#What is API Management?

[dhirajmarketresearch]

[badgopher]

"Saturdays by Twin Shadow (feat. HAIM)" is how I've mentally started every post I've made here on a Saturday for the past however many years that song's been out.

I decided I needed bath bombs so I set out to do that and only realized my error when I saw the traffic control person as soon as I turned into the mall. On the Saturday before Christmas. lol

My upstairs neighbor moved out a month ago so I no longer hear about their sex life through my ceiling. My next door neighbor moved out last week so I no longer have to wear my active noise cancelling earplugs to muffle their snoring. It’s quieter around here, but the hot water takes longer to find my tap in the morning.

I deleted a whole chapter about that computer case. You’re welcome.

Never did end up doing Christmas cards this year. I’ve got mixed feelings about that.

I want to do a bunch of dumb end of year data analysis things, but I have to pull a bunch of data to do it, and that’ll take me like a dozen minutes, and that's like a dozen minutes that I could spend not doing that thing. You see my dilemma. Stay tuned, I guess?

I’m the only one on my team not scheduled off on Monday and I think Tuesday next week (and, actually, most of the next 2 weeks). It’s easy enough to keep Teams active and my work email open while I tinker on side quests.

The checkout person at LUSH is always like “oh, are these a gift?” as I unload 9 bath bombs from my basket, as if they don't get many solo middle aged dudes stocking up on bath bombs on Saturday afternoons.

Turns out I miscounted and have 1 too many bath bombs so I’m taking a bath about it.

[parakeetpark]

Another cool thing about playing Fallen London is encountering stuff and thinking "-oooohhh THAT is what that thing in Sunless Sea was refering to!!!"

[aretovetechnologies01]

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[nitorinfotech-blog]

A RESTful API (Representational State Transfer) is a web service architecture that follows a set of principles and constraints, aiming to simplify communication between systems. RESTful APIs use standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to perform operations on resources, which are identified by unique URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers).

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Are the means of computation even seizable?

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH in TOMORROW (May 15) at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

Something's very different in tech. Once upon a time, every bad choice by tech companies – taking away features, locking out mods or plugins, nerfing the API – was countered, nearly instantaneously, by someone writing a program that overrode that choice.

Bad clients would be muscled aside by third-party clients. Locked bootloaders would be hacked and replaced. Code that confirmed you were using OEM parts, consumables or adapters would be found and nuked from orbit. Weak APIs would be replaced with muscular, unofficial APIs built out of unstoppable scrapers running on headless machines in some data-center. Every time some tech company erected a 10-foot enshittifying fence, someone would show up with an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder.

Those 11-foot ladders represented the power of interoperability, the inescapable bounty of the Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine, which, by definition, is capable of running every valid program. Specifically, they represented the power of adversarial interoperability – when someone modifies a technology against its manufacturer's wishes. Adversarial interoperability is the origin story of today's tech giants, from Microsoft to Apple to Google:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

But adversarial interop has been in steady decline for the past quarter-century. These big companies moved fast and broke things, but no one is returning the favor. If you ask the companies what changed, they'll just smirk and say that they're better at security than the incumbents they disrupted. The reason no one's hacked up a third-party iOS App Store is that Apple's security team is just so fucking 1337 that no one can break their shit.

I think this is nonsense. I think that what's really going on is that we've made it possible for companies to design their technologies in such a way that any attempt at adversarial interop is illegal.

"Anticircumvention" laws like Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act make bypassing any kind of digital lock (AKA "Digital Rights Management" or "DRM") very illegal. Under DMCA, just talking about how to remove a digital lock can land you in prison for 5 years. I tell the story of this law's passage in "Understood: Who Broke the Internet," my new podcast series for the CBC:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

For a quarter century, tech companies have aggressively lobbied and litigated to expand the scope of anticircumvention laws. At the same time, companies have come up with a million ways to wrap their products in digital locks that are a crime to break.

Digital locks let Chamberlain, a garage-door opener monopolist block all third-party garage-door apps. Then, Chamberlain stuck ads in its app, so you have to watch an ad to open your garage-door:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Digital locks let John Deere block third-party repair of its tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

And they let Apple block third-party repair of iPhones:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

These companies built 11-foot ladders to get over their competitors' 10-foot walls, and then they kicked the ladder away. Once they were secure atop their walls, they committed enshittifying sins their fallen adversaries could only dream of.

I've been campaigning to abolish anticircumvention laws for the past quarter-century, and I've noticed a curious pattern. Whenever these companies stand to lose their legal protections, they freak out and spend vast fortunes to keep those protections intact. That's weird, because it strongly implies that their locks don't work. A lock that works works, whether or not it's illegal to break that lock. The reason Signal encryption works is that it's working encryption. The legal status of breaking Signal's encryption has nothing to do with whether it works. If Signal's encryption was full of technical flaws but it was illegal to point those flaws out, you'd be crazy to trust Signal.

Signal does get involved in legal fights, of course, but the fights it gets into are ones that require Signal to introduce defects in its encryption – not fights over whether it is legal to disclose flaws in Signal or exploit them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

But tech companies that rely on digital locks manifestly act like their locks don't work and they know it. When the tech and content giants bullied the W3C into building DRM into 2 billion users' browsers, they categorically rejected any proposal to limit their ability to destroy the lives of people who broke that DRM, even if it was only to add accessibility or privacy to video:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

The thing is, if the lock works, you don't need the legal right to destroy the lives of people who find its flaws, because it works.

Do digital locks work? Can they work? I think the answer to both questions is a resounding no. The design theory of a digital lock is that I can provide you with an encrypted file that your computer has the keys to. Your computer will access those keys to decrypt or sign a file, but only under the circumstances that I have specified. Like, you can install an app when it comes from my app store, but not when it comes from a third party. Or you can play back a video in one kind of browser window, but not in another one. For this to work, your computer has to hide a cryptographic key from you, inside a device you own and control. As I pointed out more than a decade ago, this is a fool's errand:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

After all, you or I might not have the knowledge and resources to uncover the keys' hiding place, but someone does. Maybe that someone is a person looking to go into business selling your customers the disenshittifying plugin that unfucks the thing you deliberately broke. Maybe it's a hacker-tinkerer, pursuing an intellectual challenge. Maybe it's a bored grad student with a free weekend, an electron-tunneling microscope, and a seminar full of undergrads looking for a project.

The point is that hiding secrets in devices that belong to your adversaries is very bad security practice. No matter how good a bank safe is, the bank keeps it in its vault – not in the bank-robber's basement workshop.

For a hiding-secrets-in-your-adversaries'-device plan to work, the manufacturer has to make zero mistakes. The adversary – a competitor, a tinkerer, a grad student – only has to find one mistake and exploit it. This is a bedrock of security theory: attackers have an inescapable advantage.

So I think that DRM doesn't work. I think DRM is a legal construct, not a technical one. I think DRM is a kind of magic Saran Wrap that manufacturers can wrap around their products, and, in so doing, make it a literal jailable offense to use those products in otherwise legal ways that their shareholders don't like. As Jay Freeman put it, using DRM creates a new law called "Felony Contempt of Business Model." It's a law that has never been passed by any legislature, but is nevertheless enforceable.

In the 25 years I've been fighting anticircumvention laws, I've spoken to many government officials from all over the world about the opportunity that repealing their anticircumvention laws represents. After all, Apple makes $100b/year by gouging app makers for 30 cents on ever dollar. Allow your domestic tech sector to sell the tools to jailbreak iPhones and install third party app stores, and you can convert Apple's $100b/year to a $100m/year business for one of your own companies, and the other $999,900,000,000 will be returned to the world's iPhone owners as a consumer surplus.

But every time I pitched this, I got the same answer: "The US Trade Representative forced us to pass this law, and threatened us with tariffs if we didn't pass it." Happy Liberation Day, people – every country in the world is now liberated from the only reason to keep this stupid-ass law on their books:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

In light of the Trump tariffs, I've been making the global rounds again, making the case for an anticircumvention repeal:

https://www.ft.com/content/b882f3a7-f8c9-4247-9662-3494eb37c30b

One of the questions I've been getting repeatedly from policy wonks, activists and officials is, "Is it even possible to jailbreak modern devices?" They want to know if companies like Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, and John Deere have created unbreakable digital locks. Obviously, this is an important question, because if these locks are impregnable, then getting rid of the law won't deliver the promised benefits.

It's true that there aren't as many jailbreaks as we used to see. When a big project like Nextcloud – which is staffed up with extremely accomplished and skilled engineers – gets screwed over by Google's app store, they issue a press-release, not a patch:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/nextcloud-accuses-google-of-big-tech-gatekeeping-over-android-app-permissions/

Perhaps that's because the tech staff at Nextcloud are no match for Google, not even with the attacker's advantage on their side.

But I don't think so. Here's why: we do still get jailbreaks and mods, but these almost exclusively come from anonymous tinkerers and hobbyists:

https://consumerrights.wiki/Mazda_DMCA_takedown_of_Open_Source_Home_Assistant_App

Or from pissed off teenagers:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

These hacks are incredibly ambitious! How ambitious? How about a class break for every version of iOS as well as an unpatchable hardware attack on 8 years' worth of Apple bootloaders?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/25/mafia-logic/#sosumi

Now, maybe it's the case at all the world's best hackers are posting free code under pseudonyms. Maybe all the code wizards working for venture backed tech companies that stand to make millions through clever reverse engineering are just not as mad skilled as teenagers who want an ad-free Insta and that's why they've never replicated the feat.

Or maybe it's because teenagers and anonymous hackers are just about the only people willing to risk a $500,000 fine and 5-year prison sentence. In other words, maybe the thing that protects DRM is law, not code. After all, when Polish security researchers revealed the existence of secret digital locks that the train manufacturer Newag used to rip off train operators for millions of euros, Newag dragged them into court:

https://fsfe.org/news/2025/news-20250407-01.en.html

Tech companies are the most self-mythologizing industry on the planet, beating out even the pharma sector in boasting about their prowess and good corporate citizenship. They swear that they've made a functional digital lock…but they sure act like the only thing those locks do is let them sue people who reveal their workings.

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/2025/05/14/pregnable/#checkm8

[splatsvilles-fashionista]

Nintendo is removing twitter integration next week, here's what to do to share screenshots instead

So in case you missed it, Nintendo announced last month that they're removing the Switch's twitter integration on Jun 10/11 (depending on your time zone) as a result of twitter jacking up their API fees to absolutely ridiculous degrees. This will not affect making posts in the plaza (at least in Splatoon 3) but it does mean you will not be able to upload screenshots and videos to twitter for easy access.

If you're like me and do this a lot, then you've got two alternatives.

One of these methods is significantly easier than the others, but requires a computer that runs Windows and a USB cable. With your Switch in portable mode, go into your System Settings and find the Data Management section:

Click it and scroll down to the "Copy to PC via USB Connection" option.

Click it and you'll be prompted to connect your Switch to your PC via USB. When you do, a folder containing all your Switch screenshots and videos will pop up on your PC. From there, you can copy as many videos and screenshots as you'd like to a location of your choosing, at which point you can disconnect your Switch.

And now you're done!

The other option is a bit more finicky (and also I can't take screenshots to show you the process), but can be done with any smart device. Go into your Album and pick a video or screenshot you would like to share. Select Send to smart device, after which you'll be prompted to scan a QR code. Scan it with your smart device and you'll be given a link to connect to a Wifi, which sounds weird but is just how the console and smart device connects. Once they have, you'll be able to send your images and video to your phone.

[simdertalia]

🎀 ACNH Sanrio Set: Remaining Items 🎀

Sims 4, base game compatible except the functional vanity & dancefloor which require Vintage Glamour & Get Together | 35 items | Some extra swatches added by me 💗 | See bottom of post for all previously made Sanrio items from other sets

I try my best to make things functional, the large beds work perfectly as they have 2 mesh groups, and I used the EA mattress. The My Melody bed has 1 mesh group, sims can sleep under the covers, but the bed moves a bit when the sim gets into it.

Always suggested: bb.objects ON, it makes placing items much easier. For further placement tweaking, check out the TOOL mod.

Use the 0,9 keyboard feature to raise items or lower them

Use the scale up & down feature on your keyboard to make the items larger or smaller to your liking. If you have a non-US keyboard, it may be different keys depending on which alphabet it uses.

Set contains: Buy: -Cinnamoroll Loveseat (2 items for 2 versions with and without pillows) | 1 swatch each | 2406, & 1998 poly -Cinnamoroll Parasol | 1 swatch | 1198 poly -Cinnamoroll Pillows | 3 swatches each | 428 poly each -Cinnamoroll Rug | 5 swatches each | 637 poly -Hello Kitty Bed | 1 swatch | 1614 poly -Hello Kitty Bed Plushie (liberated bear) | 1 swatch | 674 poly -Hello Kitty Chair | 1 swatch | 1130 poly each -Hello Kitty Clock | 1 swatch | 580 poly -Hello Kitty Dresser (2 items for 2 versions, edited V2 to have the big piece in the back)  | 1 swatch each | 1746 poly each -Hello Kitty Nightstand| 1 swatch | 718 poly each -Hello Kitty Plant (2 items, Large & Small) | 1 swatch each | 2008 poly each -Hello Kitty Rug | 1 swatch | 446 poly -Hello Kitty Shoe Decor (child size) | 1 swatch | 812 poly -Hello Kitty Table Dining | 1 swatch | 702 poly -Keroppi Bench with Divider | 1 swatch | 2109 poly -Keroppi Dancefloor (requires Get Together) | 1 swatch | 2 poly -Keroppi Rug | 1 swatch | 584 poly -My Melody Bed | 1 swatch | 2001 poly -My Melody Clock | 1 swatch | 712 poly -My Melody Rug | 1 swatch | 681 poly -My Melody Vanity BGC (non functional) | 1 swatch | 1218 poly -My Melody Vanity functional (requires Vintage Glamour) | 1 swatch | 1218 poly -Pompompurin Bed | 1 swatch | 1824 poly -Pompompurin Chair | 1 swatch | 1189 poly -Pompompurin Nightstand | 1 swatch | 1132 poly -Pompompurin TV (2 versions, "off" with face, & functional) | 1 swatch each | 1486, & 1480 poly -Posters | 6 swatches | 4 poly -Twin Stars Loveseat | 3 swatches for legs | 2426 poly -Twin Stars Rug | 3 swatches | 807 poly Build: -Walls | 3 swatches | Wallpaper -Floors | 5 swatches | Wood & Tile

Type “acnh sanrio" into the search query in build mode to find  quickly. You can always find items like this, just begin typing  the title and it will appear.

*Remember to run the DX11 batch fix if you are using DX11. I do not use DX11 with my game, when I looked up what would happen if I ran the batch fix even though I don't have this turned on, the consensus was not to do this if you are not using the DX11 option. For those that have never done it, do not fear for it is very simple and will update any CC in your mods folder that needed it to work with DX11. I know the new DX11 API causes issues having something to do with the wall items, or other image texture-related things- that I know of. If you do not have Sims 4 Studio, here is a link about how to install it from their official website. And of course, if you need help please send me a message.

As always, please let me know if you have any issues! 💗

📁 Download all or pick & choose (SFS, No Ads): HERE

📁 Alt Mega Download (still no ads): HERE

📁 Download on Patreon

Will be public on January 5th, 2025 💗 Midnight CET

Happy Simming! ✨ Some of my CC is early access. If you like my work, please consider supporting me (all support helps me with managing my chronic pain/illness & things have been rough as of late):

★ Patreon  🎉 ❤️ |★ Ko-Fi  ☕️  ❤️ ★ Instagram📷

Thank you for reblogging ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

@sssvitlanz  @maxismatchccworld @mmoutfitters  @coffee-cc-finds  @itsjessicaccfinds  @gamommypeach  @stargazer-sims-finds  @khelga68  @suricringe  @vaporwavesims  @mystictrance15 @moonglitchccfinds @xlost-in-wonderlandx @jbthedisabledvet

Other CC Pictured:

Other Sanrio CC (downloads always have pick & choose option): -Cinnamoroll Set 1-Cinnamoroll Set 2 -Cinnamoroll Walls -Cinnamoroll & Twin Stars Items -Cinnamoroll Shoe Decor -Keroppi Mini Set -Keroppi Ghost Doll Set -Keroppi Bridge -Keroppi Boots Decor -Twin Stars & My Melody Wallpaper, My Melody Chair & Table-Twin Stars Kid Desk, Wall Clock, Clock Radio, Hair Clips Decor & Shoes Decor -My Melody Slippers Decor -Pompompurin Pudding -Pompompurin Book Table -Pompompurin Rug -Pompompurin Boots

The rest of my CC

[sims2packrat]

hi hi! was just wondering if you knew of any reuploads of simsomia's content? all their links are hidden behind adfly (booooo) and i can't seem to get the bypass tutorial you have linked to work? when i put the full url in the bypass page it says 'not supported by free API' and idk what that means :/ anyways specifically i'd like to download the purple dress from their 2012 advent day 18 if possible. thanks!!

Hello anon! :-D I've noticed this as well. I've been trying to find a new working website but I haven't managed yet.. Fingers crossed someone makes a new one, or the ones out there gets updated soon!

I found this MTS-thread where digi has "cleaned" up some of their links, but the 2012 advent day 18 is not one of them. Does anyone here have this purple dress from simsomia and could re-upload for anon? Or feel brave enough to click on the link lol...

Edit: kindly re-uploaded by @vampireacademysims here!

[daggerfall]

So the GM of one of the big PC/NA raiding servers attended the ESO guild summit and wrote down some notes about questions and answers asked there. A lot of them are about potential future features we could see in ESO's future, and also answers to questions some worried players have had, but most of it is about guild stuff. I'll post the text under a read more.

Hey @/everyone, I recently attended a guild summit with ZOS developers where we got a chance to do a Q&A session. I am breaking down some of the keys points from the discussion for us. I will include the stuff I know a lot of us care about first. This is a really exciting time for us to have some feedback/suggestion for the future of ESO. ZOS has been doing a great job of engaging the community and we can expect more from them in the future. For instance, this guild summit will likely become yearly or biannual. About the questions - I missed some, there’s some interpretation, and comments from me included. I want to keep you guys in the loop on what is going on and how we as a guild are involved. A lot of this stuff is things they are considering doing or testing feasibility on. It doesn’t mean it will 100% happen.

Isiimode and I had a very similar question about the next trial drop. They answered the question by saying watch the global reveal. They said they don’t see a lot of the content drops changing. My interpretation of this was mainly that we can still expect a yearly trial and it might not drop exactly on the day that it used to drop on. They want more flexibility in releases and instead of large drops with a drought they would like to drop engaging content as its ready to keep players more engaged over the year. April 10th will be revealing the new trial/content. I think(?) there will be a new trial like normally scheduled just by interpreting Rich’s comments.

It looks like ZOS is going to be working on guild management tools for us in the future. Guildhalls seem unlikely but maybe if we can do them with limited capacity. They are looking into guild halls more. They are going to try to make it so multiple people can manage a guild home from a guild like an officer permission. This last sentence is my interpretation but based on Rich’s answer it seems like someone still have to own it and this is hard to do.

They are working on guild traders and adjusting how they work. Number of listing was really high and this was hard on the servers. They want people to still be able to sell stuff and understand this changed a lot for trading guilds.

They are thinking of more mechanical ways to make guilds useful. They understand that the only reason for joining a guild is really a guild trader. Otherwise discord is the best place for things to happen. No real specifics on this yet.

Limits on guild capacity and other limit items are there to reduce server load. When they started enforcing the mail limit it turned their mail server from terabytes of data to gigabytes. They are trying to minimize the workload on the servers with some of the choices they are making. They referenced guild history, and even Cyrodil changes. Ideally reducing server load overall should help with performance.

Five guild is somewhat arbitrary but it cant be higher because it is a lot of server load to manage five guilds for everyone. Think about how the server has to be pinged every time someone logs on and off or deposits something in the bank. They might consider reducing the number of people in a guild so you can have more but i dont think this is a good idea. They are going to add a guild search function if possible.

They are going to add a guild communication system if possible. It might not look like in-game mail. It could be a calendar or some other functionality.

They are going to explore adding API for guild bank/roster stuff for addon developers to introduce addons. (I didnt really understand this question)

They are going to consider working on a companion app to allow people look at achievements and other account statistics and have already done this in the past but they always blow up the server and make performance tank.

Servers are expensive and getting aussie or other servers seems unlikely. They are already supporting some servers that aren't really active so it’s hard to add more that might not be active.

Some leaderboard changes might be coming in the future. Ultimately, score is the best metrics to base leaderboards on. It includes vit, speed, and HM so it is all encompassing.

What would console addons look like? Very hard to answer. Strict memory limits make it very hard. On PC memory isnt really the limiting issue so its hard to say what console addon developers will be able to use. Codes combat and lazy writ crafter will likely go to console.

People want lore about the players to be included in the game more.

Do the devs play the game? The team plays the game a lot but not everyone plays the game the same. Rich likes the solo content and does that more. Other developers like world bosses, cyrodil, and trading. Its really hard to make content that every single person will love. That being said the devs do play the game and just see different issues than we might see. These summits are way for us to bring our issues forward.

How many people dont interact with guilds? A lot of players play this game like a traditional eso game but might join a guild for a trader or something. They are thinking of new ways to include the community in the functionalities that they have created. It seems like a lot people find playing with people scary.

ZOS love RP community and they like giving them opportunities to RP. A lot of story development includes ways for people to RP.

There is some consideration for integrating EU console servers.

Increasing limits on furnishing in player homes is something they are thinking about but might be hard to do.

They dont want guild homes to replace going to a major city. They want people to have reasons to go to these areas. No one stop shops!

A lot of the cyrodil related development right now is solely on the performance and the champion campaigin/system(?). No other changes will likely be made in the short term.

Will the game be around in 5 years? The best way to answer this is look at development patterns. New cyrodil stuff is an indication that ZOS is going to continue to support the game. ZOS is committed to the game and will continue to commit to the game.

Update the guild tabards to look more modern. Guild specific decorations would be fun and cool.

[dhirajmarketresearch]

[kosher-martian]

Jewish and Israeli Tumblr, I just can't deal with the USA anymore. We're on our tenth consecutive forever-year of stochastic politics. I feel like 2020 was 20 years ago at this point.

I'm tired.

I'll put all the justifications below the cut, but let me get right to my question: Olim & Natural-Born Israeli citizens: What can I expect from Aliyah? Is there a place for me? I want out of the USA.

I currently work as in IT asset management and procurement. Basically I just keep track of my employer's IT-related inventory (think paper, toner, laptops, and tablets), spec and purchase new devices as part of our IT lifecycle, prepare old assets for disposal through our e-waste vendor, and manage/deploy our new inventory when it comes in.

I know Israel has a booming tech sector, but I'm worried I won't make the cut. I'm not an impressive candidate. I have experience in IT but I'm not credentialed or anything. My academic background (Bachelor's) is in business.

Before my current job, I worked in QA software testing (APIs mostly), healthcare technology, and helpdesk (Tier 2). It's gotten me pretty far in the "firm handshake" economy of small town Texas, but I'm not sure it will get me far in the "real" IT world.

Does anyone have any advice for a prospective oleh who's coming from low-paying IT / IT-adjacent work in a low cost of living mid-sized Texan city? What are some good cities / towns to look at besides Jerusalem and Tel Aviv? Are there jobs for someone like me outside of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv?

I guess what I'm asking is whether Aliyah is a good economic decision for someone who doesn't already have money? Any olim here that could give me insights?

The ugly truth is this: The US is sliding into authoritarianism really quickly and I'm on the losing side. Sure there are supposed to be laws in place that will slow this down or mostly stop it, but the law only works if there's someone willing to enforce it and well... Can you name one person who has show the moral fortitude and is still in a position to do something?

To put it in more utilitarian terms: I'd rather be someplace where I'm unlikely to be scooped up and interrogated for being politically and ideologically incompatible with MAGA or whatever. They're already detaining Native Americans and Black Americans and trying to deport them. Bad things are coming, and I'd rather get out now while I still can.

It's not flattering for me to say, it reflects poorly on me, but it's honest: I'm no hero. I'm a coward and I'm not afraid to say it.

[keystonepublishing]

The Saga of Hermitcraft on r/Place (1 April 2022 - 4 April 2022)

On the 1st of April 2022, Reddit unveiled a white blank canvas where every user had the ability to place one colored pixel in every 5 minutes. At its height, about 4 million people participated in one of the biggest internet collaborations ever made. The ripple effects reverberated into news reports as far away as Turkey, and the final canvas represents a snapshot of the multiple communities, events, memes, and what was popular around the world at that time.

This is a documentation of the Hermitcraft mural on r/place 2022.

aka.

Remember what I said about my latest ficbind being a distraction? This is what I wanted to be distracted from.

After Reddit's API fiasco of this year and the subsequent controversial event that was r/place 2023, I decided to save as much documentation about the 2022 event as I could. Luckily, I remember how there are already a series of posts by @riacte who documented the progress of the Hermitcraft mural throughout the whole event, from beginning to end. Her blogposts form the bulk of this book (like, 95%!) and I cannot thank her enough for preserving the happenings of the block men mural.

With that said, I quickly realized that someone who's not a Hermitcraft fan - or me if I'm older - might not get the gist of who's who on the mural. The solution? Make several pages dedicated to just listing who's who on the murals! Because of the sheer number of heads, the mural was divided into several pieces for easier labeling. As a bonus, I also threw in another mural nearby which was connected enough to the Hermitcraft community.

For consistency's sake and preserving focus, I decided to not label the peeps from Dream SMP or the MCC secondary mural. Wrangling Microsoft Word to create an infographic was hard enough, let alone 3! If I inadvertently left out a few bits of extra context from this decision, mea culpa.

When it came to typesetting the entire text block, I decided to make some consistent rules. Titles denoting each day or stage of the mural are on their own pages. New sections are titled using the Bahnschrift font and colored blue, while the first paragraph has their beginning lines look Minecraft-coded and topped with a drop cap (aka. those super-large alphabets).

The names of Hermitcraft and Minecraft players in general are bolded when they first appear in the text. Afterwards, they are bolded if they are contextually important to what's being said.

Extra context would be placed in the footnotes section at the bottom of the page. This is also where I dump some background information that would be invaluable for any readers who aren't Minecraft fans, which is why the SpaceX page looked like... uh, that.

My image policy is to go with the flow; I used as many images from riacte's posts as possible, but I also added-in some of my own if more context is needed. Placing them to look smooth with the text was harder - some are small enough to not cause any problems, others are large enough to fill entire pages without any problems, but a few like the Dream SMP mural (hey there! I managed to put you in!) are too wonky to fit perfectly without leaving no empty spaces.

So in that mural's case, I placed them to the side and let the contextual text flow around it. This principle was also used for the Dota2 / Love Live images and in a few other places throughout the book. The biggest case of this are the few images that are just too wide.

Like this one.

Making double-page spreads is not the easiest thing to do in Microsoft Word, and there are a few r/place images that are too wide to fit perfectly in a single page. Confining them to one page would also mean losing all their details, so making them a double-page spread was necessary.

Didn't make it easy though, especially when there are paragraphs of text and other images that needed to be shuffled around. Mess up the double-page images, and they won't meet in the middle. Mess up the text and other pics? There goes the layout and overall flow!

In the end, making this book took a lot longer than I expected, but I am still grateful to have made this as I have now read through many posts from Tumblr, Reddit, and even Youtube - people expressing joy that they have collectively made something together. I can only hope I have made some justice to them by compiling their work and (even if a small sliver) preserving their testaments.

May this r/place be remembered.

[aretovetechnologies01]

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[sirenjose]

Theory: about Vilhelm, Alice, Orpheus, the final game, and who made the assassination request

The organization Vilhelm has had Evelyn train and grow for him, an organization (skilled in secrets, deception, disguise, and the like) which included women like Martha Behamfil, are highly likely to be the ones spying on Alice, who had been adopted and taken to Melbourne by Vilhelm for his experiments until she managed to escape with Orpheus' help. Vilhelm likely wasn't happy by this, which would explain why he might've sent his spies to find and investigate her. They were eventually exposed though, leading to their recommendation the target be "eliminat[ed]".

This could be when Vilhelm made the assassination request. Possibly because he couldn't let any information about his secret organization leak (or anything else bad he might've done), which could've been her intent eventually considering she decided to be an "investigative journalist" (solving mysteries and reporting on her findings).

And considering based on this we know Vilhelm was recommended to eliminate her, that would relate to the "assassination" request we knew Norton was given. This was the reason Norton went to the manor (for the final game), meaning the 2 options (so far) are Melly or Alice, and if the request came from Vilhelm, Alice is the more likely answer.

Melly on the other hand I think may currently be blackmailed by Orpheus, who I think found out about what she did to her husband, and thus why he would've sent her the same "rare" bee specimen that caused his death (implying he knew the truth).

I think everything Melly said is technically true (maybe could call it a lie of omission). She is here due to her husband's death, which was caused by a "type of rare bee venom" that wasn't recorded in his observation notes. And she did likely receive a bee specimen from the manor, the same that caused his death, and was promised info on the bee species and the cause of her husband's death if she participated in his game. But I think what is missing is she was the one to find and utilize that type of bee, which based on the Ashes of Memory Concept Video may have been the "Apis Mellifera Scutellata Lepeletier" or Africanized bee, and likely that Orpheus may have threatened to release the truth about how she killed her husband to the public if she didn't participate in his game. The Concept Video even had an article that talked about how they attack, how deadly their sting is, and affects caused by their sting, with the following frames showing a path for the bee from Cape Town in Africa to London, England.

It's possible Orpheus may have done similar to Norton, and maybe that could explain why Norton worked with Orpheus to capture and drug Alice in Orpheus' secret basement. Unless Alice did hallucinate Orpheus as Norton in that 1 basement scene where she's drugged.

If it wasn't a hallucination, that would imply Norton is working for both Orpheus and Vilhelm, unless the request came from Orpheus.

It's clear that Orpheus cares for Alice considering Alice's 1st letter shows he helped her to remember him (Orpheus) and escape from Vilhelm, with him calling her his "Nightingale" at the end of the letter (potentially a hint to Alice maybe being connected to "Miss Nightingale" in the present day). So Orpheus doesn't actually want her dead, but it's possible he might've made the request in order to create a situation where he could act like a hero and save her from death, gaining her trust and potentially helping them to grow closer together.

The order would've come from the manor owner (Baron DeRoss), meaning Norton (and everyone) wouldn't know Orpheus is the owner, and thus (if he does actually try to kill her) he would just think someone random (not the person who made the request) was trying to stop him.

Additionally, Orpheus most likely knows Alice is Alice, based on his behavior in Ashes of Memory 1 and 2, expressions, and how he knocks her out and drugs her. It's likely he kept an eye on her the whole time, including her time at White Sand Street Asylum (based on his 1st letter) and her time with Vilhelm in Melbourne, based on Alice's 1st letter and Alice's flashback during Ashes of Memory 2, as well as likely afterwards, after he helps her escape. It's probably just that Alice doesn't know who Orpheus really is (her friend from before the tragedy, or the fact he's the manor owner).

So, if Orpheus doesn't want to kill Alice, but is still trying to use his drugs on her, that may mean his goal has to do with her memories. We've already seen he cares about what she remembers, considering he made sure she remembered him. Maybe his goal then is to change her memories of the tragedy, the most significant and tragic moment of both their pasts. Her backstory even states she "suffered from hysteria" afterwards, while Orpheus' 1st letter states she is "unstable" and even includes the comment "what happened in the past wasn't a great memory to her". Therefore, maybe he wants to change that memory so it's no longer so painful for her. It's possible he may want her to completely forget, but as he didn't want her to forget him, I think it's more likely he wants to change the memory somehow, which could fit in with how the Hydra drug (which "reconstructs" memory) seems to be the drug with the most focus or emphasis (it's the drug Orpheus drinks near the latter part of the Time of Reunion event).

How exactly he wants it to change, I'm not quite sure yet. There is the possibility he wants to at least change her memory of his involvement in it, considering Bonbon's deductions implies he may have helped his real parents take some valuables from the manor. Maybe he also wants to disassociate himself from his real parents, so she doesn't remember it was his own parents that caused the events that led to her parents' deaths. He could do other things as well that would make the memory less painful, maybe even change who she thought her real parents were so she doesn't have to deal with the memory of losing them, who knows. Maybe he wanted to change it so he was the son of the DeRoss couple while she wasn't, so it'd be him in her memories that'd have to deal with their deaths rather than her as much. That could fit with the story he tells her, where he phrases it as he was the kid of the DeRoss couple instead of her. Whatever else, I don't know.

But we know from Alice's trailer that she wants to "face" the truth and whatever other troubles she encounters. She doesn't want Orpheus to be trying to make her avoid the pain by making her forget or changing her memories, nor does she likely agree with his experiments or methods he uses to test his drugs, and thus why she in the end will work to stop him (potentially with the help of Melly and Norton, considering Tracy's game as well as COA 4 emphasize the importance of teamwork to achieve victory).

I still wonder about the specifics regarding what Orpheus' end goal is, but I also wish I knew more about what Vilhelm (and Count Barriere) was trying to do. We know he wanted "goods" from the Mediterranean based on a deal he made with Jose's father, Joaquin Baden. We also know from Evelyn's backstory that he was having her training people like her (in deception, disguises, acting, tricks, good social skills, how to be dangerous, etc...) to work for him like some type of spy organization.

This is likely the same organization from Martha's 4th letter, which is referred to as some type of "unregistered organization" that even an official intelligence agency are unable to investigate with all their manpower and resources. Though it is suggested information on that organization may be "beyond our clearance level", suggesting it is pretty important.

Speaking of Martha, who we know was 1 of the most gifted students Evelyn trained, Martha we know from her 3rd letter is unable or unwilling to be herself. Considering how she was meant to take over for Evelyn, I wonder if this was the type of person Vilhelm wanted Alice to become. We know from her 1st letter she had been forgetting some things, including who Orpheus was. Maybe if Orpheus hadn't saved her sooner, Vilhelm would've been successful.

Maybe the "goods" Vilhelm wanted from the Mediterranean were for his experiments. Maybe it was some of the goods included the "Delphi" plant that we know is used in Orpheus' drugs, as well as Vera's Euphoria. Maybe like Orpheus, Vilhelm wants to mess with people's memories too, maybe to help his organization and to get whatever else it is he wants.

[beardedmrbean]

https://youtube.com/shorts/kZVhghN-aPY?si=fdvZ806evM-HtoPh

Bill Maher is a odd case in political commentary circles, he's managed to tick off everyone at some point but also to have them cheering them on at another.

Not a huge fan personally, but as people that do what he does he's far better to watch than folks like john oliver and his ilk.