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>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

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if you're looking for an actual answer, it's because Kerdly is a popular meme ship among bigots and other garden-variety assholes who find Berdly relatable and defend him and the ship because it's a convenient way to defend their own behavior without directly stating it. not all Kerdly shippers are like this; some are just fascinated by the possibility of him becoming less of an asshole for the sake of love (or the possibility of Kris being into his assholish behavior), and to each their own. but there's a lot of vocal assholes in that vein.

for the record, idc who or what anyone ships, it's fiction and it doesn't matter. what i care about is how one treats real people. the ship itself isn't the red flag, the jumping people over not liking it or correctly stating it has no real basis in canon is.

why is kerdly nation jumping you

I DONT KNOWWW like i at most made a post abt how the "haha i forced kris and berdly to date" joke bothered me and answered some resulting asks and its just gone really weird since then

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this is pretty damn close to what i've been thinking recently, though i have a bit of a different spin.

based on what we know of SOULs in Undertale, and how Ralsei describes it as being where their will and compassion resides, i think Kris's SOUL is their emotional core - the part of them that cares. that means their love and passion and hope, sure, but it also means their fear and grief and occasional hate.

the times they remove their SOUL are the times that they feel that grief and rage so strongly that it's unbearable. so overwhelming that all they wanna do is stop feeling anything for a moment. what better way to stop feeling than to sever yourself from the part that feels? and their instinctive self takes over when they do. they act selfishly, logically, coldly.

except, they don't really stop feeling. their SOUL still feels everything, just now it's separated from the body and mind. it does whatever feels right, does its best to make its way back to the body and seek out whatever it has been before. then when it rejoins, all of that emotion rushes back and they get overwhelmed again for just a moment.

alternatively, they take it out each time they're about to do something for the Knight - because they do not like whatever they've been roped into doing. and if it's too important to slack on, then just for a moment they need to not feel anything so they can stop hesitating and get it done. it hurts every time and they wish they had another option, but the Knight is holding something over their head. someone as free-spirited as Kris wouldn't be going along with such a destructive and dangerous idea as risking the Roaring if they could afford to refuse.

and we play as their SOUL, not the entirety of Kris, because we care too. what better way to illustrate just how conflicted and torn they are?

the fandom consensus is that this isn't really Kris's SOUL, it either belongs to some other entity that we play as or it's Literally Ours - but c'mon. the things the SOUL can choose are far too opinionated and specific to come from some generic player. if they were actually possessed they'd be freaking out and desperately trying to tell someone, and even if it was part of some plan what other entity could possibly know them so well as to consistently fake being Kris so well as to fool their mother?

someday i'm going to make my own post about this, but i need to gather a lot of evidence first, and it'll take a while to write. for now, just know you're not alone in thinking this sort of thing, and i think it will pay off in a massive way later in the game.

Deltarune Spoilers ahoy but here's my big brain theory 🧠 (I've only played 1/3rd or so of ch 4 as of rn)

dunno what everyone's thoughts are on deltarune bc I haven't been in any fandom spaces since I was 20 for tales of vesperia. I kinda get the sense the consensus is the opposite of my theory?? Bc my brother is tapped into the deltarune fandom n we autism abt it together

But

I feel like Kris' soul is the real Kris. and whoever throws them out of their body is NOT Kris. It's their unprocessed grief, rage, pain, trauma, lonliness, and sorrow that takes over. And the roaring knight is using that to control Kris

because. the whole thing w studying at Noelle's house? And they were talking to the dark knight on the phone?

That was a huge confirmation for me that wasn't Kris

Bc when Kris went into Dess's room to look for the shelter code? That obviously triggered a lot of grief in Kris. bc they grew up with her as a best friend. They probably haven't been in her room for a long time. Seeing the guitar pick probably unlocked a memory

And that grief and rage and pain and sorrow? that took over for a bit. because it's right after that they talk on the phone to the roaring knight

people are not their pain, trauma, anger, or sorrow. the heart is the seat of the soul in Egyptian Kemetic culture, and in many others. It's no coincidence that Kris' soul is heart shaped

Kris has been through a lot. adopted kid whose parents divorce, his brother being the gifted kid that gets community praise and then going off to college, very socially isolated, small religious town, best friend growing up died and nobody talks about it, and they don't seem to care much for their dad when he shows up (who repeatedly still crosses Toriel's boundaries. Irt coming in to ruin her and Sans flirting, and showing up after church with flowers after her and Rudy were catching up and rekindling)

It's genuinely understandable for them to be carrying so much that they haven't processed. They're like... what? 13 ffs!! in a small town that doesn't seem to have help for any of that

and with the roaring knight being Noelle's mom Carol, who is SUPER abusive and controlling... she most definitely uses that to her advantage to control and manipulate Kris. She already does for Kris' dad

And I think that they don't stay down for long, combined with the fact the deltarune is their family's symbol (why else would she want Toriel kidnapped? She can't control Kris, and Asgore is no longer in the family, even though he's still under her control) is why she wants to control Kris so bad

... I just put together that in Undertale, Asgore kills innocent kids for revenge bc of his unprocessed grief and trauma he takes out on other ppl. it takes over him, no matter how nice or pleasant he may seem. And that's why in deltarune, the physical manifestation of that is the enemy. Not Asgore. in deltarune the manifestation takes control of the mayor of the town. Somebody else in power over a group of people with their own immense unprocessed grief and pain (the loss of her child, December)

But anyway. Back to Kris

The way that their personality shines through when you pick an answer that is more akin to them, like the option to say "nah your drawing sucks Susie" when she asks how it is leads to more fun dialogue. because saying "yeah it's great!" would just be masking who Kris really is, somebody who canonically draws and doesn't give a gaf about what people think abt what they say

On Tenna's TV Time quiz that asks what Kris' fav food is, they cough when you don't choose butterscotch pie. Signaling "BITCH YOU BETTER NOT GET THIS WRONG I love my mommy's pie!!!" 😝

Why would somebody like that open a fountain of darkness in their own home when having a sleepover with their new best friend and mom, while they're sleeping? Kris wouldn't do that. They LOVE them

When Spamton NEO attacks Kris in the castle basement, Susie and Ralsei save them. Right after, their soul enters defend their friends mode. Just like in ch 1, when the trio were betrayed by Lancer's dad, and Kris jumped in to defend them. Kris LOVES their friends. They LOVE Susie and Ralsei. That time at the diner with Susie? When they ate the special together, got free ice cream, and goofed around? drawing with their breath and fingers in the window? THAT'S the real Kris

Love is what makes us who we are. Love is stored in the soul!!! Love is what feeds us, nourishes us, keeps us alive. Love is who we are, hope an extension of that. Hope is part of the prophecy, that the lightner's will bring it when all is thought to be lost. Because those that have the greatest and brightest light are those who have experienced the greatest darkness

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Lost where the forest would grow, the children followed the pointed tail.

ROOTS PHRASE

anyone figure out the rearrangement yet? it feels like its so close

the ones ive thought of so far:

Lost children followed where the forest would grow, the pointed tail. [the]

Lost children pointed where the forest would grow, the followed tail. [the]

Lost forest followed the children where the pointed would grow, the tail.

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the situation with Carol is very very different than with Mike. until a week ago all we knew about Mike was that he was someone Spamton had had contact with before his fall, and not even the Sweepstakes cleared that up - that event just revealed the existence of Tenna. all sorts of crazy theories were bound to happen and not many, if any, could have had any weight. the closest anyone got was a theory that the secret boss of each chapter would in some way mention the main boss of the next chapter, since Jevil did that with the Queen, and as it happened Tenna did in fact become (a) major antagonist in chapter 3! and then Mike turned out to not even appear on-screen, and possibly not exist at all.

but we actually SAW Carol and heard her speak, in a context that i can only describe as concerning.

her actual dialogue doesn't tell us much. it boils down to three things:

1) she is understandably protective of Dess's possessions. this is her missing/possibly dead daughter we're talking about, i think anyone could get this way.

2) she is authoritarian even with her own family (which was kinda implied with Rudy's dialogue already) and has no problem forcibly dissolving friendships if she deems it necessary.

3) her relationship with Kris seems to go beyond "child of friends of the family," as she places a very striking emphasis on "YOU" in her last line.

the first two points are understandable, and the third is a bit too vague to examine at this moment. (ADDENDUM: for the authoritarianism specifically, it is not surprising that someone in her position would adopt this mindset; she has lost her eldest daughter and is likely trying to prevent the loss of her other daughter.) it is the events that lead up to her introduction that tell us that there is something more sinister going on.

up until this moment, Kris has been trying to prevent us or anyone else from seeing the guitar. they specifically pull their SOUL out of their chest just before we finish reading the code written on it. we then eavesdrop on a phone call they make, speaking with someone who is discussing events such as the Dark Worlds in a context only the Fun Gang and the Roaring Knight could possibly know about. and the caller is making a very disturbing sound effect too! since Susie is with Noelle and exactly zero Darkners are capable of communication in the Light World, it MUST be the Knight or some ally of theirs on the other end of this call.

then more shenanigans happen and Susie gets hold of the guitar. and what does Kris do? pull out their phone again and make another call, informing the other person that Susie has the guitar. then the exact same sound effect from before plays as the speaker says they'll be right there. not two minutes later, Carol Holiday walks in the door, and for most of the ensuing scene, the highly disturbing song "C" plays, which consists of what sounds like a raspy breath with echo effects and pitch modulation applied to it. and weirdly enough she has a top-heavy triangular body shape, really spiky horns compared to the rest of her family, at least two separate katanas in her home, and a strong association with winter and the cold overall - moreso than with Noelle or Rudy, who are both more about Christmas specifically. all traits that the Roaring Knight happens to have.

all of this is very clearly implying that Carol is either an ally of the Roaring Knight, or outright IS the Roaring Knight.

the only way that is NOT what the scene implies is if we are supposed to believe that the identical sound effect in both calls does NOT indicate that the speaker is the same. which i find very difficult to believe. is it supposed to be the sound a call makes then? can't be, because Kris takes a few other calls outside this scene and all of them just use the speaker's normal soundbite. is it supposed to be representative of the tension of the scene? that's a weird method of symbolism, and i think the dialogue itself alongside the surrounding events provide plenty of tension already.

Carol Holiday is being set up as a major antagonist for Deltarune overall. whether or not she is the Knight, she is the only Lightner so far to be this hostile and cold towards anyone, and the way she is discussed by the other residents of Hometown ranges from reverence to fear to outright dislike. for once, this is not a fandom hallucination; the signs are there and we would be fools to ignore them.

I'm very impressed by many of Deltarune fans' ability to consistently fall for red herrings and never ever learn from those mistakes.

So many people theorizing about how Mike was gonna be the Shadow Crystal holder of chapter 3 and turning out to be very wrong, you would think some of them would at least wait before jumping to conclusions about Carol Holiday's villain status based on like three minutes of screentime where essentially everything she says is only sinister (beyond the bad parenting, I mean) if you're already suspicious of her, but nope, they're already talking like the Roaring Knight turned to the camera and said they were her.

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kill the shift manager in your brain

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Hey,

i really wanted to avoid having to engage with this petty fandom bullshit publicly but i've had a serial harasser known as @snowcollecter/@brieffamilycat/@krispy-chicken-shipping/@bonniehbunny who until this point has been slandering me within Deltarune circles. i've tried not to engage with it but today they've escalated to targeting my business email with a bombardment of false sign-up emails.

idk what to really achieve with this post but i want you to know this is the degree of harassment that i'm now facing. You'd think that people would be a lil hesitant to engage with this sort of shit after what happened to Predstrogen but here we are. If you get an anon ask slandering my character, please know these are the tactics being used to try and remove me from the fandom.

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RESTORE ALL THE ACCOUNTS THAT HAVE BEEN AND CONTINUE TO BE BANNED FOR MERELY BEING TRANSGENDER.

MAYBE THEN WE'LL BELIEVE YOU.

A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:

We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally. 

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt's response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:

The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.

Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.

Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr. 

Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.

When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:

Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.

Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.

Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.

We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.

We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.

— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.

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dealing with the worst case scenario

your condom breaks

you feel a lump on your breast

your friends are ignoring you

you’re stranded on an island 

you got rejected by a crush

you get into a car accident

you got stung by a bee/wasp

you got fired from your job

you’re in an earthquake

your tattoo gets infected

your house is on fire

you’re lost in the woods

you get arrested abroad

you get robbed

your partner cheated on you

you’re on a ship that’s sinking

you fall into ice

you’re stuck in an elevator

you hit a deer with your car

you have food poisoning

your pet passed away

you fall off of a horse

you or your friend has alcohol poisoning

you have toxic shock syndrome

your house has a gas leak

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adding this to the pile of things i may or may not make in the future - assuming you don't end up making it yourself.

Metroidvania where each upgrade modifies or disables a particular form of game-mechanical bounds-checking.

For example, one upgrade might disable underflow checking for the player character's heath meter; most damage sources only inflict one "unit" of damage (assume a very coarse-grained health system, like Legend of Zelda hearts), so this isn't terribly useful in the general case, but against any damage source which inflicts 2+ health units in one go this can be exploited to make your health wrap back around to full if the final value would be negative. Apart from its situational applicability in fights against bosses with highly damaging attacks, this also serves as the game's equivalent of a hellrun mitigator; damaging environments knock off two units of health per tick, so as long as you ensure that your current health value is always an odd number it will just keep wrapping around indefinitely.

Another upgrade might uncap the player character's falling velocity. Mostly this just lets you get places quicker, but in locations where it's possible to fall long distances it can get you going fast enough to clip into the floor. The game's progression logic explicitly incorporates these floor clips, and several areas are gated by long vertical shafts with one-tile-thick floors at the bottom where the only way to pass is to use your uncapped fall speed to clip through.

Late in the game you pick up an upgrade which disables flag checking for scripted events, making all events available regardless of whether you've satisfied their prerequisites or not. This is mainly useful for completionists, since it allows map areas gated behind "permanently missable" flags to be freely explored during the 100% cleanup phase, but it also grants access to several events whose prerequisites are impossible to satisfy during normal play, including story events which require multiple mutually exclusive outcomes to have happened simultaneously. The narrative implications of this are not addressed.

The last upgrade, of course, disables the map position check that automatically kills the player character if they're out of bounds. This is necessary to reach the final boss.

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My dad and I once had a disagreement over him using the adage "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.

So my dad and I agreed, what doesn't kill you doesn't actually make you stronger, but healing does. And if you feel like healing hasn't made you stronger than you were before, you're probably not done healing. You've got to give these things time to set.

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Selling you shitty Game of Ur microtransactions call me EA-nasir

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Requested by anon.

Reblog for a larger sample size!

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COME ONE, COME ALL! WE GOT BUGFIXES, WE GOT EASTER EGGS, WE GOT HIDEOUS MASSES IN HD! ALL IN THE NEW ULTRAKILL PATCH

Spoilers for Layer 7: VIOLENCE under the cut

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