet or revamp style, try a juice cleanse, take a cooking class, get a tarot/astrology/mediumship reading, practice tarot/astrology/mediumship abilities, or take self-defense class

3 - the empress

build up your crystal collection, reset closet or revamp style, go to an art museum, see a ballet or take a ballet class, sketch daily, practice makeup looks, keep a flower garden, get jewelry cleaned or revamp jewelry collection, save for real pearl/diamond/stone jewelry, learn to make your own candy/sweets, start a budget or emergency fund, reset closet or revamp style, save for a designer piece/accessory, start a new beauty/skincare routine, take a trip to a fancy restaurant, learn how to dried your own fruits, start a garden or try to grow something new in your garden, go to a concert/orchestra, read or write a poetry book, go to a play, start wearing lingerie (sometimes it's a pick me up to know you look good for yourself), get a boudoir photoshoot done, go to a vineyard or wine tasting (for those of drinking age), or take a dance class

4 - the emperor

start a new skincare routine, go on a rock climbing retreat, start going to the gym or become a personal trainer, try an adrenaline rush activity (skydiving, bungee jumping, etc), take a wood shop class, get more into your coffee - learn about sourcing/grinding beans, start taking better care of your eyes, start a hair care routine, start an oral health routine, start meditating, or start using time blocking or following a planner

5 - the hierophant

sketch daily, go on an architectural tour, start a beauty routine, go to a history museum, learn how to make pastries/sweets/candies, get your earrings cleaned professionally or save for a quality set, learn how to make sour dough, save for real pearl/diamond/stone jewelry, take piano/organ lessons or give them, take or give singing lessons, or take a class

6 - the lovers

get car detailed, get car license, do a bicycle marathon or learn how to rider a bike, read a set number of books, buy a quality briefcase / work tote, go on a day trip, start a gym membership or soulcycle classes, build up you crystal collection and learn how to use them, upgrade your desk set up, go for hand & foot message, learn how to do nails at home, start reading the newspaper (i recommend the new yorker), take a language classes, learn a new language, take a train trip, learn how to better your communication with others, or start talk therapy

7 - the chariot

start a garden or try to grow something new in your garden, learn how to bake or learn how to bake something new, start a new beauty routine, go on a boat trip / cruise, get car detailed, try a juice cleanse, upgrade glassware, declutter, invest in home, stay at a hotel or bed & breakfast, upgrade kitchenware, go on a lake trip, go tubing, invest in pearls, invest in real estate / land, try a new restaurant, get silver jewelry cleaned professionally, shop your pantry, go on a trip, or start journaling your intentions / bullet journaling

8 - strength

go to an amusement park, work on or finish a passion project, take ballroom dancing classes, learn about tea and tea leaves, learn to read tea leaves, start playing a new game or design a new game, practice vulnerability, go to the movie theater, start a flower garden, or get a pet

9 - the hermit

get a pet, organize bookshelves, try a juice cleanse, upgrade clothing or declutter closet, start an oral health routine, start journaling more consistently, learn more about emergency preparedness, invest in emergency preparedness, learn to cook something new, invest in new dining ware (new plates/bowls, cups / glassware, silverware, etc), try a food subscriptions (home chef, hello fresh, pickle of the month club, bokksu japanese snack box, etc), take care of a bonsai, take supplements, learn to knit or crochet, start an herb garden, learn to dry your own herbs, take a one way trip to anywhere, or go on a hiking trip

10 - wheel of fortune

learn about different incenses/herbs, practice or take a class in archery, plant a tree, invest in land, learn how to dry berries, start a budget, learn how to budget, start going to a gym / exercising, expand religious/spiritual/philosophical knowledge, learn how to play a new card game, learn how to spin your own wool (then you can move to weaving, crocheting, and/or knitting), learn how to make your own clothing, buy a luxury coat, take a trip to a country or place you have never been, start an oral health routine, take an etiquette class, learn about the customs of other countries/cultures, eat more fruit, get a beehive / harvest your own honey, start taking royal jelly, take a horseback riding lesson, upgrade shoes / shoe collection, support spiritual practices / keep learning about what you believe in / trust, or start practicing a positive mindset

11 - justice

go to a ballet or an art gallery, start using or invest in an air purifier, learn how to take care of house plants, buy a house plant, take a spa day, go to a spa, reset your cosmetics (please clean your brushes and sponges), wearing lingerie (sometimes it's a pick me up to know you look good for yourself), get a boudoir photoshoot done, organize your closet, declutter your closet, start a capsule wardrobe, learn how to make pastries/sweets, invest in diamonds, propose to your lover, buy a dress that makes you feel good and take yourself on a date (fancy diner and a play/opera/ballet), go to a fashion show or exhibit, buy yourself flowers, start a flower garden, invest in a luxury chair (a chaise, reading chair, gaming card - whatever your thing is, justice person), declutter your jewelry, invest in luxury jewelry, get your jewelry professional cleaned, go to a concert, read or write a poetry, buy yourself chocolate dipped strawberries, get hair extensions (i know you want to lol), do logic puzzles, or go to an escape room

12 - the hanged man

take a mixology course or find your signature drink (if you are of age), learn how to better decode angel numbers, look into / practice natural medical remedies, take a ballet class, go to a ballet, revamp your self-care routine, go on a beach vacation, try a new tea or coffee, learn more about tea or coffee, practice photography or start a photography side hustle, take a dance class, read or write a smutty/romance/fantasy book, make a fairy garden, get a tarot/astrology/mediumship reading, practice your tarot/astrology/mediumship abilities, start budgeting, try a new makeup look or practice your makeup skills, go to a concert, paint something, read or write a poetry book, take a swim class, make a poppet, or practice meditation

13 - death

start practicing or expanding homeopathic cures and remedies, learn more about meat sourcing, purchase/invest in half a cow or pig, learn how to cook and trim meats, try to be a vegetarian or a vegan for a month or longer, do a colon cleanse, read a philosophy of death book, expand your knowledge of magic, try a new period product, learn more about poisonous plants, make a frog pond, buy a scorpion/snake/snake, gift someone something unexpectedly, or declutter your space

14 - temperance

go on a hunting trip, take an archery class, read a book on religion or philosophy, start a devotional journal, read the book of your core religion or philosophy, purchase a book on dream meanings and keep a dream journal to reflect on your dreams, take a certification course or college class, take a horseback riding lesson, go on a horse drawn carriage ride, do logic puzzles, or learn how to better decode angel numbers

15 - the devil

invest in a fan or air conditioning unit, if you have the land for it - buy a cow/horse/goat, learn how to use kinetic tape, start dry brushing, invest in diamonds / diamond jewelry, propose to your significant other, invest in a luxury clock or watch, practice/learn better nail care, invest in room darkening curtains, invest in and use a happy lamp, start a lotion/cream skin routine, learn how to knit or crochet, invest in hair products (extensions, shampoo subscription, etc), start a hair routine, invest in leather fashion-ware, start a garden or try to successfully grow something new in your garden, invest in an ice maker or ice molds, or try a juice cleanse

16 - the tower

practice yoga, take an acrobatic/gymnastic class, learn about and practice homeopathic cures and remedies, take a first-aid course, learn how to bake, learn how to season and marinate your meats, get a bad haircut or shave your hair off, learn how to use a straight razor, learn knife skills, get a custom metal works done, take boxing lesson, go to a boxing match or monster truck duel, learn more about meat sourcing, purchase/invest in half a cow or pig, learn how to cook and trim meats, try to be a vegetarian or a vegan for a month or longer, take a wood shop class, start a cactus/succulent garden, buy a cactus or succulent, learn how to cook something from scratch (and be okay with failing at it multiple times), invest in pocket knife / knife set /leatherman / multitool and learn how to use it, invest in a tool kit, read or write a comic or graphic novel, take a mixology course or find your signature drink (if you are of age), listen to more rock music, invest in a vinyl, go to a rock concert, maintain a pepper plant, or build a lego kit

17 - the star

learn how to make friendship bracelets, invest in a fan or air conditioning unit, take a flight lesson, use compression stockings/socks, take an architectural tour, read or write an astrology reading, get car detailed, get a club memberships, invest in an electronic device brand, collect movies, watch a new movie, invest in a camera, film a short film or practice photography, start a photography side hustle, practice shadow work, get rid of unused subscriptions, take an acting class, read or write a book on health or mental health, or read or write a book on positivity

18 - the moon

make a piece of abstract art, take a mixology course or find your signature drink (if you are of age), pay a fish, visit an aquarium, go on a fishing trip (for the dads), watch a fishery documentary, read or write a book of conspiracy theories, learn how to read a crystal ball, buy a tarot/astrology/mediumship reading, practice your tarot/astrology/mediumship abilities, invest a camera, practice photography or start a photography side hustle, read or write poetry book, attempt hydroponics, practice bluffing, take an acting class, invest in new shoes, start using a sleeping eye mask, invest in silk pillow cases, buy yourself new quality bed sheets, start using a bonnet, invest in a typewriter, practice shadow work, buy a puppy, or purchase a book on dream meanings and keep a dream journal to reflect on your dreams

19 - the sun

read an autobiographical books, take ballroom dancing lessons, start an oral health routine, try a new card game, make your own chocolates, take an artistic/creative class, get new jewelry or an engagement ring, buy yourself flowers, start a flow garden, start a herb garden, learn how to dry your own herbs, go to a race of some sort (cars, horse, etc), invest in sporting equipment, buy and maintain an ivy plant, take a pottery class, or work on your passion project / hobbies

20 - judgment

buy an ant farm, practice astral projection, learn more about emergency preparedness, invest in emergency preparedness, practice illusions and slight of hand, buy and learn about poisonous plants, read the divine comedy, do a puzzle, buy a bubby, or wearing lingerie (sometimes it's a pick me up to know you look good for yourself)

21 - the world

start a garden or try to grow something new, take or give a guitar lesson, invest in air conditioning or fan, take an architectural tour, make your own teddy bear (literally sow one), buy a pair of quality/luxury boots, keep a calendar or planner, practice sun protect / use sunblock products, convert to wooden kitchen supplies (cutting board, spoon, etc), buy a luxury carpet, make a clay house guardian, invest in a luxury clock or watch, use compression stockings/socks, collect coins, learn how to use kinetic tape, build up your crystal collection, start a budget tracker, start a lotion for dry skin routine, learn to knit/crochet, start a hair care routine, invest in an ice machine or ice making trays, learn to make ice cream, take a pottery class, invest in real estate or land, keep a zen sand garden, or invest in a sculpture

22 - the fool

take flight lessons, take a flight to anywhere, get car detailed, get an astrology reading, practice your astrology reading abilities, learn how to ride a bike or do a bike marathon, go to the movie theater, invest in a luxury clock or watch, start a club memberships, take a train ride, take motorcycle classes, do something impulsive, filming or recording something and upload it online, learn to cross stitch / knitting / crocheting, invest in a camera, practice photography, watch a new movie / tv show, invest in a new tv, or take a class

have ideas for new content? please use my “suggest a post topic” button!

return to nox's guide to metaphysics

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© a-d-nox 2023 all rights reserved

[quitealotofsodapop]

Wukong's reveal happened suddenly for him. He had simply been helping Pigsy and MK out with the food truck, making sure the truck was running smooth and helping with advertisement (look, as much as Pigsy loves the guy, he isn't letting anyone part of his oil and dirt covered fur near food he has to cook and serve to customers, that's a health code violation waiting to happen) and overall just being there to celebrate eith his friends. When the shop goes on break so that the family can eat and eatch the parade, he's right there with them, excitedly waiting for the fireworks and parade.

Only pandemonium and chaos begin as the Spider Queen attacks. I've mentioned this in dms before about how I believe Tang was passively creating a barrier of protection around MK simply because he is Tripitaka's reincarnation and therefore naturally masks and protects MK's own dao signature as a stone monkey and the Harbinger of Chaos and how it extends to other aus (namely TMKATI and peach soup). Well, in this case, it serves as a major negative because the spider bots are all attracted to his dao signature and that of the rest of the Noodle Gang, aiming to restrain and contain the msot powerful demons first so that Spider Queen can use them as her personal batteries.

Wukong may not be involved in Monkie Kid business and may have sworn off being the Monkey King, but he's still Wukong. He still has a martyr complex. So when he realizes that the Spider bots were attracted to powerful dao and that MK was useless against creepy crawlies due to his arachnophobia, he made a decision. MK and his friends need to run! It was the only way, but they can not escape with their own dao acting as a homing beacon for the tiny bots. But there was at least one person present who would be far too tempting for the Spider Queen and her posse. Someone who had spent many many lifetimes cultivating his dao and gaining power until his abilities and powers could rival and even defeat the very gods. He hadn't tapped into in centuries, and he quite frankly was worried what would happen if he did as there was no going back, ince he plays hishand and reveals his power there would be no way someone would not notice.

But MK and his family needed a distraction!

Wukong shoves Pigsy out of the way of a web, his own arm getting caught in it. But where other, lesser demons would have been pulled into the belly of the beast, Wukong stood strong.

"Uncle Wu!!"

"Go! GET OUT OF HERE!!"

Ripping the web from his arm, there was an explosion of golden power unlike anything any of the Noodle Gang had felt, all except one who could only staring in awe as his Little Big Brother poured the entirety of hus power out, blamketing the area in an aura of birnong protection and soothing light that he hadn'tfelt in centuries. A feeling he had sorely missed. Wukong glanced back at him, golden eyes gleaming as he silently urged Sandy to go with them. He took his cje and grabbed everyone, taking the distraction Wukong gave him as he wished his brother the best of luck.

The plan worked a little too well. Instantly, nearly every bot in the city began to converge on his location. He managed to play a game of cat and mouse for a good long while, leading the majority of them away and allowing several demons to escape, PIF and a certain Vixen included in that number altho he had never realized that particular fact. But he can't keep it up forever. It's inevitable he gets captured. After solidifying her takeover, Spider Queen was eager to take a look at her spoils, especially the mysterious source of that godly dao that coveres the entire city for a few brief moments! She didn't imagine she'd see a greasy little monkey in an oil stained white tank top who looked far too familiar to her for it to be a mere coincidence. And the moment she recognizes the face under the oil and grime, her day just got a whole lot more interesting!

Prev.

Yesss

Wukong accidentally breaks his 500+ years of cover to protect his loved ones!

Also the whole fam esp MK seeing dear "Uncle Wu" burst forth with a divine/demonic energy unseen in hundreds of years. All while wearing a stained tank top and stinking of gasoline.

However, this very same selfless act announces to every demon inside that Spider Mech and beyond; that Sun Wukong The Beautiful Wise Monkey King, The Great Sage Equal to Heaven - IS ALIVE!!!

DBK cannot believe his eyes.

Macaque can barely believe his ears.

And Wukong can't believe his big mouth/hero complex!

[autolenaphilia]

Why enshittification happens and how to stop it.

The enshittification of the internet and increasingly the software we use to access it is driven by profit. It happens because corporations are machines for making profits from end users, the users and customers are only seen as sources of profits. Their interests are only considered if it can help the bottom line. It's capitalism.

For social media it's users are mainly seen by the companies that run the sites as a way for getting advertisers to pay money that can profit the shareholders. And social media is in a bit of death spiral right now, since they have seldom or never been profitable and investor money is drying up as they realize this.

So the social media companies. are getting more and more desperate for money. That's why they are getting more aggressive with getting you to watch ads or pay for the privilege of not watching ads. It won't work and tumblr and all the other sites will die eventually.

But it's not just social media companies, it's everything tech-related. It gets worse the more monopolistic a tech giant is. Google is abusing its chrome-based near monopoly over the web, nerfing adblockers, trying to drm the web, you name it. And Microsoft is famously a terrible company, spying on Windows users and selling their data. Again, there is so much money being poured into advertising, at least 493 billion globally, the tech giants want a slice of that massive pie. It's all about making profits for shareholders, people be damned.

And the only insurance against this death spiral is not being run by a corporation. If the software is being developed by a non-profit entity, and it's open source, there is no incentive for the developers to fuck over the users for the sake of profits for shareholders, because there aren't any profits, and no shareholders.

Free and Open source software is an important part of why such software development can stay non-corporate. It allows for volunteers to contribute to the code and makes it harder for users to be secretly be fucked over by hidden code.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are good examples of this. There is a Mozilla corporation, but it exists only for legal reasons and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla foundation. There are no shareholders. That means the Mozilla corporation is not really a corporation in the sense that Google is, and as an organization has entirely different incentives. If someone tells you that Mozilla is just another corporation, (which people have said in the notes of posts about firefox on this very site) they are spreading misinformation.

That's why Firefox has resisted the enshittification of the internet so well, it's not profit driven. And people who develop useful plugins that deshitify the web like Ublock origin and Xkit are as a rule not profit-driven corporations.

And you can go on with other examples of non-profit software like Libreoffice and VLC media player, both of which you should use.

And you can go further, use Linux as your computer's operating system.. It's the only way to resist the enshitification that the corporate duopoly of Microsoft and Apple has brought to their operating system. The plethora of community-run non-profit Linux distributions like Debian, Mint and Arch are the way to counteract that, and they will stay resistant to the same forces (creating profit for shareholders) that drove Microsoft to create Windows 11.

Of course not all Linux distributions are non-profits. There are corporate created distros like Red Hat's various distros, Canonical's Ubuntu and Suse's Opensuse, and they prove the point I'm making. There has some degree of enshittification going on with those, red hat going closed source and Canonical with the snap store for example. Mint is by now a succesful community-driven response to deshitify Ubuntu by removing snaps for example, and even they have a back-up plan to use Debian as a base in case Canonical makes Ubuntu unuseable.

As for social media, which I started with, I'm going to stay on tumblr for now, but it will definitely die. The closest thing to a community run non-profit replacement I can see is Mastodon, which I'm on as @autolenaphilia@chaosfem.tw.

You don't have to keep using corporate software, and have it inevitably decline because the corporations that develop it cares more about its profits than you as an end user.

The process of enshittification proves that corporations being profit-driven don't mean they will create a better product, and in fact may cause them to do the opposite. And the existence of great free and open source software, created entirely without the motivation of corporate profits, proves that people don't need to profit in order to help their fellow human beings. It kinda makes you question capitalism.

[horrorfilmlesbian]

Cardassian Flower Language

As requested by @unholysails here is the meta post about the flower language I invented in my garashir amesia fic A Difference In Perspective.

(I will note is contradicted by beta canon slightly but it's fic adjacent and I can do what I want and also I didn't read that particular book until AFTER I finished this).

Notably, in a desert climate, I think giving someone flowers would be a very special gesture*, almost analogous to the fruit gift culture in Japan in some ways

(*this is sort of canon in A Stitch In Time too where Garak grows edosian orchids to trade, so I'm taking that detail and running with it)

Garden culture too is a status thing - the more flowers you have growing, the better placed you are in society. Parks and gardens are a luxury, especially if it's a private one.

Anyway, the important part - colours! Basically:

Blue = passion (romantic/sexual)

White = loyalty, dedication (platonic)

Yellow = love (romantic)

Orange = steadfast commitment, marriage

Pink = sorrow, condolences, sympathy

Red = friendship, appreciation

Purple = purity, familial love

Green = thanks, gratitude, congratulations

(no black because there aren't really any true black flowers in nature and yes this is a scifi universe but I was mostly focusing on a palette that was in contrast to human ones)

Below the cut is a sort of essay about why each colour is what it is and how these tie into Cardassian culture at large. Also some notes about Garak's own logic for giving Julian a Yellow/Orange bouquet in the fic.

Importantly, I think earth tones (shades of orange, yellow, red and green) reflect things like steadfast commitment. Since desert = home, then comparing your love to these things means you're completely committed to them as I see Cardassians are quite proud of their home and these things are basically a way to compare your lover to the one thing you love above all else (or are supposed to, anyway)

Blue is obvious as a sexy sort of colour, since there's that quite popular headcanon (I don't believe it's strictly supported by any alpha or beta canon, but prove me wrong) that Cardassians blush blue, so much like how red is a bit of sexy colour in human cultures, so is blue here.

Other jewel tones are about expressing sentiment, the big gift giving ones that mean you really cared enough to source something bright and colourful for someone you care about. Flashy and a bit more temporary. Which is why blue is more of a ~sexy colour as opposed to being the more serious romantic colour.

A fun fact is that gay Cardassians have taken on blue flowers as a bit of a symbol, much like Oscar Wilde and his green carnations. The idea is that they wear these sort of sexual, flagrant symbols as a means of identifying each other in a secret code. In defiance of the State* they show themselves as equally worth the love they share with each other.

As an aside, Garak would not give Julian blue flowers because they're far more of a "you're hot/" kind of vibe (think a valentine's gift to a crush sort of thing) and he really didn't want to make his lover think he was just in it for sex! He really wanted to prove he was #serious about their relationship.

*going with the Una McCormack based idea that Cardassian society is super family-focused and kind of homophobic and rigid in a lot of ways pre-collapse/Fire (dominion war). Like they're super family focused and value unions that create families above all else, as "unproductive" unions are seen as inferior because they don't produce children.

I do also have a whole separate thing about "green marriages" which is basically Cardassian lavender marriages but reskinned for their cultural context. But that's neither here nor there, just another detail in my intricate web of Cardassian cultural ideas.

[fangirltothefullest]

How old does your blog have to be to see the desktop blog view thing?

You can just make it happen whenever you want!

In your browser, set it to desktop mode (available in the dropdown dots menu) and then just type in a user's name first, then tumblr.com

Example:

Fangirltothefullest.tumblr.com

If they have set up a desktop version it'll show

Users older than when mobile became a thing will have desktop versions as they are more customizable. You could even add music if you had the html code for a player.

If you wsnt one yourself, you have to enable custom themes.

Log into tumblr on your browser either on desktop or on mobile. I suggest logging in through desktop mode on your phone's web browser and opening the log in in a new tab so it stops trying to pop up the app.

Once logged in you can disable desktop mode in your browsers drop down to see things easier.

It'll probably up like this otherwise and be a formating nightmare.

Now.... once it's OFF desktop mode,

Go to the blog you want and hit blog settings in the drop down.

Enable the custom theme and hit the edit theme button. You'll be taken to a place that looks likethis:

You can zoom in to hit the browse themes button:

It'll bring you here:

And you can choose what style you want! Hit save and you'll notice it gives you options to play around- choose a background, colour scheme. Fonts etc. Play with the html!

On a regular desktop this is easier to see so I suggest doing this on a laptop or pc.

Also fun fact you can hide secret messages in the html coding and if someone pops open the page source they'll see the surprise message in the code. XD just a fun thing if anyone wants to... say... make their own arg or send out secrets etc.

You CAN create whole pages with this feature too but they are unreliable and after this long it might be broken? So... yeah.

NOW REMEMBER: TO ACCESS THE DESKTOP PAGES YOU HAVE TO CHANGE THE LINK!

Forfeature. As a said above, my desktop link is fangirltothefullest.tumblr.com

I believe the mobile version has it as tumblr.com/fangirltothefullest.

Only people who have made a desktop version will have their blog show up if you'd like to test this festure.

Also this is how you access everyone's blog archive! Because blog archives exist!

Mine would be:

Fangirltothefullest.tumblr.com/archive and you can't open it in mobile or it'll just pop up the mobile version which doesn't exist.

You wsnt this page which let's you find the earliest things a blog has posted. So I created this blog in june 2012 lol.

It works for tags too to show you ONLY the contents of that specific tag

Fangirltothefullest.tumblr.com/tagged/tashiarts/

And if you want a tag in order you add /chrono to the end to get it chronologically sorted from the earliest posts in the tag.

Fangirltothefullest.tumblr.com/tagged/tashiarts/chrono

I hope this helps!

NOW EVERYOE GO HAVE FUN MAKING COOL DESKTOP VERSIONS OF YOUR BLOGS!

[elventhespian]

So with the pandora's box of AI being released into the world, cybersecurity has become kind of insane for the average user in a way that's difficult to describe for those who aren't following along. Coding in unfamiliar languages is easier to do now, for better and worse. Purchasable hacking "kits" are a thing on the dark web that basically streamline the process of deploying ransomware. And generative AI is making it much easier for more and more people to obscure their intentions and identities, regardless of their tech proficiency.

The impacts of this have been Really Bad in the last year or two in particular. For example:

(I'm about to link to sources, and you better be hovering and checking those links before clicking on them as a habit)

Ransomware attacks have become increasingly lucrative for private and state-sponsored hacking groups, with at least one hack recently reported to have resulted in a $75 MILLION payout from the victim. This in combination with the aforementioned factors has made it a bigger and bigger risk for companies and organizations holding your most sensitive data.

In the US, the Salt Typhoon hack over the past year or so has compromised virtually all major phone networks--meaning text and phone calls are no longer secure means of communication. While this won't affect most people in day-to-day, it does make basically all the information you share over traditional phone comms very vulnerable. You should avoid sharing sensitive information over the phone when you can.

CISA updated their security recommendations late last year in response to this compromise. One of the recommendations is to use a separate comms app with end-to-end encryption. I personally prefer Signal, since it's open source and not owned by Meta, but the challenge can be getting people you know on the same service. So... have fun with that.

2FA is no longer as secure as it was--because SMS itself is no longer secure, yeah, but even app-based 2FA has been rendered useless in certain circumstances. One reason for this is because...

A modern version of the early-2000's trick of gaining access to people's accounts via hijacked cookies has come back around for Chromium browsers, and hackers are gaining access to people's Google accounts via OAuth session hijacking. Meaning they can get into your already-logged-in accounts without passwords or 2FA even being needed to begin with. This has been achieved both through hackers compromising chrome browser extensions, and via a reinvigorated push to send out compromising links via email.

Thanks to AI, discerning compromised email is harder now. Cybercriminals are getting better at replicating legitimate email forms and website login screens etc., and coming up with ways to time the emails around times when you might legitimately expect them. (Some go so far as to hack into a person's phone to watch for when a text confirmation might indicate a recent purchase has been made via texted shipping alerts, for example)

If you go to a website that asks you to double-click a link or button--that is a major red flag. A potential method of clickjacking sessions is done via a script that has to be run with the end user's approval. Basically, to get around people who know enough to not authenticate scripts they don't recognize, hackers are concealing the related pop ups behind a "double-click" prompt instruction that places the "consent" prompt's button under the user's mouse in disguised UI, so that on the second click, the user will unwittingly elevate the script without realizing they are doing it.

Attachments are also a fresh concern, as hackers have figured out how to intentionally corrupt key areas of a file in a way that bypasses built-in virus check--for the email service's virus checker as well as many major anti-virus installed on endpoint systems

Hackers are also increasingly infiltrating trusted channels, like creating fake IT accounts in companies' Office 365 environment, allowing them to Teams employees instead of simply email them. Meaning when IT sends you a new PM in tools like Zoom, Slack, or Teams, you need to double-check what email address they are using before assuming it's the real IT person in question.

Spearphishing's growing sophistication has accelerated the theft of large, sensitive databases like the United/Change Healthcare hacks, the NHS hack & the recent Powerschool hack. Cybercriminals are not only gaining access to emails and accounts, but also using generative AI tools to clone the voices (written and spoken) of key individuals close to them, in order to more thoroughly fool targets into giving away sensitive data that compromises access to bigger accounts and databases.

This is mostly being used to target big-ticket targets, like company CSO's and other executives or security/IT personnel. But it also showcases the way scammers are likely to start trying to manipulate the average person more thoroughly as well. The amount of sensitive information--like the health databases being stolen and sold on the darkweb--means people's most personal details are up for sale and exploitation. So we're not too far off from grandparents being fooled by weaponized AI trained off a grandchild's scraped tiktok videos or other public-facing social media, for example. And who is vulnerable to believing these scams will expand, as scammers can potentially answer sensitive questions figured out from stolen databases, to be even more convincing.

And finally, Big Tech's interest in replacing their employees with AI to net higher profits has resulted in cybersecurity teams who are overworked, even more understaffed they already were before, and increasingly lacking the long-term industry experience useful to leading effective teams and finding good solutions. We're effectively in an arms race that is burning IT pros out faster and harder than before, resulting in the circumvention of crucial QA steps, and mistakes like the faulty release that created the Crowdstrike outage earlier last year.

Most of this won't impact the average person all at once or to the same degree big name targets with potential for big ransoms. But they are little things that have combined into major risks for people in ways that aren't entirely in our control. Password security has become virtually obsolete at this point. And 2FA's effectiveness is tenuous at best, assuming you can maintain vigilance.

The new and currently best advice to keeping your individual accounts secure is to switch to using Passkeys and FIDO keys like Yubikeys. However, the effectiveness of passkeys are held back somewhat as users are slow to adopt them, and therefore websites and services are required to continue to support passwords on people's accounts anyway--keeping password vulnerabilities there as a back door.

TLDR; it's pretty ugly out there right now, and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. Because even with more sophisticated EDR and anti-virus tools, social engineering itself is getting more complex, which renders certain defensive technologies as somewhat obsolete.

Try to use a passkey when you can, as well as a password locker to create strong passwords you don't have to memorize and non-SMS 2FA as much as possible. FIDO keys are ideal if you can get one you won't lose.

Change your passwords for your most sensitive accounts often.

Don't give websites more personal info about yourself than is absolutely necessary.

Don't double-click links or buttons on websites/captchas.

Be careful what you click and download on piracy sources.

Try to treat your emails and PMs with a healthy dose of skepticism--double-check who is sending them etc for stealthily disguised typos or clever names. It's not going to be as obvious as it used to be that someone is phishing you.

It doesn't hurt to come up with an offline pass phrase to verify people you know IRL. Really.

And basically brace for more big hacks to happen that you cannot control to begin with. The employees at your insurance companies, your hospital, your telecomms company etc. are all likely targets for a breach.

[mariacallous]

In the near future one hacker may be able to unleash 20 zero-day attacks on different systems across the world all at once. Polymorphic malware could rampage across a codebase, using a bespoke generative AI system to rewrite itself as it learns and adapts. Armies of script kiddies could use purpose-built LLMs to unleash a torrent of malicious code at the push of a button.

Case in point: as of this writing, an AI system is sitting at the top of several leaderboards on HackerOne—an enterprise bug bounty system. The AI is XBOW, a system aimed at whitehat pentesters that “autonomously finds and exploits vulnerabilities in 75 percent of web benchmarks,” according to the company’s website.

AI-assisted hackers are a major fear in the cybersecurity industry, even if their potential hasn’t quite been realized yet. “I compare it to being on an emergency landing on an aircraft where it’s like ‘brace, brace, brace’ but we still have yet to impact anything,” Hayden Smith, the cofounder of security company Hunted Labs, tells WIRED. “We’re still waiting to have that mass event.”

Generative AI has made it easier for anyone to code. The LLMs improve every day, new models spit out more efficient code, and companies like Microsoft say they’re using AI agents to help write their codebase. Anyone can spit out a Python script using ChatGPT now, and vibe coding—asking an AI to write code for you, even if you don’t have much of an idea how to do it yourself—is popular; but there’s also vibe hacking.

“We’re going to see vibe hacking. And people without previous knowledge or deep knowledge will be able to tell AI what it wants to create and be able to go ahead and get that problem solved,” Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of Luta Security, tells WIRED.

Vibe hacking frontends have existed since 2023. Back then, a purpose-built LLM for generating malicious code called WormGPT spread on Discord groups, Telegram servers, and darknet forums. When security professionals and the media discovered it, its creators pulled the plug.

WormGPT faded away, but other services that billed themselves as blackhat LLMs, like FraudGPT, replaced it. But WormGPT’s successors had problems. As security firm Abnormal AI notes, many of these apps may have just been jailbroken versions of ChatGPT with some extra code to make them appear as if they were a stand-alone product.

Better then, if you’re a bad actor, to just go to the source. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are easily jailbroken. Most LLMs have guard rails that prevent them from generating malicious code, but there are whole communities online dedicated to bypassing those guardrails. Anthropic even offers a bug bounty to people who discover new ones in Claude.

“It’s very important to us that we develop our models safely,” an OpenAI spokesperson tells WIRED. “We take steps to reduce the risk of malicious use, and we’re continually improving safeguards to make our models more robust against exploits like jailbreaks. For example, you can read our research and approach to jailbreaks in the GPT-4.5 system card, or in the OpenAI o3 and o4-mini system card.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2023, security researchers at Trend Micro got ChatGPT to generate malicious code by prompting it into the role of a security researcher and pentester. ChatGPT would then happily generate PowerShell scripts based on databases of malicious code.

“You can use it to create malware,” Moussouris says. “The easiest way to get around those safeguards put in place by the makers of the AI models is to say that you’re competing in a capture-the-flag exercise, and it will happily generate malicious code for you.”

Unsophisticated actors like script kiddies are an age-old problem in the world of cybersecurity, and AI may well amplify their profile. “It lowers the barrier to entry to cybercrime,” Hayley Benedict, a Cyber Intelligence Analyst at RANE, tells WIRED.

But, she says, the real threat may come from established hacking groups who will use AI to further enhance their already fearsome abilities.

“It’s the hackers that already have the capabilities and already have these operations,” she says. “It’s being able to drastically scale up these cybercriminal operations, and they can create the malicious code a lot faster.”

Moussouris agrees. “The acceleration is what is going to make it extremely difficult to control,” she says.

Hunted Labs’ Smith also says that the real threat of AI-generated code is in the hands of someone who already knows the code in and out who uses it to scale up an attack. “When you’re working with someone who has deep experience and you combine that with, ‘Hey, I can do things a lot faster that otherwise would have taken me a couple days or three days, and now it takes me 30 minutes.’ That's a really interesting and dynamic part of the situation,” he says.

According to Smith, an experienced hacker could design a system that defeats multiple security protections and learns as it goes. The malicious bit of code would rewrite its malicious payload as it learns on the fly. “That would be completely insane and difficult to triage,” he says.

Smith imagines a world where 20 zero-day events all happen at the same time. “That makes it a little bit more scary,” he says.

Moussouris says that the tools to make that kind of attack a reality exist now. “They are good enough in the hands of a good enough operator,” she says, but AI is not quite good enough yet for an inexperienced hacker to operate hands-off.

“We’re not quite there in terms of AI being able to fully take over the function of a human in offensive security,” she says.

The primal fear that chatbot code sparks is that anyone will be able to do it, but the reality is that a sophisticated actor with deep knowledge of existing code is much more frightening. XBOW may be the closest thing to an autonomous “AI hacker” that exists in the wild, and it’s the creation of a team of more than 20 skilled people whose previous work experience includes GitHub, Microsoft, and a half a dozen assorted security companies.

It also points to another truth. “The best defense against a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI,” Benedict says.

For Moussouris, the use of AI by both blackhats and whitehats is just the next evolution of a cybersecurity arms race she’s watched unfold over 30 years. “It went from: ‘I’m going to perform this hack manually or create my own custom exploit,’ to, ‘I’m going to create a tool that anyone can run and perform some of these checks automatically,’” she says.

“AI is just another tool in the toolbox, and those who do know how to steer it appropriately now are going to be the ones that make those vibey frontends that anyone could use.”

[mahouplanetofficial]

Advanced Mahou Outfit Guide 💫

Hi guys! I hope you all are excited for more posts to come– AP exams are over, and soon school will be out for the year! To those who have upcoming school exams, or are in the final stretch of school, good luck! We believe in you :) 

Also, another reminder to join Mahou Planet! We have a couple of Summer events we’re planning, gamenights, challenges, etc! It’d be lovely to have you join our endeavors ^^

Now that that’s over, are you guys ready for today’s guide?

👗 INTRODUCTION TO MAHOU FASHION

If you’re no stranger to the world of magical heroes, you’ll know that they have different outfits whenever they transform. Strikingly different outfits compared to how most of us dress on the norm. Advanced magical heroes will likely know what they’re searching for in terms of outfits, however, beginner magical heroes may not know where to start– that’s what this guide is for! In this guide, I’ll be discussing a couple of tips and tricks to create your magical hero outfit!

👠 HOW DO I GET STARTED?

To get started, I recommend following some of the advice that I shared on my concept basics post– especially with making lists. I recommend making bulleted lists of what you want/don’t want, specifically in outfits. For example, writing down “I want to wear a skirt” and “I don’t want heels” already narrows down a LOT of possibilities you have for an outfit! 

Another recommendation is to decide a couple of concept themes before you create an outfit, so you can correlate your concept with your outfit. Knowing the basics can help you more than you think– know your desired motifs, colors, etc.

One more important tip, think about what you are comfortable wearing and what you’d like to embody as a magical hero. You can experiment with this by playing dress-up in your bedroom, fitting rooms, etc! Experiment with what you feel comfortable wearing in real life, so you’ll get an idea of what you’d like to wear while doing magic. If you can’t do this, then think about what you would like to wear as a magical hero. Maybe you want to try a new style, or (my personal motivation) defy societal norms/the “dress code” you were raised with. Basically, go out there and experiment! 

💄 BRAINSTORMING IDEAS

Now that you have these new ideas layed out, it’s time to brainstorm! Go out in the real world or on the wonderful world wide web and search for some outfit ideas! Here are some helpful sources for finding outfits:

Pinterest is a STAPLE for inspiration. Some keywords I recommend are “magical girl”, “magical girl oc”, “magical girl oc design”, “(your aesthetic)core outfit”, “runway outfit” and “stage outfit”!

Research some magical hero animes/games for outfit ideas! Some I recommend looking at are Madoka Magica (more specifically Magia Record since there’s like 1000 magical girls there), Precure, Girls x Heroine, Cocoppa Play, and Pripara!

tumblr (this platform teehee) is also a nice place to search for inspiration! You can use the same keywords above, just with tumblr hashtags!

Play around with dress-up apps like Gacha Life 2, Dolldivine, Everskies, Picrew, and ROBLOX (I know a couple of avatar editor games, if you want me to drop them, just ask!)

Go window shopping (or shopping if you have the money) and look at magical hero-esque outfits! You can go thrifting, to the mall, online shopping, or look at other people’s everyday outfits!

🎨 DESIGNING THE OUTFIT: SECTION 1

Now that you have inspiration and plenty of ideas to go off of, it’s time to DESIGN! You can design your outfit with any method, from creating collages off of images, to using dress-up games, drawing your design, commissioning an artist, there’s endless possibilities!

The only method I recommend you don’t use is AI art. AI art not only takes credit away from actual artists, but AI art is environmentally harmful and the algorithm searches every image on the internet, including medical records and illegal and problematic images. Mahou Planet has a rule against using AI art: “There will be no AI art usage in this server. This rule is non-negotiable. Accidentally sending AI art without knowing is understandable and can be corrected by deleting the message, however, do not promote the usage of/use AI art.” I will not be willing to argue with anyone about the morality of AI art– know it is not supported by us. There are many better alternatives that can get you a better design, and most importantly- it’s a design that you (for the most part) create yourself!

There are lots of different factors to consider for your outfit design, such as whether you have teammates, uniforms, shared outfit motifs, outfit rules, etc. We’ll go over those in this section!

TEAMMATES

If you have teammates, it may be a good idea to correlate your outfits together to show that you’re a team. 

For example, the magical girls in each Precure season have shared outfit motifs to show their team harmony. I think the Precure season that does this well is GoPri. The Cures in Go Princess Precure each have a tiara with a charm representing their outfits motif, princess-like dresses, a back bow, and a golden gem on their outfits. You can easily look at them and tell that they are a team. 

Another example of this is of Winx (specifically S1)! The simplicity of their designs, the glittery fabric, the small wings, and the boots are all correlated, even though the girls themselves all stand out with unique takes on these rules. 

Something to take from these magical girls is that they each have something to tell that they’re a team. If you are a team and want you guys to have shared outfit motifs, make sure that someone can look at a picture of your team and can tell that you guys work together.

A simpler solution to this is uniforms! Uniforms are basically a simpler way to coordinate your teammate outfits. One of the most famous examples of this is Sailor Moon: their outfits, besides some accessories, are the same. The only difference is the color scheme. This is easy for those who don’t want to design unique outfits, or want outfits to stand out in terms of color. 

Here’s a more simplified list of the pros and cons of having uniforms VS unique outfits:

Uniforms

Easy to design

Takes little to no thought

Colors easy to pick out

Can be either simple or complex

Colors may be hard to remember for each member

Limited freedom of expression

Unique Outfits

Harder to design, but a more satisfied finish

Outfit and colors may be hard to remember for each member

Usually complex but some can be simple

Freedom of expression, or much freedom if there are still rules

Harder to coordinate

As you can see, I have a little bit more pros under uniforms. However, do what you want with your designs! I personally always go for unique outfits– some of the unique outfits I’ve seen in the magical hero community look STUNNING!

If you want to have unique outfits or uniforms, a good thing to implement is outfit rules. Rules are basically what you can and can’t do in a design. When I’m designing teammates, I have rules listed under DO, DO NOT, and IT DEPENDS categories.

DO is of stuff you can change, add, modify, etc. For example: you can have a unique hairstyle.

DO NOT is stuff you cannot change, no exceptions! Example: you must keep a bow on your chest.

IT DEPENDS is stuff you can modify, but may be limited. Example: You can change the shape of a skirt, but it must keep white ruffles and be in the color of your theme color.

These rules can vary based on your kind of magical hero and what you want for your team. Remember: you are the designer! Design to your heart's content and what you think looks good for you and your team! 💫

SOLO

If you’re going solo, this section may be a bit more helpful than what I said in the teammates section. Solo outfits usually apply to just yourself, so you have so much more freedom in designing your outfit. When making an outfit, don’t just focus on what looks good. Remember to design an outfit that makes you comfortable, and you only! 

If you want to have teammates in the future, or if you need more guidance on creating outfits, then it’s recommended to create outfit rules, just in case. Or if you’d like 100% freedom on outfit designs, do what you want! It’s your outfit!

THEME COLOR

Choosing a theme color is easier said than done. I see most magical heroes choose their favorite colors as their theme colors, and I have also seen magical heroes put more thought in their theme colors. Do what you want! Even if you don’t want a theme color or want multiple, you are still a valid magical hero!

For color palettes for an outfit, you can go on Pinterest for colors, or go to coolors.co to generate color palettes! A cool thing about coolors is that you can save color palettes for your magical form!

MOTIFS

Motifs are also important to decide on your outfit! To decide outfit motifs, repeating elements in your outfit, think about the theme your magical hero wants to display, or a moral lesson you’d like for whoever you’re fighting/the general public to learn. If you’re a magical hero of love, you can opt for adding heart shapes and motifs to your outfit. If you’re a magical hero of wishes, add some shooting stars on your outfit! It goes on and on for any motifs, it’s all up to you to determine how you use them.

🎨 DESIGNING THE OUTFIT: SECTION 2

For this section, I’ll go over the more detailed aspects of your design, from top to bottom! I’ll give advice on designing outfits, as well as some practical tips for your magical design.

HAIR

Probably the most famous– magical heroes are notorious for their crazy hair. Most magical heroes you see have long hair, either down or in some updo, and in the color of their theme color or an accent color. Some magical girls have their hair be a variation of their natural hair. You can have any kind of hair you’d like as a magical hero! Here are some of my tips:

Make sure your hair won’t hinder your fighting abilities- it won’t get caught in your outfit, you won’t trip on it, etc. Also, make sure your villains can’t grab your hair to pull you/catch you off guard! This is a common fighting technique and I’ve seen this absolutely destroy people in school fights. If crazy freshman can do it, your villains likely will as well.

Don’t worry about your hair being “easily recognizable” if you’re keeping your natural hair. You can always script in that no one recognizes you or use magic to ensure no one associates you with your secret identity.

As for personal recommendations, I recommend having your hair out of your face. I have bangs in real life and in my magical girl form; sometimes they’re a pain, especially on hot days. It’d kind of hinder your ability to see in your magical form. A good counter to this would be scripting the thickness or thinness of your bangs if you plan on having any, or to script that you see better once you transform (this is good for people with glasses!)

Also recommend to script that you don’t sweat when you transform. Sweat + hair = pain.

Choose a hairstyle you can fight in and feel comfortable with– if you’re not sure where to start, think about hairstyles you would like to try or hairstyles that flatter you. Even hairstyles you wear in real life would be a good start!

Don’t worry about damaging your hair with the color you choose, I’d like to imagine magic changes your hair color, and is completely damage-free! (Really wish this were the case in real life 😭)

HEADGEAR

I know a couple of magical heroes who plan on having hats or SOMETHING on their head in their magical hero form. If you’re interested in having headgear in your magical hero form, here are some precautions and tips:

I don’t want to say it’s a hindrance to have a hat (because I literally wear an ushanka in my magical hero form 💀), but try to find some way it’ll stay on your head while fighting. Unless you don’t anticipate doing crazy backflips, I’d recommend scripting that your headgear won’t fall off even in the craziest situations– or even better, it can only be taken off by your hands only.

Also script that your hat (or better: your entire mh outfit) is the exact size for you, and grows as you grow in civilian form!

Try to find some practicality in it! I see magical heroes go for goggles to replace their civilian form glasses. Some magical heroes wear hats to keep the sun out of their eyes. I had an old concept where my magic came from a top hat (if you know, you know). Hats don’t just have to be fashionable, but I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted something cool just to finish off your outfit.

If you’re looking for hat designs, a good game I recommend for inspiration is Genshin Impact! The creativity the characters have for their headgear is amazing, and I can imagine some magical hero designs based off of just hats alone. Pinterest is also a good place to look!

TOPS

Tops! This is one of my favorite parts of designing! Designing tops is always really fun. Here’s some advice:

I recommend looking up necklines or just pretty tops in general for inspiration! 

Also recommend to have a built-in bra with your top, wearing one separately would be a hassle in my opinion.

One of my biggest pet peeves with strapless tops is it falling down every 5 seconds, so if you have a strapless top, make sure you script that it won’t fall while you’re fighting. 

This is the same for sleeves in general! Script they won’t fall down.

If you have anything tied in your magical form, like ribbons, script that they won’t come out or loose.

Make sure you choose something you’re comfortable with! Script that you’re comfortable in your top, no matter what kind of top you’re going to wear in your magical form.

PSA for magical heroes who want gloves: script that you can use your phone while wearing them. I hate wearing gloves and then having to take them off just to use my phone :( 

If you aren’t planning on wearing gloves, script that you don’t leave fingerprint traces on surfaces you touch, just for security reasons!

I’d hate to continue the “YOU DON’T NEED PAINTED NAILS IF YOU’RE WEARING GLOVES DUHHH!!!!” debate, do what you want with your nails! Pinterest has gorgeous nail designs! If you are wearing gloves, I’d recommend making the color of your nails change the natural color of your nails. Long nails would probably be more of a liability than shorter ones, or you could script your nails are immune to breaking, getting damaged, falling off, etc.

A smart idea would be incorporating your outfit into some kind of use with your magic. For example, if your main weapon is guns, then I’d recommend keeping ammunition on your body, on a sling or a belt. This takes a bit more thought to be put into it, but it’s so worth it and makes a great design in the end!

BOTTOMS

Bottoms are also fun to design! In my opinion, these are the most versatile. There are different directions you can take for bottoms, SO many different directions! Here’s my advice and suggestions:

Go for what makes you the most comfortable! You are 100% a valid magical hero if you go for pants or shorts over a skirt and vice versa! It’s your outfit! If someone has a problem with how you present your magical self, they can kiss your- 💥💥/JOKE /ok but fr ignore people who have problems with your outfit they’re just insecure (/srs)

If you are planning on wearing a skirt, please script safety shorts or opt for a skort instead! I don’t think I should explain why flashing people while you’re fighting is not only embarrassing but dangerous since there are terrible and disgusting weirdos out there. 

If you’re wearing socks, script that they won’t slide down (another pet peeve of mine)

If you want to wear heels, or if your shoes are high heeled, PLEASE script that you know how to fight in heels and won’t fall or trip! Been there done that, it’s not fun. Also scripting that your feet won’t get blisters is a good precaution too!

Also, if you’re wearing a back bow/something on the back/a cape, or anything you’re scared will catch up into something while moving, script that you’re not going to get stuck or nothing will catch your clothes while you’re moving.

MAKEUP

I feel like makeup is a less commonly talked about thing when it comes to magical hero design. I think makeup is also important to consider when you’re transformed! Here are some considerations:

Make sure your makeup is sweat-proof, sensory friendly, and won’t wipe off or get ruined while fighting. Emphasis on sensory friendly, I avoid makeup in civilian form because foundation is absolutely PAINFUL.

Search for makeup styles you like, or go off of makeup you wear or would like to wear in real life! You can go for natural makeup, glamorous makeup, stage makeup, etc.

Royale High on ROBLOX is a good game to look for makeup styles! The makeup in faces (to my knowledge) is free to use! Everskies is also a good game to experiment with makeup!

Tear proof makeup works as well, just in case you end up crying in your magical hero form. 

🎤 GENERAL TIPS

Keep in mind the environment you’ll be fighting in may change depending on where you go. You may fight in the rain, in snow, on the beach, etc. It’d be a nice idea to accommodate your outfit for such conditions, or to script that your outfit is weather-proof. 

Speaking of accommodations, if you’re disabled, it’s always a great idea to script accommodations for your outfit! You can script that your outfit is sensory friendly, isn’t itchy, and (my favorite) there are no tags on your magical outfit.

I also like to script that my magical outfit is able to regulate heat/coolness! This can work for any outfit, even if you can’t find the logic behind it. It’s magic! That’s all the logic you need!

Make sure you’re able to find some way you can fight in your outfit. Even if you don’t plan on fighting, it’s a good precaution!

Kind of TMI, but if you get periods, script that your outfit is bleed-proof. This is also good if you end up getting hurt in your outfit. Also scripting that your outfit’s immune to tearing or getting injured is a great idea!

A fun way to experiment with how your magical hero outfit may look is to take a full body picture of yourself and then draw over it with your magical hero clothes. You can also dress in aspects of your magical hero outfit in real life with items you have at home (ex. wearing a top similar to the top in your magical hero form) to get a feel of what you’ll be wearing.

If you need design help, I suggest joining Mahou Planet! There are great magical hero designs there and talented designers willing to help you! Searching for inspiration, meshing different pictures of outfits together, and asking friends for help are also valid methods!

💫 CONCLUSION

In conclusion, there are about a gajillion different ways to create a magical outfit. There’s not one right or wrong way to design, or a “bad” or “good” design: what matters is that you’re comfortable in it and that it’s an outfit you love! Outfit changes are 100% valid, and I’d even recommend scripting variations of your outfit for weather/personal reasons!

At the end of the day, designing should be a fun process. I hope you guys learned a thing or two from this post, and have fun designing your magical hero outfit! Remember to join Mahou Planet to have a chance to choose the next article I write!

See you guys next post! 

(idols: yeojin - loossemble, jinsoul, choerry, kim lip - artms, mina - twice, ella - pixy, gowon, hyeju - loossemble, gwsn ot7, stayc ot6)

[izicodes]

My 2023 Projects

Wednesday 3rd January 2024

I thought it would be cool to share some of the projects I made last year that I liked and enjoyed working on! Most of them were small projects, some were projects I built straight after I learnt a new concept and a few are discontinued (I won't finish them anytime soon)!

I really hope, which I know I will because it's natural for me at this point, to make lots of more cool projects! This year, I want to make more with other people! Coding alone is cool and all but with other people I get more inspired!

Lastly = always remember to build projects that you're interested in. Projects you will have fun working on for a while. Every single one of these projects I've made, I was interested in somehow. And I had fun!!

Anyhoo, check out the projects below~! 🙋🏾‍♀️😊🖤

TumblrTextTint

Basically a formatter for Tumblr posts by adding custom colours to your text! Even learnt how to make FireFox extensions so I could add it as an extension to my browser - link 1, link 2

Web Odyssey

I looked at old Windows GUI on Pinterest one day and decided to recreate the GUI with HTML, CSS and JavaScript! - link 1, link 2

Cat Fact Generator

For one of the projects I did for the #3Days1Project challenge, I created a cute cat generator. Learnt how to work with APIs and a CSS library (Pattern.css) - link 1, link 2

Studyblr Valentines Gift 2023

It was valentine season in the Studyblr community and I participated! I made a poem webpage for a studyblr who was learning Russian! (I don't know anything in Russian but for a couple of weeks I learnt some of the poems!) - link 1, link 2

Saint Jerome Tribute Page

I made a page for my favourite patron saint, Saint Jerome, for his feast day (Sept 30)! I haven't had time to complete it fully and there's no live page for it but I did make posts about it! - link 1

Trigun Quote Generator

Just finished the Trigun anime series at the time so I decided to make a project for it for the #3Days1Project challenge! The anime is so good, it is my 2nd favourite (JOJO comes 1st place) - link 1, link 2

Froggie To-Do

Just came from learning the absolute BASICS of React.js, so I wanted to test my skills so far so I made this project! Shared it on my blog and some people started using it for studying (which made me so happy!) and it became a mini open-source project because random people started adding mini features to the app! Very special project for me! - link 1, link 2, link 3

[cyberstudious]

Tools of the Trade for Learning Cybersecurity

I created this post for the Studyblr Masterpost Jam, check out the tag for more cool masterposts from folks in the studyblr community!

Cybersecurity professionals use a lot of different tools to get the job done. There are plenty of fancy and expensive tools that enterprise security teams use, but luckily there are also lots of brilliant people writing free and open-source software. In this post, I'm going to list some popular free tools that you can download right now to practice and learn with.

In my opinion, one of the most important tools you can learn how to use is a virtual machine. If you're not already familiar with Linux, this is a great way to learn. VMs are helpful for separating all your security tools from your everyday OS, isolating potentially malicious files, and just generally experimenting. You'll need to use something like VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation (Workstation Pro is now free for personal use, but they make you jump through hoops to download it).

Below is a list of some popular cybersecurity-focused Linux distributions that come with lots of tools pre-installed:

Kali is a popular distro that comes loaded with tools for penetration testing

REMnux is a distro built for malware analysis

honorable mention for FLARE-VM, which is not a VM on its own, but a set of scripts for setting up a malware analysis workstation & installing tools on a Windows VM.

SANS maintains several different distros that are used in their courses. You'll need to create an account to download them, but they're all free:

Slingshot is built for penetration testing

SIFT Workstation is a distro that comes with lots of tools for digital forensics

These distros can be kind of overwhelming if you don't know how to use most of the pre-installed software yet, so just starting with a regular Linux distribution and installing tools as you want to learn them is another good choice for learning.

Free Software

Wireshark: sniff packets and explore network protocols

Ghidra and the free version of IDA Pro are the top picks for reverse engineering

for digital forensics, check out Eric Zimmerman's tools - there are many different ones for exploring & analyzing different forensic artifacts

pwntools is a super useful Python library for solving binary exploitation CTF challenges

CyberChef is a tool that makes it easy to manipulate data - encryption & decryption, encoding & decoding, formatting, conversions… CyberChef gives you a lot to work with (and there's a web version - no installation required!).

Burp Suite is a handy tool for web security testing that has a free community edition

Metasploit is a popular penetration testing framework, check out Metasploitable if you want a target to practice with

SANS also has a list of free tools that's worth checking out.

Programming Languages

Knowing how to write code isn't a hard requirement for learning cybersecurity, but it's incredibly useful. Any programming language will do, especially since learning one will make it easy to pick up others, but these are some common ones that security folks use:

Python is quick to write, easy to learn, and since it's so popular, there are lots of helpful libraries out there.

PowerShell is useful for automating things in the Windows world. It's built on .NET, so you can practically dip into writing C# if you need a bit more power.

Go is a relatively new language, but it's popular and there are some security tools written in it.

Rust is another new-ish language that's designed for memory safety and it has a wonderful community. There's a bit of a steep learning curve, but learning Rust makes you understand how memory bugs work and I think that's neat.

If you want to get into reverse engineering or malware analysis, you'll want to have a good grasp of C and C++.

Other Tools for Cybersecurity

There are lots of things you'll need that aren't specific to cybersecurity, like:

a good system for taking notes, whether that's pen & paper or software-based. I recommend using something that lets you work in plain text or close to it.

general command line familiarity + basic knowledge of CLI text editors (nano is great, but what if you have to work with a system that only has vi?)

familiarity with git and docker will be helpful

There are countless scripts and programs out there, but the most important thing is understanding what your tools do and how they work. There is no magic "hack this system" or "solve this forensics case" button. Tools are great for speeding up the process, but you have to know what the process is. Definitely take some time to learn how to use them, but don't base your entire understanding of security on code that someone else wrote. That's how you end up as a "script kiddie", and your skills and knowledge will be limited.

Feel free to send me an ask if you have questions about any specific tool or something you found that I haven't listed. I have approximate knowledge of many things, and if I don't have an answer I can at least help point you in the right direction.

[andmaybegayer]

This is very interesting: a novel CAD package built on a text based file format that should allow you to check files into version control and automate tasks, plus a geometry engine optimized for GPU compute.

It's also got some noteworthy backers, the appeal of this is obvious to anyone who has ever tried to integrate CAD into a larger workflow, it takes a lot of manual shunting of files and tagging of releases and fighting with export formats, even with all the features SolidWorks and Inventor and SolidEdge have added over the years.

It's not parametric, of course, because that's a totally different approach to modelling that's much harder to automate this way. I'm not sure if that's reasonably possible without just doing SVG bullshit.

There's an LLM powered Text To CAD thing where you are meant to be able to just describe an object and get back the CAD for it but at least for now it can only do things that are relatively simple, it feels a little like a crutch to deal with how slow generating simple parts through code CAD can be. Defining an I-beam parametrically is the kind of thing you can do basically without thinking. I guess you'd probably want to have a library of parametrically defined common parts to pull from once you've been doing this for five minutes.

Close but no cigar! It does get the flange and web the right way around. Using inches because I assume it's trained in Freedomheit.

They're keeping their geometry solver closed source, but I'd be interested to see if declarative cad like this takes off in industry, it's a slow moving space but hardware design is increasingly available to startups and small businesses who might be willing to throw away a lot of old CAD philosophy.

A lot of industry uses constructive CAD like this, the US military has BRL-CAD. Never could get my head around it.

[mumms-the-word]

aight now that all the DA moots are asleep (they’re not but let’s say they are) I have silly thoughts about Rogue Trader

under the cut cause some people don’t care + spoilers

I know it’s a warhammer 40k game and w40k people are their own crowd of like weirdly fanatical TTRPG-ers that I do not belong in nor have much understanding of but like this game is lowkey slept on for how good the writing is

gameplay makes me want to claw my eyes out a bit because it’s literally built around the concept of min-maxing at the most fine-tuned level. I would KILL for a skill tree that lays everything out in a web for me, but I know some people really like the freedom this game gives when it comes to building skills and threading together specific types of skills to create extremely unique builds

I, however, am here for the writing so I’m just like….please stop throwing numbers at me 😭 what is the thing that makes the enemies go boom give me that one pls

but I digress, the story so far is genuinely worth it. I actually don’t like a lot of grimdark stuff. The world as we know it sucks rn and I get too empathetic about a lot of things to enjoy grimdark settings, but Rogue Trader keeps things almost comical with how exaggerated everything is. Like, the word that comes to mind is that this game is carnivalesque—like in that literary sort of way that subverts your expectations with humor and chaos kind of carnivalesque.

One second I’m puzzling through how to deal with a worker strike (with force? with leniency? do we negotiate or just kill everyone?) and the next I’m jumping down a deadly air-duct into a giant blood-soaked death cult temple to meet a blind old assassin where I can ask him directly, “How come my companions could just walk through the front door while I had to risk my neck jumping through a rotating propeller?” One moment I’m wrestling with the consequences of my actions on a planet in the throes of rebellion and the next I’m eating mold-slime soup and getting a semi-permanent debuff to all of my stats because I failed the toughness test to actually swallow it down.

Like this game is just a grimdark space void clown show and I kind of love it even though it’s 100% not my speed

but the writing oh my god

I only just finished chapter 1 or act 1, whatever you want to call it, and already I’m blown away by the moments where the game seems to take everything suddenly very seriously. After doing all this work to save a planet from a cult, the cult gets the upper hand anyway when mysterious forces steal the sun (no really), causing the planet to devolve into madness from both the cult and lack of sun (I could be reading the situation wrong but I haven’t yet figured out what’s behind the sun theft exactly). My companions that I’ve picked up along the way lay out the severity of the situation: we can abandon the planet, which will then devolve into a chaos daemon world (bad for everybody), we can try to save a few people or an ancient powerful relic which is basically just a giant fusion reactor power source (good for only a few select people), or we can sail our voidship a little ways away and bomb the reactor so that it effectively kills the planet (everyone dies, both good and bad, but there is no daemon planet anymore).

What a choice! And then in the subsequent chaos, there’s this scene where you and your tech-priest buddy, Pasqal, are trying to restore a computer that somehow controls elements of the ship’s warp travel capabilities so you can get the heck out of dodge before the planet goes all daemony or explodes, but the metaphorical clock is ticking, there’s a lot of corrupted data, Pasqal can only crack the codes so much, and while you can override some of the systems by literally feeding it your blood (yeah, really) you don’t know how to read the code or fix the data either. It was an incredibly well-written tense scene that, even though it felt a little more linear then the wildly branching moment where I decided a planet’s whole fate just before this, had me holding my breath as I clicked through text prompts to stick my character’s hand in something called a cybergargoyle so it could bite her, take her blood, and recognize her as the heir to the ship. Pasqal is trying to explain what the computer is and isn’t doing, swinging between what seems like traditional hacking and religious reverent prayers and rituals to machine spirits (which may or may not even be real spirits) until I finally have my character practically beg the computers to rescue us. And it works.

Insane. The descriptions are top tier and I’m literally learning new words or refreshing on words I haven’t seen in forever as I read through the game (febrile? irascible? campanological? no one writes like this anymore!!). It’s not my favorite setting but I really have to hand it to the writers over at OwlCat Studios, they are truly some of the best writing talent I’ve seen in the game development world in recent memory…and I don’t say that lightly.

Anyways onward to act 2. Im told there’s a big party at the end of this act and that I can kiss a certain interrogator if I play my cards right, so that’s something to look forward to!