ariaverde

[ariaverde]

I can't stress enough how much I miss StumbleUpon

[ariaverde]

Hey guys something fucking bad happened

KOSA/the kids online safety act has been reintroduced into legislature after it passed Senate last year and then got snubbed. It is not unlike the bill that just passed in the UK a few weeks ago. If you don't want what happened in the UK to happen here, now would be a good time to vocally oppose it.

Here is a petition that can be signed by Americans. Attached to the petition is an easy tool that allows you to call and leave messages for your representatives. I have already done so. You can also email your representatives by searching for their name, most have message submission boards as well. This thing died once, it can die again.

Please sign/share the petition and contact your representatives.

[ariaverde]

i love the world so much. why do i often forget this

[ariaverde]

There is a species of butterfly that lives in the mountains.

When it hatches as a caterpillar, it lowers itself to the ground on a strand of silk, and then produces a chemical that smells like the larvae of ants. An ant eventually discovers it, lured by the scent, and brings it back to the anthill, where it is cared for by the colony until it pupates. After a few weeks, the adult butterfly crawls back up through the anthill, through the dirt and the winding tunnels, and out into the sunlight before it can finally open its wings.

Some say that the caterpillar “tricks” the ants into doing this. I don’t know if I agree – I think it’s too small a thing to accuse of guile, don’t you?

With this in mind: Once upon a time, there were seven dwarves.

They lived and worked in the mountains, mining for gold and jewels and precious things. And one night, after a long day’s labour, they heard a knocking at the great stone doors of their mountain.

Outside, shivering and small, they found a human child.

I’m sure you can guess most of what she told them. Stepmothers were involved – it’s not important. What’s important was that each of the dwarves felt a dire and pressing need to care for the child, and they took her into their home, fed her, clothed her, and gave her a warm bed to sleep in. And many seasons passed around that mountain, with the dwarves raising the child as one of their own, until one autumn’s day.

The girl laid, slender and still, in a coffin of spun glass. And some weeks later, one of the dwarves had the idea to call for a prince. This was of course the sensible thing to do, and the prince of a nearby kingdom who listened to the story thought an ensorcelled girl would be a grand thing to rescue.

Poor devils. It feels cruel to judge them. But there were so many questions they could’ve asked – what was this stepmother’s name? Was she real? Did she exist? Who had made the glass coffin? Surely one of them must’ve thought of the question. And why did it grow more opaque with every passing day?

Were they wrong to trust?

I guess it doesn’t matter now.

The moment the prince stepped into the subterranean chamber with the glass coffin, it shivered with a twinkling, plinking noise. Threads of glass exploded into glittering, razor-edged confetti.

A claw split the great glass cocoon.

The thing that spilled out of it, hulking and huge, knew in the fog of its mind, in a base animal sense that screamed, that it was in a room too small for it to fit. It wanted up. It wanted out.

In front of it was some twiggy little thing holding a sword.

It took its first breath.

The flames were the colour of cornflowers.

The dwarves fled. The thing followed close behind, up, up, up through the stone and the winding tunnels, not to chase, not to hunt, but to get up, to get out, out, out–

It struck the great stone doors at a run. They crumbled like gingerbread. And then there was sunlight, and the open sky…

And it could finally open its wings.

Convergent evolution is a hell of a thing.

The dragon, of course, lived happily ever after with its loot of gold and jewels from a hastily abandoned dwarf mine. Being much bigger than a caterpillar, we could accuse it of tricking the dwarves who were kind to it, had taken it in, had fed and clothed and warmed it.

It probably wouldn't mind.

[ariaverde]

Mastercard and visa have reported to a couple news outlets that they are currently being swamped with calls and complaints. Keep up the pressure and try to (politely) insist that you leave a complaint via phone instead of letting the rep direct you to emails. It's way easier to be overwhelmed by a much smaller number of calls so each one counts for a bit more!

[ariaverde]

Heads up, UK friends.

Discord has implemented the age verification requirement system per the upcoming law going into affect later this week early, so prepare yourself for other sites, which may include Tumblr given the intent is to target adult content which may affect here because of how it still does get posted here, even if the intended targets are the actual site for it.

As of writing, the official petition to have the Online Safety Act repealed is close to 30,000 signatures, but it's barely enough to garner much attention to where it may be dismissed by Parliament, or may get discussed but not getting to where it'll be repealed to actually figure a system that doesn't carry the risk of private information getting leaked.

So again, please help spread and sign the official petition here.

[ariaverde]

They're angry over one of the most basic components of his character?

I was kind of joking about that post about how you couldn't make Blazing Saddles nowadays, but I guess it's just true. You can't even make Superman these days without them complaining he's woke.

[ariaverde]

Everyone: Please please please don't write your books in Google Docs. Frankly don't use Google Drive for personal stuff.

Their terms of service say they take down stuff like content related to terrorism and trafficking, but this Google Sheet was literally a list of movies I'd watched this year and books I'd read.

[ariaverde]

You have to admit it's funny

[ariaverde]

Reading the new checks that might come in due to the Online Safety Act in the UK and this is actually bullshit

[Image Transcript:

And how will I prove my age?

There’s a number of methods a site or app might use to ask you to confirm your age. They might do this check themselves or use another company to do the check. These methods include:

Facial age estimation – you show your face via photo or video, and technology analyses it to estimate your age. 

Open banking – you give permission for the age-check service to securely access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. The age-check service then confirms this with the site or app.

Digital identity services – these include digital identity wallets, which can securely store and share information which proves your age in a digital format.

Credit card age checks – you provide your credit card details and a payment processor checks if the card is valid. As you must be over 18 to obtain a credit card this shows you are over 18.

Email-based age estimation – you provide your email address, and technology analyses other online services where it has been used – such as banking or utility providers - to estimate your age.  

Mobile network operator age checks – you give your permission for an age-check service to confirm whether or not your mobile phone number has age filters applied to it. If there are no restrictions, this confirms you are over 18. 

Photo-ID matching – this is similar to a check when you show a document. For example, you upload an image of a document that shows your face and age, and an image of yourself at the same time – these are compared to confirm if the document is yours.

End Transcript.]

Not only is this such a fucking breach of privacy, but this is going to hurt adults in vulnerable and abusive situations. Some adults don’t have bank accounts or credit cards or even a fucking phone. I’m one of them. I could not give half of this information even if I wanted to. What the fuck is this. Fuck the UK government. This isn’t going to protect kids, this is just going to hurt adults, and I know full well when they say “sites that allow pornography” they’re going to be going after sites that have huge amounts of queer content, like tumblr and Ao3. Queer kids are gonna lose their fucking communities because of this shit. Abuse victims are going to lose online support systems because of this.

I’m genuinely fucked off about this, and worried about whether I’m going to lose every single one of my online friends. Anyone in the UK, please email your MP and sign this petition. It needs to reach 100k signatures to pass through Parliament.

I’m only hoping the backlash will be big enough for them to stop implementing these measures.

[ariaverde]

so itchio has shadowbanned any games tagged with 'nsfw', 'adult', or 'erotic' so they don't show up in searches, and several devs have reported that their r18 games have been removed from the site with no warning

you know, maybe the internet shouldn’t be controlled by payment processors and terf lobbyists. and maybe people should be more concerned about this rise of censorship on queer media.

[ariaverde]

anyway in case you don’t know it yet

[ariaverde]

in keeping with the continued purification of the internet, itch io has shadowbanned or outright deleted all adult games.

[ariaverde]

My question is, what do the weird anti-kink people do when they discover they have a kink

do they just like

pretend everyone else likes feet or hair or McDonald’s playplace mascot statues or whatever exactly as much as they do

Or is it more of a Catholic denial-of-the-self sort of thing

[ariaverde]

I'm struck with that curse of wanting to write something but being unable to.

Uuuuuuuughdbjakzyxhdbskajavdh-

[ariaverde]

Consequences

Everything that has happened and will happen to GhostBlade is in some way his fault.

I made sure to look at his character at both his point of view and the point of view of people around him or at least how I would view him if I was somewhat close to him.

He keeps to himself and does his work in silence, but to most of his family they would see a prodigy that thinks he's too good to talk to anyone.

He is genuinely scared of going back to the noisy place of his childhood, but his wife would see a man that's too busy being an edge lord to be a proper Dad.

He's doing everything in his power to try to be better and make up for his shortcomings, but everyone around him keeps misinterpreting his actions!

I genuinely hate how much I see parts of myself in this particular character.

You could be living your life minding your own business and unfortunately you do something that upsets someone else!

When he kills people he feels no guilt, it's no different from slaughtering a pig to him, he is taking the lives of people and doesn't care.

In a sense it makes me think, did I ever do something that didn't mean anything to me but hurt someone else?

It's with this in mind I can say I'm happy that GhostBlade never got the chance to raise his daughter.

Can any of us honestly say that family wouldn't end in a tragedy?

We've seen how Lou-Li is with her Dad, how much worse would it be for GhostBlade and his daughter?

Even now I still don't think he could handle the "noise" it comes with raising a child, he might come to resent his own child for taking away his quiet, and considering he had no issue signing a contract to be an actual assassin and left his family just because they were too loud, I feel like that's a valid fear.

Also a lot of us seem to forget the man he works under is the same man that made the "new E-Soul" who he is now.

The only reason Rock wasn't in the current episodes was because GhostBlade has nothing he can control.

No friends, family, he can't even properly blackmail him because as far as he knows being GhostBlade is all there is to this "hero".

His actions ruined his relationship with his wife and daughter, but might have just saved both of their lives, it's a double edged sword I tell you.

Honestly I hope Johnny gets a few good licks in before he calms down because considering how long GhostBlade has been a hero I'm genuinely surprised that there's no talk about people going after him to avenge their loved ones or at least him talking about defeating people like that.

Overall he's been dealing with the backlash of his personality and I think we need to give a break.

On the other hand he needs to deal with the backlash of his actions.

P.S the second this show gets more popular, you GhostBlade fans better get ready to defend him.

As a DC fan, I can say for certainty that the mischaracterization that he will go through would make people think that he's the Chinese version of Slade and his daughter would be Terra.

[ariaverde]

Sable: A Ghost Story - Teaser

Sable is an ongoing gothic horror webcomic. The story will launch publicly on August 19th, but it starts TODAY on Patreon!