#(the other being pcb)

[kazziodyne]

I told you not to look into her eyes...

(old reisen doodle)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system – it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start – they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fucked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax – a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them – they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fucked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively raped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. Remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fucking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds – who controlled 90% of the market – to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" – rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia – writing on behalf of a unanimous court! – said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist…to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fucking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" – that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

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

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

[secretgamergirl]

How a Computer Works - Part 1 (Components)

I am about to teach you on a real fundamental, connecting up electronic components level, how a computer actually works. Before I get into the meat of this though (you can just skip down below the fold if you don't care), here's the reasons I'm sitting doing so in this format:

Like a decade or two ago, companies Facebook pushed this whole "pivot to video" idea on the whole internet with some completely faked data, convincing everyone that everything had to be a video, and we need to start pushing back against that. Especially for stuff like complex explanations of things or instructions, it's much more efficient to just explain things clearly in text, maybe with some visual aids, so people can easily search, scan, and skip around between sections. It's also a hell of a lot easier to host things long term, and you can even print out a text based explainer and not need a computer to read it, keep it on a desk, highlight it, etc.

People are so clueless about how computers actually work that they start really thinking like it's all magical. Even programmers. Aside from how proper knowledge lets you get more out of them, this leads to people spouting off total nonsense about "teaching sand to think" or "everything is just 1s and 0s" or "this 'AI' a con artist who was trying to sell me NFTs a month ago probably really is an amazing creative thinking machine that can do everything he says!"

We used to have this cultural value going where it was expected that if you owned something and used it day to day, you'd have enough basic knowledge of how it worked that if it stopped working you could open it up, see what was wrong, and maybe fix it on your own, or maybe even put one together again from scratch, and that's obviously worth bringing back.

I'm personally working on a totally bonkers DIY project and I'd like to hype up like-minded people for when it gets farther along.

So all that said, have a standard reminder that I am completely reliant on Patreon donations to survive, keep updating this blog, and ideally start getting some PCBs and chips and a nice oscilloscope to get that mystery project off the ground.

Electricity probably doesn't work like how you were taught (and my explanation shouldn't be trusted too far either).

I remember, growing up, hearing all sorts of things about electricity having this sort of magical ability to always find the shortest possible path to where it needs to get, flowing like water, and a bunch of other things that are kind of useful for explaining how a Faraday cage or a lightning rod works, and not conflicting with how simple electronics will have a battery and then a single line of wire going through like a switch and a light bulb or whatever back to the other end of the battery.

If you had this idea drilled into your head hard enough, you might end up thinking that if we have a wire hooked to the negative end of a battery stretching off to the east, and another wire stretching off to the east from the positive end, and we bridge between the two in several places with an LED or something soldered to both ends, only the westernmost one is going to light up, because hey, the shortest path is the one that turns off as quickly as possible to connect to the other side, right? Well turns out no, all three are going to light up, because that "shortest path" thing is a total misunderstanding.

Here's how it actually works, roughly. If you took basic high school chemistry, you learned about how the periodic table is set up, right? A given atom, normally, has whatever number of protons in the core, and the same number of electrons, whipping all over around it, being attracted to those protons but repelled by each other, and there's particular counts of electrons which are super chill with that arrangement so we put those elements in the same column as each other, and then as you count up from those, you get the elements between those either have some electrons that don't fit all tight packed in the tight orbit and just kinda hang out all wide and lonely and "want to" buddy up with another atom that has more room, up to the half full column that can kinda go either way, then as we approach the next happy number they "want to" have a little more company to get right to that cozy tight packed number, and when you have "extra" electrons and "missing" electrons other atoms kinda cozy up and share so they hit those good noble gas counts.

I'm sure real experts want to scream at me for both that and this, but this is basically how electricity works. You have a big pile of something at the "positive" end that's "missing electrons" (for the above reason or maybe actually ionized so they really aren't there), and a "negative" end that's got spares. Then you make wires out of stuff from those middle of the road elements that have awkward electron counts and don't mind buddying up (and also high melting points and some other handy qualities) and you hook those in there. And the electron clouds on all the atoms in the wire get kinda pulled towards the positive side because there's more room over there, but if they full on leave their nucleus needs more electron pals, so yeah neighbors get pulled over, and the whole wire connected to the positive bit ends up with a positive charge to it, and the whole wire on the negative bit is negatively charged, and so yeah, anywhere you bridge the gap between the two, the electrons are pretty stoked about balancing out these two big awkward compromises and they'll start conga lining over to balance things out, and while they're at it they'll light up lights or shake speakers or spin motors or activate electromagnets or whatever other rad things you've worked out how to make happen with a live electric current.

Insulators, Resistors, Waves, and Capacitors

Oh and we typically surround these wires made of things that are super happy about sharing electrons around with materials that are very much "I'm good, thanks," but this isn't an all or nothing system and there's stuff you can connect between the positive and negative ends of things that still pass the current along, but only so much so fast. We use those to make resistors, and those are handy because sometimes you don't want to put all the juice you have through something because it would damage it, and having a resistor anywhere along a path you're putting current through puts a cap on that flow, and also sometimes you might want a wire connected to positive or negative with a really strong resistor so it'll have SOME sort of default charge, but if we get a free(r) flowing connection attached to that wire somewhere else that opens sometimes, screw that little trickle going one way, we're leaning everyone the other way for now.

The other thing with electricity is is that the flow here isn't a basic yes/no thing. How enthusiastically those electrons are getting pulled depends on the difference in charge at the positive and negative ends, and also if you're running super long wires then even if they conduct real good, having all that space to spread along is going to kinda slow things to a trickle, AND the whole thing is kinda going to have some inherent bounciness to it both because we're dealing with electrons whipping and spinning all over and because, since it's a property that's actually useful for a lot of things we do with electricity, the power coming out of the wall has this intentional wobbly nature because we've actually got this ridiculous spinny thing going on that's constantly flip flopping which prong of the socket is positive and which is negative and point is we get these sine waves of strength by default, and they kinda flop over if we're going really far.

Of course there's also a lot of times when you really want to not have your current flow flickering on and off all the time, but hey fortunately one of the first neat little electronic components we ever worked out are capacitors... and look, I'm going to be straight with you. I don't really get capacitors, but the basic idea is you've got two wires that go to big wide plates, and between those you have something that doesn't conduct the electricity normally, but they're so close the electromagnetic fields are like vibing, and then if you disconnect them from the flow they were almost conducting and/or they get charged to their limit, they just can't deal with being so charged up and they'll bridge their own gap and let it out. So basically you give them electricity to hold onto for a bit then pass along, and various sizes of them are super handy if you want to have a delay between throwing a switch and having things start doing their thing, or keeping stuff going after you break a connection, or you make a little branching path where one branch connects all regular and the other goes through a capacitor, and the electricity which is coming in in little pulses effectively comes out as a relatively steady stream because every time it'd cut out the capacity lets its charge go.

We don't just have switches, we have potentiometers.

OK, so... all of the above is just sort of about having a current and maybe worrying about how strong it is, but other than explaining how you can just kinda have main power rails running all over, and just hook stuff across them all willy-nilly rather than being forced to put everything in one big line, but still, all you can do with that is turn the whole thing on and off by breaking the circuit. Incidentally, switches, buttons, keys, and anything else you use to control the behavior of any electronic device really are just physically touching loose wires together or pulling them apart... well wait no, not all, this is a good bit to know.

None of this is actually pass/fail, really, there's wave amplitudes and how big a difference we have between the all. So when you have like, a volume knob, that's a potentiometer, which is a simple little thing where you've got your wire, it's going through a resistor, and then we have another wire we're scraping back and forth along the resistor, using a knob, usually, and the idea is the current only has to go through X percent of the resistor to get to the wire you're moving, which proportionately reduces the resistance. So you have like a 20 volt current, you've got a resistor that'll drop that down to 5 or so, but then you move this other wire down along and you've got this whole dynamic range and you can fine tune it to 15 or 10 or whatever coming down that wire. And what's nice about this again, what's actually coming down the wire is this wobbily wave of current, it's not really just "on" or "off, and as you add resistance, the wobble stays the same, it's just the peaks and valleys get closer to being just flat. Which is great if you're making, say, a knob to control volume, or brightness, or anything you want variable intensity in really.

Hey hey, it's a relay!

Again, a lot of the earliest stuff people did with electronics was really dependent on that analog wobbly waveform angle. Particularly for reproducing sound, and particularly the signals of a telegraph. Those had to travel down wires for absurd distances, and as previously stated, when you do that the signal is going to eventually decay to nothing. But then someone came up with this really basic idea where every so often along those super long wires, you set something up that takes the old signal and uses it to start a new one. They called them relays, because you know, it's like a relay race.

If you know how an electromagnet works (something about the field generated when you coil a bunch of copper wire around an iron core and run an electric current through it), a relay is super simple. You've got an electromagnet in the first circuit you're running, presumably right by where it's going to hit the big charged endpoint, and that magnetically pulls a tab of metal that's acting as a switch on a new circuit. As long as you've got enough juice left to activate the magnet, you slam that switch and voom you've got all the voltage you can generate on the new line.

Relays don't get used too much in other stuff, being unpopular at the time for not being all analog and wobbily (slamming that switch back and forth IS going to be a very binary on or off sorta thing), and they make this loud clacking noise that's actually just super cool to hear in devices that do use them (pinball machines are one of the main surviving use cases I believe) but could be annoying in some cases. What's also neat is that they're a logical AND gate. That is, if you have current flowing into the magnet, AND you have current flowing into the new wire up to the switch, you have it flowing out through the far side of the switch, but if either of those isn't true, nothing happens. Logic gates, to get ahead of myself a bit, are kinda the whole thing with computers, but we still need the rest of them. So for these purposes, relays re only neat if it's the most power and space efficient AND gate you have access to.

Oh and come to think of it, there's no reason we need to have that magnet closing the circuit when it's doing its thing. We could have it closed by default and yank it open by the magnet. Hey, now we're inverting whatever we're getting on the first wire! Neat!

Relay computers clack too loud! Gimme vacuum tubes!

So... let's take a look at the other main thing people used electricity for before coming up with the whole computer thing, our old friend the light bulb! Now I already touched a bit on the whole wacky alternating current thing, and I think this is actually one of the cases that eventually lead to it being adopted so widely, but the earliest light bulbs tended to just use normal direct current, where again, you've got the positive end and the negative end, and we just take a little filament of whatever we have handy that glows when you run enough of a current through it, and we put that in a big glass bulb and pump out all the air we can, because if we don't, the oxygen in there is probably going to change that from glowing a bit to straight up catching on fire and burning immediately.

But, we have a new weird little problem, because of the physics behind that glowing. Making something hot, on a molecular level, is just kinda adding energy to the system so everything jitters around more violently, and if you get something hot enough that it glows, you're getting it all twitchy enough for tinier particles to just fly the hell off it. Specifically photons, that's the light bit, but also hey, remember, electrons are just kinda free moving and whipping all over looking for their naked proton pals... and hey, inside this big glass bulb, we've got that other end of the wire with the more positive charge to it. Why bother wandering up this whole coily filament when we're in a vacuum and there's nothing to get in the way if we just leap straight over that gap? So... they do that, and they're coming in fast and on elliptical approaches and all, so a bunch of electrons overshoot and smack into the glass on the far side, and now one side of every light bulb is getting all gross and burnt from that and turning all brown and we can't have that.

So again, part of the fix is we switched to alternating current so it's at least splitting those wild jumps up to either side, but before that, someone tried to solve this by just... kinda putting a backboard in there. Stick a big metal plate on the end of another wire in the bulb connected to a positive charge, and now OK, all those maverick electrons smack into here and aren't messing up the glass, but also hey, this is a neat little thing. Those electrons are making that hop because they're all hot and bothered. If we're not heating up the plate they're jumping to, and there's no real reason we'd want to, then if we had a negative signal over on that side... nothing would happen. Electrons aren't getting all antsy and jumping back.

So now we have a diode! The name comes because we have two (di-) electrodes (-ode) we care about in the bulb (we're just kind of ignoring the negative one), and it's a one way street for our circuit. That's useful for a lot of stuff, like not having electricity flow backwards through complex systems and mess things up, converting AC to DC (when it flips, current won't flow through the diode so we lop off the bottom of the wave, and hey, we can do that thing with capacitors to release their current during those cutoffs, and if we're clever we can get a pretty steady high).

More electrodes! More electrodes!

So a bit after someone worked out this whole vacuum tube diode thing, someone went hey, what if it was a triode? So, let's stick another electrode in there, and this one just kinda curves around in the middle, just kinda making a grate or a mesh grid, between our hot always flowing filament and that catch plate we're keeping positively charged when it's doing stuff. Well this works in a neat way. If there's a negative charge on it, it's going to be pushing back on those electrons jumping over, and if there's a positive charge on it, it's going to help pull those electrons over (it's all thin, so they're going to shoot right past it, especially if there's way more of a positive charge over on the plate... and here's the super cool part- This is an analog thing. If we have a relatively big negative charge, it's going to repel everything, if it's a relatively big positive, it's going to pull a ton across, if it's right in the middle, it's like it wasn't even in there, and you can have tiny charges for all the gradients in between.

We don't need a huge charge for any of this though, because we're just helping or hindering the big jump from the high voltage stuff, and huh, weren't we doing this whole weak current controlling a strong current thing before with the relay? We were! And this is doing the same thing! Except now we're doing it all analog style, not slapping switch with a magnet, and we can make those wavy currents peak higher or lower and cool, now we can have phone lines boost over long distances too, and make volume knobs, and all that good stuff.

The relay version of this had that cool trick though where you could flip the output. Can we still flip the output? We sure can, we just need some other toys in the mix. See we keep talking about positive charges and negative charges at the ends of our circuits, but these are relative things. I mentioned way back when how you can use resistors to throttle how much of a current we've got, so you can run two wires to that grid in the triode. One connects to a negative charge and the other positive, with resistors on both those lines, and a switch that can break the connection on the positive end. If the positive is disconnected, we've got a negative charge on the grid, since it's all we've got, but if we connect it, and the resistor to the negative end really limits flow, we're positive in the section the grid's in. And over on the side with the collecting plate, we branch off with another resistor setup so the negative charge on that side is normally the only viable connection for a positive, but when we flip the grid to positive, we're jumping across the gap in the vacuum tube, and that's a big open flow so we'll just take those electrons instead of the ones that have to squeeze through a tight resistor to get there.

That explanation is probably a bit hard to follow because I'm over here trying to explain it based on how the electrons are actually getting pulled around. In the world of electronics everyone decided to just pretend the flow is going the other way because it makes stuff easier to follow. So pretend we have magical positrons that go the other way and if they have nothing better to do they go down the path where we have all the fun stuff further down the circuit lighting lights and all that even though it's a tight squeeze through a resistor, because there's a yucky double negative in the triode and that's worse, but we have the switch rigged up to make that a nice positive go signal to the resistance free promised land with a bonus booster to cut across, so we're just gonna go that way when the grid signal's connected.

Oh and you can make other sorts of logic circuits or double up on them in a single tube if you add more grids and such, which we did for a while, but not really relevant these days.

Cool history lesson but I know there's no relays or vacuum tubes in my computer.

Right, so the above things are how we used to make computers, but they were super bulky, and you'd have to deal with how relays are super loud and kinda slow, and vacuum tubes need a big power draw and get hot. What we use instead of either of those these days are transistors. See after spending a good number of years working out all this circuit flow stuff with vacuum tubes we eventually focused on how the real important thing in all of this is how with the right materials you can make a little juncture where current flows between a positive and negative charge if a third wire going in there is also positively charged, but if it's negatively charged we're pulling over. And turns out there is a WAY more efficient way of doing that if you take a chunk of good ol' middle of the electron road silicon, and just kinda lightly paint the side of it with just the tiniest amount of positive leaning and negative leaning elements on the sides.

Really transistors don't require understanding anything new past the large number of topics already covered here, they're just more compact about it. Positive leaning bit, negative leaning bit, wildcard in the middle, like a vacuum tube. Based on the concepts of pulling electrons around from chemistry, like a circuit in general. The control wire in the middle kinda works in just a pass-fail sort of way, like a relay. They're just really nice compared to the older alternatives because they don't make noise or have moving parts to wear down, you don't have to run enough current through them for metal to start glowing and the whole room to heat up, and you can make them small. Absurdly small. Like... need an electron microscope to see them small.

And of course you can also make an inverter super tiny like that, and a diode (while you're at it you can use special materials or phosphors to make them light emitting, go LEDs!) and resistors can get pretty damn small if you just use less of a more resistant material, capacitors I think have a limit to how tiny you can get, practically, but yeah, you now know enough of the basic fundamentals of how computers work to throw some logic gates together. We've covered how a relay, triode, or transistor function as an AND gate. An OR gate is super easy, you just stick diodes on two wires so you don't have messy backflow then connect them together and lead off there. If you can get your head around wiring up an inverter (AKA NOT), hey, stick one after an AND to get a NAND, or an OR to get a NOR. You can work out XOR and XNOR from there right? Just build 4 NANDs, pass input A into gates 1 and 2, B into 2 and 3, 2's output into 1 and 3, 1 and 3's output into 4 for a XOR, use NORs instead for a XNOR. That's all of them right? So now just build a ton of those and arrange them into a computer. It's all logic and math from there.

Oh right. It's... an absurd amount of logic and math, and I can only fit so many words in a blog post. So we'll have to go all...

CONTINUED IN PART 2!

Meanwhile, again, if you can spare some cash I'd really appreciate it.

[tennco]

as vague as it was, i think zun had some idea of yukari at the time of her introduction, as seen with her concern over the barrier and the wellbeing of gensokyo. this would eventually evolve into the gensokyo sages and include kasen and okina, though even among them yukari remains the most noteworthy. but i'm not here to talk about that, i'm here to talk about outfits

her original appearance in PCB had yukari wearing a purple dress, in reference to her name most likely, nothing fancy. but it's interesting to me how zun immediately put that aside to go with the pale dress and tabard, similar to her shikigami Ran, for the following games IaMP and IN

it definitely gives her a more distinct look from any other character, although being the setting that Touhou is, it's kinda weird to me for someone to be wearing similar clothes as their subordinate. i might be missing the mark on that one though. thing is we would see the purple dress, or a variation of it, on multiple occasions after IN. for a while it seemed like zun was going back to that design actually, only broken up by SWR because, going on a limb here, they probably didn't wanna re-do the art and spritework. even in WaHH where the second sage kasen is introduced, yukari is seen with a variation of her og dress.

what's the meaning of all this then? i don't know. the wiki states that the purple dress is yukari's casual wear while the tabard is her work attire, with a nice "citation needed" next to it. though it sounds believable enough i guess, every time yukari's seen with the tabard on she's actively participating in an incident. it makes sense that on those occasions where she's actually showing herself, she would want to present and fully put on display who she really is. even though no one really associates the look with the sages or anything afaik, that's something only we know

so the tabard look started as "this is what ran wears", evolved to "this is what yukari and her shikigami wear", and finally "this is what the sages of gensokyo and everyone related wears", as kasen and okina's outfits share that element (and later, chen as well). except yukari, yukari can dress up like a grandma when she wants to because she's a special girl

[henchy5824]

My newest project is a scene inspired by the #666 live on air series from the amazing @prince-liest Go check out their stuff!

Jazzhands

SO I've never done lighting before. I live in perpetual darkness. I don't know what light looks like, can't you tell??!

I've had to actively hype myself up to draw Alastor and I kept putting it off. The intimidation factor with the strawberry pimp is pretty high....

Alt version below

"something violently teal-colored", you say? "fluorescent purple cap", you say? Say no more fam ❤ Of course it would be Nuka-cola-quantum. What else is there?!

They both have a bad day, I feel like. Vox is wearing the most scraggly looking shirt that was not yet chucked in the laundry and he doesn't even care that it's buttoned unevenly. Val is on a date without him, after all.

Alastor has one of those bad hair days. He kept going through his hair all day. Not sure about the ghostly sensation of Vox scritching his ears the day before.

Also: I don't know why Vox would have pcb patterns on his arms on the outside of his body but the idea seemed hella sick, so I had to draw it.

So headcannon time:

-Vox would be the type to have the most designer- and bare-looking kitchen in the history of Hell. Velvette designed it for him and he didn't mind.

-He's got a Potoro Marble countertop and he uses it to eat takeout straight out of the cardboard box and microwave meals straight out of the tin they came in.

-If the appliance isn't fisher price-coloured, it's not VoxTek and therefore has no place in his kitchen.

-The most used appliances are the coffee machine and the microwave.

-He has more barstools but the only one he uses is the one Alastor is currently sitting on. Vox only lingers in the kitchen to scroll on his phone while his meals are heating up or the coffee is brewing.

-He does own a knifeblock and several high-grade kitchen knives but they are still in their packaging in one of the drawers under the counter. He only uses his claws to perforate his microwave meals.

-He does own pots and pans....somewhere.. They are also VoxTek branded.

-Of course he would choose the most retro-50s-looking wallpaper possible. It drove Velvette up the wall but he insisted.

Things I've learned while doing this piece:

-How to use colour swatches

-Being sensible about layers and which layers will interfere with others

-Using light gradient boxes and swatches (omg so helpful)

-Actually using a colour pallette

-The perspective tool!

-Creating a colour filter by applying opacity. (yea, as if I actually knew what I was doing!)

Thanks for reading my brainrot and sharing in my continued effort to draw somewhat adequately looking stick figures and badly lit settings!

[themotherofhorses]

paloma: first meeting

— simon "ghost" riley x oc!silentdove reyes.

summary: he's not annoyed, per se, but ghost is just not really in the mood to chit-chat with the american airman scurrying around the base. at best, he tolerates them.

(or the first exchange between ghost and his montanan woman.)

warnings: none, aside from explicit language.

note: okay, so despite this being an obvious OC-insert series, i invite anyone and everyone to read it :D this is actually my first time tackling an OC-insert fanfic (as well as writing ghost) so im still trying to get the rhythm of things.

dividers by: @saradika

paloma (masterlist) | main masterlist

[2021] 

Simon Riley won’t ever admit it — never aloud, anyway — but every time he steps foot on American soil, he feels more akin to a wolf draped in sheep’s clothing. 

In his mind, he sticks out like a sore thumb. He is not a hero, really; unlike the lot teetering around the military base he is currently stationed at for the next five or so weeks, he is less flesh and blood, and more a phantom. Or something along those lines. Actually, that could explain why there is such little traffic aimed his way. But he doesn’t particularly care. His schedule lacks the room to voice any complaints. 

Right now, his main concern is doing his job, and doing it right. 

Two weeks back, Price had him fishing out his passport tucked away inside his bedside table. “Fancy a two month getaway to the States?” Great Falls, Montana, to be exact. High west, nearing the border of Canada, and surrounded by land he’s only ever seen in those silly ass spaghetti western movies. 

The view is nice, he’ll admit. Beautiful, even. Exhilarating. He now understands why they refer to Montana as “Big Sky Country.” 

Malmstrom is much smaller than he imagined, and homier too. The Air Force base is nestled within the city’s east side, offering its own museum and park. He’s quite grateful for the latter; the trails allow for his nighttime walks when the nightmares prove too shitty to sleep. 

Great Falls is pretty as well. Price would like it, maybe Garrick too. He knows the two are big on history, and almost every inch of the city is drenched with some memory belonging to the old frontier days. 

Upon arriving, the yanks provided him with his own private office, housed in the back of the 341st logistics readiness squadron. It’s nothin’ fancy, really, just a wee room furnished with a dark mahogany desk, two windows, a steel cabinet, the Montana flag to his left, and the American to his right. 

Again, he’s not one to complain. Something’s something. 

Earlier, one of the higher-up airmen, a Staff Sergeant Benson (he believes is the name), had handed him a folder jam-packed with a shit ton of mission statements — logistics, strategic planning, reports of previous global concerns, and reviews of the base’s Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. All the documents are dated in a time range varying between two months ago to 0800 this morning. 

In the back of his mind, he can already hear Price chuckling.

“Have fun, Simon.”

Bloody bastard. 

So now, Ghost sits hunched over the desk, feeling a little too damn big for it. All the paperwork is strewn about messily around him, with sticky notes, a pen, and some other random shit of his. No one has yet to visit him; until that happens, he feels little need to remain organized. 

His boot taps against the floor. “—Initial efforts to clean polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from launch facilities at Malmstrom AFB are ongoing but seeing success…” Ghost reads under his breath. PCBs? That’s nice to hear.

“...after PCBs were detected on surfaces in launch facilities at all three of the command’s missile wings.” 

PCBs. Polychlorinated biphenyls — man-made and highly toxic, consisting of carbon, hydrogen, and chlorine atoms. He clicks his tongue, shaking his head as he flips onto the next page.

“We know they’re present on what appears to be otherwise pristine surfaces, due to the survey—” 

—a sudden knock interrupts his reading. 

With a curse on his tongue, Ghost sets down the report. He quicks a sneaking glance at his watch. 1342 hours. He’s due in a meeting at 1700. 

“Come in.” His voice sounds low and raspy, the two words sounding more like a growl than a greeting. He’s not annoyed, per se, but Ghost is just not really in the mood to chit-chat with the American airmen scurrying around the base. At best, he tolerates them.

(In his mind, they’re all little Graves, ready to stir up a headache.) 

The door slowly cracks open.

“Lieutenant Riley?” A female voice calls out — soft and cautious; Ghost’s chin drops against his knuckles. “Apologies for the disruption, sir, but I have some additional paperwork I need to drop off with you, at the request of my superior.” He grunts, and the airman then steps into his office, quickly shutting the door behind her before meeting his eyes. 

It is entirely unlike him, Ghost knows, but his brain almost short-circuits right then and there. Two dark brown eyes, framed by thick lashes, peering up at him. Shit. He’d always thought brown was such a pretty eye color on a woman, but hers stretched further across common compliments. 

Both of  ‘em — they held no animosity, no uneasiness or fear, nothing. 

That, itself, is quite fucking bizarre. He’s not used to that.

Ghost is .... well, Ghost. He knows the mask he is always donning on his face isn't exactly a sign of welcomeness. Just his mere presence is enough to startle the living shit out of rookies, baby recruits, wide-eyed sergeants, and the like. There is something inherently unnerving when you are unable to get a good reading of the person you're standing across from.

She’s brave, he thinks. Or merely oblivious to who he is. 

“Here you go, sir,” the airman says while placing the packet of new documents down on his desk. Her lips are shaped prettily, plump and shining with a fresh layer of gloss, and across her nose is a splatter of faint freckles. Under a different circumstance, maybe he would’ve taken the time to try and count them all.

Ghost swallows hard, incapable (for what feels like the first time in his life) of mustering up an appropriate reply. “Ah, thank you, ma’am.” 

The airman's brow lifts.

“Reyes,” she then corrects him with a kind smile, gesturing to the name badge sitting above her right chest pocket. Sure enough, in bold military lettering, reads Reyes. “My name is Senior Airman SilentDove Reyes. I am actually a cryptologic linguist analyst here on base; but sometimes I run errands for others, when not needed for a translation, of course.”

There is a slight chirp in her voice that Ghost picks up, along with the way she casually rocks back and forth on her feet. She seems awfully young, no older than 22, possibly 23, but even that's cutting it; a kid, compared to him. Maybe 5'7, with dark hair pulled back into two tight braids that fall at her belted waistline.

A stark contrast compared to him.

He's oddly curious now — about her age and first name and those long braids and why she stands before him, calm, collected, and sure — but he knows damn well this is not the time nor place for any questions. Both of them are on the clock, and it is likely she’ll need to report back to her supervisor soon. 

He offers her a curt nod. “Well, thank you again, Reyes,” he states, keeping his voice flat. 

“You are welcome, sir.” She turns to leave, but when her hand latches onto the doorknob, Reyes glances over her shoulder at him, “—oh, and Lieutenant? If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to ask.” 

“I’ll keep that in mind.” 

–

The successful cleaning came after a bioenvironmental team at Malmstrom AFB …. Malmstrom AFB .. consulted with engineers and ….. and medical experts on the cleaning …. cleaning processes and– 

–and agents most likely to effectively remove the chemicals…. 

He knows his mind is wandering off, in desperate search of that pretty senior airman from fifteen minutes ago. “Bloody fucking hell,” Ghost grumbles, leaning back in his chair. His head lolls back as he blinks upward, studying the ceiling overhead. The texture is popcorn, a creamy color, with a simple fan jutting down. One light bulb, probably a recent replacement. 

Fuck. He doesn’t need this shit. Not one bit. 

Five more weeks and he’ll be gone from here. 

Ghost rechecks his watch, feeling a bit peeved at the time. 1411. He has several more hours until he can leave all this work shit behind for the evening, and maybe catch a short walk before hunkering down for the night. He doesn’t like sitting down for too long; it causes him to become restless. Agitated. Overthinking.

He doesn’t want distractions. He doesn’t need ‘em. Distractions ruin work ethic; clouding up the mind while fucking up all sense of responsibility. Price will have his ass if he – somehow – becomes compromised. And he'll never hear the end of it from Johnny. 

Settling back into the paperwork, he decides that he won’t allow himself another second thinking about all that – the American airman and her pretty brown eyes and high cheekbones and first name. 

Something tells him that’s easier said than done. 

[fuzzkaizer]

Emmons - Riptone Fuzz

"..."Mfd. by Emmons Industries. Belleville, New Jersey"... the more famous Emmons brand was based out of Tennessee ... There's a few things you'll notice when looking inside the Riptone; 1. is that it's clearly an FZ-1A style fuzz. 2. the components match those found in other fuzzes from late 60s NY/NJ manufacturers, and 3. all of the boards have been cracked in half! ...

safe to assume the consistently broken pcb is a result of the switch being threaded directly through the board and then attached to the enclosure.

Just a handful of stomps from an over-excited delinquent fuzz fiend probably was enough to crack the board like we see here. But what's most surprising is that it apparently didn't affect the functionality at all???

While this is an obvious flaw, it is again though not super surprising coming from an electronics company that probably wasn't regularly making guitar equipment; and the poor design is also a possible reason why we don't see too many of these floating around nowadays. "

cred: tonemachinesblog.com

[commodorez]

How would one go about learning how to make something like the cactus?

Like prerequisites, older code, hardware stuff, etc.

The main prerequisites I can think of are being heavily interested in vintage computers, and having the drive to try and fail and then try again.

I started with building Grant Searle's design, borrowing from other working designs as I went. However, for the front panel? That's alot of time designing, learning, simulating in Logisim, and testing with physical logic gates to produce something 100% original and of my own design. I imagine most folks won't want to go to the trouble of designing an entire front panel state machine like I did.

The good news is that there are way more kits that can help teach the necessary skills than ever before! Most notably, Ben Eater's 6502 kit is a really great way to learn many of the things that I've put into practice here. He has a whole youtube video series associated with it, walking through concepts, construction, programming, etc. step by step. Even if you don't build one of his kits, watching them is an informative process. *I* learned alot, even after having built the Cactus.

If you're going the Z80 direction, the RC2014 series of kits can teach you plenty. There's also glitchworks kits in a few processor types, but those tend to be a bit more for the advanced user. There's the 1802 Membership Card but that's small and not really expandable. I could be here all day listing kits that can help teach and build up experience.

I should mention that I have a computer science degree in my back pocket, but learning logic gates or using assembly was only lightly touched on in the course of my studies. Most of the programming I do involved messing around in BASIC anyway.

I really didn't have a game plan for some of it, so alot of my learning process was trial and error. Alot of errors, in fact. Still making them, and learning from them. I also took the harder route to construction, since I didn't know how to use EDA tools for designing PCBs like KiCAD or Altium or Eagle (don't use Fritzing for the love of fuck).

Oh, one other thing I can recommend: reading through contemporary 1970s computing magazines like Byte (check the internet archive for back issues). There are all sorts of cool projects and ideas present that can really guide you. It doesn't hurt to have a copy of Don Lancaster's TTL Cookbook on hand (I think it's in PDF form online).

Finding a community to help you out is also a great idea. Even back in the 1970s, many folks who jump-started the home computer revolution had the Homebrew Computer Club to help them out. Community meetings to bounce ideas off of, and help one another through debugging are essential in my book -- you don't have to work in a vacuum. I've got a few places I've asked for help, most notably the Retrotech Crew discord server. I've had the benefit of friends who also have homebrewed designs like @techav, who have inspired me with their ideas, but helped me out with mine. In turn, as I've learned, I've been able to help out others.

Hopefully that answers your question. Keep 'em coming!

[ramblingsfromthytruly]

welcome to my blog~

hi! my name is mithi.

i post a lot of varied content on this blog but most of the common themes include content related to feminism, being queer, writing, poetry, aesthetics, my fav fandoms, etc.

dni if:

homophobic/lesbophobic

transphobe/terf

any kind of bigotry really

currently reading- jane eyre, girl in pieces & once upon a broken heart

currently watching- reign & dickinson

current fav artists- gracie abrams, lorde & chappell roan

fandoms i am in:

books- marauders/harry potter, percy jackson, six of crows, the seven husbands of evelyn hugo, solitaire, heartstopper, pride and prejudice

movies/shows- heartstopper, stranger things, reign, dickinson, lady bird, the edge of seventeen, young royals, little women, pride and prejudice, hunger games

about me:

i love literature, music & film (the holy trinity fr). i love reading, writing, dancing, singing, plants, art, maximalism, dark chocolate, paneer (my life fr), coffee, platonic love (underrated), pinterest (hands down best social media app), aesthetically pleasing college vlogs on youtube (very specific but they own my heart).

i am an 11th grader in india studying pcb+psychology.

i am an intj. a libra. fun fact: i was born exactly at 11:11 pm, if that matters to you.

i want to be a successful writer & research psychologist.

my youtube channel: @heyy.im_mithi

my (other actual non-tumblr) blog: mithisramblings.blogspot.com (name: ramblings of thy truly)

my ao3 account (i plan to solely write sapphic marauders content because we are starved of it. might dabble in a bit of jily & tedromeda. recently started a marylily fic!): heyy_im_mithi

my pinterest (it's on private until i turn 16 unfortunately): @heyy.im_mithi

[germanpostwarmodern]

Both the architecture of and the human being Oscar Niemeyer are very dear to my heart and so I was very positively surprised when I found the present German language book at an antiquarian bookshop for 5€: „Oscar Niemeyer - Selbstdarstellung, Kritiken, Oeuvre“, edited by Alexander Fils and published by Frölich & Kaufmann in 1982. It isn’t a monograph but rather a compilation of texts by Niemeyer about himself and his works, texts and criticisms by others and a rather interesting work catalogue. In view of the scarcity of German language literature about Niemeyer the compilation of mostly essays and articles makes total sense and provides rare insights into the architect‘s design principles as well as his personality. The latter shows in his deliberations about his relationship to communism and the Brazilian communist party PCB and again manifests his deeply humane and humble attitude to life. My personal highlight is a 1981 interview conducted by a German architecture journalist who tries to draw a connection between Niemeyer and German organic architects Hugo Häring and Hans Scharoun (both of whom Niemeyer has never heard of) and whom he gives a dry but hilarious runaround. To all my German readers: this book is a good value way to familiarize yourself with Niemeyer’s architecture, personality and design principles. Warmly recommended!

[alphian-hcs]

Idia totally cringes when Yuu busts out his cheap crowly supplied phone. Dude totally decides to give Yuu an upgrade because yeah they really do deserve better.

"You definitely gotta get an upgrade."

Let's be honest. Crowely gave Yuu a crappy flip phone and called it a day lmao. Also yes, musical reference in title because hehe musical make alphian brain go brr. Ngl, I forgot a lot of tech terms while writing this lmao.

----------------------------------------------

-Oh boy. oh boy oh boy. That modified third grade calculator will NOT do! If your going to be Idia's player 2 (platonically or romantically) He will never have you going out with that glorified PCB that seemed like it was always smoking

-Idia is already working away as soon as he see's the phone, making ides in his head before writing them down in a notebook or in his phone for when he arrives back to his dorm. He orders a high rated phone brand(rich ass-), and as soon as it arrives he begins his work on it adding his own modifiers on,making it run faster than a cheetah with sonic's powers.

-He would 100% add on some phone case with a favorite show, like the ones that glow and wirelessly charge the phone so that there is little to no need to charge it between classes. ----------------

Idia had just finished up the modification of the phone he had purchased, and wrapped it up in a box with a nice blue and black bow. Idia of course knew it wasn't Yuu's birthday or anything, but after seeing that somehow functioning electrical fire hazard in Yuu's hand he just couldn't stop thinking of it. Now that the gift was finished though, he had a smile on his face, knowing that this would be like getting a 100 exp booster for Yuu. Idia left his room, Ortho coming with for support, both brothers heading to Ramshackle, Idia fidgeting with his fiery hair as he walked, a few paces behind Ortho to be able to take time to compose himself.

When they arrived, Ortho rang the doorbell, a prolonged, broken chime ringing into the rundown house. Soon Yuu walked out, seeing the two Shrouds, smiling as they spoke. "oh? what brings you two? I thought Idia had a event." they said, taking out their Crowley supplied phone, making the tech-wiz cringe at it, before he nervously walked over to the prefect. "well...I saw that phone you had and thought.. I w-would get and make a b-better one for you.. I mean, that glorified Motorola is pretty terrible.. so, I modified this one." He said, handing the box to Yuu, a smile on his face as he watched the prefect open the box.

"Whoa- Idia this is so cool! How should I pay you back?" Yuu asked, looking to the male who held his hand up "no need-" he attempted to say, but Ortho cut him off with a request. "You can pay us back by continuing to be my big brother's friend! Whenever he's around you his serotonin levels increase tenfold!" He said with a smile, making Idia panic and pull his hood up and pull the tassels to close the opening and hide himself from the others, his face red from being exposed for enjoying a 'normie's' company.

[eleemosynecdoche]

Hecatia Lapislazuli's outfit is the subject of a lot of deserved memes, but please stop for a moment and consider what it would look like on a person. Look at where her skirt hangs down to, look at where her top's neckline is. Consider that she has a choker with chains attached to it on.

This outfit is a sexualized one, though the character isn't presented with a stylization that makes the sexuality direct. But she's really not wearing a lot of clothing at all, and her clothing is definitely on the sexier end of Goth/raver wear.

Now. Hecatia's got a few roles in Team Shanghai Alice productions. In Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, she shows up as the Extra Stage boss. As part of that, she talks in a fairly informal way, to contrast with her partner Junko, who speaks and dresses formally and somewhat archaically. This confuses many of the playable characters, and then Hecatia shifts to highly threatening language to open the boss fight.

In Visionary Fairies in Shrine, she shows up to essentially be Clownpiece's mom while Clownpiece thinks Hecatia is her boss or superior. In Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia, she shows up to represent an ideological position while reprimanding Aya, and also invoke Shin Megami Tensei's Chaos alignment. In Grimoire of Usami, she shows up with Junko as her +1... but those ships were already sailing.

So Hecatia is drawn in a sexy outfit and invoking an erotic fantasy of the goth girl with chains on her outfit that in our contemporary moment has been displaced by the "big titty goth gf". But she's also a character with multiple functional roles that aren't related to her dress. These roles put her in a position of dignity, and the narrative simply takes it as a given that she's worthy of respect.

So one thing that's going on with her is that she doesn't need to dress in a dignified or serious way to command dignity and respect. This is an important symbolic reflection of the line in her profile about being on a completely different level from anyone in Gensokyo or the Lunar Capital. She doesn't need to care about people judging her on appearances, because she can force them to treat her with respect, or just act regardless of their opinions. Another way of putting it is that Hecatia is so strong she's truly free to dress how she pleases without fear- which goes right into her appearance in Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia!

To contrast, Yukari sometimes wears an outfit that could be a dress and a mobcap, but could also be sleepwear, which we see in PCB when she was sleeping recently, but which also emphasizes that she's powerful enough (through structures if nothing else) to play with the boundaries of dressing inappropriately. But even she doesn't go for an outfit that's more than plausibly deniable.

Hecatia's sexy outfit also ties into other parts of her character, and without understanding that it's a sexy goth girl outfit, and that people don't tend to respect people wearing clubwear as serious thinkers, we miss that part of her character, and are maybe taken aback when we read her interview in Alternative Facts in Eastern Utopia.

Clothing, the social role that clothing communicates, and sexuality are pretty useful ways to characterize fictional characters, and ignoring them cheapens those characterizations.

[occasionaltouhou]

yukari outfit summary

basic purple dress (pcb/ssib): casual. home outfit. worn for chilling. just a little youkai girl. strategically used against the watatsukis to seem less professional (this worked)

advanced purple dress (wahh): Outfits Worn To Tantalise Your Ex

sage outfit (in/iamp/swr): dressed to impress. trying to intimidate whoever she's talking to at the time (as shown by its primary use being against eirin + tenshi). not yet reached its final form

advanced purple dress (fs/aocf/etc.): dressed to seriously impress (ironic given its primary use so far has been against kosuzu + the yorigamis). at some point in her time away she decided to make this outfit as big and ridiculous as possible (probably related to the other sages becoming active again)

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

According to “Mass Animal Deaths Heat up Fight To Permanently Halt SeaWorld Operations” by Inside the Magic, bird conservation organizations are literally begging SeaWorld to stop their fireworks shows because of how many native birds they’re killing. But go ahead keep acting like their rescue operations justify all the harm/trauma they caused to the wild cetaceans they captured and the wildlife they continue to put in harm’s way in the name of human entertainment. Using ur large platform to assuage ppl’s guilt about spending their money at seaworld *directly* perpetuates this harm. I don’t know how you call yourself a proponent of animal welfare and then support this mega corporation that puts profits above all else

Hi there it seems like you think that I support corporate SeaWorld and all the decisions it makes. I am against a lot of things that SeaWorld does.

This includes: setting off fireworks, building roller coasters instead of updating animal habitats and the cruel layoffs that they inflicted on their employees during COVID.

I agree with the letter put forward, San Diego Audubon did a great job documenting the very real impacts of fireworks on seabirds. Firework events like the 4th of July and New Years Eve are extremely stressful for all animals - as detailed in the letter there were also illegal fireworks along with the firework shows in the City of San Diego and SeaWorld.

SeaWorld stopping their fireworks shows in favour of something potentially less impactful like a drone show would be a great start, but fireworks shows - legal or illegal, would continue regardless. Whether that would reduce the impact or not remains to be seen, but I think SeaWorld should stop their firework shows.

The problem is, it is a corporate company that wants to give people want they want so they buy tickets. Guests like fireworks. People expect fireworks on the 4th of July, NYE ect. I personally think we need to evolve as a society and move away from fireworks in general but that’s not a popular opinion.

Now, to your point about impact on wild whale populations, there is certainly not enough data to conclude that populations were unable to recover from the captures.

You can see with this graph that the Southern Residents were able to recover their numbers after the capture periods, but unfortunately populations continued to decline due to other factors. This includes anthropogenic causes like boat traffic and decreasing food supply with increasing dam building and more efficient fishing methods to take more Chinook Salmon from the orcas. And ongoing effects of bioaccumulation of toxins like PCBs and DDTs.

Some scientists argue that the population decrease from capture resulted in less competition and increased survival rate. Others say that the impacts are still being felt today. There’s not exactly a consensus on it because it’s hard to measure the effects.

While I disagree with corporate SeaWorld and a lot of decisions they make, I will continue to support the work of SeaWorld’s team of marine mammal specialists and veterinarians. And support accredited facilities that are able to create positive welfare states for their animals, even if the conditions aren’t perfect. I have no issue with animals entertaining people as long as the animals have agency and choice and show positive welfare states.

Whether you like it or not SeaWorld just have more money and resources than most other facilities simply due to their ability to appeal to a wide demographic (including people who like fireworks) - that sells tickets. And yeah a portion of that goes to CEO salaries and stakeholders (not nearly enough goes to the workers). But having that luxury of that much money means getting high end diagnostic equipment, paying for medications, antibiotics, scans, developing new technologies to assist in rehab and rescue work, pay staff to work in shifts for standing in the stranding pool to hold up a baby dolphin.

That’s why they’re usually in the front lines of rescue work, often collaborating with other rescues. Because their resources are invaluable to the rescue and rehabilitation of marine animals.

These resources are also giving scientists the ability to collect baseline data and compare to wild populations - and develop technologies and test these with animals in human care before using it in field work.

I disagree with a black and white approach to animal welfare and find it to be detrimental in the long term. Welfare is an evolving state that is always in flux and depends on a variety of factors.

SeaWorld’s fireworks contributed to seabird deaths - but not acknowledging that even if SeaWorld stopped their fireworks, there would continue to be fireworks on the 4th of July that would continue to cause bird deaths isn’t helpful to protecting seabirds.

SeaWorld have rescued, rehabbed and released or provided a permanent home for over 40,000 animals. It was funded by the same company that also put on fireworks shows. The two facts can exist side by side. A company can cause harm while also creating positive change.

The reality of capitalism is that to rescue animals you need to have the resources to do so. People visit SeaWorld to ride roller coasters and ignore the animals (which I can never understand) - yet it is the ability to appeal to a wide demographic that makes money and that money is what can be used for incredibly important conservation and rescue projects.

However, I would still say all of that wouldn’t matter if the welfare of the animals in their care was extremely poor. Which, based on their ability to achieve multiple levels of high standard accreditation like AZA and other signs of positive welfare in basic observation , doesn’t seem to be the case.

I encourage anyone to try to take a more nuanced approach to animal welfare and never just accept something at face value. And if you don’t like SeaWorld, that’s okay! There’s a lot of ethical discussions to be had. But I can only convey the experience and knowledge that I have in both research, hands on practical cetacean welfare experience and general experience and understanding of how marine mammal facilities operate.

[yamayuandadu]

thank you for the reply and the information! I was curious how the other fox would fit in with PCB Extra's metatextual mention of Three Lands, but I hadn't even considered it might be three worlds and not three countries. this is neat

(Original post for context)

I forgot I left the response to this in my drafts, sorry. Luckily, this means I could update it with recently acquired knowledge when I found it again. Truth to be told, my point is less that the other fox is a better match, and more that Ran being Tamamo no Mae is one of these things which make sense at first glance, but the deeper you look into it, the less coherent it becomes.

This got much longer than I planned, so for organizational purposes let's refer to this post as Revenge of the "graveyard god", or why I don't think Ran is Tamamo no Mae. More under the cut.

The early Tamamo no Mae

The main point of connection between Tamamo no Mae and Ran are the nine tails, but that’s not even really a consistent part of the former's background. The oldest version of the story - which is really fun, the seduction section is pages upon pages of Tamamo and emperor Toba discussing esoteric Buddhism -  states that she was “an 800-year-old two-tailed fox from the Nasuno Plain in Shimotsuke Province”. Early depictions of her true form follow this pretty closely:

Nezu Museum of Art, via Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds. A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales

Kyoto University Rare Materials Digital Library

Suntory Museum of Art

As far as I am aware, the two tails are actually unique to her. Other foxes of note have either one tail or nine. While it does seem the belief in the number of tails growing with age is genuine rather than a modern misconception, it’s hardly central to fox folklore (I’ve seen the portmoneu “foxlore” at least once btw, it’s very funny). And, as I will outline later, it doesn’t even seem to be behind the idea of nine-tailed foxes in the first place. Anyway, the oldest version does provide Tamamo with more backstory, but it’s closer to presenting Shuten Dōji as a manifestation of Mara than to a straightforward “Tamamo is x under a pseudonym” popular today. As we learn, the two-tailed fox is in fact a reincarnation of a “graveyard god” (塚の神, Tsuka no Kami) from India, described in the apocryphal Humane Kings Sutra (it gets namedropped directly), likely originally composed in China.

How come? It all started when Kalmashapada, a prince of Devala in India, wanted to offer 1000 skulls of virtuous rulers to this deity because a suspicious “heretical” preacher convinced him it’s a good idea. After defeating and imprisoning 999 such kings, he encountered Shrutasoma, one of the previous incarnations of the historical Buddha, who managed to show him the error of his ways. All of the kings were released, and Kalmashapada was redeemed. The “graveyard god” was less than thrilled, and swore to keep reincarnating as a fox in kingdoms where Buddhism flourished to destroy it. We are told that happened many times, but only one past identity, that of Bao Si (Hōji), comes up. Obviously, eighth century BCE China was not exactly an area famous for Buddhist devotion, but that’s irrelevant here. We are told the endgame is not just to overthrow a righteous ruler, but also to become his replacement. Alas, Tamamo no Mae obviously fails at both of these goals. Still, points for trying.

The story does not provide the deity with a specific identity. However, Nobumi Iyanaga notes that in the referenced sutra he’s Mahakala (the original Makakaraten version, not the joyful Daikokuten). In East Asian Buddhism he is described as dwelling in the graveyards due to acting as both the chief of dakinis and their subduer. At the same time, Iyanaga argues in the context of the Tamamo no Mae story it can be argued he is either implicitly replaced by the dakini par excellence, Dakiniten (closely associated with foxes), or that the deity has no identity other than the fox one.

Later Tamamo developments

Two elements which are mainstays of modern retellings are missing from the oldest version, as you might have noticed. It doesn’t feature the Sesshōseki, which was only added later, seemingly as a way to promote Zen Buddhism, since this extension of the story casts a member of this school as the new protagonist. In the early variants Tamamo’s corpse was brought to the imperial treasury, the same one which shows up in a similar context in the tale of Shuten Dōji, and there is no indication she came back as a vengeful ghost, let alone that she repented and accepted Buddhism, as she does in some of the Sesshōseki variants.

The other difference is, as I already pointed out, the tails. The oldest depiction of a nine-tailed Tamamo no Mae I am aware of is Sekien’s. Based on a few papers I read it would appear textual variants of the story giving her nine tails might have been in circulation earlier, but that’s not reflected in any of the illustrated scrolls shown above. 

Sekien's nine-tailed Tamamo (wikimedia commons)

Sekien claims that Tamamo no Mae is one and the same as Daji (I’ll get back to her later), and specifies the latter was a nine-tailed fox. He cites Zhang Dingsi’s Langye Dai Zui Bian (浪挪代醉編, “Langye’s Substitute for Drunkenness: A Compilation”) as his source for this tidbit, but does not explain where does the conflation of the two foxes come from. In contrast with the elaborate reincarnation scheme from the older version, he states Daji simply flew across the sea to reach Japan, without reincarnating.

What is now essentially treated as the “definitive” version of the Tamamo no Mae story, and what cemented her image as a nine-tailed fox, only dates back to 1805. That’s when Ehon Sangoku Yōfuden (絵本三国妖婦伝; “Tales of Enchantresses in the Three Kingdoms”) finished publication. The author, Ranzan Takai (高井蘭山), was an enthusiast of neo-confucian thought, and he wanted to write a story highlighting the time honored confucian belief that dynasties are brought down by suspicious concubines. The real goal was somewhat broader, though -the story of Tamamo no Mae was essentially repurposed as a critique of the concept of women playing an important role in public life.

It needs to be noted here that it is not impossible that the original was already part of a political polemic. Arguments have been made that Tamamo is a fictional representation of Bifukomon-in, for instance. They are certainly linked to the same emperor, Toba.

Bifukomon-in (wikimedia commons)

However, while I would not rule this out altogether, it’s hard to deny the typical medieval penchant for reinterpreting Buddhist material feels more central to the story. It is ultimately a very elaborate twist on the Humane Kings Sutra first and foremost. It belongs to the same world as other fabulous tales about figures from distant Buddhist lands arriving in Japan, alongside the likes of the legend of emperor Suwa of Hadai or the medieval Amaterasu narrative involving Mara (stay tuned for my post about that one).

Ideological motivations aside, in Ranzan’s version an anonymous nine-tailed fox appears as Daji in China, Kayō in India (seemingly a leftover of the original “graveyard god” story; here the prince is convinced to carry out his evil plans by his concubine instead though), and finally Tamamo no Mae in Japan. He also gives a unique account of Tamamo’s arrival in Japan, as far as I am aware: in his novel, she was brought there by Kibi no Makibi, a famous historical envoy to China. This was not his first time as a literary character, a much earlier picture scroll about his adventures is pretty funny (I have Touhou ocs based on it), but I’ll save this discussion for another time.

Not quite Tamamo: the influence of Daji

Daji, as depicted by Hokusai (wikimedia commons)

Daji requires some further discussion. She was initially regarded simply as a non-supernatural wicked concubine, but came to be treated as a fox posing as a human by the Song period. According to Xiaofei Kang the oldest evidence for that comes from 1101, from a Japanese text presumably reflecting an already extant Chinese belief. By the Yuan period it became a commonly accepted view, with Quanxiang Pinghua (全相平話) specifically stating Daji had nine tails. Her fox-like image was finally cemented fully by popular novels in the Ming and Qing periods.

Since there was a preexisting tradition in which Daji was a human woman, a remedy was developed: the “real” Daji was possessed by a fox, who took her name and identity. Curiously, the fox component of her story is otherwise not very important, and some modern authors basically characterize it as “tacked on”: she is the quintessential evil concubine bringing kingdoms to ruin out of a sense of cruelty who just happens to be a fox, and her story doesn’t really depend on preexisting fox-related motifs. 

There are multiple accounts of Daji’s deeds, but the most famous one, and at the same time the most likely influence on Razan’s portrayal of her (and thus Tamamo), is Investiture of the Gods. However, he skips the origin attributed to her here: in the Chinese original, Daji is an agent of the goddess Nuwa, though she eventually overdoes it and is rebuked by her former boss for excessive cruelty. This doesn’t really fit well with Tamamo’s backstory, obviously; making her and Daji interchangeable was detrimental to both characters, I feel. A Chinese story dealing with Daji reincarnating does exist, but it’s not exactly similar. In the Ming novel Zhaoyang Qushi (昭陽趣事) she reincarnated as Zhao Hede, a concubine of emperor Cheng of Han. What happens next has been described as “pornographic entertainment enlivened by supernatural and historical costumes”. For more details, check out Rania Huntington’s book from the bibliography below.

Curiously, it is possible Daji was simultaneously an object of active cult, since there is a Song imperial edict outlawing the shrines dedicated to her, Wutong (a southern Chinese spirit who was believed to bring wealth and bewitch people, compared with foxes in the north) and “General Shi” (no clue who that might be, I’d hazard a guess one of the popular pacified vengeful spirit cults but don’t quote me on that). However, another contemporary source instead mentions the outlawing of temples of “fox kings”, so it might also mean that the name of Daji was applied by officials to an unrelated popular fox cult (“fox king” is a reasonably common appellation for supernatural foxes). Both regular and nine-tailed foxes are attested in such a context across history.

Early nine-tailed foxes

An early Chinese depiction of a nine-tailed fox (wikimedia commons)

The early portrayals of nine-tailed foxes are something I started looking into recently because of Ran’s freshly revealed connection to Yuuma: I figured it makes sense that she’d be in origin someone who belongs to the same world as the taotie.

Looking at the earliest Chinese sources, multiple nine-tailed foxes appear in legends about virtuous rulers like Tang, Wen or Yu the Great, essentially as generic good omens, without much fanfare. According to confucian commentaries from the Later Han period, the nine tails were understood as a sign a given emperor will have many descendants. The exception from this generally positive tendency is the Classic of Mountains and Seas, where the nine-tailed fox is described as “man-eating” (something very uncommon in Chinese fox literature). However, it also doesn’t exactly get more spotlight than the other creatures. It’s also treated as a separate animal from regular foxes, not as a particularly old fox. You could say it is to the fox what a bai ze is to an ox, I think. Visual arts add further specimens: the source of this discussion, the nine-tailed fox attendant of Xi Wangmu, later seemingly “decanonized”, and another belonging to the entourage of Zhong Kui. Both of these are hardly eminent and seem to fit the mold of auspicious omens. In Zhong Kui’s case the fox is in one case listed alongside the bai ze which only strengthens this impression. However, it also makes sense that its inclusion would reflect Zhong Kui’s role as a demon queller: he is often portrayed with conquered demons as servants, after all.

Conclusions

To sum up: ultimately it just doesn’t seem nine-tailed foxes are quite as big of a deal as popculture makes them seem, and nine tails are neither exclusive nor innate to Tamamo no Mae. Since that’s the only real point of connection between her and Ran save for a throwaway PCB line which leads to no further references, I maintain there’s no strong case for identifying them with each other, especially since there is no shortage of other candidates. 

There’s also the fact that, Daji aside, most other nine-tailed foxes are largely blank slates you can do anything with, while Tamamo has many fairly unique characteristics which would be wasted by randomly slapping her name on Ran, in my opinion. To be fair, ZUN does occasionally make similar mistakes - Yoshika is the main example (remember, the actual legend about Yoshika’s immortality claims he decided to pursue eternal life after having a thrilling affair and has him call himself “strongest madman under heaven”).

I would personally argue ZUN himself probably did not feel strongly about who Ran is supposed to actually be when he originally came up with her, though. None of her spellcards reference Tamamo no Mae. Or any other fox identified with her, for that matter. They do have a more or less consistent theme, but that theme is, broadly speaking, “magic arts”, from onmyodo (Shikigami "Banquet of the Twelve General Gods"), through shugendo (Illusion God "Descent of Izuna-Gongen", Shikigami "The Protection of Zenki and Goki", Superhuman "Soaring En no Ozunu") and esoteric Buddhism (Shikigami "Channeling Dakiniten", Esoteric Sign "Odaishi-sama's Secret Key"), to contemporary stage magic (Shiki Brilliance "Princess Tenko -Illusion-"). In other words, I do not think canon actually strongly supports any specific option. 

I will admit I’m biased but personally I think picking a different fox makes it much easier to accommodate Yuuma and their shared animal realm past, the most thrilling Ran development in ages. As for Tamamo, I do think she would be fun to see in Touhou, but preferably as her own character - with two tails, if possible.

Bibliography

Bernard Faure, The Power of Denial. Buddhism, Purity, and Gender

Rania Huntington, Alien Kind. Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative

Nobumi Iyanaga, Under the Shadow of the Great Śiva: Tantric Buddhism and its Influence on Japanese Mediaeval Culture

Idem, Dākinī in: Brill's Encyclopedia of Buddhism (vol. 2)

Xiaofei Kang, The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China

Laura K. Nüffer, Lady Tamamo in: Keller Kimbrough and Haruo Shirane (eds.), Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds. A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales

Sumiko Sekiguchi, Gender in the Meiji Renovation: Confucian 'Lessons for Women' and the Making of Modern Japan

Chun-Yi Joyce Tsai, Imagining the Supernatural Grotesque: Paintings of Zhong Kui and Demons in the Late Southern Song (1127-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) Dynasties

[sukimas]

always rember

the idea for yukari's name being specifically what it is came up in the middle of pcb's development (after trial 0.09a.) as far as we know no other touhou characters (barring of course ran) have had their name changed to such an extent between the demo and the final release (some have had minor character or pronunciation changes, but not full name alterations.) this is The Beginning Of The Timeline. guess what released just after pcb's full version?