#Law Practice Management Platform

[razorsignclm]

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[gootarts]

as of 8/3, the most recently updated version of this post is here (it's a reblog of this exact post with more info added)

as a lot of you know, limbus company recently fired its CG illustrator for being a feminist, at 11 pm, via phone call, after a bunch of misogynists walked into the office earlier that day and demanded she be fired. on top of this, as per korean fans, her firing went against labor laws---in korea, you must have your dismissal in writing.

the korean fandom on twitter is, understandably, going scorched earth on project moon due to this. there's a lot currently going on to protest the decision, so i'm posting a list here of what's going on for those who want to limit their time on elon musk's $44 billion midlife crisis impulse purchase website (if you are on twitter, domuk is a good person to follow, as they translate important updates to english). a lot of the links are in korean, but generally they play nicely with machine translators. this should be current as of 8/2.

Statements condemning the decision have been issued by The Gyeonggi Youth Union and IT Union.

A press conference at the Gyeonggido Assembly will occur on 8/3, with lawmakers of the Gyeonggi province (where Project Moon is based) in attendance. This appears driven by the leader of the Gyeonggi Youth Union.

The vice chairman of the IT union--who has a good amount of experience with labor negotiations like these--has expressed strong support for the artist and is working to get media coverage due to the ongoing feminist witch hunts in the gaming industry. Project Moon isn't union to my knowledge, but he's noted that he's taken on nonunion companies such as Netmarble (largest mobile game dev in South Korea) by getting the issue in front of the National Assembly (Korea's congress).

Articles on the incident published in The Daily Labor News, Korean Daily, multiple articles on Hankyoreh (one of which made it to the print edition), and other news outlets.

Segments about the termination on the MBN 7 o' clock news and MBC's morning news

Comments by Youth Union leaders about looking into a loan made to Project Moon via Devsisters Ventures, a venture capital firm. Tax money from Gyeonggi province was invested in Devsisters in 2017, and in 2021, Devsisters gave money to Project Moon. The Gyeonggi Youth Union is asking why hard-earned tax money was indirectly given to a company who violates ESG (environmental, social and governance) principles.

Almost nonstop signage truck protests outside Project Moon's physical office during business hours until 8/22 or the company makes a statement. This occurs alongside a coordinated hashtag campaign to get the issue trending on Twitter in Korea. The signage campaign was crowd-funded in about 3 hours.

A full boycott of the Limbus Company app, on both mobile and PC (steam) platforms. Overseas fans are highly encouraged to participate, regardless if whether they're F2P or not. Not opening the app at all is arguably the biggest thing any one person can do to protest the decision, as the app logs the number of accounts that log on daily. For a new gacha such as Limbus, a high number of F2P daily active users, but a small number of paying users is often preferable to having a smaller userbase but more paying users. If the company sees the number of daily users remain stable, they will likely decide to wait out any backlash rather than apologize.

Digging up verified reviews from previous employees regarding the company's poor management practices

Due to the firing, the Leviathan artist has posted about poor working conditions when making the story. As per a bilingual speaker, they were working on a storyboard revision, and thought 'if I ran into the street right now and got hit by a car and died, I wouldn't have to keep working.' They contacted Project Moon because they didn't want their work to be like that, and proposed changes to serialization/reduction in amount of work per picture/to build up a buffer of finished images (they did not have any buffer while working on Leviathan to my knowledge). They were shut out, and had to suck it up and accept the situation.

Hamhampangpang has a 'shrine' section of the restaurant for fans to leave fan-created merch and other items. They also allow the fans to take this merch back if they can prove it's theirs. Fans are now doing just that.

To boost all of the above, a large number of Korean fanartists with thousands of followers have deleted their works and/or converted their accounts from fanart accounts to accounts supporting the protests. Many of them are bilingual, and they're where I got the majority of this information.

[note 1: there's a targeted english-language disinformation campaign by the website that started the hate mob. i have read the artist's tweets with machine translation, and they're talked about in the second hankyoreh article linked above: nowhere does she express any transphobic or similarly awful beliefs. likewise, be wary of any claims that she supported anything whose description makes you raise eyebrows--those claims are likely in reference to megalia, a korean feminist movement. for information on that, i'd recommend the NPR/BBC articles below and this google drive link of english-language scholarly papers on them. for the love of god don't get your information about a feminist movement from guys going on witch hunts for feminists.]

[note 2: i've seen a couple people argue that the firing was for the physical safety of the employees, citing the kyoani incident in japan. as per this korean fan, most fans there strongly do not believe this was the case. we have english-translated transcripts of the meeting between the mob and project moon; the threats the mob was making were to......brand project moon as a feminist company online. yes, really. male korean gamers aren't normal about feminism, and there's been an ongoing witch hunt for feminists in the industry since about 2016, something you see noted in both the labor union statements. both NPR and the BBC this phenomenon to gamergate, and i'd say it's a pretty apt comparison.]

let me know if anything needs correction or if anything should be added.

[universalitgirlsblog2]

💗🌺YOU DON'T LIKE YOURSELF? CREATE A NEW VERSION OF YOURSELF💗🌺

💗INTRODUCTION

The world needs to accept as you are. no ! The world does not owe you anything. People do not owe you anything. We are changing everyday , we are always trying to improve ourselves. No person is the same person as he or she was from the day that they were born. Everything will be okay when you make it okay. Your life is in your hands. Nobody is coming to save you. Not your mom , your dad , your spouse , your children etc. You want your life to change? You have to change.

🌺CREATE ANOTHER VERSION OF YOURSELF ( ALTER EGO)

Beyonce says that whenever she goes on stage she is not Beyonce , she is Sasha Fierce. David Goggins grew up in poverty, gained alot of weight but then he lost weight and ran marathons. They all say to create a new version of yourself.

Liz said that she is lazy , doesn't like attention which comes from social media and stay her in bed all day but all this will get her nowhere so she created a new version. Somebody that is confident , uses her platform , goes after her goals , gets up and goes to gym and somebody with a very hard mindset and tough skin . You need to create a tough skin especially if you are an influencer or a celebrity.

If you start acting like your alter ego , you will become like her. Ask yourself . What does the higher version of yourself look like ? How does she / he look like ? What is she / he wearing ? Who do they date ? What is their career ? How do they spend their time ? What is their hairstyle ?

💗START TAKING SMALL STEPS TOWARDS GREATNESS

Before doing anything , ask yourself , will my highest version do this? If you are eating sugary food, ask yourself If your highest version would eat that dessert. If you don't feel like going to the gym , ask yourself If your highest version would skip gym or go to gym.

🌺WHAT'S YOUR PASSION/ BEST CAREER OPPORTUNITY?

Find your own passion . No one can tell you what your passion is , you need to find it .

God gives us passion because that's what we are supposed to do.

If you have no idea about your passion , what am I really good at ? Every single person is good at something . It might be as small as cooking, managing team or very much into social media.

💗GET HONEST WITH YOURSELF/ STOP SUGAR-COATING

You can't be always kind to yourself, sometimes you need a reality check . Also , ask yourself what your best version of yourself would do ? Go for walk. Listen to podcast.

🌺PRACTICE THE LAW OF ASSUMPTION AND TRUST GOD/THE UNIVERSE

Talk to God as if he is your best friend. Ask God and the universe for the things you want. Don't expect help if you don't ask for help. God puts people in our life to help us , to upgrade us.

💗LET GO OF TRYING TO CONTROL AND START TRUSTING THAT IT WILL HAPPEN.

Ask once , be specific and practice gratitude before asking. Start assuming like the world is designed for you to succeed .

🌺GET INTO THE MINDSET OF : WHAT WOULD THE HIGHEST VERSION OF MYSELF DO ?

You walk into a room , you have a meeting or a presentation. You feel nervous. Ask yourself : what would the highest version of myself do ? Shoulders back , walk into the room and start talking. Wherever you go , think that everyone is in love with you , it will make you confident.

You have to tell yourself affirmations . Look into the mirror and say " I am powerful . I am amazing. I am going to kill this day ." Ask God to help you and stand by me .

💗ACCEPT THAT RECOVERY IS NOT LINEAR AND BE GRATEFUL FOR THE BAD DAYS.

It takes accountability. Going through the progress of looking at yourself differently.

🌺FALL IN LOVE WITH THE PROGRESS , NOT THE GOAL.

Know that the bad day is a blessing. How will we appreciate good days if we have no bad days ?

If you want an expensive watch , the watch itself doesn't fulfill you , it's the process towards the watch & the anticipation. If you want to lose weight , going to gym regularly and seeing the scale going down, Feeling healthier and better. That is the process. That is happiness.

💗STOP TALKING ABOUT IT AND START ACTUALLY DOING IT

Do not tell anyone about your ambitions .Show them what you are doing .

If you tell big dreams to small minded people , they will never support you because they do not understand. They have not done it themselves

🌺DON'T TALK ABOUT IT UNTIL IT IS DONE.

The big issue with people is that they want to talk before it happened. Why are you putting evil eye on yourself?

" What people don't know they can't ruin "

Be private. You never know who is praying for your downfall.

Don't talk about things you want to accomplish before you accomplished them.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Demon-haunted computers are back, baby

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

As a science fiction writer, I am professionally irritated by a lot of sf movies. Not only do those writers get paid a lot more than I do, they insist on including things like "self-destruct" buttons on the bridges of their starships.

Look, I get it. When the evil empire is closing in on your flagship with its secret transdimensional technology, it's important that you keep those secrets out of the emperor's hand. An irrevocable self-destruct switch there on the bridge gets the job done! (It has to be irrevocable, otherwise the baddies'll just swarm the bridge and toggle it off).

But c'mon. If there's a facility built into your spaceship that causes it to explode no matter what the people on the bridge do, that is also a pretty big security risk! What if the bad guy figures out how to hijack the measure that – by design – the people who depend on the spaceship as a matter of life and death can't detect or override?

I mean, sure, you can try to simplify that self-destruct system to make it easier to audit and assure yourself that it doesn't have any bugs in it, but remember Schneier's Law: anyone can design a security system that works so well that they themselves can't think of a flaw in it. That doesn't mean you've made a security system that works – only that you've made a security system that works on people stupider than you.

I know it's weird to be worried about realism in movies that pretend we will ever find a practical means to visit other star systems and shuttle back and forth between them (which we are very, very unlikely to do):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

But this kind of foolishness galls me. It galls me even more when it happens in the real world of technology design, which is why I've spent the past quarter-century being very cross about Digital Rights Management in general, and trusted computing in particular.

It all starts in 2002, when a team from Microsoft visited our offices at EFF to tell us about this new thing they'd dreamed up called "trusted computing":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The big idea was to stick a second computer inside your computer, a very secure little co-processor, that you couldn't access directly, let alone reprogram or interfere with. As far as this "trusted platform module" was concerned, you were the enemy. The "trust" in trusted computing was about other people being able to trust your computer, even if they didn't trust you.

So that little TPM would do all kinds of cute tricks. It could observe and produce a cryptographically signed manifest of the entire boot-chain of your computer, which was meant to be an unforgeable certificate attesting to which kind of computer you were running and what software you were running on it. That meant that programs on other computers could decide whether to talk to your computer based on whether they agreed with your choices about which code to run.

This process, called "remote attestation," is generally billed as a way to identify and block computers that have been compromised by malware, or to identify gamers who are running cheats and refuse to play with them. But inevitably it turns into a way to refuse service to computers that have privacy blockers turned on, or are running stream-ripping software, or whose owners are blocking ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

After all, a system that treats the device's owner as an adversary is a natural ally for the owner's other, human adversaries. The rubric for treating the owner as an adversary focuses on the way that users can be fooled by bad people with bad programs. If your computer gets taken over by malicious software, that malware might intercept queries from your antivirus program and send it false data that lulls it into thinking your computer is fine, even as your private data is being plundered and your system is being used to launch malware attacks on others.

These separate, non-user-accessible, non-updateable secure systems serve a nubs of certainty, a remote fortress that observes and faithfully reports on the interior workings of your computer. This separate system can't be user-modifiable or field-updateable, because then malicious software could impersonate the user and disable the security chip.

It's true that compromised computers are a real and terrifying problem. Your computer is privy to your most intimate secrets and an attacker who can turn it against you can harm you in untold ways. But the widespread redesign of out computers to treat us as their enemies gives rise to a range of completely predictable and – I would argue – even worse harms. Building computers that treat their owners as untrusted parties is a system that works well, but fails badly.

First of all, there are the ways that trusted computing is designed to hurt you. The most reliable way to enshittify something is to supply it over a computer that runs programs you can't alter, and that rats you out to third parties if you run counter-programs that disenshittify the service you're using. That's how we get inkjet printers that refuse to use perfectly good third-party ink and cars that refuse to accept perfectly good engine repairs if they are performed by third-party mechanics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

It's how we get cursed devices and appliances, from the juicer that won't squeeze third-party juice to the insulin pump that won't connect to a third-party continuous glucose monitor:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

But trusted computing doesn't just create an opaque veil between your computer and the programs you use to inspect and control it. Trusted computing creates a no-go zone where programs can change their behavior based on whether they think they're being observed.

The most prominent example of this is Dieselgate, where auto manufacturers murdered hundreds of people by gimmicking their cars to emit illegal amount of NOX. Key to Dieselgate was a program that sought to determine whether it was being observed by regulators (it checked for the telltale signs of the standard test-suite) and changed its behavior to color within the lines.

Software that is seeking to harm the owner of the device that's running it must be able to detect when it is being run inside a simulation, a test-suite, a virtual machine, or any other hallucinatory virtual world. Just as Descartes couldn't know whether anything was real until he assured himself that he could trust his senses, malware is always questing to discover whether it is running in the real universe, or in a simulation created by a wicked god:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/28/descartes-was-an-optimist/#uh-oh

That's why mobile malware uses clever gambits like periodically checking for readings from your device's accelerometer, on the theory that a virtual mobile phone running on a security researcher's test bench won't have the fidelity to generate plausible jiggles to match the real data that comes from a phone in your pocket:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/google-play-malware-used-phones-motion-sensors-to-conceal-itself/

Sometimes this backfires in absolutely delightful ways. When the Wannacry ransomware was holding the world hostage, the security researcher Marcus Hutchins noticed that its code made reference to a very weird website: iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com. Hutchins stood up a website at that address and every Wannacry-infection in the world went instantly dormant:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#the-matrix

It turns out that Wannacry's authors were using that ferkakte URL the same way that mobile malware authors were using accelerometer readings – to fulfill Descartes' imperative to distinguish the Matrix from reality. The malware authors knew that security researchers often ran malicious code inside sandboxes that answered every network query with fake data in hopes of eliciting responses that could be analyzed for weaknesses. So the Wannacry worm would periodically poll this nonexistent website and, if it got an answer, it would assume that it was being monitored by a security researcher and it would retreat to an encrypted blob, ceasing to operate lest it give intelligence to the enemy. When Hutchins put a webserver up at iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com, every Wannacry instance in the world was instantly convinced that it was running on an enemy's simulator and withdrew into sulky hibernation.

The arms race to distinguish simulation from reality is critical and the stakes only get higher by the day. Malware abounds, even as our devices grow more intimately woven through our lives. We put our bodies into computers – cars, buildings – and computers inside our bodies. We absolutely want our computers to be able to faithfully convey what's going on inside them.

But we keep running as hard as we can in the opposite direction, leaning harder into secure computing models built on subsystems in our computers that treat us as the threat. Take UEFI, the ubiquitous security system that observes your computer's boot process, halting it if it sees something it doesn't approve of. On the one hand, this has made installing GNU/Linux and other alternative OSes vastly harder across a wide variety of devices. This means that when a vendor end-of-lifes a gadget, no one can make an alternative OS for it, so off the landfill it goes.

It doesn't help that UEFI – and other trusted computing modules – are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it a felony to publish information that can bypass or weaken the system. The threat of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine means that UEFI and other trusted computing systems are understudied, leaving them festering with longstanding bugs:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva

Here's where it gets really bad. If an attacker can get inside UEFI, they can run malicious software that – by design – no program running on our computers can detect or block. That badware is running in "Ring -1" – a zone of privilege that overrides the operating system itself.

Here's the bad news: UEFI malware has already been detected in the wild:

https://securelist.com/cosmicstrand-uefi-firmware-rootkit/106973/

And here's the worst news: researchers have just identified another exploitable UEFI bug, dubbed Pixiefail:

https://blog.quarkslab.com/pixiefail-nine-vulnerabilities-in-tianocores-edk-ii-ipv6-network-stack.html

Writing in Ars Technica, Dan Goodin breaks down Pixiefail, describing how anyone on the same LAN as a vulnerable computer can infect its firmware:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/new-uefi-vulnerabilities-send-firmware-devs-across-an-entire-ecosystem-scrambling/

That vulnerability extends to computers in a data-center where the attacker has a cloud computing instance. PXE – the system that Pixiefail attacks – isn't widely used in home or office environments, but it's very common in data-centers.

Again, once a computer is exploited with Pixiefail, software running on that computer can't detect or delete the Pixiefail code. When the compromised computer is queried by the operating system, Pixiefail undetectably lies to the OS. "Hey, OS, does this drive have a file called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope." "Hey, OS, are you running a process called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope."

This is a self-destruct switch that's been compromised by the enemy, and which no one on the bridge can de-activate – by design. It's not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.

There are models for helping your computer bust out of the Matrix. Back in 2016, Edward Snowden and bunnie Huang prototyped and published source code and schematics for an "introspection engine":

https://assets.pubpub.org/aacpjrja/AgainstTheLaw-CounteringLawfulAbusesofDigitalSurveillance.pdf

This is a single-board computer that lives in an ultraslim shim that you slide between your iPhone's mainboard and its case, leaving a ribbon cable poking out of the SIM slot. This connects to a case that has its own OLED display. The board has leads that physically contact each of the network interfaces on the phone, conveying any data they transit to the screen so that you can observe the data your phone is sending without having to trust your phone.

(I liked this gadget so much that I included it as a major plot point in my 2020 novel Attack Surface, the third book in the Little Brother series):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/

We don't have to cede control over our devices in order to secure them. Indeed, we can't ever secure them unless we can control them. Self-destruct switches don't belong on the bridge of your spaceship, and trusted computing modules don't belong in your devices.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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/2024/01/17/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

Image: Mike (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stillwellmike/15676883261/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[charmedreincarnation]

Hey, guys! I've been receiving a ton of messages in response to my last post. It's reminding me of how I first discovered shifting. I feel like doing a little story time since Ive just passed the three-year mark of my discovery, and I've been reminiscing with friends about it.

I remember being in a very dark place when I stumbled upon shifting. I was depressed, and very suicidal. Yet, there was this unshakeable optimism inside me that I was meant for an extraordinary life. Despite my mental state, I had a lot of knowledge of subliminals and the law of attraction (-_-). These gave me hope, but they weren't enough tbh. I didn't want to attract my dream life through practicing gratitude or becoming a magnet for my desires or whatever. Nor did I want to have to listen to subliminals for years on end to achieve my goals. My list of desires was so long, and I needed everything to change that going step by step and waiting years for each one to manifest just wasn't feasible.

But I refused to give up. One day, after a particularly hard day of being sad per usual, I searched on Quora for something like "fastest most powerful subliminals on YouTube ever" (Y’all 😭😭). Among the recommended sub creators, I found a video called "Desired Life: Reality Shifting". The description promised everything I had ever wanted: waking up with all your desires fulfilled permanently in short. It piqued my curiosity so much. Could I really just wake up with my dream life, family, house, wealth, all based on my scripts and imagination?

Growing up, I was a heavy maladaptive daydreamer. From ages 10-17, I created alternate lives in my head, telling myself I would go there someday. I was always doing SATs (State Akin to Sleep), and I think that's what kept me from ending it all. I was constantly in the wish fulfilled state, even though I didn't know what that was at the time.

Back to my story, I went into the comments of that video and came across a guy who claimed that after a week of using this subliminal, he woke up with a new life as a multi-millionaire living in his dream penthouse. I messaged him, and he gave me his Instagram which showcased his luxurious life. He had what seemed like a perfect relationship, he was very attractive, had so many cars, and travelled 24/7 while having a six figures amount of followers. He was living proof that this wasn't just scripting. Also the law of attraction community is known for their mad expensive coaching.. like hundreds of dollars per hour for questions and he was answering it all for free something I didn’t see the law of attraction community. And I talked to him for hours! He never got mad, he had proof, and he was kind, proof and the behavior of someone who really had mastered the art of life.

After our conversation, I spent the next couple of months doing research. I found numerous stories about glitches in the matrix, accidental shifting, people entering parallel realities, and eventually, shifting communities on platforms like Amino and Reddit. It was stuff I already believed in and did in my imagination; I just didn’t know there was a term for it.

Then I got reminded of a memory that I had seriously repressed bc it was so fucking weird. When I was 6 and my brother was 3, we were absolutely obsessed with dodo birds. One day, we were outside playing, and on god time seemed to stop. Out of nowhere, a dodo bird appeared. I know you’re probably like “maya be so fr rn you were a kid” but no, This wasn't just our young imaginations running wild - there was a bird that was huge, dinosaur-like, exactly how dodos are described in books and pictures we had.

Then things got weirder. Suddenly it started raining eggs. Big, large eggs everywhere it was so gross and my brother and I were a mess. We were young, sure, but not stupid. We knew this wasn't normal. My brother and I rushed inside to tell our dad. When I managed to drag him outside, he was furious, accusing me of throwing eggs everywhere. To this day, he tells the story of the time I "trashed the backyard with eggs." And every time, I'm like, "Dad, where would I get that many eggs?" We didn’t have eggs but so he assumed I stole them and we went inside for hours and it was magically cleaned. So he also tells the story of how responsible I am and how I took accountability for my actions even as a child. I didn’t clean that shit bro and I tell him that too and he just laughs it makes me so mad.

My brother, who knows I'm into reality shifting (though he doesn’t really believe in it), can't explain that day either. He often shrugs it off as a "glitch in the matrix," which honestly, well no duh it is a shift dummie. He does believe in manifesting but only bc he has seen me use it and he experiences the good things I manifest as well. They’re the same thing anyways but that isn’t the point

The reason I'm bringing up this bizarre childhood memory is because during my months of research into shifting, I found countless stories of accidental shifts, people entering the void, entering parallel universes, time glitches, examples of the Mandela effect first hand, glitches in the matrix and etc. It was like uncovering a myriad of experiences that confirmed what I already believed: we can change and choose our reality. I just didn’t know the phenomena had a name. Obviously in the future I came across other things like the law of assumption, the void state, etc etc but this was where it started.

I wish I had saved all those fascinating stories, posts, and blogs. I might go back and compile everything I found because they were so real and enlightening. It will probably take forever tho if I do choose to do that, but I think it's worth sharing.

In the meantime, check out this accounts of accidental shifts that my friend shared with me this account https://instagram.com/tessicavision?igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA== based off the Glitch in the Matrix subreddit which is also a goldmine of people experiencing similar phenomena. It helped me make sense of my own experiences and might do the same for you.

I don’t want this to be too long and I already got to the point I think! but regardless stay curious and realize you’re really not that special. I mean ofc you are, i mean this is not some tumblr thing teens girls discovered or created and isn’t even limited to “spiritually/manifesting inclined people” I think at the beginning of my journey people talking about accidental shifts and such, inspired me more than purposeful success stories because they really have no reason to lie and they were looking for answers just like I was.

[illdowhatiwantthanks]

Panic! At the DA's Office

Casey Novak x fem!reader Warnings: suicidal ideation, mental health struggle, anxiety/depression, panic attack, established relationship, fluff forever, some explicit language Word count: 2k

Summary: You're supposed to be meeting your girlfriend, Casey, for lunch, but prepping for the bar exam has you in an anxious spiral. You try to hide it, but it's hard to pretend you're okay when you're with Casey.

You stood on the subway platform, greasy Shake Shack takeout bags tucked under your arm. You'd told Casey you'd bring her lunch, and you were a woman of your word. Even though the bar exam was two weeks away. Even though you'd written so many practice essays you'd had to get a wrist splint for the cramps. Even though you were practically drowning in information about constitutional law, civil procedure, torts, contracts. You were exhausted from studying, and it felt like it was all for nothing. The more you studied, the more things seemed to get jumbled up in your mind. The more you'd stare at the page and the words would stare back, shifting and writhing until they meant nothing.

With each practice test, you felt less confident. As the day of the exam got closer and closer, your anxiety grew and grew. And you were so good at hiding it. You had to be good at it, or else how would you go on? How would the world keep on spinning, and you with it? Sometimes you wished it wouldn't. Not forever, not for always. You just wished that, for a little while, everything would stop. That just for a little while, no one would need or expect anything from you and you could just be. Or not be, maybe.

As you stood on the platform, waiting for the subway that would take you to the DA's office and your girlfriend you thought, briefly–as you sometimes did at your lowest–how easy it would be to jump. It would be so easy, so fast. But you had the warm food in your hands. You had Casey's milkshake. She loved milkshakes. And she would be so sad. It was always the thought of Casey's heartbreak that stopped you. Or imagining your dad crying. Imagining your parents having to tell your siblings what had happened.

You felt the rush of the subway as it sped past you and exhaled deeply. The moment was over. At least for now. You took a seat and did your best to steel yourself to see Casey. She was excellent at reading you, and you needed to be unreadable today. The last thing you wanted to do was worry her.

You walked the last bit of your journey in the freezing cold, appreciating the way the wind stung your eyes. It brought you out of yourself.

You saw Casey through the window before she saw you, and your heart surged. Just seeing her made you feel better. Not all the way better, but at least a little better. You knocked at her open door, and the look on her face when she saw you made your heart soar.

"Y/N!" she called, waving you in and shutting a notebook.

You were quiet. You didn't trust yourself to speak, afraid you might start crying. The downside of feeling so safe with Casey was that your usual ability to wall up your emotions was significantly impaired with her. You leaned down to kiss her quickly, and she wrapped her arms around your waist, burying her face in your chest.

"This case is killing me," she said as you pulled up a chair, divvying up the food. "I mean, the evidence they've given me is absolute shit. It's always fucking Stabler jumping the gun, and now I have to clean it up. Typical white man. So I think I'm gonna try..."

You let Casey ramble, grateful to hear her voice, to hear about her day, to have the excuse of food in your mouth to simply nod absentmindedly. But you couldn't manage to eat much, mostly pushing ketchup around with your fries and trying to white-knuckle through the panic rising in your chest. Your heart pumped faster and faster, and you were trying so hard to breathe normally, even though you felt like you were suffocating.

"Y/N?" Casey said, snapping you out of it.

"What?" Your voice was shaky, and you avoided her eyes. If she saw your eyes, she'd know.

"I just asked how bar prep was going..." She looked you over, furrowing her eyebrows. "Are you okay?"

You needed to breathe before you could speak, but when you opened your mouth to try, your breath hitched, hiccuping and separating into hyperventilation.

"Y– yes," you replied, clearly not okay, as tears pricked at the corners of your eyes and your breath came in short gasps. It was as if all the anxiety of the last few days, all you'd bottled up and kept at bay, had come flooding in all at once, knocking the air out of you.

"Okay, well, that's obviously a lie," Casey observed, standing quickly to close the blinds and lock the door. She sighed as she sat back down, mentally beating herself up for not noticing that something was off when you came in.

"Come here, honey." She pulled your chair toward her, grabbing your clenched fists in her hands and forcing them flat.

You were rocking and hyperventilating at this point. Your heartbeat was so fast and loud it was almost all you could hear. If you hadn't had panic attacks before, you would have thought you were dying. You knew better: you were dying, but only on the inside.

Casey pressed her forehead to yours and breathed slowly, in and out, in and out.

"Breathe with me, sweetheart, come on," she said softly.

"I– I c-can't."

"Yes, you can, honey. Come on."

You took a big, shaky breath and let it out, coughing.

"That's it, baby, that's it. Just keep going. Just breathe."

After what felt like an eternity, your heartbeat started to slow. You paired your breathing with Casey's, shaking slightly. She ran her thumbs over your knuckles in rhythm with your breath, and you felt an icy calm settle over you, the same calm that comes after an adrenaline rush, all that hot terror seeping away.

You exhaled and lifted your head a bit, avoiding Casey's eyes.

"Sorry."

She shook her head, fixing your hair and wiping away that tears that lingered on the bottoms of your eyelids.

"Don't be sorry."

But you were. You were so sorry. Your panic attack might have subsided, but the sense of being a burden had only increased. You wanted to sit on Casey's lap. You wanted her arms around you. You wanted her to tell you that she loved you, that she needed you, that you weren't too much for her. But all of that felt like too much to ask for, so you just sat, arms wrapped around yourself.

"Will you tell me what's going on?" Casey asked gently.

You felt more tears coming and dashed them away.

"It's just everything," you said, the words spilling out in a flood. "I'm doing terrible on the practice exams, Casey. Terrible. I'm gonna fail the fucking bar exam, and then what!? What was it all even for? I just can't do it! I can't! Every time I sit down to study I feel like I'm gonna die, and I can't start because I'm too anxious, but then I don't study and I just get more anxious. I'm just– I'm not good enough!"

Your voice broke, and Casey's heart broke with it.

"I'm not good enough for you, and I– I don't want to do this. It's not worth it, I'm not worth it." You grasped your hair and groaned. "Sometimes I wish I wasn't even here. Today I even thought about jumping in front of the fucking subway. I'd never do it," you added, noticing Casey's alarm. "But it just... feels like it'd be easier for everyone, including me, if I wasn't around."

Your head was in your hands. You couldn't see it, but Casey looked devastated, her heart surging for you. She grabbed you up and pulled your body into hers until you were on her lap, her arms wrapped tightly around you.

"Oh, honey," she breathed, pressing her face into yours. "Please don't say things like that. Do you know how empty life would be if you weren't here?"

You shrugged your shoulders, sniffling

"Who would bring me milkshakes?"

You giggled.

"Who would sing loud with me in the car, huh? Who would make laugh so hard I snort?"

You smiled, moments with Casey flashing through your mind, some of the happiest moments of your life.

"Who would make me feel loved and safe and proud, if you weren't here?"

"Somebody would," you argued.

She cupped your face and looked you hard in the eyes. "No. Not like you do."

"You're just saying that."

"I'm not. I don't just say things, you know that," Casey reprimanded you. She placed small, warm kisses on your cheek, your forehead, your eyelids, the corner of your mouth, until you were laughing and squinting.

"You," she continued, "are generous and brave and kind and funny and sweet and so, so beautiful. And the world would be a lot darker without you in it."

Your chest buzzed with warmth, like stepping outside on an unexpectedly sunny day or coming downstairs on Christmas morning.

"I don't know about that," you protested, but Casey had successfully beaten back your blues. And she could tell.

"Well, my world would be anyway," she chuckled.

You placed a kiss on the corner of her mouth before returning to your seat, reaching for a french fry.

"Now you're hungry," Casey said, rolling her eyes.

You glanced at the clock. "I thought you had a meeting?"

"I do."

You froze, but Casey was quick to reassure you.

"It's okay! Not a big deal for me to be a few minutes late, I promise."

You relaxed, taking a sip of Casey's milkshake. She snatched the cup back.

"I thought I told you to get your own milkshake."

"Well, I just wanted a little bit!" you whined.

"That's what you always say, and you always drink half of mine."

You flashed her your most charming smile, and she sighed, handing you the cup. You tried not to look too smug as you sipped.

"Don't you have somewhere to be?" you said, dripping with sarcasm. "Probably can't take a milkshake to your fancy lawyer meeting."

"I do have somewhere to be, but I need you to do something for me before I go."

"Oh." You sat up a little straighter. "Okay. What?"

"I need you to call your therapist," she stated, staring at you pointedly.

"Case, I'm fi–"

"No, you're not," she cut you off. "If you're having thoughts like you said you were, you need to talk to her."

You sighed and nodded. "Okay. I'll call."

Casey didn't budge.

"Casey," you needled. "You can go. I will call."

She shrugged her shoulders and leaned back in her chair, stance wide, looking like a hot Wall Street businessman in her work suit. She could make you do anything when she looked like that, and she knew it.

"Fine." You picked up your phone, scrolled through the contacts, and found your therapist, flipping the screen around to show Casey the contact info before pressing the call button.

"Speaker," Casey commanded.

"You're fucking bossy, you know that?"

Your therapist didn't pick up–probably in a session–but you left a message.

"Hey, Carla, this is Y/N. Just kind of having a rough day... slash week slash time in general, and I was wondering if you could squeeze me in maybe earlier than my session next week? Like maybe..."

"TODAY," Casey whispered aggressively.

"...even today or tomorrow if you've got anything open. Thanks, bye."

You rolled your eyes. "Happy now?"

"Mmhm." Casey stood, picked up her briefcase, and bent to kiss you on the head. "I gotta run, but let me know what your therapist says, okay?"

"Okay," you agreed, suddenly feeling embarrassed again.

"Hey," she said, grabbing your chin and forcing you to look at her. "I love you."

"I love you, too."

She planted a firm kiss on your lips before opening the door.

"You can stay in here and work if you want. When I come back, we can work together."

"Okay," you said, already feeling better about an afternoon of studying. If Casey was there, it couldn't be too bad.

"I love you so much I'll even let you have the rest of my milkshake," she called back as she walked down the hallway.

You shook your head and took a sip, feeling better than you had in weeks.

[astroismypassion]

✨PART OF FORTUNE IN SIGNS AND HOUSES SERIES: 9TH HOUSE✨

Credit: Tumblr blog @astroismypassion

ARIES PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Aries and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You would do well as a personal trainer or fitness instructor since you have great energy and motivation that can inspire clients to achieve health and fitness goals. You feel abundant when you are inspired and inspiring others and when you can experience the childlike joy and share it with those around you.

TAURUS PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Taurus and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via teaching about practical skills, business, economics or the arts, via creating and selling educational content (online courses, e-books, instructional videos), by becoming a travel writer or blogger, starting or managing a tourism-related business (travel agency, boutique hotel or guided tour company), via international law.

GEMINI PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Gemini and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via developing or working with educational technology platforms that facilitate online learning, via work in international business/trade, via diplomacy, engaging in media production, creating content for TV, radio or online platforms.

CANCER PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You can feel the most abundant when you have Cancer and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via selling home-brewed beer or offering brewing classes, via media content (podcasts, videos) connected with family relationships, emotional health, cultural traditions, life coaching, via real estate related to family homes, community housing, vacation properties that provide a sense of home and comfort, via non-profit organizations that focus on family support, emotional well-being and cultural preservation.

LEO PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Leo and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via providing high-end services, such as image consulting or bespoke travel planning, via engaging in theatre, film, directing, producing, via creative arts (music, painting, dancing), via sharing your experiences by storytelling, via teaching, arts, philosophy or leadership.

VIRGO PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Virgo and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via nutrition counselling, naturopathy, wellness coaching, preventative care, via writing for technical and scientific publications, via developing or managing programs that facilitate cultural exchanges and study abroad opportunities. You feel abundant when you are focused on service and when you have clear communication.

LIBRA PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Libra and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via becoming a make-up artist, creating tutorials or selling beauty products. You feel abundant when you travel with your loved ones, your partner or as a part of the team. You find wealth via becoming a teacher in subjects like art, design, law or philosophy. You find abundance in starting a business in art (art gallery, design studio, fashion brand).

SCORPIO PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Scorpio and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via esoteric studies, sociology, spiritual transformation, via energy work, shamanic healing, transformational coaching. You feel abundant when you dive into transformation, healing and deep psychological insights. You can also offer consulting services in areas, like crisis management, organizational transformation or deep personal development. You feel abundant when you promote healing and transformation via self-help books, wellness products or spiritual tools.

SAGITTARIUS PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via offering tailored travel plans, starting a business in adventure tourism (offering hiking, trekking and cultural tours), offering spiritual counselling or coaching, helping others find their path and purpose.

CAPRICORN PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Capricorn and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via import/export, global consultancy, multinational corporations, via offering historical tours, archaeological digs, via eco-tourism, via international law or corporate law. You feel abundant when you are disciplined, patient and persistent.

AQUARIUS PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Aquarius and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via writing or speaking about progressive philosophical or spiritual ideas that align with modern, futuristic or humanitarian values, via online courses, workshops or alternative education methods, via technology, social sciences or futuristic studies.

PISCES PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Pisces and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via producing media content (podcast, video, documentary) on spiritual, artistic, cultural topic, via creating educational programs/workshops that blend traditional learning with holistic or spiritual perspective, via spiritual coaching, astrology or psychic readings.

Credit: Tumblr blog @astroismypassion

[ac3-76]

Legend of korra headcannons🐌

warnings: brief mention of drinking(kinda alcoholism), other than that nothing

(Most of these are in a modern setting)

Wing Beifong is a motorcycle guy and posts Aushen Ride type videos

Varrick is a coffee addict and he has awful coffee breath

Korra got a stingray tattooed on her upper back. the tail goes down her spine and the wings(?) are on her shoulder blades

If Formula 1 is a thing in their universe, Future Indistries is one of the og teams

Asami would have future industries make a feminine car for the races taking place in Women's History Month (march)

And for the cars used by the drivers outside of March there'd be something feminine on it, like a lip stick kiss mark

She started it because she wanted a more feminine touch in the sport to show that you can be a girly girl or a girly person and still enjoy and partake in something that's traditionally masculine

I feel like in general she uses her cars to bring awareness to things occurring in society

When Bolin got paid for the Nuktuk series one of the first things he bought was a high quality gaming set up that he had his eye on for years

Now he streams him playing video games and makes a fair bit of money from it

Sometimes the others will play games with him and make apperances on his streams

the fan favorite is Asami because she has the best builds in Minecraft and the best strategy in Call of Duty

Mako likes to watch Criminal Minds and other law/criminal shows to see if he can figure out where it's going and solve it before the characters do

Wu photoshops everything that he posts and is very active on all social media platforms

when Korra went on her own for 6 months after Zaheer tried to kill her, she started drinking because it made her sleepy

she didn't have to be awake and deal with her hallucinations, and when she slept it was nothing, no dreams, no nightmares, just hours of being away from her trauma

being with Toph in the swamp for a couple of weeks(or days?) was the start of her recovery from becoming reliant on drinking to avoid dealing with trauma

Opal collects cool rocks and crystals she finds in the places she travels to

She gets them as gifts for her mother

Also because she's an Air bender and thus follows the air nomad life style, she's always sure to say thank you to the land for allowing her to give the rock to her mom

Huan has had his art in museums and has sold some pieces to well known rich people

He gives most of the money to charity

Mako sleeps on silk sheets only

he was fine with cotton and other cheaper materials until he became Wus bodyguard

Wu insisted he sleep on silk sheets after Mako told him that he had never slept on silk, and now Mako needs silk sheets

Korra's had the same black 21 oz hyddroflask since she was 15

she refuses to buy another waterbottle

it's also covered in stickers

Bolin got Pabu a bed that was specially made for Pabus size, weight, and measurements

Kinda like the one Princess Anneliese had for her cat, Serafina, in Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper

Korras favorite thing to do when she sees a book or something with words is to ask how much spice in it

She's at a restaurant with Asami, they just got the menu, Korra picks it up and displays the front cover to Asami before asking "Booktok girlys before I read this how much spice is in it?"

She thinks it's the funniest thing ever

Wei and Bolin stream and play video games together, Wei has very severe anger management issues when it comes to video games

Not punch a hole in the wall bad because Su got mad at him the one time he did punch the wall, so he's practiced restraint, but still pretty bad

Su has a wax warmer for the scented wax cube things in every room of her house

She makes sure the scent is changed every week, and it has to be the same scent throughout the whole house

Tenzin avoids using social media and most technologies, as do the air nomads and monks, but Kya did get Tenzin to allow her to make a social media account for the air nation

it's mostly run by Jinora and owned by Kya on Kyas phone

it's used to spread information about the air nation, their culture, beliefs, customs, history, etc.

Lin wears boxer briefs

Asami has endometriosis

Mako doesn't handle spicy food that we'll, which is odd considering he's a fire bender

Wei's really into photography and always has a compact camera on him

His favorite compact camera is his Panasonic Lumix TZ95

Wings not super into photography but knows his way around a camera because Wei has rambled on about cameras and angles to him so many times

Wing also has to take pictures for Weis Instagram so he's had training on how to use cameras from Wei

Korra goes through a lot of interest that last for a couple of months, one of those interest was wood working/carving

Korra made Jinora a wooden claw clip for her birthday once

it's the only claw clip Jinora has and she loves it

Makos biggest guilty pleasure is cross stitch and other embroidery styles, but mostly cross stitch

Bolins bed has an uncountable number of pillows on it

After Korra and Asami come back from their spirit world vacation, they decide to travel the world

They both only ever traveled for world saving business, and even then it was earth kingdom and water tribe areas only

So they spent the next year or two traveling the world to see it in a tourist way and not a fighting war way

[probablyasocialecologist]

The struggle to save Palestinians is to stop the systemic erasure of indigenous societies which were tied to and co-existed alongside the land upon which they lived. The bombs that fall on the children of Palestine are enforcing a rift between people and the environment as a form of environmental apartheid. We see a nation-State terraforming the environment and polluting it as settler colonialism is enacted. Agrarian lands are dug up and hillsides converted to settler residences. Sea shores and sea waters bear the brunt of occupational blockade. Olive trees are burned down, fertile lands ruined and cut off by apartheid walls. Water sources are poisoned as a form of biological warfare. Native pastoralists and their livestock are displaced, native flora and fauna killed alongside Palestinians. The air is poisoned by chemical warfare and bomb plumes, massive emissions due to military infrastructure. The famed water management and agrarian practices which irrevocably change native biomes are a tool to wrest control over domestic production and finance the settler colonial project. The myth that settlers brought bloom to a desert which was uninhabited and untended is one of the myriad ways in which sustainability narratives are used to greenwash colonialism in Palestine and other regions of the Global South. Justice for Palestine is simultaneously a preservation of animal and plant life, caring for diverse biospheres and a systemic change towards climate justice.

[netherworldpost]

Hey Atty, I had your AI vs Artists comic in the queue and felt like I needed to update you -- judges ruled that human creation is essential for copyright; AI art can never be copyrighted. A pretty solid win in my book!

I am gladdened on a foundational level but I will likely spend the rest of my career / life looking over my shoulder.

It is such a frustrating situation.

There is inarguably a huge variety of (to my taste) agreeable uses -- in the same way a camera shortens the distance between "I have an idea" to "I have made a thing." In the same way stock photography, modeling programs -- hell, Google Images -- etc. work.

Having very recently spent a very significant amount of time with lawyers (unrelated to AI art to be fair), one of the major things I have taken away from legal proceedings is "the law of unintended consequences is one of few things you can count on."

It is gladdening that we are here -- in this country, for these uses, at this time, for the current structures in place.

And.

Nothing is set in stone. And even when it is that doesn't mean that things go according to plan.

And.

"Not going according to plan" is not always a bad thing. The nature of Things Tend to be Chaotic does not equal Things Tend to be Bad, it rawly means Out of All Possibilities Conceivable or Unthinkable, Everything is Equally Possible.

This is all to say that laws are extremely gooey and there are equal chances this will be reversed, amended, and/or somehow add more layers of protection to people who make things.

I deeply like the idea that people who do not have the ability to draw have the opportunity to take a tool and say "Make a thing."

I despise the outright theft and violation and let us be clear utterly frequent malice, or to a degree such ignorance that it provides the same result, in which the companies that create (singular, current, present tense) these systems proceed.

Ultimately.

People will always be people, which encapsulates every artist, art enjoyer (purposefully seeking out art), art enjoyer (art happens around them without their knowledge), etc.

If you look at Art (commercial and/or non and/or things that blend the two), you have a mystifying paradox of I WANT NEW and I WANT EXACTLY THE SAME and it goes on forever at the exact same time at the exact same rate.

When I was a practicing graphic designer, I read the blog Brand New like it was a newspaper. It covers "This company has a new logo and we're going to talk about it."

Sometimes the refresh is subtle. Sometimes it is overt. Sometimes it is dramatic. Sometimes the new is unrecognizable from the original.

There are always A Lot of Thoughts from the graphic design public, with varying degrees of "I love it" to "I hate it" to "WHY" -- the percentages change, but all camps are regularly presented.

On the exact same frequency but maybe a bit easier to approach -- browse any tag system on any social site. Tumblr, for instance!

You have: october, octobercore, autumncore,autumnblog, autumn, autumn year round, year-round-autumn, year-round-october, october 31, oct 31, october thirty first ...

... etc. across countless tags.

Very subtle shifts around a central theme (pictures of autumn, frequently in North America or select parts of Europe, frequently between late afternoon through twilight, frequently of forests or small towns with a similar aesthetic, pictures of pumpkins, pictures of a reasonably narrow set of movies or books -- etc.)

In short: A lot of tags basically for 1 core subject.

This is the aforementioned law of unintended consequences.

Social platform gives users ability to self-generate and self manage tags -> first group of users generate tags -> usage expands -> intangible differences begin appearing as users create variants specific to personally defined unpublished unknowable criteria ("This is tagged #october31 but not #october)

There is no mechanism introduced at any point to corral the data, and frankly, there can't be, because if this were to be introduced, users would use -- "#Zero-ct-Zero-blR" -- workarounds.

Now you have vernacular. FURTHER SPLINTERING THE SYSTEM.

I don't know what the answer is. OH WAIT.

Actually

I do

Having written a lot of essays on it for clients.

Create learning libraries based on public domain and verified-permission-granted work via a system that clearly illustrates what permissions are offered, for what time length, for what usage, for what time length, and how to remove said work should the owner change their mind in the future -- and similar criteria -- ensuring the library contains only usage either available to anyone for any purpose or rights-granted similar to how other libraries of content work.

:-)

I've rambled.

Far too much on this now.

For a blog that is for an extremely tiny media startup that does not use AI and will unlikely to be materially affected by it.

And wound myself up against inavariable arguments -- not against you on any level, friend --

-- but because I started down the never-useful path of "preparing arguments against someone who will inevitably think it their mission, and my job, to argue."

I've made as close to "making sense" as I can at this o'clock in the morning.

Invariably it is always some o'clock in the morning.

I look forward to believing in a future in which I can be calm about things.

[mariacallous]

Can you imagine what a digital white ethnostate or a cyber caliphate might look like? Having spent most of my career on the inside of online extremist movements, I certainly can. The year 2024 might be the one in which neo-Nazis, jihadists, and conspiracy theorists turn their utopian visions of creating their own self-governed states into reality—not offline, but in the form of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

DAOs are digital entities that are collaboratively governed without central leadership and operate based on blockchain. They allow internet users to establish their own organizational structures, which no longer require the involvement of a third party in financial transactions and rulemaking. The World Economic Forum described DAOs as “an experiment to reimagine how we connect, collaborate and create”. However, as with all new technologies, there is also a darker side to them: They are likely to give rise to new threats emerging from decentralized extremist mobilization.

Today, there are already over 10,000 DAOs, which collectively manage billions of dollars and count millions of participants. So far, DAOs have attracted a wild mix of libertarians, activists, pranksters, and hobbyists. Most DAOs I have come across in my research sound innocent and fun. Personally, my favorites include theCaféDAO, which aims “to replace Starbucks” (good luck with that!); the Doge DAO, which wants to “make the Doge meme the most recognizable piece of art in the world”; and the HairDAO, “a decentralized asset manager solving hair loss.” But some DAOs use a more radical tone. For example, the Redacted Club DAO, which is rife with alt-right codes and conspiracy myth references, claims to be a secret network with the aim of “slaying” the “evil Meta Lizard King.”

The year 2024 might be one in which extremists start using DAOs strategically. Policies, legal contracts, and financial transactions that were traditionally the domain of governments, courts, and banks can be replaced with smart contracts, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and cryptocurrencies. The use of anonymous bitcoin wallets and non-transparent cryptocurrencies such as Monero is already widespread among extremists whose bank accounts have been frozen. A shift to entirely decentralized forms of self-governance is only one step away.

Beyond practical reasons that encourage extremists to create their own self-governed structures, there is an ideological incentive too: their fundamental distrust in the establishment. If you believe that the deep state or the “global Jewish elites” control everything from governments and Big Tech to the global banking system, DAOs offer an appealing alternative. Conversations on far-right fringe platforms such as BitChute and Odysee reveal that there is much appetite for decentralized alternative forms of collaboration, communication, and crowdfunding.

So what happens if anti-minority groups establish their own digital worlds in which they impose their own governing mechanisms? What are the stakes if trolling armies start cooperating via DAOs to launch election interference campaigns? The activities of extremist DAOs could challenge the rule of law, pose a threat to minority groups, and disrupt institutions that are currently considered fundamental pillars of democratic systems. Another risk is that DAOs can serve as safe havens for extremist movements by enabling users to circumvent government regulation and security services monitoring activities. They might also allow extremists to find new ways to fundraise, plan, and plot radicalization campaigns or even attacks. While many governments have focused on developing legal frameworks to regulate AI, few have even recognized the existence of DAOs. Their looming exploitation for extremist and criminal purposes is something that has flown under the radar of global policymakers.

Technology expert Carl Miller, who has long warned of potential misuse of DAOs, told me that “even though DAOs behave like companies, they are not registered as legal entities.” There are only a few exceptions: The US states of Wyoming, Vermont, and Tennessee have passed laws to legally recognize DAOs. With no regulations in place to hold DAOs accountable for extremist or criminal activities, the big question for 2024 will be: How can we ensure the metaverse doesn’t give rise to digital white ethnostates or cyber caliphates?

[boycrazedboy]

Can't stop thinking about an alternate world where basically everyone can do vore, in a similar way to how everyone technically can commit theft or vandalism at any time, only with some evolutionary differences to make the act physically possible.

And in that world, vore is controversial as fuck.

Some cultures consider it a "barbaric" practice and have long banned it, training kids while young to not do it. Some others consider it a right, a biological necessity, even, especially for teenagers and young adults who are the most prone to impulsively eating their peers. So while it is discouraged - for instance, you'll be expelled from a college/university if you are found to repeatedly eat other students- you won't go to jail for it.

Many places have spiritual and cultural practices which manage the number and frequency of those eaten, but in a world of secularisation, what is there to stop people from eating others? Or make them?

The studies are very conflicting over whether or not vore is biologically necessary. While many suggest it contributes to mental well-being, whether it is better for physical health vs. just eating a balanced diet is a matter of ongoing debate.

People may have more children to compensate, expecting at least one to be eaten at some point. Given how large humans can stretch to eat, it means people can safely be pregnant with far more kids, so sextuplets aren't unusual. Perhaps to ensure their safety, humans come out a little more developed; so pregnancies can last far longer depending on certain circumstances. Pregnancies lasting three years or more are not usual.

Maybe you live in a country where it's legal to vore, but highly disapproved. Maybe in your university you might get expelled for slipping up even once. But maybe a fellow student is from a family which donates so much to the university that they couldn't expel a member of that family even if they wanted to. Even if that "kid" is literally eating their way through the rest of the student body.

Even though our bodies are designed to cope with the massive, simultaneous influx of meat, maybe they aren't designed to keep going as normal when digesting. Maybe predators can't actually support the weight of their bellies unless they work out enough to do that. Or maybe they hibernate. Or maybe mobility devices for preds are common- wheeled platforms, modified rollators, spacious scooters, and reinforced wheelchairs are available to whoever can afford them.

There might be regular protests outside of businesses which refuse to deal with an out-of-control predator. Or outside of government buildings to make the practice illegal. Or maybe in places where it's completely banned, hoards of "would-be"* predators are the ones protesting.

*let's be real, if you had the ability, would the law stop you?

Maybe people take holidays to places in which vore is legal, leading to an initial population drop, but then a massive influx of cash when the locals figure out how to exclusively pit the tourists against eachother. Maybe some locals even specialize in pickpocketing the meat-drunk preds when they're too busy eating or basking in the glow of fullness to notice their wallet being pinched.

Maybe in some places public vore is treated like exhibitionism, so it's only legal in private.

Maybe in others, the prey needs to consent, leading to a huge and impossible-to-prove issue of faked prey-consent forms.

I'd think in most places, going out with a writhing, full, post-vore belly will garner you dirty looks from the people who're against it. Maybe you'd even get harassed for it- at the risk of the person stupid enough to harass a pred, especially if it's in a place where it's legal.

Maybe some people have a strict pred-eat-pred policy, where they only target preds, viewing committing the act of vore as a waiver. Maybe those pred-eat-pred people only target preds who DON'T eat preds, as a form of vigilante justice.

[head-post]

Telegram chief Durov’s arrest in France “misguided”

Pavel Durov, the founder of the Telegram messenger who is under investigation in France, said French authorities should have addressed complaints to his company rather than detaining him.

Early Friday morning, Durov wrote his first public comments in Telegram since his detention last month. He also denied any suggestion that the app was an “anarchic paradise,” calling his arrest “misguided.”

The claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day.

He said the investigation into the app was unexpected because French authorities had access to the “hot line” he helped create. Officials could have contacted Telegram’s EU representative at any time.

If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.

French authorities detained the head of Telegram in late August as part of an investigation into offences related to child sexual abuse images, drug trafficking, and fraudulent operations allegedly flourishing in the app.

He was charged by the judiciary for allegedly allowing criminal activity on Telegram. Durov posted bail of 5 million euros and was released on condition that he would report to a police station twice a week and remain in France.

His unexpected arrest drew attention to the criminal liability of Telegram, a popular app with about 1 billion users. The incident sparked a storm of debate about freedom of speech and state censorship.

Read more HERE

[brookspayroll]

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[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 9, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 10, 2024

Yesterday the Washington Post published an article by Beth Reinhard examining the philosophy and the power of Russell Vought, the hard-right Christian nationalist who is drafting plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank, and he was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who will impose religious rule on the United States. 

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Vought advised the far right, calling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. He called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act, more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on. 

Last month the Republican National Committee (RNC), now dominated by Trump loyalists, named Vought policy director of the RNC platform committee, the group that will draft a political platform for the Republicans this year. In 2020 the Republican Party did not write a platform, simply saying that it “enthusiastically” supported Trump and his agenda. With Vought at the head of policy, it is reasonable to think that the party’s 2024 platform will skew toward the policies Vought has advanced elsewhere.

Vought argues that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect individual Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought calls for what he calls “Radical Constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.

There are historical problems with this assessment, not least that it attributes to “the Left” a practical and popular change in the U.S. government to adjust it to the modern industrial world, as if somehow that change was a fringe stealth campaign. 

While it has been popular among the radical right to bash Democratic president Woodrow Wilson for the 1913 Revenue Act that established the modern income tax, suggesting that it was this moment that began the creation of the modern state, the recasting of government in fact took place under Republican Theodore Roosevelt a decade before Wilson took office, and it was popular without regard to partisanship. 

The liberalism on which the United States was founded in the late 1700s came from the notion—radical at the time—that individuals have rights and that the government generally must not intrude on those rights. This idea was central to the thinking of the Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence, who put into the form of a mathematical constant—“we hold these truths to be self-evident”—the idea that “all men are created equal” and that they have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as well as the right to live under a government of their own choosing. 

To keep the government from crushing those individual rights, the Constitution’s Framers wrote the Bill of Rights. Those first ten amendments to the Constitution hold back the federal government by, among other things, prohibiting Congress from making laws that would establish a national religion or prohibit the free exercise of religion, limit freedom of speech or of the press, or hamper people’s right to assemble peacefully or to petition the government for a redress of grievances. 

The belief that liberalism depended on a small government dominated the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the rise of industry in the late nineteenth century shifted the relationship between individuals and the government. Was everyone really equal when industrialists were worth millions and commanded state legislatures and Congress, while workers, consumers, and children had little leverage to protect themselves? 

The majority of Americans said no, and Theodore Roosevelt agreed. The danger for individuals in their era was not that the government would crush them, but that industrialists would. In order for the government truly to protect the people, Roosevelt argued, it must regulate businesses and support the ability of ordinary Americans to prosper. A true liberal government, one that protected the rights of individuals, must be big enough and strong enough to act as a referee between workers, consumers, and businessmen. 

Roosevelt actually loathed Wilson, in part because Wilson ran for office in 1912 with the argument that as soon as the government broke up big corporations, the country could revert back to a small government. To Roosevelt, this made no sense. Unless the conditions of the modern economy were changed—and he believed they could not be, because the trend was always toward bigger and bigger enterprises—industry would always concentrate. Only a big government could stop those corporations from taking over the country.

Tearing apart the modern state, as those like Vought advocate, would take us back to the world Roosevelt recognized as being antithetical to the rights of individuals promised by the Declaration of Independence. 

A key argument for a strong administrative state was that it could break the power of a few men to control the nation. It is no accident that those arguing for a return to a system without a strong administrative state are eager to impose their religion on the American majority, who have rejected their principles and policies. Americans support abortion rights, women’s rights, LBGTQ+ rights, minority rights: the equal rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence. 

And therein lies the second historical problem with Vought’s “Radical Constitutionalism.” James Madison, the key thinker behind the Constitution, explained why a democracy cannot be based on religion. As a young man, Madison had watched officials in his home state of Virginia arrest itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by 1773 he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices, but he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience. 

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights on which our own Bill of Rights would be based. It reads: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” Madison explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants. 

Journalist Reinhard points out that Trump strategist Steve Bannon recently praised Vought and his colleagues as “madmen” who are going to destroy the U.S. government. “We’re going to rip and shred the federal government apart, and if you don’t like it, you can lump it,” Bannon said. 

In July 2022 a jury found Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress for his defiance of a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and that October, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, sentenced him to four months in prison. Bannon fought the conviction, but in May 2024 a federal appeals court upheld it. 

On June 6, Judge Nichols ordered him to report to prison by July 1.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[pure-garbage]

Familiar Tactics? A Brief Moment Of Recognition!

Chapter Warnings: Violence, Language

The destructive power of Lana's attack didn't come without a cost. She swayed in place, barely managing to keep her footing as the glow of her aura faded, leaving her clutching her dagger. Cami popped her head up out of the water, blinking hard in the open air as she met Lana's eyes one more time. The mermaid flashed her a thumbs up, even though her grim expression didn't lighten.

'I shouldn't have been so harsh on the kid,' Lana sighed internally. 'She's just doing her best. Just like all of us.'

"Damn. I'm gonna have to practice that one," Lana panted, struggling to catch her breath after such an overexertion. "Now... let me see that collar, Cami. I'll get it off you and we can get the hell out of here."

"You can't!" Cami squealed, grabbing the collar in alarm. "It'll blow up! I saw it happen!"

"I won't blow you up," Lana assured her, leaning on the edge of the tank and beckoning her closer. "Come on. I know what I'm doing. Besides, Luffy'll give me hell if I let you explode. I would never let my captain down like that. Just let me work, okay?"

"I don't know, are... are you sure about this?" Cami asked, even as she inched closer. Lana took hold of the collar, peering into the keyhole discerningly.

"This is my skillset," Lana assured her. "You're in good hands."

"But I saw-"

"I won't blow you up."

Lana finished her inspection and retrieved her pins from her pocket.

"The lock isn't very high quality," she informed the mermaid, hoping to comfort her. "Guess they rely on the detonation as a deterrent."

"Um... yeah, makes sense," Cami reasoned, trembling. "After all, exploding is pretty scary!"

Lana grinned and flipped her pins around between her fingers.

"Just hold real still now, 'kay?"

Cami only had time to gasp. Then it was over. Lana thrust her pins into place with all the confidence befitting her reputation. The collar clicked and fell open.

"You... you did it!"

"Don't act so surprised," Lana chided her gently. 'There's a good reason Corrin was so keen on keeping me around.'

Lana didn't have any more time to celebrate.

"Cami, duck!" she cried.

The mermaid did and a shot rang out behind them.

'Whoever it is, they're a terrible shot,' Lana thought. It hadn't been strictly necessary for Cami to move. Lana's intuition told her the mermaid was the shooter's intended target, but the bullet whistled high overhead, lodging in the back wall of the platform.

"If that damned fish is the cause of al this trouble, I'll just kill it myself!"

Lana turned her gaze on the speaker. One of the celestial dragons advanced through the chaos, clumsily wielding a pistol.

Rage surged anew in Lana.

"You jerks are supposed to be the ones running the world?!" she demanded. "And you're complicit in this bullshit?! Trading in human lives is sick enough, but does hers mean so little to you that you'd sentence her to death for absolutely no crime at all?!"

"Silence, commoner!" the girl decreed imperiously.

'Absolute power and they're barely more than overgrown toddlers, treating the world like a playpen full of toys to amuse themselves!' Lana fumed.

"No, you!" she roared aloud, voice rising with her swelling fury. "Calm-calm hush!"

The celestial dragon threw a muted hissy fit, while back in the stands, Lana's voice carried to an ear that was familiar with the phrase. Among the men still in their seats, unbothered by the battle raging on around them, a head bearing a fluffy leopard-print hat snapped up. Sharp black eyes zeroed in on Lana, growing wide with disbelief as the mind behind them processed what it had just heard.

"What- What did she just say?!" Trafalgar Law gasped.

"Stay low, Cami," Lana instructed. She grabbed the collar, dragging it from the water as she stepped away from what remained of the aquarium. The celestial dragon turned the entirety of her scorn on Lana, who shifted as subtly as possible to avoid the bullets flying at her while she advanced on the girl firing them.

"You're just a child," Lana observed disdainfully, wondering at the girl's capacity for vitriol. 'So young and the world has already taught her to believe that she stands so far above the rest of us. What a fucking joke.'

Lana came close enough to snatch the gun from the dragon's hand, pushing her chest hard with her palm. The dragon toppled, wordless shouts inaudible to the rest of the hall, suppressed by Lana's devil fruit power.

The celestial dragon had Lana's undivided attention, so she didn't notice that she, in turn, was the sole focus of Law's previously panscopic gaze. He leaned forward in his seat, hat shading his enraptured features as he watched the exchange unfold.

Zoro had defeated every adversary set before him and as his eyes swept across the hall, searching for the next enemy, Law's shock and fixation with Lana didn't escape his notice. His eyes narrowed, but the captain of the heart pirates made no move to attack, so Zoro moved on. He took on the next wave of guards, but kept one eye on Law as he in turn observed Lana closely.

"I've had my fill of bloodshed for today," Lana declared, putting her foot on the dragon's neck and popping off the bubble-esque helmet she wore. All the guards were busy dealing with the rest of Lana's crew and the dragon was unable to cry for help anyway. The girl ranted and blubbered in fear, no sound escaping the spell Lana had placed over her.

"You can pay for being a shitty person at someone else's hands... if you live that long," Lana sneered. She bent with a deranged grin, brandishing the collar that had been Cami's moments before. The girl resisted, but Lana slapped her hands away easily, clicking the collar into place securely with a cackle.

"Now... have a little taste of the terror you've been watching," Lana smirked devilishly.

She released the girl, who struggled away, still unable to make a sound.

Lana's gaze swept out over the hall, hoping to appraise whether her crew would be able to make a break for it any time soon. Marines were joining in too now, entering the auction hall sporadically.

'Looks like we've still got a hell of a fight on our hands before...'

Lana lost the thread of her thought as she locked eyes with the man staring at her from the seats. She had no idea who he was, but he was looking at her like he'd seen a ghost.

'Another pirate? That would explain why they've just been sitting there this whole time. Enjoying the show... but why the hell is he staring at me like that?'

Lana glared back, silently challenging the man. He relaxed and settled back into his seat, fixing his face even if he didn't break eye contact, meeting Lana's challenge head on with easy confidence that told her he didn't care that he'd been caught.

'Whoever this weirdo is, I don't have time to deal with him right now,' she decided.

_________________________________________________

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