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Forcing your computer to rat you out

Powerful people imprisoned by the cluelessness of their own isolation, locked up with their own motivated reasoning: “It’s impossible to get a CEO to understand something when his quarterly earnings call depends on him not understanding it.”
Take Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg insists that anyone who wanted to use a pseudonym online is “two-faced,” engaged in dishonest social behavior. The Zuckerberg Doctrine claims that forcing people to use their own names is a way to ensure civility. This is an idea so radioactively wrong, it can be spotted from orbit.
From the very beginning, social scientists (both inside and outside Facebook) told Zuckerberg that he was wrong. People have lots of reasons to hide their identities online, both good and bad, but a Real Names Policy affects different people differently:
https://memex.craphound.com/2018/01/22/social-scientists-have-warned-zuck-all-along-that-the-facebook-theory-of-interaction-would-make-people-angry-and-miserable/
For marginalized and at-risk people, there are plenty of reasons to want to have more than one online identity — say, because you are a #MeToo whistleblower hoping that Harvey Weinstein won’t sic his ex-Mossad mercenaries on you:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies
Or maybe you’re a Rohingya Muslim hoping to avoid the genocidal attentions of the troll army that used Facebook to organize — under their real, legal names — to rape and murder you and everyone you love:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/
But even if no one is looking to destroy your life or kill you and your family, there are plenty of good reasons to present different facets of your identity to different people. No one talks to their lover, their boss and their toddler in exactly the same way, or reveals the same facts about their lives to those people. Maintaining different facets to your identity is normal and healthy — and the opposite, presenting the same face to everyone in your life, is a wildly terrible way to live.
None of this is controversial among social scientists, nor is it hard to grasp. But Zuckerberg stubbornly stuck to this anonymity-breeds-incivility doctrine, even as dictators used the fact that Facebook forced dissidents to use their real names to retain power through the threat (and reality) of arrest and torture:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/25/nationalize-moderna/#hun-sen
Why did Zuck cling to this dangerous and obvious fallacy? Because the more he could collapse your identity into one unitary whole, the better he could target you with ads. Truly, it is impossible to get a billionaire to understand something when his mega-yacht depends on his not understanding it.
This motivated reasoning ripples through all of Silicon Valley’s top brass, producing what Anil Dash calls “VC QAnon,” the collection of conspiratorial, debunked and absurd beliefs embraced by powerful people who hold the digital lives of billions of us in their quivering grasp:
https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/
These fallacy-ridden autocrats like to disguise their demands as observations, as though wanting something to be true was the same as making it true. Think of when Eric Schmidt — then the CEO of Google — dismissed online privacy concerns, stating “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy
Schmidt was echoing the sentiments of his old co-conspirator, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it”:
https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/
Both men knew better. Schmidt, in particular, is very jealous of his own privacy. When Cnet reporters used Google to uncover and publish public (but intimate and personal) facts about Schmidt, Schmidt ordered Google PR to ignore all future requests for comment from Cnet reporters:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/how-cnet-got-banned-by-google/
(Like everything else he does, Elon Musk’s policy of responding to media questions about Twitter with a poop emoji is just him copying things other people thought up, making them worse, and taking credit for them:)
https://www.theverge.com/23815634/tesla-elon-musk-origin-founder-twitter-land-of-the-giants
Schmidt’s actions do not reflect an attitude of “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Rather, they are the normal response that we all have to getting doxed.
When Schmidt and McNealy and Zuck tell us that we don’t have privacy, or we don’t want privacy, or that privacy is bad for us, they’re disguising a demand as an observation. “Privacy is dead” actually means, “When privacy is dead, I will be richer than you can imagine, so stop trying to save it, goddamnit.”
We are all prone to believing our own bullshit, but when a tech baron gets high on his own supply, his mental contortions have broad implications for all of us. A couple years after Schmidt’s anti-privacy manifesto, Google launched Google Plus, a social network where everyone was required to use their “real name.”
This decision — justified as a means of ensuring civility and a transparent ruse to improve ad targeting — kicked off the Nym Wars:
https://epeus.blogspot.com/2011/08/google-plus-must-stop-this-identity.html
One of the best documents to come out of that ugly conflict is “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names,” a profound and surprising enumeration of all the ways that the experiences of tech bros in Silicon Valley are the real edge-cases, unreflective of the reality of billions of their users:
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
This, in turn, spawned a whole genre of programmer-fallacy catalogs, falsehoods programmers believe about time, currency, birthdays, timezones, email addresses, national borders, nations, biometrics, gender, language, alphabets, phone numbers, addresses, systems of measurement, and, of course, families:
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
But humility is in short supply in tech. It’s impossible to get a programmer to understand something when their boss requires them not to understand it. A programmer will happily insist that ordering you to remove your “mask” is for your own good — and not even notice that they’re taking your skin off with it.
There are so many ways that tech executives could improve their profits if only we would abandon our stubborn attachment to being so goddamned complicated. Think of Netflix and its anti-passsword-sharing holy war, which is really a demand that we redefine “family” to be legible and profitable for Netflix:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes
But despite the entreaties of tech companies to collapse our identities, our families, and our online lives into streamlined, computably hard-edged shapes that fit neatly into their database structures, we continue to live fuzzy, complicated lives that only glancingly resemble those of the executives seeking to shape them.
Now, the rich, powerful people making these demands don’t plan on being constrained by them. They are conservatives, in the tradition of #FrankWilhoit, believers in a system of “in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect”:
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288
As with Schmidt’s desire to spy on you from asshole to appetite for his own personal gain, and his violent aversion to having his own personal life made public, the tech millionaires and billionaires who made their fortune from the flexibility of general purpose computers would like to end that flexibility. They insist that the time for general purpose computers has passed, and that today, “consumers” crave the simplicity of appliances:
https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/
It is in the War On General Purpose Computing that we find the cheapest and flimsiest rhetoric. Companies like Apple — and their apologists — insist that no one wants to use third-party app stores, or seek out independent repair depots — and then spend millions to make sure that it’s illegal to jailbreak your phone or get it fixed outside of their own official channel:
https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13
The cognitive dissonance of “no one wants this,” and “we must make it illegal to get this” is powerful, but the motivated reasoning is more powerful still. It is impossible to get Tim Cook to understand something when his $49 million paycheck depends on him not understanding it.
The War on General Purpose Computing has been underway for decades. Computers, like the people who use them, stubbornly insist on being reality-based, and the reality of computers is that they are general purpose. Every computer is a Turing complete, universal Von Neumann machine, which means that it can run every valid program. There is no way to get a computer to be almost Turing Complete, only capable of running programs that don’t upset your shareholders’ fragile emotional state.
There is no such thing as a printer that will only run the “reject third-party ink” program. There is no such thing as a phone that will only run the “reject third-party apps” program. There are only laws, like the Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that make writing and distributing those programs a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine (for a first offense).
That is to say, the War On General Purpose Computing is only incidentally a technical fight: it is primarily a legal fight. When Apple says, “You can’t install a third party app store on your phone,” what they means is, “it’s illegal to install that third party app store.” It’s not a technical countermeasure that stands between you and technological self-determination, it’s a legal doctrine we can call “felony contempt of business model”:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
But the mighty US government will not step in to protect a company’s business model unless it at least gestures towards the technical. To invoke DMCA 1201, a company must first add the thinnest skin of digital rights management to their product. Since 1201 makes removing DRM illegal, a company can use this molecule-thick scrim of DRM to felonize any activity that the DRM prevents.
More than 20 years ago, technologists started to tinker with ways to combine the legal and technical to tame the wild general purpose computer. Starting with Microsoft’s Palladium project, they theorized a new “Secure Computing” model for allowing companies to reach into your computer long after you had paid for it and brought it home, in order to discipline you for using it in ways that undermined its shareholders’ interest.
Secure Computing began with the idea of shipping every computer with two CPUs. The first one was the normal CPU, the one you interacted with when you booted it up, loaded your OS, and ran programs. The second CPU would be a Trusted Platform Module, a brute-simple system-on-a-chip designed to be off-limits to modification, even by its owner (that is, you).
The TPM would ship with a limited suite of simple programs it could run, each thoroughly audited for bugs, as well as secret cryptographic signing keys that you were not permitted to extract. The original plan called for some truly exotic physical security measures for that TPM, like an acid-filled cavity that would melt the chip if you tried to decap it or run it through an electron-tunneling microscope:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil
This second computer represented a crack in the otherwise perfectly smooth wall of a computer’s general purposeness; and Trusted Computing proposed to hammer a piton into that crack and use it to anchor a whole superstructure that could observe — and limited — the activity of your computer.
This would start with observation: the TPM would observe every step of your computer’s boot sequence, creating cryptographic hashes of each block of code as it loaded and executed. Each stage of the boot-up could be compared to “known good” versions of those programs. If your computer did something unexpected, the TPM could halt it in its tracks, blocking the boot cycle.
What kind of unexpected things do computers do during their boot cycle? Well, if your computer is infected with malware, it might load poisoned versions of its operating system. Once your OS is poisoned, it’s very hard to detect its malicious conduct, since normal antivirus programs rely on the OS to faithfully report what your computer is doing. When the AV program asks the OS to tell it which programs are running, or which files are on the drive, it has no choice but to trust the OS’s response. When the OS is compromised, it can feed a stream of lies to users’ programs, assuring these apps that everything is fine.
That’s a very beneficial use for a TPM, but there’s a sinister flipside: the TPM can also watch your boot sequence to make sure that there aren’t beneficial modifications present in your operating system. If you modify your OS to let you do things the manufacturer wants to prevent — like loading apps from a third-party app-store — the TPM can spot this and block it.
Now, these beneficial and sinister uses can be teased apart. When the Palladium team first presented its research, my colleague Seth Schoen proposed an “owner override”: a modification of Trusted Computing that would let the computer’s owner override the TPM:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021004125515/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/2002-07-05.html
This override would introduce its own risks, of course. A user who was tricked into overriding the TPM might expose themselves to malicious software, which could harm that user, as well as attacking other computers on the user’s network and the other users whose data were on the compromised computer’s drive.
But an override would also provide serious benefits: it would rule out the monopolistic abuse of a TPM to force users to run malicious code that the manufacturer insisted on — code that prevented the user from doing things that benefited the user, even if it harmed the manufacturer’s shareholders. For example, with owner override, Microsoft couldn’t force you to use its official MS Office programs rather than third-party compatible programs like Apple’s iWork or Google Docs or LibreOffice.
Owner override also completely changed the calculus for another, even more dangerous part of Trusted Computing: remote attestation.
Remote Attestation is a way for third parties to request a reliable, cryptographically secured assurances about which operating system and programs your computer is running. In Remote Attestation, the TPM in your computer observes every stage of your computer’s boot, gathers information about all the programs you’re running, and cryptographically signs them, using the signing keys the manufacturer installed during fabrication.
You can send this “attestation” to other people on the internet. If they trust that your computer’s TPM is truly secure, then they know that you have sent them a true picture of your computer’s working (the actual protocol is a little more complicated and involves the remote party sending you a random number to cryptographically hash with the attestation, to prevent out-of-date attestations).
Now, this is also potentially beneficial. If you want to make sure that your technologically unsophisticated friend is running an uncompromised computer before you transmit sensitive data to it, you can ask them for an attestation that will tell you whether they’ve been infected with malware.
But it’s also potentially very sinister. Your government can require all the computers in its borders to send a daily attestation to confirm that you’re still running the mandatory spyware. Your abusive spouse — or abusive boss — can do the same for their own disciplinary technologies. Such a tool could prevent you from connecting to a service using a VPN, and make it impossible to use Tor Browser to protect your privacy when interacting with someone who wishes you harm.
The thing is, it’s completely normal and good for computers to lie to other computers on behalf of their owners. Like, if your IoT ebike’s manufacturer goes out of business and all their bikes get bricked because they can no longer talk to their servers, you can run an app that tricks the bike into thinking that it’s still talking to the mothership:
https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/15/alternative-app-can-unlock-vanmoof-bikes-popular-amid-bankruptcy-fears
Or if you’re connecting to a webserver that tries to track you by fingerprinting you based on your computer’s RAM, screen size, fonts, etc, you can order your browser to send random data about this stuff:
https://jshelter.org/fingerprinting/
Or if you’re connecting to a site that wants to track you and nonconsensually cram ads into your eyeballs, you can run an adblocker that doesn’t show you the ads, but tells the site that it did:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah
Owner override leaves some of the beneficial uses of remote attestation intact. If you’re asking a friend to remotely confirm that your computer is secure, you’re not going to use an override to send them bad data about about your computer’s configuration.
And owner override also sweeps all of the malicious uses of remote attestation off the board. With owner override, you can tell any lie about your computer to a webserver, a site, your boss, your abusive spouse, or your government, and they can’t spot the lie.
But owner override also eliminates some beneficial uses of remote attestation. For example, owner override rules out remote attestation as a way for strangers to play multiplayer video games while confirming that none of them are using cheat programs (like aimhack). It also means that you can’t use remote attestation to verify the configuration of a cloud server you’re renting in order to assure yourself that it’s not stealing your data or serving malware to your users.
This is a tradeoff, and it’s a tradeoff that’s similar to lots of other tradeoffs we make online, between the freedom to do something good and the freedom to do something bad. Participating anonymously, contributing to free software, distributing penetration testing tools, or providing a speech platform that’s open to the public all represent the same tradeoff.
We have lots of experience with making the tradeoff in favor of restrictions rather than freedom: powerful bad actors are happy to attach their names to their cruel speech and incitement to violence. Their victims are silenced for fear of that retaliation.
When we tell security researchers they can’t disclose defects in software without the manufacturer’s permission, the manufacturers use this as a club to silence their critics, not as a way to ensure orderly updates.
When we let corporations decide who is allowed to speak, they act with a mixture of carelessness and self-interest, becoming off-the-books deputies of authoritarian regimes and corrupt, powerful elites.
Alas, we made the wrong tradeoff with Trusted Computing. For the past twenty years, Trusted Computing has been creeping into our devices, albeit in somewhat denatured form. The original vision of acid-filled secondary processors has been replaced with less exotic (and expensive) alternatives, like “secure enclaves.” With a secure enclave, the manufacturer saves on the expense of installing a whole second computer, and instead, they draw a notional rectangle around a region of your computer’s main chip and try really hard to make sure that it can only perform a very constrained set of tasks.
This gives us the worst of all worlds. When secure enclaves are compromised, we not only lose the benefit of cryptographic certainty, knowing for sure that our computers are only booting up trusted, unalterted versions of the OS, but those compromised enclaves run malicious software that is essentially impossible to detect or remove:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/28/descartes-was-an-optimist/#uh-oh
But while Trusted Computing has wormed its way into boot-restrictions — preventing you from jailbreaking your computer so it will run the OS and apps of your choosing — there’s been very little work on remote attestation…until now.
Web Environment Integrity is Google’s proposal to integrate remote attestation into everyday web-browsing. The idea is to allow web-servers to verify what OS, extensions, browser, and add-ons your computer is using before the server will communicate with you:
https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md
Even by the thin standards of the remote attestation imaginaries, there are precious few beneficial uses for this. The googlers behind the proposal have a couple of laughable suggestions, like, maybe if ad-supported sites can comprehensively refuse to serve ad-blocking browsers, they will invest the extra profits in making things you like. Or: letting websites block scriptable browsers will make it harder for bad people to auto-post fake reviews and comments, giving users more assurances about the products they buy.
But foundationally, WEI is about compelling you to disclose true facts about yourself to people who you want to keep those facts from. It is a Real Names Policy for your browser. Google wants to add a new capability to the internet: the ability of people who have the power to force you to tell them things to know for sure that you’re not lying.
The fact that the authors assume this will be beneficial is just another “falsehood programmers believe”: there is no good reason to hide the truth from other people. Squint a little and we’re back to McNealy’s “Privacy is dead, get over it.” Or Schmidt’s “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
And like those men, the programmers behind this harebrained scheme don’t imagine that it will ever apply to them. As Chris Palmer — who worked on Chromium — points out, this is not compatible with normal developer tools or debuggers, which are “incalculably valuable and not really negotiable”:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/Ux5h_kGO22g/m/5Lt5cnkLCwAJ
This proposal is still obscure in the mainstream, but in tech circles, it has precipitated a flood of righteous fury:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
As I wrote last week, giving manufacturers the power to decide how your computer is configured, overriding your own choices, is a bad tradeoff — the worst tradeoff, a greased slide into terminal enshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/
All of which leads to the question: what now? What should be done about WEI and remote attestation?
Let me start by saying: I don’t think it should be illegal for programmers to design and release these tools. Code is speech, and we can’t understand how this stuff works if we can’t study it.
But programmers shouldn’t deploy it in production code, in the same way that programmers should be allowed to make pen-testing tools, but shouldn’t use them to attack production systems and harm their users. Programmers who do this should be criticized and excluded from the society of their ethical, user-respecting peers.
Corporations that use remote attestation should face legal restrictions: privacy law should prevent the use of remote attestation to compel the production of true facts about users or the exclusion of users who refuse to produce those facts. Unfair competition law should prevent companies from using remote attestation to block interoperability or tie their products to related products and services.
Finally, we must withdraw the laws that prevent users and programmers from overriding TPMs, secure enclaves and remote attestations. You should have the right to study and modify your computer to produce false attestations, or run any code of your choosing. Felony contempt of business model is an outrage. We should alter or strike down DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and other laws (like contract law’s “tortious interference”) that stand between you and “sole and despotic dominion” over your own computer. All of that applies not just to users who want to reconfigure their own computers, but also toolsmiths who want to help them do so, by offering information, code, products or services to jailbreak and alter your devices.
Tech giants will squeal at this, insisting that they serve your interests when they prevent rivals from opening up their products. After all, those rivals might be bad guys who want to hurt you. That’s 100% true. What is likewise true is that no tech giant will defend you from its own bad impulses, and if you can’t alter your device, you are powerless to stop them:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Companies should be stopped from harming you, but the right place to decide whether a business is doing something nefarious isn’t in the boardroom of that company’s chief competitor: it’s in the halls of democratically accountable governments:
https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy
So how do we get there? Well, that’s another matter. In my next book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso Books, Sept 5), I lay out a detailed program, describing which policies will disenshittify the internet, and how to get those policies:
https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con
Predictably, there are challenges getting this kind of book out into the world via our concentrated tech sector. Amazon refuses to carry the audio edition on its monopoly audiobook platform, Audible, unless it is locked to Amazon forever with mandatory DRM. That’s left me self-financing my own DRM-free audio edition, which is currently available for pre-order via this Kickstarter:
http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai
[Image ID: An anatomical drawing of a flayed human head; it has been altered to give it a wide-stretched mouth revealing a gadget nestled in the back of the figure's throat, connected by a probe whose two coiled wires stretch to an old fashioned electronic box. The head's eyes have been replaced by the red, menacing eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Behind the head is a code waterfall effect as seen in the credits of the Wachowskis' 'The Matrix.']
Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
#pluralistic#chaffing#spoofing#remote attestation#rene descartes#adversarial interoperability#war on general purpose computing#canvas attacks#vpns#compelled speech#onion routing#owner override#stalkerware#ngscb#palladium#trusted computing#secure enclaves#tor#interop#net neutrality#taking the fifth#right to remain silent#real names policy#the zuckerberg doctrine#none of your business#the right to lie#right to repair#bossware#spyware#wei web environment integrity
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I don’t know why people are saying the Hansry reunion at Suchdol was underwhelming?? Look at the time they’re in, they can’t exactly go around screeching their feelings for each other—but if Henry stands up for Hans during the talk with Hanush about his wedding, it’s so bloody obvious how in love Hans is with Henry.
That speechless, longing look he gives Henry when Hanush says Hans isn’t happy about the wedding, and Henry looks directly at Hans and says with intimate understanding, “I can see why.”
The conversation with Hans after Hanush leaves where he tells Henry how worried he was about him, how Henry promises to tend to his wounds later and Hans’ voice softens in the cutest way because he’ll do just about anything to be alone with Henry again.
Hans mentioning finding somewhere more ‘private’ for the two of them to live together while Hans actively sabotages his wedding at every turn (lmao love him for that).
And when Hans says, “You and me… I guess we’ll have to wait and see” - if you listen to the determination and thought in his tone, this isn’t him saying he’s laying down and taking whatever is being forced on him. It’s him promising Henry that there will be a ‘you and me’ regardless of what happens. Which means even if he does get married, he’s going to find a way to still be with Henry—status and expectations be damned.
They literally cannot live without each other, it’s absolutely disgusting and perfect and horrible and lovely and devastatingly beautiful, I hate them so goddamn much (affectionate)
#kcd#kcd2#kingdom come deliverance 2#kingdom come deliverance#kcd spoilers#kcd2 spoilers#hansry#henry of skalitz#hans capon#lord hans capon#apple babble 🍎#apple plays kcd2#i actually didn’t mind that ending at all like you gotta realize how to read tones fr#there was nothing in Hans voice that even HINTED that he was going to abandon Henry in any way#it actually sounded like he was already strategizing how to do what he does best#and be an absolute troublemaking brat to keep them together lmaooo#the historical accuracy part of kcd of course can likely steer a tragic route#but i genuinely believe kcd2’s ending gave us pretty good hope for Hansry in the next game#anyway#that’s just my onion
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Very surreal feeling watching Undertale fan works struggle for a decade with on-point character writing
while like 95% of the Deltarune fanworks I've seen are so spot-on they could be scenes right out of the game
#(btw it's me I'm the struggler this is not a call out post)#and i don't just mean sans and pap and AU stuff#I think even the side characters and tone are just being more clearly understood in DR than UT#maybe it's just that the DR characterizations are less ambiguous/mysterious/slowly peeled onions than how UT did it#i feel like UT definitely recontextualized characters more frequently and more extremely on different routes#the weird route in DR recontextualizes the player more than the other characters this time around#or maybe the 'one sexyman per chapter' rule is taking all the arrows to the back to protect the other characters in DR i dunno lol#simon says a lot of things#deltarune
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2025 will be the Year of the Snake, which is quite fitting to release two (2) games starring leather-gloved, snakeskin-clad, totally sound of mind gentlemen whom the fandoms like a normal amount
#snek bois save me#is it really possible for my yakuza mutuals and my pathologic mutuals to be in a relationship?#but boi i draw sth after a months long hiatus and it involves me fighting with snakeskin textures#rgg#yakuza#like a dragon#majima goro#pathologic#pathologic 3#мор утопия#daniil dankovsky#the bachelor#bachelor route#trans onion truther#art#fanart#teisuart
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pivoting a little off of that Neve post to say real quick that if you haven't played the Templar route of DAI i highly recommend it. Some highlights:
Calpernia vs Leliana > Samson vs Cullen. Samson, as an antagonist, honestly feels pulled out of thin air, and having an extremely weird rivalry between him and Cullen shines a spotlight on the very strange role Cullen plays in DAI and makes the player wonder why they aren't switched. Calpernia, on the other hand, is a nuanced and complex character with somewhat sympathetic motivations, and watching Leliana get to put her spymaster skills to use to find out more about her is a lot more satisfying imo. Additionally, Samson's maguffin of his Red Lyrium armor being weakened for the unavoidable fight pales in comparison to convincing Calpernia to stand down by telling her the truth about how Corypheus is using her.
DAI's infamous issue with Corypheus's lack of presence in the story? Somewhat alleviated in this route. It's still not great, but we actively see him manipulate Calpernia, multiple times iirc, and at one point we hear his thoughts throughout one of the dungeons. I sincerely believe the reasons Corypheus gained such a reputation for being absent in the story are because most players have only played the mage route
Everything involving Therinfal Redoubt. The Envy demon, the mind prison, Cole's introduction (a far improvement over his intro in the mage route), the slow and natural revelation of the Venatori's ultimate goals (as a opposed to "i accidentally got chucked into the future but some time goo and here's everything i was able to learn for the whole Hour I was there"), Ser Barris my beloved <3
Depending on how you play it obviously, but there's an argument to be made that dissolving the Templars may do more good and result in more lasting change than freeing the Circles, seeing as the idea of the circles, as an academic space for mages to learn to control their powers, was never really the issue and oppression and abuse of the Templars is the true root of the problem. YMMV here though
As mentioned in a previous point, no time magic! this streamlines a lot of the storytelling imo, and makes for an INCREDIBLY CRUNCHY introduction to Dorian, who shows up at Haven and, since he's allowed to talk like a normal person and not a Spirit of Compassion, brings a very intense energy to the scene. Imo this works best if this is your very first time meeting him, as in you never went to Redcliffe and never had to deal with the Headache that is Alexius, the character assassination of Fiona, and the illogic inherent to Time Magic
The Templar route is just better integrated into the rest of the story. Cassandra's personal quest where they mention the Lord Seeker's been replaced by a demon? That no longer feels like it came out of left field, we literally saw that and so this quest feels like payoff. Leliana gets more time to shine doing Spymaster Things so her personal quest about being More Than A Tool feels more impactful. The Inquisition being an organization that scares the Chantry makes more sense because we stole the Chantry's army. The Red Templars no longer feel like a "bad thing made worse for some reason" and instead feel like sad endings for good (or well, i should say "good") people, who could've found a better way with the Inquisition and instead chose to be This. Emprise Du Lion and the Emerald Graves are now completely skippable areas, aside from whatever sidequests you'd like to do there.
Unfortunately, the greatest barrier to entry is justifying the In-Character reasons for your Inquisitor to get help from the Fucking Templars, which is. not ideal. BUT if you can do that, I really truly believe it's the superior route
#i'd go so far as to compare it to DA2 just not writing a mage ending#the mage route of DAI feels so immensely underbaked to me it's a very reminiscent feeling#does creating an rpg where the choices the player makes are rendered obsolete by virtue of one being vastly surperior to the other -#- mean it fails as a Role Playing Game? probably yeah.#BUT the PREMADE story BW is clearly trying to tell isn't that bad imo#and i enjoyed DAI a lot more once i stopped fighting it and just played along with who BW clearly wants my PC to be#also like. this is all in my humble onion#there are things to like about the Mage route and i haven't played the Templar route in like a year so i might be forgetting worse parts#and so if you prefer the mage route that's 100% awesome and valid#but i think a lot of people don't enjoy it and so they don't enjoy DAI as a whole bc they feel like the Templar route isn't an option#when i think it's DAI's best side and fixes (or at least alleviates) a lot of the game's issues#dragon age#dai#marie speaks
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as someone who loves safield immensely ( and is a firm believer that those two were in love with each other in game ), i will say that i actually agree with safi not being a love interest in de? honestly, i think explicitly heavy handed romance scenes would’ve dampened so much of what makes them special in my eyes … mainly because them loving each other so entirely speaks more volumes than if the game made a specific turn towards romantic or platonic affection? like, safield thrives in de without a specific label and while existing in that ‘are they?’ dichotomy. and, on the other hand, i just can’t think of any way they could’ve made a safi romance arc work with max’s and safi’s character directions. safi was always going to leave at the end and max was always going to stay. and, on top of that, as much as they both care for each other, there were many things standing in their way : themselves, other people … their respective ghosts. i much prefer safield being a slowburn in the sense that safi would become a romance option later on, as it gives safi and max room to breathe with other charactera and to find themselves more.
plus, lets be honest, safi’s plot would feel cluttered as all hell if they added a romance plotline on top of it ( my girls were already dealing with a lot, i genuinely cannot comprehend them acting upon their feelings in game ).
#my posts.#life is strange double exposure#safield#obviously i mess with making content where they were screwing or something#thats the joys of fanfic baby we do what we want in here!! but for canon? i wouldn’t add a romance route to safi at all#would just feel hollow to me as it stands currently? but i’m all for a safield confession when they meet up again inevitably in canon#like i guess i’m just not particularly hung up on it because to me safield is canon? i do think the game makes that clear#so even if it’s not canon in a ‘they kiss’ way i still come out of de feeling fulfilled by what i did get yknow?#their ep5 moment feels like a confession. the song they play in ep4 places an emphasis on lovers and secrets etc etc#safi was undeniably the most important person to max throughout the whole game and#safi without a doubt loved max deeply. in a way she might’ve loved maya. and so on *gestures*#i’d be happy with a kiss and an endgame later but tbh it already feels rather canon to me so. i’m content with their choice for safi#being non-romanceable … plus again it’d really add too much onto her already intense / messy arc#i digress! i just have had this onion for a while so i’m sharing it whoop whoop
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SOBS YOUR WRITING IS SO GOODDDDD
also i SAW those tags, don’t be shy, disaster duo (laito and ayato-) angst is amazing 👀👀
~Lazarus~
[I. Lake]
He always stays near Mother. Especially when she is in a mood. The kind effortless, ephemerally hungering—not for flesh, but for a drowning. A readily plain sort of suffering.
As if it could mask how she drowns in Father’s absence. An unholy projection—pretty, warped, and ugly.
He pulls Ayato from the lake only after Mother turns to go, further and farther away—like a careless zookeeper abandoning polar bears to a too-hot, artificial habitat.
Water bursts from Ayato’s mouth.
“…M-Mother—”
“I know.”
Laito doesn’t know how to comfort—just pats the water from Ayato’s chest, gives him breath, despite how concave his own lungs are.
He saves him. Time and time again. From Mother’s full attention.
Like some twisted Lazarus, dragged back not by miracle, but by necessity. Never once asked if he wanted to return. As it should be.
His childish wish—every birthday (though no candles are lit), every night he tries to whisper some phantom of a human prayer, every time he scatters a pappus in the wind, a weed like him—is that his brother will never truly understand.
[II. Bat]
Again. He rescues him.
This time, from Mother’s punishment for eating the cookies left behind by one of many indiscernible shadows—familiars, perhaps. Strangers, most likely. All in preparation for afternoon tea.
Mother always admired his affinity—his strange convalescence toward sacrifice. She doted with her mouth, praised him softly as she named it his finest quality.
She always made her body wanton—open to him—when bored or peckish. His vulnerability—the lump she swallows to stomach her bitter boiled leaves, while speaking in riddles to Father’s other wives. Circling vultures, really.
Sometimes, when unusually fond, she calls him her little bat. It makes sense—he is far too mammalian. Not like his brother, the pretty bird, caged in suffocating expectations. That cage is more ordinary than the one she keeps for him.
Later, when Ayato helps Kanato catch a bat of his own, Laito snatches it before Kanato can name it—and, without knowing why, tears it apart.
Blood drips from his hands as he clutches the dead thing. Kanato’s naive, tantruming screams only irritate him.
Something in him whispers: what’s killed should stay dead. But nothing ever does. Not in this house.
[III. Burn]
Older now, no wiser. But he lights candles.
Not to celebrate his birth—(which, if he were still a child, he would beg God each night to take back)—but to remind himself that Mother is dead.
Some nights, he wonders if that makes him Lazarus too—alive, but only because she isn’t. And still buried under everything she left.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember—that she is truly gone. Especially before dawn, before the songbirds sing their mating dances—those consuming tunes.
That was her favorite time to enter his room. To study him. To admire how he gives, hides, and breaks—all at once—in delightfully different ways. Delightful to her, anyway.
A knock at the door. Ayato. He’s probably noticed the smell of skin burning over candle flame. It doesn’t hurt—it numbs. A better feeling than the house-consuming fire she left him.
“Yo… Four-eyes said to come to dinner. Just… letting you know.”
His presence lingers, hesitant. Then walks away.
Laito smiles. It’s better this way. No need for anything to change.
He’s lucky Ayato still hates him. Because someone has to. And Laito is left to carry what’s left: his own unwavering indifference. To himself. To everyone else. To Mother. To him.
#diabolik lovers#sakamaki#ayato sakamaki#kanato sakamaki#laito sakamaki#AWH STAPH IT U (O///W////O)#THANK U ANGSTY BESTIE (your praises means a lot tbh)#I AM SO GLAD YOU INDULGE MY PENCHANT FOR ANGST#and my need to put the ginger in every situation imaginable#so many layers to this onion (and I want to peel them ALL)#unlike shu's route which is so fuckin' boring#like I am in maniac and I am waiting for the moment I am supposed to care about this whattpad version of shu and reiji's relationship#i fear that moment will never arrive :')#not when I feasted on laito's chef kiss of a DF route#ugh still cry thinking about his endings
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#olba#i'm chewin on baxter ward like he's beef jerky. dude is so hard on himself#and FOR WHAT#RIP my mc raven. i'm so sorry i've put u in a situation by putting u on this route#this man fears happiness/people genuinely caring about him so much he should be an onion headline#they're both v lucky though that i don't add to the Mess in step 4 by ratting out Baxter for what he said#about jude and scott's relationship lmao
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help I'm going insane over deltarune and Undertale stuff again
#Guysss#Did you know the sprite for spamton neo has 6 stirngs#It's fucking with me so much guys#Element 6 and gaster and whatnot#Also have I. Have I mentioned the muffet thing#Muffet has these lines in. I think the neutral route?#Where she talks abt the person who warned her abt u#They had a lovely smile and were shapeshifting in the shadows apparently#Also the muffet laugh slowed down by 666% and reversed is the smile.ogg sound for entry 17#There's multiple ways to make that connection this is just the fastest#Also gaster presumably egg man bc if you get ch1 egg in ch2 the car closest to u in the traffic jam can be interacted with one time#There's a man in that car and he smiles at you#Very clearly egg man but also specifically referring to him smiling like#Bestie gaster spooky noise literally titled smile.ogg. and is also very clearly the thing that fucked spamton up#Like bc the addisons after the neo fight tell u abt his mysterious benefactor right#And the garbage noise on the phone#And garbage noise being the description of what happens on the phone in the dark world#And yknow thats also smile.ogg#... Also what the fuck is the thing about the ocean in deltarune like fr#The vessel creation screen is water. There's ocean.ogg in the beginning of the dark world in ch1. the fucking song from the sea with onion#Whatever the fuck was going on when sans was talking about shyren at that one post a few years back#I have so much brain space that I use to store infinite utdr info#Like fr I need ppl to ask me directed questions for me to infodump bc I don't even know where to start??#Like. Do I start with the fonts thing? I can't even find the fonts thing anymore but I know its a thing#Do I start at the significance of the number 6 to gaster stuff? Do I start with the way his leitmotif is concerningly in noelles theme??#Like really. I'm begging to be asked questions about my special interests
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Route 66 Fried Onion Burgers
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🖤 // Gently setting this down for... either Dainsleif or Baizhu maybe?
prompt
DAINSLEIF
attractiveness:
repulsive / hideous / ugly / not attractive / unappealing / not unattractive / meh / no preference / ok / mildly attractive / nice looking / cute / adorable / attractive / pleasant on the eyes / good looking / hot / sexy / beautiful / gorgeous / hot damn / would tap that / perfect / godlike / holy fuck there are no words.
personality:
grating / irritating / frustrating / boring / confusing at best / awkward / unreasonable / psychotic / disturbing / interesting / engaging / affectionate / aggressive / ambitious / anxious / artistic / bad tempered / bossy / charismatic / appealing / unappealing / creative / courageous / dependable / unreliable / unpredictable / predictable / devious / dim / extroverted / introverted / egotistical / gregarious / fabulous / impulsive / intelligent / sympathetic / talkative / up beat / peaceful / calming / badass / flexible.
how likely they would have sex with them:
not if they were the last person on earth and the world was ending / fuck no! / never / no way / not likely / not sure / indifferent / I’m asexual / maybe / probably / it depends / fairly likely / likely / yeah sure / yes / would tap that / hell yes / fuck yes! / wishing that could happen right now / as many times as possible / we are already having sex.
level of friendship:
never in a million years / worst of enemies / enemies / rivals / indifferent / neutral / acquaintance / friendly toward each other / casual friends / friends / good friends / best friends / fuck buddies / bosom buddies / practically the same person / would die for them / true friends / my only friend.
first impression of them:
i hate them so much / i don’t like them / i don’t trust them / they annoy me / they’re weird / I’m indifferent / meh / they seem alright / they’re growing on me / truce / I think I like them / I like them / I’m not sure if I trust them / I trust them / they’re cool / they’re genuine / I think we’re going to get along / I really like them / I think I’m in love / oh fuck they’re hot / I love them.
current impression of them:
i hate them so much / i don’t like them / i don’t trust them / they annoy me / they’re weird / I’m indifferent / meh / they seem alright / they’re growing on me / truce / I think I like them / I like them / I’m not sure if I trust them / I trust them / they’re cool / they’re genuine / I think we’re going to get along / I really like them / I think I’m in love / oh fuck they’re hot / I love them.
BAIZHU
attractiveness:
repulsive / hideous / ugly / not attractive / unappealing / not unattractive / meh / no preference / ok / mildly attractive / nice looking / cute / adorable / attractive / pleasant on the eyes / good looking / hot / sexy / beautiful / gorgeous / hot damn / would tap that / perfect / godlike / holy fuck there are no words.
personality:
grating / irritating / frustrating / boring / confusing at best / awkward / unreasonable / psychotic / disturbing / interesting / engaging / affectionate / aggressive / ambitious / anxious / artistic / bad tempered / bossy / charismatic / appealing / unappealing / creative / courageous / dependable / unreliable / unpredictable / predictable / devious / dim / extroverted / introverted / egotistical / gregarious / fabulous / impulsive / intelligent / sympathetic / talkative / up beat / peaceful / calming / badass / flexible.
how likely they would have sex with them:
not if they were the last person on earth and the world was ending / fuck no! / never / no way / not likely / not sure / indifferent / I’m asexual / maybe / probably / it depends / fairly likely / likely / yeah sure / yes / would tap that / hell yes / fuck yes! / wishing that could happen right now / as many times as possible / we are already having sex.
level of friendship:
never in a million years / worst of enemies / enemies / rivals / indifferent / neutral / acquaintance / friendly toward each other / casual friends / friends / good friends / best friends / fuck buddies / bosom buddies / practically the same person / would die for them / true friends / my only friend.
first impression of them:
i hate them so much / i don’t like them / i don’t trust them / they annoy me / they’re weird / I’m indifferent / meh / they seem alright / they’re growing on me / truce / I think I like them / I like them / I’m not sure if I trust them / I trust them / they’re cool / they’re genuine / I think we’re going to get along / I really like them / I think I’m in love / oh fuck they’re hot / I love them.
current impression of them:
i hate them so much / i don’t like them / i don’t trust them / they annoy me / they’re weird / I’m indifferent / meh / they seem alright / they’re growing on me / truce / I think I like them / I like them / I’m not sure if I trust them / I trust them / they’re cool / they’re genuine / I think we’re going to get along / I really like them / I think I’m in love / oh fuck they’re hot / I love them.
#(ooc. ✧)#tenebriism#(answered ask. ✧)#so for dain i went the milquetoast route of the canon interaction because people have SOOOO many different like... hcs/interpretations#on possible dainsleif & kaeya interactions so i wanted to be Safe with that one because im not sure what you think of them!#but i really like dainsleif and kaeya u_u#ANYWAY AS FOR BAIZHU#i fucking. love. baizhu. so. much.#hyv is full of fucking cowards because i can see baizhu and kaeya getting along REAL well In My Honest & Humble Onion.#there's so many characters i think kaeya would get along with but as i said. hyv is full of fucking cowards#and they refuse to branch out a lot of their characters to different nations#it pisses me AWF#LIKE CMON. IK DAMN WELL THE RAGS WENT TO LIYUE AND IK DAMN WELL KAEYA VISITS LIYUE HERE AND THERE FOR BUSINESS TOO#WTFYM KAEYA WOULDNT KNOW PEOPLE IN LIYUE#anyway :) a heehee [giggle] thank u for listening to my ted talk#aka the ramblings of a madman#long post#suggestive
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[HE ONLY HAD ONE HAND? YEAH, HE ONLY HAD ONE OF 'EM. (laughs) JUST A LOT OF HISTORY HERE. IT'S GREAT FOOD. RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU WANT ONIONS. ONE COKE. ONE DR. PEPPER. SEE SOMETHIN' OTHER THAN THE EVERYDAY FAST FOODS.]
#s02e02 route 66#guy fieri#guyfieri#diners drive-ins and dives#everyday fast foods#one dr. pepper#one coke#great food#one hand#yeah#em#laughs#lot#history#onions#somethin
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GUYS HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE POSITIVE WITHOUT BEING ANNOYING AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
I KNOW I SHOULD COMMENT ON STUFF I LIKE TO SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGE THE CREATORS BUT WORDS ARE HARD AND I HAVE SO MANY OF THEM BUT SO LITTLE TO ACTUALLY SAY AND ALSO MOST OF THEM ARE WEIRD LIKE HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SAY ‘I LOVE YOU AND WOULD GENUINELY DIE TO ACHIEVE ANOTHER CREATION FOR ME TO POTENTIALLY CONSUME IN THE AFTERLIFE IF I SOMEHOW MANAGE TO GET INTO HEAVEN, BECAUSE YOUR CREATION HAS CERTAINLY EARNED ITS WAY INTO THE PEARLY GATES, ALSO DO YOU WANT MY SOUL BECAUSE I DON’T NEED IT ANYMORE AND I THINK YOU DESERVE IT FOR PRODUCING SOMETHING OF THIS LEVEL OF ABSOLUTE PERFECTION’ LIKE YEAH I COULD SAY THAT BUT IM TRYING TO COME OFF AS SANE ENOUGH THAT THEY AREN’T GROSSED OUT OR SOMETHING????????
#send help#like actually#I am in dire need of assistance 😔 /hamilton reference#comment on fics#ahhhhhhhhhhh#like sometimes it’s easy? and sometimes it’s hard as FUCK#AND IT DOESNT EVEN NECESSARILY HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE QUALITY????????#LIKE SOMETIMES IM DRINKING THE AMBROSIA OF THE GODS AND CAN COMMENT BUT SOMETIMES I CANT?????#AND SOMETIMES SOMETHING IS JUST A CHILL SNACK OR GOOD SOUP AND I CANT COMMENT? BUT SOMETIMES I CAN?????????#AMERICA EXPLAIN#and honestly that isn’t even the weirdest I can be#like legit sometimes I’m reading something so good that it makes me want to like. disembowl myself? like how am I supposed to comment that#they’d think it’s negative. but it’s not :(#it’s like the fucking#like#torture? but in a good way?#I don’t know man#like ‘I will rip out my beating heart and take a knife to it until it looks like one of those onion flower things and present it to you—‘#‘—as an offering from an undeserving mortal to an incredibly generous god’#like. STOOOOP THATS WEEEEIRD#I have to filter myself at all times or I will be Burned At The Stake#but at the same time reading these fics make me feel like I’d do that to myself intentionally but in a /pos way#and I can’t even go the route of ‘just compliment a specific part of the chapter!!’ bc my memory is sHIT#ugghhhhhh#I wanna pluck my eyes out and feed them to the authors like grapes#tw gore mention#I fucking guess#because I can’t be fucking normal for one fucking second#kms. anyway#things to tell my therapist
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Why are mcdonalds large drinks so small this is america the big drink country and thats mcdonalds THE american fast food joint
#gravy talks#idk if i complained about this before but ill do it again !!!!!#also wtf are the onions they put on the burgers? those are onion flavored crumbs ??? what the hell#sonic would never do this to me sonic my beloved route 44 diet coke save me
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