#Web development definition

[jadetheblueartist]

New official Frida lore: she’s gonna hyperfixate on Hatsune Miku so hard it’s not even funny

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

Me seeing these bad bitches as a kid

“You can do that? You can dress like that AND be cool? Woagh”

Me now: wait. is this why I’m goth?

[fencesandfrogs]

I’ve decided I’m keeping plants pretty similar to earth plants, because botany is so ridiculous that I don’t even need to make shit up. Also, Tuvok hybridized a Vulcan flower with an earth orchid. So like. Plant hybridization is crazy, but this is like the Spock mammal thing.

Anyway I’m considering having my CAM plants be a major branch because like. What are the odds of convergent evolution creating that change multiple times on TWO planets. …high enough that I’m only considering having CAM be a major decision.

Plants also lend support to my thoughts on the Forge: there’s a carnivorous vine from that hat area, and.

Y’know what no i’m not using my walk home to type out half formed thoughts on low nitrogen environments. Please research carnivorous plants if you’re curious; pitcher plants are a favorite of mine.

So anyway they don’t really make sense in an arid desert environment IMO. But by an oasis?? Oh yeah, now we’re talking.

I’m not 100% sure that I’m keeping the major divisions of plants from earth, but like. I didn’t take botany for nothing. Ya boy knows his gymnosperms and monocots and so on and he wants to be able to use that knowledge.

[the-it-cart]

How To Conduct Effective Logo Design Research

Logo design is an essential element of branding that captures the fundamental nature of a company or an individual in a solitary visual depiction. A proficient logo is more than just a work of art; it is a strategic instrument that communicates a brand’s identity, values, and mission. Even before you start the creative process of logo design, it is important to conduct a comprehensive research and gather sources of inspiration. This initial phase guarantees that the ultimate design connects with the intended audience and distinguishes itself in a competitive market. This blog will examine different strategies and techniques that are generally used for performing efficient logo design research and approaches for collecting inspiration. The step by step strategies for conducting efficient logo design research, its methods for research and collecting inspiration can guide the designers to produce logos that possess both aesthetic appeal and have a significant influence. 

Comprehend The Essence and Identity of The Brand

Before undertaking a logo design job, it is important to gain a comprehensive understanding of the brand. This entails exploring the brand’s objectives, mission, values, and historical background. A thorough comprehension of the brand will direct the design process and guarantee that the logo precisely mirrors the brand’s identity. To understand the brand, one must actively involve themselves in the company’s goal statement, its narrative, its future vision, brand’s core values and principles. The question should include: Who are the intended customers? What specific feelings should the logo elicit? These basic comprehensions can establish a strong base on which the design can be constructed, guaranteeing that each component of the logo has a specific purpose and is in complete harmony with the brand’s fundamental statement.

Target Audience Analysis

Understanding the target audience is essential when designing a logo that deeply connects with them. Engaging in audience research increases comprehension of the inclinations, cultural subtleties, and curiosities of the intended target audience. Audience research can be done using methods like surveys, focus groups, or social media analysis. The accurate comprehension of the demographic characteristics, including age, gender, income, and lifestyle preferences, facilitates the customization of the logo design to appeal and attract the target audience. For example, the appearance of a logo designed for a government organization will be significantly different from the logo of a children’s toy brand. The objective is to develop a design that effectively communicates with the consumer at an emotional and psychological level. 

Collect Visual Stimuli For Inspiration

Gathering visual stimuli for artistic procedure can encompass a wide range of subjects, including art, architecture, nature, historical monuments, local birds or even the culture. A mood board can be compiled to assist in categorizing various sources of inspiration and igniting fresh concepts. A mood board is a compilation of visuals, including images, colors, textures, and typography, that is intended to bring out the desired aesthetic and emotional response for the logo. This will function as a visual point of reference throughout the design process. The designers can also utilize platforms such as Behance and Pinterest, utilize actual cuts from publications, to gather and organize their sources of inspiration. This visual analysis will aid in discovering recurring motifs and artistic techniques that can be integrated into the logo design, ensuring its distinctiveness and aesthetic appeal.

For more details visit us at How To Conduct Effective Logo Design Research - THE IT CART

[cre8tivit]

Progress. Slow, eventual progress.

Getting a bit tired of staring at this, but at least it's no longer color-vomit.

[psychogeniccircuits]

HTML Definitions

Element: Everything from the start tag to the end tag.

Tag: a piece of markup language that is used to indicate the beginning and end of an html element in an html document.

Example: &lt;p> your text here </p>

Nesting: when you put things inside the main element, usually with indentation.

Indentation: when you indent code

Self-closing tag: a tag for an element without a closing tag.

Attributes: special words used inside the opening tag of an element to control the element's behavior. An example would be a source attribute which can come after an image tag, specifying an image's url.

Example: <img src="url">

{{ under construction }}

[gadgets-ark]

The Top 10 Freelancing Websites: Your Guide to Remote Work Opportunities

Upwork (www.upwork.com)Fiverr (www.fiverr.com)IntroductionOverviewUser Experience and InterfaceDiverse Freelancer CommunityAffordability and FlexibilityConclusionFreelancer (www.freelancer.com)Toptal (www.toptal.com)Guru (www.guru.com)99designs (www.99designs.com)Empowering Creativity and Collaboration:How It Works:Diverse Design Categories:Community and Collaboration:Security and…

[emilyofjane]

It’s hard to believe that only a few years ago Neopets was on life support and was almost gutted and stripped for parts by a crypto company.

And now, just one year after Neo became independent, we’ve gotten Daily Quests, UCs, the return of (some) Flash games, trading cards, a mobile app that actually isn’t ass, AND the first full-scale plot in almost a decade.

It’s honestly an understatement to say that Neopets is going through a renaissance era; they’ve literally risen from the ashes. Especially for such a small team, what they have done to revive and rejuvenate this website is nothing short of a miracle. I genuinely feel excited to play Neopets again, which is something I hadn’t felt in years.

This weird little twilight zone corner of the web definitely isn’t perfect, but man…I’m so grateful for how things turned out. We could’ve easily entered the worst possible timeline for this game, but TNT knew that it deserved better. WE deserved better. And they fought like hell to make sure that it didn’t happen. And while the site may still be rough in some areas, we now have a thriving and growing community run by a truly passionate development team who has exceeded everyone’s expectations.

I’m so thankful that we ended up in the good timeline.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

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

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

--

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[genericpuff]

I've been griping about the normalization of identity outing via social media for a while now. To put it simply, it's become almost some weird societal requirement that if you don't have every detail listed about yourself in your Twitter/FB/etc. bio, then it means you have "something to hide" or that you're not as "verifiable" because your account looks indistinct from that of a bot.

But that societal norm has really only benefited the people who profit off of that information in some way, whether it's through selling user data or through weaponizing details about a person against them.

I know that a lot of us love to use the fun little labels and acronyms in our bio that help others like us identify us as a 'safe person' or as someone who's in the same social/racial/identity groups as them. We're humans, we love to categorize things, it's in our nature (and it's fun!)

But if there's any time to start regulating that habit and challenging the norm that you're obligated to include all your personal info online - it's now.

There was a time when sock puppet accounts were expected and typical, not "suspicious".

There was a time when even age-sex-location was considered "too much information", but once it became the norm, we only EVER gave our personal information beyond generic ASL to people who we knew both online and in real life, or at the very least, people who we had known online for a significant enough amount of time that they had proved to be trustworthy (and even then, we didn't owe that information to anyone, ever; there are forum friends who I made online 10+ years ago and still talk to who do not know my personal information beyond broad strokes).

There was a time when simply being an avatar with a funny username was enough. And it still is enough, but massive platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been brainwashing us for years to believe that's not the case, under the guise of, "You wouldn't want to be dishonest, would you?" Through these same norms, we were led to believe that anime profile pictures are cringe, that having a fake online name is stupid, that the photos of you having fun at social events have to be taken JUST right otherwise you might imply to others that you're not actually having fun.

And considering how long these platforms have been around now, we have entire generations of children now who have been born and raised on that version of the ZuckMusk web, who have been taught that it "protects them" to express to everyone publicly their age, their school, their workplace, their family members, everything about themselves, because to not do so would be disingenuous.

None of this is to imply that the Internet was "safer" back in the day. I definitely should not have been on the Internet as much as I was when I was 13 in the late 2000's, it definitely did not benefit my brain development or my social skills. But the version of the Internet we currently exist in now is one that's been predicated on the false sense of security - the belief that if you're honest, everyone else has to be, too.

We've always had ways of identifying our safe people - by participating in the communities that we know are designed around our hobbies, our interests, our people. They might be small, they might not be as "cool" as the idea of netting yourself a big following of thousands of people, but they're also a lot safer and more genuine than that idealized following ever could be.

Don't feel pressured to include every bit of information about yourself in your bio. Even on Facebook, there's no rule that says you have to list your workplace, your school, your family members. There's no rule that says you have to list your personality type, queer labels, and neurodivergent disorders in your Twitter bio. There's no rule that you have to "prove" your life is real and fulfilled through the verification of photos, location tagging, and open-book sharing. If you share those photos, it should be because you genuinely want to share them, not because you feel some societal pressure to live up to others' expectations.

And I guarantee you, even your local mutuals on Facebook - your former classmates, family friends, distant relatives, coworkers, etc. - do not actually give that much of a damn about your personal life that they should be owed that much of a look into it on a daily basis. They've got their own shit going on, they literally do not need to know every detail about you.

I know it sounds scary. It also sounds kind of boring, when we've been used to a certain "way" of browsing and participating for years, that if we don't do so, it feels like being in the "out group" and that we're "breaking the rules". But I promise you, after spending over half my life online, those rules do not exist or benefit anyone who wouldn't profit off that information.

If you're wanting to learn how to branch off from major platforms like Facebook and Twitter and/or become more self-sufficient online, here are some guides to navigating the Internet like an old schooler that may help you!

FREE SITE BUILDER:

DIGITAL PIRACY 101:

(also in addition to everything mentioned here ^^^ they neglect to also mention Tor Browser which is a light and free-to-use browser software that allows you to browse anonymously; note that it's similar to a VPN in that it helps hide your identity online, HOWEVER it won't mask you from your ISP quite as effectively as a VPN, and if you sign into personal accounts with Tor, that's still going to obviously out you online lmao but I love using Tor for the odd time when I need to make a sock puppet for something and don't want it linked to my IP! and unlike a VPN, it's free to use!)

LEARN HOW TO USE RSS FEEDS:

People still use these! They're especially helpful for getting updates from your favorite pages and sites directly to your browser WITHOUT having to worry about stupid algorithm bullshit picking and choosing what you see. And many sites DO have RSS support once you know how to find it! (like adding in /rss at the end of a URL! Like this!)

FAKE EMAIL SERVICES:

LEARN HOW TO CODE IN HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT (AND MORE!):

DECENTRALIZED SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS:

I hope this helps arm you with some new knowledge in how to navigate the Internet like a Certified Old Person™️(like meeee!) Make your secret alt blogs for besties! Make your formal Facebook accounts that are clean of personal information and present the most neutral, safe-for-work version of yourself and keep the fun stuff to the secret profiles and chat groups that are just for you and friends/family/etc!! It might be "inconvenient" to have multiple accounts for the same purpose, but it's also INCREDIBLY freeing and can make your online experience both safer and more enjoyable.

Being "less" of yourself online does not make you any less you. It is your identity - you do not owe any amount of it to anyone beyond yourself. And in times like these, your identity is your greatest asset. Protect it.

[domesticandlovingmonsters]

On the topic of oviposition, have you considered: a drider who needs to find a safe, warm place to lay their eggs

How could I have missed Driders?????

Forgive me if the first bit isn't a typical oviposition theme but it popped in my head and now I need to vent it!

But a Drider female who needs to lay her eggs in a safe place, but she cannot find a secluded area to her liking.

You offer to harbor her eggs for her. Since you're around her den a lot and don't go far, you could keep her eggs close. And your warm body would be a great asset to the eggs growth and development.

Plus, she wouldn't have to lay the delicate sack against the hard stone walls. Or worry her webbing would fail if she's away for too long.

She's unsure at first. Not because she doesn't trust you but because she has never placed her eggs on a living organism before.

But after some discussion, she agrees and it's a rather messy endeavor. Lots of webbing and thick, bulbous sacks that rest against your chest and stomach as you lay on your back. Allowing her to lay her eggs against your skin.

There's something intimate about this situation. You rub your hands along her lower abdomen, soothing her and massaging her as she carefully places each sack against you.

Once her eggs are laid, she delicately wraps web and silk around you. Securing the sacks to your body.

She assures you that her brood won't eat you when they hatch. She promises to remove them when the incubation period gets close.

She's worried her brood might be too heavy for you. But you shoo her worries away gently as you wobble around with the new weight.

Your back would definitely start aching after a few days, but the eggs are safe and your Drider partner is absolutely thrilled about this new prospect of egg-laying.

A little NSFW version below with a Male Drider:

Your Drider lover needs to breed. A different sort of breeding than your usual intimate activities, you found out.

He's sweet when he explains about the ache in his arachnid abdomen and the build up of eggs he needs to deposit. And speaking about such a topic starts to rile him up.

He grows incredibly needy.

You agree to bear his eggs. And he lays you on a bed of silk, mounting you differently than he usually does.

Instead of his humanoid cock from the front of the body, be begins to grind a pointed tip against your center from the end of his spider half.

It's hard at first. But with more friction and the encouraging warmth from your body, his second length begins to slide from its hardened sheath.

You've never seen this part of him before. It's thick and flexible, but finds your waiting core easily. Your head rolls back as your penetrated in one smooth stroke. And your lover hisses above you. His many legs twitching as a blinding pleasure overtakes him.

You feel a cool substance slide between your legs from him and very quickly, your body falls into a relaxed state. The bliss and pleasure remains as your partner fucks slowly into you. Thrusting until you feel him so deep inside you it feels like he's pressing against your womb.

You watch as his abdomen swells and tightens, then something round begins to slide down the length that connected the two of you.

Your mouth falls open as your walls are stretched and the burn of the intrusion is soothed by whatever aphrodisiac like secretion pours from his cock.

The egg sack settles heavily in your core and you groan as a second follows.

Your Drider lover purrs sweet words to you as you open your legs more for him. Welcoming his eggs as he continues to pound into you. A loving, but brutal, rhythm so his eggs are left as deep within you as you can take.

Your Drider lover only stops when he feels you can take no more. And he slides out of you slowly. Kissing his way down your body until his fangs trace over your inner thighs.

When his tongue licks over your core, you feel his eggs roll inside you as you squirm under the harsh stimulation.

"You look so beautiful swollen with my brood, my love." He says. Pressing more kisses along your rounded abdomen.

[girlyhornywriter]

Get Milked [1/2]

[Contains Weight Gain, Hucow]

Bethany tried her best to control her breathing and calm herself down as she took stock of her situation: restraints wrapped around her wrists and ankles ensured she didn't move an inch from the strange dentist chair-like piece of furniture she was sitting in; her street clothes had been stripped from her at some point, replaced with a loose grey t-shirt and matching shorts that fortunately allowed her to maintain her modesty; there was a closed doorway to her left, and a set of double-doors to her right through which she could feel a gentle breeze blowing through; she had been feeling somewhat dazed since she woke up, but that feeling was finally fading away, implying that whatever drugs they had hit her with were wearing off.

She had no idea where she was being held, but she had an upsetting level of certainty about who had brought her here. She'd heard all the rumours about the "Happy Cow Dairy" through the web. Nominally, they were just one of the many industrial dairy mega-farms active in the US, providing milk and cream to the public at reasonable prices. If you believed some of the less charitable opinions about them, they were also huge political donors, able to sway regulations and laws to suit their business interests despite the risks to health and safety.

And if you believed some of the really out-there conspiracies...

Bethany wasn't usually one to believe the sort of nonsensical rambling that gets shared by the paranoid and the delusional on social media, but some of the stories about the Happy Cow Dairy were just plausible enough to make her finish reading any post about them that she saw. Mentions of their links to government bio-tech firms, collusion with intelligence agencies, even some gene-editing companies absorbed under their corporate umbrella. This was all just the icing on the cake though - the real story was the number of abductions that had been blamed on them over the past couple of years. It all would have sounded like the usual crank nonsense, except for one shred of proof that had made its way onto the internet. She would never forget what she saw when she finally got her hands on a link to that video...

Back when she had first moved out to the small, rural town in which she currently lived, Bethany had befriended a waitress called Danielle, who worked at the cafe next to her apartment. They were both out-of-towners who didn't really have any close family, so they naturally gravitated towards each other; Danielle would spend half of her shift loitering at Bethany's table, keeping her coffee topped up and letting her vent about what a rough week she'd had. They chatted about everything, from Bethany's insatiable love of all things sweet to Danielle's story about the wicked scar on her eyebrow she'd acquired in a freak rollerblading accident. Her manager didn't seem to appreciate it, but she wasn't technically breaking any rules, so there wasn't much he could do beyond glare at the two of them. But a couple of months ago, Danielle seemed to... Vanish. She was never on shift, the other staff hadn't heard from her, and her manager just shrugged his shoulders when Bethany asked about where she'd gone. She got a bad enough feeling about the whole thing to contact the police about it. They got back to her a couple of weeks later - They'd managed to get in touch with her and confirm she was safe, but beyond that, they couldn't give Bethany any details.

She would have relegated the whole ordeal to Danielle just being weirdly skittish... If not for the contents of the video. It supposedly showed one of Happy Cow Dairy's "top-secret" R&D labs, where they develop new hormone formulas for maximising the milk production of their cows.

Except these weren't cows. These were women.

You could be mistaken for thinking they were cows at first glance. Their size and proportions were definitely far from normal. Lined up on either side of a central walkway, dozens of immensely fat women crouched on their hands and knees, all communally eating from two long metal troughs running parallel to each other for as far as the camera showed. Each face looked dazed as it munched on whatever slop was being served, spilling the stuff all over their triple-chins and onto their massive mammaries. Every now and then, a low, guttural moo would escape from one of the captive women, echoing through the vast hall long after the offending cattle had dipped her head back down into the slop.

The smallest of the "cows" had to be at least 700lbs, and the biggest were too big to even fit fully into frame as the camera passed over them each in turn. Their bellies all scraped along the faux-grass floor as they dragged their immense bulks from one section of the trough to another, seeking out more mouthfuls of the apparently delicious slop. Their breasts looked so big and so heavy, sagging low and also touching the ground as they endlessly leaked thin streams of creamy milk; whatever hormone cocktail those scientists had pumped into these poor girls, it was clearly having its intended effect. Some girls had their enormous breasts hooked up to pumping stations in the far corners of the hall - They panted, moaned and mooed in ecstasy as their overfilled teats were emptied, the milk siphoned off to God-knows-where. Men and women in lab coats wandered casually from cow to cow, making notes into the tablets they were carrying or pointing things out to their lab partners. Compared to the hulking, barely-mobile forms of the cattle-women, these researchers almost looked malnourished.

The video went on for less than a minute, but every frame seemed to last an eternity when Bethany first watched it. It was horrifying... But it was still, at the end of the day, just a video on the internet. It wasn't proof of anything. Sure, Happy Cow Dairy might have a secret lab filled with women who had been halfway transformed into dairy cows. But it was just as likely that somebody with a lot of skill in digital effects had created the whole thing as a hoax, maybe as part of some vendetta against the Dairy for firing them or building a farm over their land. As Bethany had approached the end of the video, she had all but convinced herself that that was the explanation. Just a disgruntled ex-employee, getting back at their old bosses with this wild conspiracy.

She just wished she had closed the video at that point. She could have moved on with her life and laughed at what a gullible fool she had been for digging so deep into all of this nonsense. But she hadn't. She had watched it through to the end. And as the camera panned over the last couple of faces bowing their heads into the half-empty trough, Bethany's heart had skipped a beat.

It was Danielle.

If not for the colour of her hair and the distinctive scar on her eyebrow, Bethany wouldn't have recognised her old friend. Her face was so much rounder and softer, dominated by chubby cheeks and several chins, with a mop of wild, greasy hair framing her once delicate face. She glanced at the camera as it passed over her, not even bothering to pause from sinking her stained mouth into the slop and swallowing a hefty mouthful. She wore no clothes, except for a grey pair of shorts that barely seemed to cover the colossal mountain of ass that now weighed down her rear end. The tag attached to her ear was just legible for a single frame of the video, and Bethany had managed to decipher it.

"DAISY"

Suddenly, Bethany was stirred from her reminiscing by a gentle buzz from the doorway on her left. With a soft click, the door opened to reveal a tall woman wearing a familiar-looking labcoat, and carrying an equally familiar-looking tablet. She wore safety goggles and a facemask, preventing Bethany from seeing what emotions were playing across her face as she stepped into the room and paused in front of the chair that she was constrained to. Was it pity? Curiosity? Excitement? She tried to speak to the scientist, but her words fell on deaf ears - Literally, as the scientist's earplugs prevented her from hearing any more than a gentle hum coming from Bethany's direction. She typed something into the tablet, then walked around to a point behind Bethany that she couldn't see. After some cryptic beeps and buzzing from whatever console was located there, the woman left the room through the same door she had entered by, leaving Bethany alone once again.

Her head sank in defeat as she realised just how bad this was looking. Nobody was going to help her. Whatever these people were going to do to her, she wasn't going to be able to fight it. This was a well-oiled machine, and Bethany's role in it was already decided; anything she could try to do to resist them, they'd probably already thought of and planned for. Her only choice was to hope they made some kind of mistake before they could do her much harm.

As she sat there with her head hanging towards the ground, she noticed something that made her heart sink. The grey outfit she had woken up in...

It was exactly the same shade as the shorts Danielle was wearing in that video.

The console behind her, which had been humming softly since the scientist had left, suddenly came to life, and Bethany could do nothing but watch as a thick rubber tube descended from the ceiling towards her gasping mouth...

[waaaffle]

Dumping my thoughts here about something I have noticed because why not (a few spoilers for anime-onlys):

Shipping / headcanons are not an issue, but it's not lost on me that some of the people who ship Shisui/Loulan with Maomao are always hoping Jinshi — who is clearly the deuteragonist — dies or is written out of the story in some other way because he is considered an "obstacle" for the ship. I am not claiming that it is all or even most, but it is enough to where it's noticeable imo. This is a bummer because I think he is an interesting and well-written character in general (not just for his devotion for Maomao) but he is often reduced to some one-dimensional evil. Also, any Jinmao fans hating unprovoked are wrong as well, but I have already seen posts about that side of things, so I don't need to say much else.

I have seen people insinuate that the author should "fix" her story (disrespectful) or that she intended to write yuri between them but was forced in the other direction (flat out misinformation).

I saw a take recently where someone said that "Shisui is the closest maomao has come to feel affection for someone" which is a poor analysis of Maomao's character (this person said they are on LN 7 btw; such a take makes no sense if you are an anime-only imo, but is much worse coming from a supposed LN reader). She cares deeply for Luomen, Xiaolan, her sisters, etc. so this take is odd. The attempts to downplay Maomao's care and romantic love for him in the story (the tired take of "Maomao clearly hates him") to make their ship appear more "legitimate" (???) are just unserious 😭 why can't people just enjoy something without spreading misinformation. I don't think anyone should feel the need to prove why their ship is more legitimate and / or minimize what is written to enjoy it.

Side note: Someone else was mad that Jinshi came to save her + stop the rebellion because he was putting Loulan in danger by doing so, and that he should have left Maomao with the Shi clan. Just ridiculous. 😵‍💫

Unfortunately, blocking and muting does not fully help when this kind of stuff is even under posts and in spaces that like Jinshi and / or Jinmao. Imagine trying to find a space to talk about your favorite character, and instead you find people constantly bashing them, primarily for romance that was set up early on in the LNs. I think most people would be annoyed after a while — especially considering the particularly visceral hatred for and rampant mischaracterization of Jinshi that seems to run deep in the western fandom. I know the hate for him won't change and that's fine, but I think it's weird to go into spaces where people like him just to argue.

The author decided that Jinshi was going to be the deuteragonist very early on in the development of this story because he was already inseparable from the plot by LN 2 at latest.

She didn't have to (and no, she was not forced to) but she did.

Shisui was introduced for the Shi clan plotline and her character arc concluded nicely with its end (even died in the web novel). Definitely an important character for various reasons (the Shi clan rebellion and her actions lead to events that mark a key turning point in the series, an important role in Maomao making friends / opening up, etc.). However, based on the writing, there were likely no plans to make her role much different from what it was.

The author recently stated that she rarely makes big changes to the plot, so making Jinshi integral to the story as a whole (as in the plot would be completely different without him) and making their romance integral to the plot was a very deliberate decision on her part.

You definitely don't have to like him or their romance at all, we all have our personal tastes, but the story isn't bad for not going in a direction that it never intended to go in (or for taking a direction that you don't like).

[the-it-cart]

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[0sbrain]

here's a list of mozilla add-ons for all of you tumblrinas out there to have a better internet experience

also, if you like my post, please reblog it. Tumblr hates links but i had to put them so you adhd bitches actually download them <3 i know because i am also adhd bitches

BASIC STUFF:

AdGuard AdBlocker / uBlock Origin : adguard is a basic adblock and with origin you can also block any other element you want. for example i got rid of the shop menu on tumblr

Privacy Badger : this add on will block trackers. if an element contains a tracker it will give you the option to use it or not

Shinigami Eyes: this will highlight transphobic and trans friendly users and sites using different colors by using a moderated database. perfect to avoid terfs on any social media. i will explain how to use this and other add-ons on android as well under the read more cut

THINGS YOU TUMBLINAS WANT:

Xkit: the best tumblr related add on. with many customizable options, xkit not only enhances your experience from a visual standpoint, but provides some much needed accessibility tools

bonus: if you are into tf2 and wanna be a cool cat, you can also get the old version to add cool reblog icons

AO3 enhancer: some basic enhancements including reading time and the ability to block authors and tags

YOUTUBE

Return of the YouTube Dislike : pretty self explanatory

Youtube non-stop: gets rid of the annoying "Video paused. Continue watching?" popup when you have a video in the background

SponsorBlock: gives you options to skip either automatically or manually sponsors, videoclip non music sectors and discloses other type of sponsorships/paid partnerships

Enhancer for YouTube: adds some useful options such as custom play speed, let's you play videos in a window and most important of all, it allows you to make the youtube interface as ugly as your heart desires. I can't show a full image of what it looks like because i've been told its eye strainy and i want this post to be accessible but look at this <3

PocketTube: allows you to organize your subscriptions into groups

YouTube Comment Search: what it says

FINDING STUFF

WayBack Machine: you probably know about this site and definitely should get the add on. this allows you to save pages and access older versions with the click of a button. while you can search wayback using web archives, please get this one as well as it allows you to easily save pages and contribute to the archive.

Web Archives: it allows you to search through multiple archives and search engines including WayBack Machine, Google, Yandex and more.

Search by Image: allows you to reverse image search using multiple search engines (in my experience yandex tends to yield the best results)

Image Search Options: similar to the last one

this next section is pretty niche but... STEAM AND STEAM TRADING

SteamDB: adds some interesting and useful statistics

Augmented Steam: useful info specially for browsing and buying games

TF2 Trade Helper: an absolute godsend, lets you add items in bundles, keeps track of your keys and metal and your recent trades, displays links to the backpack tf page next to users profiles and more. look it tells me how much moneys i have and adds metal to trades without clicking one by one oh may god

IN CONCLUSION: oooooh you want to change to firefox so badly, you want to delete chrome and all the chrome clones that are actually just spyware and use firefox

HOW TO USE MOZILLA ADD-ONS ON YOUR PHONE

if you already use firefox on android, you'll know there are certain add-ons compatible with the app, some of them even being made just for the mobile version such as Video Background Play FIx. while most of them are pretty useful, some more specific ones aren't available on this version of the browser, but there's a way of getting some of them to work

you need to download the firefox nightly app, which is basically the same as the regular firefox browser but with the ability of activating developer mode. you can find how to do that here. once you've enabled it, you need to create a collection with all the add ons you want. i wouldn't recommend adding extensions if the creators haven't talked about phone compatibility, but XKit and Shinigami Eyes should work

also, don't tell the government this secret skater move, but you can try using both the regular firefox browser and nightly so you can have youtube videos in a floating box while you browse social media.

see? i can block this terf while Rick Rolling the people following this tutorial. isn't that tubular?

[loversrocktvgirl2]

my mini multiverse of madness…

Avengers Tower Headcannons (Peter Edition)

word count: 0.4k

Avengers Tower Headcannons Masterlist

You and Peter are the “young ones” at the Avengers Tower. 

You’re both full of pop culture references and incredibly cheerful and funny.

You also both share an affinity for prancing Tony. Over time, you’ve developed more and more elaborate pranks to play on the poor man, including using Peter’s web shooters to lower yourself into his workshop through the vents to give him a jump scare.

One time, you accidentally jumped in when he was with Pepper. You were so shocked you let out a little yelp, and Peter covered your mouth with his hand and lifted you up, closing the vent before Tony and Pepper could see you.

Except they did see you.

You and Peter agreed to let Tony bribe you with candy to keep quiet about it.

You both love what you call “vintage movies”, which are really just 90s and 00s films. You calling it this drives everyone from that generation crazy, which only spurs you on to do it more often. 

Regardless, movie nights with Peter are extraordinarily entertaining.

You build pillow forts and hide all of the snacks with you to watch Empire Strikes Back

You two also love bothering Thor and requesting stories from him. The way he talks and the stories he’s got of Loki entertain you both, and you constantly ask for them.

From Thor’s perspective, it’s nice to be wanted.

You and Peter are definitely known as the troublemakers of the group. Fury hates working with the two of you, but you’re also impossible to hate—you’re so excited to be included with everything that it’s hard to get mad at you, even when you screw up. 

Peter is your friend for a long time before he becomes your boyfriend. 

Your relationship doesn’t change much once he does; there’s just a little more cuddling and affection than previously. 

You’ve gone on a few official dates out to places, but you’re together so much that it almost feels like you’re on dates constantly. 

You don’t have an official couple song yet—but you definitely love listening to music together and singing off pitch loudly at everybody.

Natasha’s like your aunt now, always defending you to other Avengers and also trying to keep you both out of too much trouble.

Everybody knows you’ll find it and get into it anyway.