#What is iOS 10?

[aethersea]

cons of executive dysfunction: everything

pros of executive dysfunction: yesterday I had an actual good day and got a couple things done that I've been meaning to for weeks; then today I woke up an hour early, unprompted, and had the energy to dance around my room for a bit and then find out how past tense works across the romance languages (why does no one else have the perfect tense? what's wrong with these people, don't they crave perfection), and because I mustered up some spoons the other day I actually have breakfast cereal so I have real food I can eat, and the combination of all these factors is leaving me somewhere just shy of euphoric

[starswirly]

@lazy-shapeshiofter

[ * Uhm uhm uhm ] [ * ITS VERY COOL OKAY??? I HOPE I DID IO AN EPIC AMOUNT OF JUSTICE :DDDD ]

[beardedhandstoadshark]

What is better: an entity that produces great content but treats its fans like crap or an entity that produces sometimes-good-but-sometimes-bad content yet appreciates its own fans?

Is the vibe supposed to be more Disney and Nintendo vs indies, or perfect gods vs. mortalborne deities?

Regardless, in both cases the first entity will inevitably be the one that could be deemed worse, for while the product they make might be great, it itself is not - even the waters of the greatest painting cannot wash away the blood of the hands it was made with.

(But really, what meaning do good or bad hold in the face of creation?)

[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

[flightrising]

Maintenance Update

Happy Wednesday, everyone! While we’re waiting for the engineers to do their thing with today’s maintenance and update, we wanted to touch base with you ahead of time about accessibility and today’s update.

If you’re someone who is sensitive to moving lights, images, or colors online or if you just don’t like them, you have the option to force a setting globally, called prefers-reduced-motion, through your operating system:

Windows 10: Start > Settings > Ease of Access > Display > Show Animations in Windows

MacOS: System Preferences > Accessibility > Display> Reduce Motion

iOS: Settings > Accessibility > Motion> Reduce Motion

Android: Settings > Accessibility > Remove Animations

While not all websites respect the prefers-reduced-motion flag (yet), the update we’re launching today does! What’s especially helpful when you use this setting is that today's update will respect your motion preferences even when you’re logged out!

If you’re sensitive to such animations, this down time is a good time to set your global preferences.

There will also be a toggle in your Account Settings that will allow players to completely turn off the feature if needed or desired. We’ll have more information about the level of individual control a player has with this feature for you when maintenance concludes.

[sematarygirls]

                      Salt &&. Secrets (SMAU.ᐟ)

summary: what started as a fun hobby quickly became more when your anonymous gossip blog unexpectedly began gaining traction after "kook king" rafe cameron discovered your writings about him and publicly bashed you, vowing to discover your identity.

       NAV ! Part Two. Part Three. Part Four.

notes .ᐟ kind of a lot going on in this one, but i did leave yall hanging for a couple days. thank you to everyone who informed me that browser allows you to add more than 10 pics 🙏 you're a lifesaver frfr. also everyone ignore how sometimes the emojis are android and sometimes they're ios...

taglist .ᐟ @kyranheyward @theeternaloptimistt @lovinqbella @glitterybombshell @thebumbqueen @zyafics @psychicnatural @fortheloveofwbb @a-lovers-card @rafesangelita @colbysbrocks @shincidios @memoirofasparklemuff1n @drwstarkeys @k-k0129 @lilithblackkk @hewwokitti @hwaaholic @loveu-always @ietss @cl4uus @blckbrrybasket @vanessa-rafesgirl

                                ୭ৎ

[sealsdaily]

Rating Seal Emojis

Somewhat of a tired format but i still enjoy it so i decided to do one myself?

These sweet thangs don't have much history, as the seal emoji was only added in 2021, but there's still enough to go around so let's go.

Apple iOS

Looks to be evocative of a really grey baby seal. It's quite sweet but i dont like that it has shoulders. 7/10

Google Android

Actually biased, but this is easily one of the cutest. I can excuse the undefined flippers. 10/10

Samsung 2.5

Like trying to redraw the Google emoji from memory. The features seem weirdly disconnected from each other. 5/10

Samsung 6.0

They went back, and decided it needed to be cuter, which they overdid, but who's to say it didn't work? 100% baby thing. Hind flippers are way small though 7/10

Windows 11 2021

Feels more evocative of a baby harp seal than the other ones. The tail makes what i can only describe as a "Seal Bident" and the front flippers are closest to the sleeves of a wavy blouse, but above all, it's JOYFUL and y'know what, i love the energy 9/10

Windows 11 November Update

...and then this came in. There's nothing wrong with this one per se but just compare the previous one! They took its joy and made it some kind of undefined mystery species. 5/10

Microsoft 3D Fluent

It's just the last one, but in 3D. Purple is a pretty novel color to shade a seal with but it doesn't add much, and the definition 3Dness gives it makes it feel weirder. 5/10

WhatsApp

"A seal is just like if you put a dog head on a fish, right?" I can't find a single species of phocid that has this coloration making me think they found an Australian sea lion and went "good enough". Ironically, this one also has the most accurate pose and flipper detail, so it's kind of a net zero. 7/10

Twitter

Sea lion! The tail is a hand and while usually that could be fun and interesting this emoji is going for accuracy and it just makes that fall apart a little bit. 8/10

Facebook

Standing tall and proud! This emoji, while recognizing how the hind flippers are placed, seems to forget the tail resulting in Smooth Barbie Crotch for seals. Front flippers bend real weird too. 8/10

[changes]

Thursday, September 12th, 2024

🌟 New

When a community post gets 10 reactions (not counting reactions from the post author) the post author will now receive a notification about those reactions. We want to give some kind of notification when you’re getting reactions, but not for every single reaction (that could be a deluge of hundreds of notifications in our big communities). Let us know what you think!

Community admins and mods will now be asked for a reason when they moderate a comment.

Logged out users, likely new visitors to Tumblr itself, can now start requesting new communities to be put on the waitlist. They will be asked to log in or sign up before finishing.

To celebrate the new folks joining Tumblr from Brazil, we have launched a lot of communities features if you’re in that country, such asrecommended communities in the For You feed and related communities carousels when searching and viewing tag pages in the mobile apps.

🛠 Fixed

Dismissed “Check out these blogs” recommendations are now dismissed forever.

New custom domains were not receiving renewed SSL certificates, and thus not properly accessible. This has now been fixed, and new SSL certificates have been granted to the affected domains.

Archives and custom pages on blogs with custom domains were broken. This has now been fixed.

On web, some dialogs did not disable our keyboard shortcuts while they were open. For example, you could like a post with the ‘l’ key even though a dialog was open on top of the post! This is now fixed.

On web, we were displaying an option to block a community in Activity, which is not actually possible, and has now been removed. Instead of blocking a community, you can simply leave a community.

The community tags section has been updated to make it clearer that they will aid in discovery of your community.

We’ve made a few small design improvements throughout communities. Less wasted space FTW!

🚧 Ongoing

We’re aware that some ads may interrupt background audio on iOS and are working on a fix! We have also received reports of a weird “cricket-like” sound in the app, which we think is related.

🌱 Upcoming

No upcoming launches to announce today.

Experiencing an issue? Check for Known Issues and file a Support Request if you have something new. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

Want to share your feedback about something? Check out our Work in Progress blog and start a discussion with other users.

Wanna support Tumblr directly with some money? Check out Premium and the Supporter badge in TumblrMart!

[back2bluesidex]

Slippin' Under - JJK (18+) [Masterlist]

Pairing: Bully!Jungkook X Fem!Reader

Theme: angst, toxic workplace settings, bullying, class difference, haters to lovers au

Word count: 1.6k+

Summary: "You're toxic, I'm slippin' under"

Warnings: workplace bullying, insulting the reader based on her social stature, class difference, Jungkook is a shit.

Masterlist | Patreon (For early access)

Minors, I am not responsible for what you consume online. So, act more rationally and stay away.

A/N: I am still taking taglist requests, so comment down to be tagged.

Chapter index: -

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 [Read now on Patreon]

Part 4 [Read now on Patreon]

Part 5 [Read now on Patreon]

Part 6 [Read now on Patreon]

Part 7 [Read now on Patreon]

Part 8 [Read now on Patreon]

Part 9 [Read now on Patreon]

Part 10 [Read now on Patreon]

If you are new to patreon and are using an iOS device then I would suggest you join via Patreon web, as in the one you can access through a browser. Using Patreon application will charge you an extra $1.5, while my monthly membership is $3, you will have to pay $4.5. but you can avoid paying extra by using patreon through a browser.

Thanks<3

Permanent Taglist:

@chimchimmarie @coffeedepressionsoup @meowstake @vonvi-blog @nochuel @chimmisbae @i-have-no-life-charlie @mikrokookiex @jjk174 @lallataegi @savageyoongi @jwnghyuns @parapiop7 @futuristicenemychaos @armystay89 @ryryvna @purple-realms @ssbb-22 @miniesjams32 @mar-lo-pap

Requested tags:

@reallygenerouskoala @tatamicc @7thsthings @diame93 @purpleheartsot7 @crisle19 @fancypeacepersona @petroogorodnik @tatamicc

[another-random-fanfic-blog]

My 8 Hybrids Ch. 2

Chapter 2

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter

Masterlist

Warnings: Blood, violence, abuse, Not edited, will be later

As you sped down the road, you began calculating the how long it would take for you to get to your house versus your clinic. The clinic is the obvious choice to go to, but your house is closer and you wouldn’t have to deal with traffic. Making the decision you used the voice dial on your car to call your friend Will.

“Did you get caught in the rain?” Will asks, forgoing a greeting.

“I need you to get to my house immediately, I’m 15 minutes away,” you respond, ignoring what he said, “This is an emergency.”

“I’ll be there in 10.”

With that you hung up the phone and continued down the road, glancing over at the unconscious rabbit sitting next to you, rage filling you every time as you imagine what you’d like to do with the person who put them there. You call the next person on your list, before you lose yourself in your work and forget to do what you need.

“What trouble did you cause this time?” Kiara asks.

“Trouble? Me? Unlikely,” you retort, giving a small smile.

“Y/N, I’m serious, if you punched another person for hurting a hybrid, despite them deserving it, I will start charging you extra,” Kiara sighs.

“No, not this time, I found two hybrids chained to trees, beaten, bloody, unconscious, a rabbit and some type of big cat I’m assuming. The rabbit may live, but I don’t have hope for the cat,” you explain calmly, “I took video and pictures before getting them down. I will send them to you but I want you to start the process for a lawsuit, just in case something happens.”

“And the hybrids?”

“They will need round the clock care for a while.”

“That’s not what I’m asking and you know it,” Kiara grumbles, “You helped get the laws changed greatly, but unless they have a home lined up, because they are abuse cases, you have to hand them over to hybrid services, where they will probably die from inadequate care.”

“We don’t have to tell them,” you state.

“It’s the law.”

“I don’t care,” you reply shrugging to no one in particular.

“Y/n…”

“Put me down as their owner for now, I will adopt them until we can all decide on something else,” you sigh, not wanting to let the hybrids be taken away.

“I will start the paperwork,” Kiara chirps cheerfully, you know that she wanted you to adopt a hybrid at some point to give you some company. “You wouldn’t happen to know their names would you?”

“According to the rabbit, the cat is named San, I don’t know the rabbits name yet,” you respond, pulling into your driveway and seeing Will sitting in his car, “I’ve got to go, talk later.”

You hang up and come skidding to a halt, throwing your car in park and pushing the door open as you turn off the engine.

“One in the front, one in the back, get the gurney from downstairs, two of them,” you yell out to Will as he nods and runs down the basement stairs.

You open the passenger door and feel the rabbits pulse before moving back to do the same with San. Will comes up in an elevator with two gurneys at his side. Carefully, you help him move San onto one gurney and take him down, while you get the rabbit.

Once the two of you were downstairs, you try to find a spot to hook the rabbit up for an IV, but with such severe dehydration, you have no choice but to do an IO on him. Quickly grabbing a drill, you bore into his bone a little below the knee. Once the fluids were started, you move over to San.

“Mind telling me what happened?” Will asks as he wheels San back from x-rays and begins Sans IO.

“I was hiking, and found these two chained to trees, this one, San apparently, had his leg stuck in a bear claw type trap. I did what I could before bringing them here.” You respond, slowly peeling the makeshift bandage off of San’s leg.

“And here I thought you were paranoid building this place under your house. You wash up while I clean the wound, then we’ll switch.” Will said, not looking up from San’s leg.

“Ok, start him on broad spectrum antibiotics, there’s no telling what bacteria is in those wounds,” you call out from the sink as you change into scrubs and begin cleaning your hands and arms while Will preps San for surgery.

Once you finish and put on gloves, Will switches off, while you continue to debridement of the wound. Once the bleeding is under control and you look at the x-rays, seeing Sans leg is fractured, not broken, which is really the only luck this guy has. Methodically and carefully you and Will work on all of San’s wounds, back and front, in complete silence.

When you first built your home, you had experience finding sick and injured animals in the past, sometimes not being able to take them to get care overnight due to closed clinics. So you demanded a small hospital be built in part of your basement, a hermetically sealed room, filled with everything you’d find in an urgent care. Will said you were crazy for spending this amount on a place you’d never use, and you always thought better safe than sorry.

When work on San was complete, you let Will go look at the blood tests for both, while you worked on the rabbit. He had contusions, cuts, a fractured wrist, dehydration, and severe sunburn. Some of his cuts were infected so you started him on antibiotics as well.

Once you finished, Will came back to you with two bowls, towels, and sponges.

“The boys need cleaned, here’s everything for a sponge bath,” he says smiling and walking away, “I also gave you stuff to wash their hair. I’ll cook some food.”

With a sigh, you carefully start cleaning them, memorizing their features once they were clean and you were done. Both were thin, too thin, tall, from what you could tell by carrying them and them laying down. San had black hair, a sharp jaw, and cat like eyes. Meanwhile, the rabbit had white hair, round boba eyes, and high cheek bones. You moved their beds closer to each other so when they woke, they could see each other easily. You turned on the monitors so they could alert you anywhere in the house, if they woke up, had an issue, or needed an IV refill. Dimming the lights, you walked upstairs to find Will eating ramen and chicken.

“So,” he says getting you a plate as you flop down in your dining room chair, “tell me how you got in this mess with your two new hybrids.” You raise an eyebrow at that, as he places a bowl in front of you. “Kiara told me you adopted them.”

You pulled out your phone and handed it to him so he could go through the pictures and videos, not liking what he saw, while you uploaded your gopro footage to the computer, sending everything in an email to Kiara before you get sidetracked again.

“I’m not a therapist,” you say, “Can you schedule something with Jessica? They will need help, and get her caught up on…this mess.” You remark waving your hand around.

“Sure,” he replies putting his bowl in the sink. “You good, or do you need me to stick around?”

“You can go home before the storm gets worse.”

“Have a good night.” He says as he walks out the door, leaving you to eat in peace.

You finish your food, do the dishes, shower, then grab a cot and set it up in the room with the hybrids, getting ready to sleep after swapping out their IVs.

You slept a solid 10 hours for the first time in…ever before being awoken by muttering. Sitting up, you looked over and saw the rabbit hybrid sitting up and muttering while gripping San’s arm. Slowly standing you make your presence known as the rabbit stares at you frozen and not moving.

“Hi,” you say, approaching as slow as you can, “do you remember me? I found you, and helped you out of the woods.”

The rabbit just stares at you, nose slightly twitching as he plays with San’s fingers.

“San?” He finally asks.

“He has a fractured leg, infection, various wounds, and dehydration…but, barring any unforeseen complications, he should recover, quickly given your advanced healing abilities.” You tell him, as you get close, right next to his bed. “My name is Y/n, this is my home, the basement of my home, can you tell me your name?”

“…Seonghwa,” he says quietly.

“Seonghwa, it’s nice to meet you,” you state, “are you hungry?” He perks up at that and nods. “After I change your IV, I will go get you something to eat. It will be light for now, probably just broth and crackers, but once you keep something down for at least a day, I’d like 2, we will move to something else, ok?”

He nods again and you begin switching out his IV and then San’s, before heading upstairs to get the food. As you heat the broth you take a deep breath, not knowing what to say to Seonghwa as you’ve never been a good conversationalist. Carrying the food down, you stop seeing that San has moved, he was lower in the bed earlier, but now he’s almost sitting, Seonghwa’s pillow helping prop him up. You’re thankful that you decided to bring down two bowls of broth and not just one.

“Here’s your broth,” you say, setting it on a cart with a tray that can move over the bed, “I’ll get you another pillow.” You grab two and bring them back, helping Seonghwa sit up as you move the bed to a more comfortable position. “Hello San,” you say as you make your way over to him. “You have a fractured leg, we weren’t able to cast it because of the open wound, so don’t move it too much, ok?”

San looks at you with wide eyes, watching your every move as you pull up a chair.

“I think we should talk about some things.” You say looking at both of them as you move a sleeve of crackers and a bowl of broth in front of San. “My name is Y/n, I own a clinic that helps hybrids, and this is a mini clinic in my basement that you are recovering in. The law states that when cases of abuse, such as yours are reported, you have to either be immediately adopted or go to hybrid services.” You watch as both hybrids tense and grasp each other’s hands, tears forming in their eyes, knowing hybrid services is not a good option and tears bonded hybrids apart. “I have decided to adopt you until the case is closed and you decide what you’d like to do next.”

“What we’d like to do next?” Seonghwa asks between sips of broth.

“If you want to earn your independence, I will help with that, or I can help you find a different owne-“

“You don’t want us?” San questions, sniffling as he stares at his food. You swear you see a tear fall and immediately think something happened with these two, mostly likely involving being rejected.

“I would be happy if you stayed, but if you didn’t like it here, I don’t want to force you to stay with me.” You respond, patting his hand that was on the side of the bed. “Now, eat, there are small bags next to the bowls in case you need to throw up. Once you are done and the food settles, I will help you shower, then, if you want, we can head upstairs. However, the IV will have to stay in.”

With that, you head upstairs to find some clothes that will fit both the hybrids. Luckily, you have a habit of buying clothes for men and women, including underwear, just in case you have an unexpected guest or something happens to a guests clothes. While you dig through your closet you call the psychologist that works at your clinic and discuss getting the two therapy appointments as soon as you can get them in condition to start walking. She asks you a few questions and you reply, immediately mentioning the comment San made about you not wanting them. She explains that they are raised to believe being owned if the best thing for them and the fact that you suggested removing them would have brought up potential years of previous rejection, plus whatever trauma they may have from whoever left them in the woods. On top of that, one or both of them could have a co-dependency issue. You grab some clothes, soaps, lotions, deodorant, toothbrushes, and toothpaste and head down stairs, asking one final question.

“I go to a conference next week that I can’t get out of because I am a presenter. Can I leave them here alone or should I take them with me?”

“That is up to you and how you feel they will do alone.” Cassie responds before hanging up, leaving you unsatisfied with her answer.

When you walk in the recovery room, you see both hybrids talking to each other, their hands still holding each other. You walk everything into the bathroom downstairs then join the two.

“So, I have some clothes for you two,” you say, gesturing to the bathroom where you put everything, “how about we get you cleaned up? San, I will have to help you because of your leg, I swear I won’t look at anything and will be 100% professional, but I can’t have you moving it wrong.”

“Can you help me too?” Seonghwa asks quietly.

“Sure, do you want to go first?”

“Can…Can we go to-together? I…I-I…”

“Yes, if you both want to be within sight of each other, that is fine.”

You get a wheelchair to take San to the bathroom and help him undress and wrap a towel around his waist, while Seonghwa gets himself ready. Seonghwa sits himself in the tub and relishes the hot water pouring on him while he vigorously scrubs all the dirt off his skin, flinching at the force he was using. Despite you giving them a sponge bath, it still wasn’t enough to remove everything. You tell San to wait, and turn on the hot showerhead to pour over him and watch how almost instantly his body begins to relax. He takes the scrubby and soap and more carefully than Seonghwa, begins to wash his upper body.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” you say to Seonghwa as you sit behind him, taking the scrubby and begin to help, using just enough pressure to clean everything off. “So, what breeds are you?”

“I’m a Lionhead rabbit,��� Seonghwa declares proudly and you have to stop yourself from groaning, knowing how playful and mischievous those breeds can be.

“In other words,” You begin, carefully washing Seonghwa’s hair as he fully leans into you, moaning at how good it feels to get his scalp scrubbed, “I’m going to have my hands full with you.”

You smile at Seonghwa when he opens his eyes and looks at you, first with concern, then with warmth.

“I’ll be good, I promise.” He says closing his eyes again, his foot thumping when you scrub his ears, working the matts out of them and his hair.

“I’m sure you will be.” You finish his hair, both shampoo and conditioner, before rinsing him off and letting him soak under the spray, then head to San, who watched you scrub Seonghwa’s hair with a look of longing. “And what breed of hybrid are you, San?” You ask as he gets a look of excitement on his face while you pour shampoo in your hand.

“I’m a maine coon cat, and I’m a good boy,” he says purring the second your hands make contact with his head. “I’m not mean or intimidating.”

You could hear the pleading in his voice when he said that, and it told you that, though he was skinny, he had muscles, and his face had a look that could go two ways, one sweet and kind, or two intimidating and mean. But just looking in his eyes, like truly looking in his eyes, you could tell he was the sweet and kind person, no matter how people may have tried to portray him.

“I could tell that by your eyes,” you tell him, smiling, causing San to blush and look down.

He closes his eyes as you scrub his hair, giving him a scalp massage before rinsing him off and moving to his tail, carefully trying to work the matts out and when you couldn’t, cutting them out. Once he was cleaned, you let him sit under the spray as well, carefully examining his leg only to see the wound has sealed shut and the stitches dissolved.

You’ll say one thing, hybrid healing is both a gift and a curse. When properly hydrated and medicated and treated, the skin can take only 12 – 24 hours to heal when assisted by stitches. Unfortunately, people think that means a hybrid is healed, this leads to them being pushed beyond their limits and can sometimes be fatal. If the skin closes too fast, it can trap infections inside, and hide other injuries, luckily, San was already treated.

“Your leg looks good, San.” You say, looking up at him, causing him to look down at you and also catching Seonghwa’s attention. “The wound is closed, but the bone won’t have healed yet, so you have to remember to be careful. Both of you,” you look at Seonghwa to make sure he understands as well, and he nods. “Now, you can either stay down here, or we can try moving you to a bedroom upstairs, once you’re done getting dressed?”

“Can…we go upstairs?” Seonghwa asks hesitantly.

“Of course, this is your house too, you can move about it freely, though very carefully until San’s leg is healed.” You say, helping both hybrids dry their hair, ears, and tails. “Can you get dressed yourselves?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll be outside.”

You walk outside of the bathroom and change into dry clothes, then grab a set of crutches for San to walk around on. You want to do one more x-ray on his leg before you take him upstairs, to see how fast the healing has progressed and whether you should cast it or boot it. Once they come out, you help San to the x-ray machine and take the images, Seonghwa glued to your side. Luckily, his leg looks much better, a week and a half and he should be completely healed. Carefully, you put a walking boot on his leg, all the way up to his knee and hand him the crutches, for him to use for the next two days.

Helping both of them upstairs, you show them the rooms, gym, library, living room, kitchen, and garage, before taking to the the top floor with the bedrooms.

“Ok, you both get to choose your own room,” you say smiling at them once they look at the first room. Both hybrids look at each other in slight panic before you continue. “You can visit and sleep in each other’s rooms, but I firmly believe in having your own space. So choose a room and we can look at decorations and clothes for you.”

It took a while, but both hybrids finally chose a room to call their own. You handed each a tablet to look at furniture and room design ideas, as well as shop for clothes, and you went to your own room. It was only 8pm but as soon as your head hit the pillow you were out cold.

Your eyes begin to open as you hear rapid thumping coming from somewhere. Sleepily standing up, you walk out of your room only to hear it stop. Waiting a few minutes, you head back to your room and collapse on the bed again, snuggling under the covers. As you begin to drift off, you hear a loud crash of thunder, followed by very heavy, rapid thumps again. Listening closely you realize it is coming from under your bed.

Rolling off your bed, you grab your phone and turn on the light, seeing a cat and rabbit under your bed, the rabbit thumping his foot on the ground after another crash of thunder. Both hybrids trembling in fear.

“Hey guys, it’s ok, nothing to be afraid of,” you coo to them, reaching a hand out, causing both to approach you. “You are welcome to come cuddle on my bed with me if you want, in human form or animal, either is fine.”

With that you stand and lay on your bed, waiting to see what they would do. It doesn’t take long for you to feel the weight of them jumping on your bed, before they make their way up to where the blanket starts, scratching at it. You lift the covers and both dive inside, just as another thunder clap occurs. You turn on your side and snuggle back into your bed, slowly falling asleep, letting your two hybrids get comfortable.

A few hours later, you wake up, feeling a weight against your stomach. Lifting the blanket, you see two hybrids curled up against you, sound asleep. Carefully, so not to disturb them, you sneak out of bed and head to the showers, realizing the storm had past and it was a bright sunny day out. Once you showered, you checked back on the hybrids and then went downstairs to purchase some things the two of them would like in their animal forms.

“Good morning,” Seonghwa mumbled, walking into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes, a sleepy San following behind him and collapsing into the dining room chair.

“Good morning, Seonghwa, and San,” you reply smiling back at them, “are you hungry?”

“A little,” San whispered, still half asleep.

“I can make eggs, bacon, and hashbrowns, or oatmeal. I don’t really have any other options yet.” You respond standing up and walking to the kitchen.

“Can I help?” Seonghwa asks, following you and you nod, allowing him to get everything out of the fridge and freezer.

He wanted to do everything himself, so you stood by, directing him on how to cook. While San moved around on his crutches.

“What’s this?” San asks, looking at your laptop, open to your recent shopping receipts.

“Ah, I bought some things for the two of you in your animal forms. Cat trees, tall and short, shelves with railings so Seonghwa won’t fall off, and tunnels that can be mounted high and low, as well as some hiding nooks.” You reply ignoring the look of shock on both hybrids faces as you explain what you bought for them. “They will be here in 2 days and you can help set them up and where you want them. I’m sure I bought enough that they can connect almost every room in the house.” After you finished speaking, San’s face lit up and Seonghwa’s foot started thumping on the ground excitedly, both of them trying to hid their excitement, but failing to do so.

It continued like this for the next week, you slowly grew closer to the two hybrids learning that they are the type to trust easily, which breaks your heart. You had both help you set up the cat shelves, tunnels cat trees, and let them set up their hiding nooks by themselves. They were so excited to be involved in the process. You also had them buy their own bedroom decorations and furniture and took them shopping for clothes. San had a sporty look, while Seonghwa enjoyed something similar, but also really liked more delicate style clothing. You were ok with whatever they wanted, as long as they actually wore it. They were also excited to start going to the gym. Though San couldn’t use his leg below his knee, you helped him with arm and ab workouts and exercises made for people in a chair, slow leg lifts that wouldn’t bother his healing but still something he could do. Seonghwa jumped right into everything and you had to slow him down, explaining that going too fast could cause more damage than good. By Friday at the end of the week, you sat them down, to discuss you leaving for the next week.

“You’re leaving us?” San asks, sounding panicked, almost ready to have a panic attack.

“It will only be for a few days and I will call you every morning and every night, we can even do a video chat if you want.”

“We’ll be alone?” Seonghwa asks, playing with the air of the table, only glancing at you.

“I can have someone stop in, in fact he helped me care for you the first night.”

“No,” San interrupts, clearing his throat before beginning again, “We…would rather be alone.”

“Can’t we go with you?” Seonghwa questions.

“I’m afraid there are no hybrid friendly hotels in the area, at least not one that would be kind to either of you.” You shudder at the thought of what could happen to your two hybrids in the hotels while you were gone, before continuing. “I will be 8 hours away, if something happens I can rush home, but it will only be for three days. The fridge is filled with food and I have emergency numbers written on it.” You reach out and take both of their hands, “I promise, I will be back. I will not abandon you.”

With that, they stare into your eyes before nodding. The next few days those two were the cuddliest creatures you ever met, and when you left, San started crying while Seonghwa’s eyes filled with tears, but they did not fall while you could see him. You started to miss them before they disappeared from view as you made your way to the airport, deciding to fly so it was a faster trip there and back.

“Inside now,” the man sneers at his hybrid, causing the hybrids breath to catch in his throat.

“B-but master, the cage is too small, the only way I’ll fit is if you break something,” the hybrid begins, being cut off by his master.

“So we’ll break something. Get in now, or I swear I WILL cut your legs off this time!” The man growls, gripping the hybrids neck.

The hybrid’s eyes go wide and he nods the best he could, quickly crawling into the cage that is far too small for his body. He had to contort himself into an uncomfortable position to fit so the door would close, however, his foot blocked the way of the door. His master didn’t care and slammed the door shut, jamming the hybrids knee into his nose, causing it to bleed, and causing a loud crack from his, foot filling the hybrids body with intense pain. However, that wasn’t all, with the angle of his body in such a small space, his legs put pressure on his chest that made it hard for the hybrid to breathe.

“Don’t make a sound.” The man sneers walking away, leaving the hybrid to suffer.

You felt like you had been walking for hours by the time you made it to the lounge, flopping yourself in the comfortable chair by the windows. This week stressed you out and all you want to do is go home and relax with your hybrids. You place your phone on the chair arm, but it fell onto the floor. When you reach down to grab it, you saw something under the table next to you that made you curious. Moving down to the floor, you see it is a large hybrid, crammed in a small cage, his body contorted in a grotesque position so he could fit, his nose bleeding, and his breathing shallow and labored, eyes closed tightly in an effort to calm himself.

“Nice hybrid isn’t he,” a man says from behind you.

You’re staring at the hybrids face, he opens his eyes and you see the silent plea for help before he closes them again, tears falling down his face.

“He is,” you reply, standing up, “you wouldn’t be interested in selling him would you?”

“You wanna buy him?”

“Yes, I quit like collecting hybrids when they catch my eyes,” you reply, sitting on the chair, staring at the man with a coy smile, trying to feign a calm detachment to the situation. “Right now, your hybrid caught my eye.”

“I’ve tried selling him before, but no one wants a hybrid his size.”

“Oh, what do you mean?”

“He’s 6”1 or 6”3, I don’t really know, and no one wants something so tall.”

“I do. How much?”

“10,000.”

You internally wince at the price, you have the money, but no matter what, $10,000 is a lot to spend. “9 he seems to have a broken nose, it ruins his pretty face.”

“95 and I throw in the cage.”

“9 and I don’t walk away from this. Like you said, no one else wants him.”

“Fine, $9,000. Would you like me to ship him to you o-”

“I will transfer the money to you now and we run across the street and get him legally transferred to me.”

“Deal. Sir,” the man turns to the concierge, “watch the hybrid, and don’t let anyone take him.”

After a half hour, you have a key to the cage and the owner is shipping it to the hotel you just ordered a room at. By the time you arrive, after ordering an uber, you enter your room, throwing your things on the floor as you approach your new hybrid.

“Hi,” you say, as you unlock the cage door, the hybrid watching you with scared eyes, “my name is Y/N, I guess I’m your new owner.”

You open the door and stand back, letting the hybrid untangle himself to get out, but then you notice he’s having trouble. Carefully, you reach in the cage and reposition his legs, slightly pulling them straighter, so he can unbend himself. Meanwhile, you go to the bathroom to get a warm wet cloth to clean his face.

“What’s your name?” You ask, walking back to the room and seeing him sitting on the floor. Slowly you lower yourself in front of him and begin cleaning the blood from his nose.

“Yunho,” he replies, sitting quietly as you examine his face.

“Good news is your nose isn’t actually broken, just a little swollen,” you look down and see his ankle sitting at an odd angle. “What happened to your foot?”

“I don’t know,” Yunho whispers looking away, clenching his fists as he stares at his leg.

“Ok, we’re taking you to a hybrid urgent care,” you state as you order another uber to the nearest hybrid treatment location. Getting a few things together, and calling to see if the front desk has a spare wheelchair to wheel Yunho to a car, you watch him carefully during that time. He doesn’t make a move at all. Soon your phone dings letting you know your uber is here, followed by a knock on the door. With the help of the bellman, you lift Yunho into the wheelchair, then head to the car. It’s not a long drive, and once Yunho is settled in at the doctor and wheeled away for x-rays, you call San and Seonghwa.

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter

Taglist: @sunnysidesins, @the-secret-thief

[sgiandubh]

Looking for balance

People have been asking for years that she would name McGill in the same sentence as 'husband'. This happened, after almost six years of marital bliss #shitshow, which is (how can I properly put it?) at least peculiar. And yes, I am still perfectly unfazed - because you see, promo also means being as consensual as possible. In this regard, it would seem the lessons of that costly, (in)famous Vanity Fair interview have been learned. But also that her fresh, organic image the veterans of this fandom so much enjoyed is probably gone.

Among all the interviews she so liberally (and rather proportionally with the big budget of The Amateur) offered, the most interesting one was for Io Donna the woman weekly supplement of the big Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. It was posted across the street and they were unable to read, let alone understand it. They imagine we were as parochial and dumb as they are, so I said 'hold my beer' and translated it for you.

[Source: https://www.iodonna.it/personaggi/star-internazionali/2025/04/08/caitriona-balfe-protagonista-con-rami-malek-in-operazione-vendetta/ - 8 April 2025]

This time, we are talking about a widespread, very prestigious European media outlet. Not a Swiss news portal, bearing also in mind that Switzerland is a market seven times less important, in terms of audience, than Italy.

Anyways, there goes - my own translation, thank you:

Caitriona Balfe, star of 'The Amateur': 'I'm Frustrated by Injustice in the World' A former model and aspiring director, she is best known for her role as Claire Fraser in the television series Outlander. by Michaela K. Bellisario

"They made Rami run around a lot. We shot the escape scene so many times that we ended up joking about it." Caitriona Balfe, 45, actress and supermodel, is one of the two female leads (the other is Rachel Brosnahan) in The Amateur with Rami Malek, an American spy action thriller directed by James Hawes, based on the 1981 novel of the same name by Robert Littell, in theaters starting April 10.

Malek is a CIA code breaker who works in the basement of the Langley headquarters in the United States. His life is turned upside down when his wife is killed in a terrorist attack in London. When his supervisors refuse to act, he embarks on a dangerous journey around the world to track down the real perpetrators of the attack and avenge his wife. Caitriona Balfe is the widow of another agent and helps Malek using her computer skills.

Caitriona Balfe in The Amateur : "I accepted the movie because we were going to shoot in Marseille and Istanbul"

For Caitriona Balfe, originally from Dublin, this is a new role . The actress is best known for her role as Claire Fraser in the TV series Outlander, for which she won a BAFTA Scotland, two People's Choice Awards and two Saturn Awards, and received four consecutive Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress in a Drama Series. In 2021, alongside Jamie Dornan, she starred in the film Belfast, written and directed by Kenneth Branagh.

Caitriona Balfe, what made you take this role? I liked the idea of ​​​​measuring up to a character so different from the others played to date. And then I was attracted by the possibility of working with Rami Malek and the director James Hawes, who I admire for the series Slow Horses. Last but not least, I confess, the fact that it was shot in Istanbul and Marseille. After all those years in Scotland ...

In fact, you basically worked and lived in Scotland for the TV series Outlander. Yes, that's eleven years in total. Intense and beautiful years. But, of course, every now and then changing location doesn't hurt, especially if I think of my colleagues who, instead, shoot for example, I don't know, in exotic locations (laughs).

Caitriona Balfe: "Rami Malek Gave Me So Much Advice" You have long scenes with Rami Malek, the “avenger”, especially those where you run to escape from the “enemies”, can you tell us a behind-the-scenes anecdote? If you mean the escape scene, we repeated it five times, it must have been three in the morning on a cold January night in Marseille. An adventure… Malek is a very generous professional and gave me a lot of advice. I arrived on the set when the shooting was already underway, it always takes a few moments of orientation to fit in and Rami supported me at every moment.

What is the message of this action thriller: revenge or peace? The film seems to be focused on revenge, Rami tries in every possible way to avenge his wife's assassination by occult terrorist forces. But during his long escape around the world, a bit like in a hero's journey, he understands that after all revenge is only the starting point of what he is doing. He understands the only thing that makes sense is to discover the truth and he wants justice to be served.

Food for thought in such a troubled moment of global politics… Exactly. In our world, these two levels, revenge and aspiration towards justice, are often confused. Yours is an interesting question we should all ask ourselves at this moment in time. I liked my character because she chose truth instead of revenge. And she has a positive influence on the character played by Rami Malek.

Caitriona Balfe: "I'm frustrated by injustice"

What makes you call for revenge? Everything! I am a Libra and I am looking for harmony in everything. I am frustrated by the lack of empathy between people, yet we are all interconnected, equal, we should treat each other with love and compassion. The same goes for animals and the environment. Everything would be easier, right? Instead, it seems to be the most difficult thing in the world. I was talking about it with a friend just today. You reach a certain point in life where you understand that the only important thing is love for all sentient beings.

Let's take a step back in time: you were a supermodel in the 90s and then you made your debut in The Devil Wears Prada… As I always say… I didn’t actually act in the film. I was an extra, one of the many girls who sashay in and out of the editorial office. But at least I had the chance to meet Meryl Streep. Even becoming a model was the result of chance. I was eighteen and studying acting in Dublin when I was noticed. I was able to live in Japan, France, Germany… ten years of discoveries.

"I'm interested in nourishing the soul"

You have tried directing on Outlander's set. Yes, I would love to end up behind the camera again, I am interested in exploring storytelling and narratives. Ultimately, thousands of years ago, when we were all cavemen, we told stories around the fire. For an actor, that is perhaps the most interesting side of it, because we are limited in the roles we play. Directing will make me able to tell stories in a much broader way.

How do you balance your private life with your professional life? Since I had a son, everything has become much more complicated. But it's not a problem, he is my priority. For the first three years of his life I worked a lot, now I've decided to take some time for us to be together, also because he will start school and we will have to find a new balance.

What do you do in your free time? I explore my creative side. I try to practice yoga. Nourishing the soul is definitely the most important task we have.'

***

I took the liberty to put in italics the answers I considered way more interesting, and perhaps even honest, than the rest. Her Stans should definitely take a deep look at what she said about empathy (or rather lack thereof), equality and her ultimately feeling that people are interconnected - all things I have particularly found Mordor wanting, especially considering their uncanny brutality and love of insults.

Corriere della Sera is a far more liberal media outlet than FOX, so the message of her points of talk was tailored to align with its values: yoga, compassion, empathy, environment and animal rights, tolerance and connection, injustice of the actual global context (subtly so, always as far as she is concerned). Again, no surprise and a clearly more serious, better adjusted image for the (perhaps more sophisticated) given audience. All you need is love, insomma: there's nothing more consensual than that, there's nothing less encouraging to probe further the real C behind the mask, Oriana Fallaci style.

I was not surprised, then, to see no mention of McGill, whatsoever. This is, at any rate, rarely done in European media of this level and importance, unless the story is compelling. She seems now entirely focused on Blonde Bambino, who (in her own words) has become 'her priority' (but, but...oooh, LOL) . That was the golden opportunity to mention McGill in a very positive, indisputable context, yet she did not take it - I really wonder why. Oh, and in case you wonder, the 'us' in 'I decided to take some time for us' refers, in my humble opinion, exclusively to her and Blonde Bambino. This being reinforced by her mentioning she worked a lot on Outlander and her will to spend more one on one time with him before he'd start school.

The contrast is clear. Different messages for different markets: she is a human being, not a batch of Skyr. However, it is with deep nostalgia (and also a wide grin) that I noticed the website also linked to a July 2016 interview of hers to the same newspaper, for the people who had time to kill and were willing to know more about her story. Lo and behold, here is what I found:

[Source: https://www.iodonna.it/personaggi/interviste-gallery/2016/07/15/caitriona-balfe-sono-uneroina-romantica-ma-non-ho-tempo-per-lamore/]

My translation: 'Caitriona Balfe: I am a romantic heroine, but I don't have time for love. On the TV screen, I have two husbands, but in my own life I've got none', jokes the actress, star of the cult series Outlander. She is talking to us about 'real sensuality', passion and feeling embarrassed. And she tells us why she'll never go to Paris with any fiancé'.

My translation: 'From the Scottish Highlands to the 1750's Paris: how much does the script weigh on the acting?

The Scottish Highlands are wild lands, the intensity of the landscape and the events of that time are encouraging Claire and Jamie's passion. Then, Paris does create strong tensions. I don't know if you have already went to the French capital while being in love: it's such a pressure to love each other, that it always ends in fighting' (laughs).

Of course, the rest is paying lip service to the narrative, but what about the trolls across the street for whom McGill was already the chosen one, by then (as if, heh... as if...)?

Stop lying. You're not doing her any good.

[luthqrs]

doctor who big finish audio stories!

⚠️ this post is no longer being updated or monitored x ⚠️

you may have seen my nuwho books post and thought “well that’s all good and proper but i wanted the big finish audio dramas >:(“ fear not, because i have a collection of those too and i am still not allergic to sharing :)

also up for grabs: doctor who novelisations (x) and torchwood big finish audios (x)

a list of what’s there + how to play below the cut x

things you’ll find here:

new who + misc

the diary of river song (series 1-12)

the death and life of river song (series 1)

the tenth doctor and river song (series 1)

the tenth doctor adventures (series 1-3)

the ninth doctor adventures (series 1 + series 4 vol. 1)

unit incursions (episodes 8.04 + 8.05)

unit nemesis (series 4)

missy (series 1-4)

the eighth of march (3.01 + 3.02)

masterful + terror of the master

rose tyler: the dimension cannon (series 1-3)

the paternoster gang (series 1-5)

master! (series 1-3)

time lord victorious (008)

once and future (005)

tenth doctor adventures: dalek universe (3.02)

classic who

the eighth doctor adventures (series 1-4)

stranded series (series 1-3)

doom coalition (series 1-4) (exc. 3.02.... working on it)

dark eyes (series 1-4)

ravenous (series 1-4)

classic main range (134, 135 + 168)

companion chronicles: the second doctor (vol 1-3 / series 10, 12 + 14)

gallifrey (series 1-3)

!!! torchwood audios have moved. they can now be found here !!!

and how to access them

press play!!

if you like to listen at 1.5x speed like me, you can use an independent media player. on ios, press the 3 dots -> open with: [audio player of choice] (i use evermusic)

make and save copies of what you want even if you don’t have time to listen right now. don’t rely on this link always being here.

want something you can't have?

⚠️ this post is not currently being monitored or updated ⚠️

if there's a particular story/series you wanted to hear that i don't have listed yet, send me an ask or pop it in the comments x

happy listening! x

[ms-demeanor]

Genuine question, if Apple sucks and Google sucks, what phone do I get? Like, I'm a proponent of Fuck Google, but I have an Android cause I'm a bigger proponent of Fuck Apple, and I don't really have a great way to reconcile these feelings of conflict

I address this a bit in the degoogling pamphlet; iphones are genuinely better for privacy and I think the phone side of apple is less terribly reprehensible than the computer side if for no other reason than market forces prevent them from gouging quite as excessively. If you own an android your best bet is to turn off location data (everyone should be doing this for all of their devices anyway) uninstall as many apps as possible, force stop or disable as many apps as possible, deny every possible permission it is possible to deny, and never use your phone for sensitive work.

Your other option is to look into linux phones, which are out there, but don't have the same kind of app ecosystem or broad support as ios or android.

And the thing that I really think everyone should do that nobody actually likes hearing is to stop using your phone as anything but a phone. They can't track your data if you don't use it. I recognize that people need phones now in a way they didn't in the past (2fa is a huge part of this; people are either using SMS or apps to verify and that means it's not as easily dismissed as a necessity as it was 10 years ago) but there's a huge part of me that's like "I want to replace my smartphone with a jitterbug."

If you can't actually replace your smartphone with a jitterbug you can at least pretend that it isn't anything but a phone with a few limited extra tools.

(Also this is my "the boomers are right about..." thing: everyone should uninstall navigation applications and go back to reading maps and pre-planning their route to their destination)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Why Millennials aren’t leaving Tiktok

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW NIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and more!

The news that Gen Z users have abandoned Tiktok in such numbers that the median Tiktoker is a Millennial (or someone even older) prompted commentators to dunk on Tiktok as uncool by dint of having lost its youthful sheen:

https://www.garbageday.email/p/tiktok-millennials-turns

But "why are Gen Z kids leaving Tiktok?" is the wrong question. The right question is, why aren't Millennials leaving Tiktok? After all, we are living through the enshittocene, the great enshittening, in which every platform gets monotonically, irreversibly worse over time, and Tiktok is no exception:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

To understand why older users are stuck to Tiktok, we need to start with why younger users relentlessly seek out new platforms. To some extent, it's just down to youth's appetite for novelty, but that's only part of the story. To really understand why people come to – and leave – platforms, you have to understand switching costs.

"Switching costs" is the economists' term for everything you have to give up when you change products or services. Switching from Ios to Android probably means giving up a bunch of your apps and purchased media. Switching from an airline where you're a high-status frequent flier to another carrier means giving up on free checked bags and early boarding.

In an open market, rivals have lots of ways to lower these switching costs (it's an open secret that you can call an airline and say, "Hi, I'm a 33rd Order Mason on American Airlines, will you make me a Triple Platinum Diamond Sky-Baron if I switch to Delta?"). Of course, big incumbents hate this, and do everything they can to increase their switching costs, finding ways to impose high switching costs that punish disloyal consumers who have the temerity to go elsewhere.

With social media, lock-in comes for free, thanks to the "collective action problem." Getting people to agree on a given course of action is hard, and as you add more people to the picture, the problem gets harder. It's hard enough to get half a dozen people in your group-chat to agree on where to go for dinner or what board-game to play. But once you're reliant on a social media service to stay in touch with friends, relatives around the world, customers, communities (say, rare disease support groups), and coordination (like organizing your kid's little league car-pool), the problem becomes nearly insoluble. Maybe you can convince your overseas relatives to switch to a Signal group, but can you do the same for your small business's customers, or your old high-school pals?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

Taken together, switching costs and collective action problems make platforms "sticky," and sticky platforms inevitably enshittify.

Platforms, after all, generate value. They connect end-users with each other (say, little league parents) and they connect end-users to business customers (you and your small business's customers). That value needs to be parceled out among end users, business customers, and the platform's shareholders. A platform can make life better for business customers at its end users' expense by increasing the number of ads (hello, Youtube!), and it can make life better for its shareholders at its business customers' expense by decreasing the share of ad revenue given to publishers or performers (oh, hello again, Youtube!).

From a platform's perspective, the ideal state is one in which end users and business customers get no value from the platform, because it's all being captured by the platform's shareholders. But if Youtube interrupted every 30 seconds of video for ten minutes of ads and paid the video creators nothing, both users and creators would ditch the platform – and advertisers would follow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dab8sKg8Ko8

So platforms seek an equilibrium: "what is the least value we apportion to end-users and business customers without triggering their departure?" Maybe that means giving more value to end-users (for example, keeping Uber fares low by suppressing wages), or to business-customers (crowding more ads into your social media feed).

Every business – including brick-and-mortar, non-digitized ones – wants to find some kind of equilibrium between the value going to its suppliers, its customers and its owners, but digital businesses have an advantage here: digital systems are flexible in ways that analog, hard-goods businesses are not. Digital businesses can alter pricing, payouts and other dynamics from moment to moment – second to second – and make a different offer to every supplier and customer. They have a bunch of knobs, and they can twiddle them at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Well, not quite at will. Businesses face constraints on their twiddling. If they get too greedy, users or business customers might weigh the cost of staying against the switching costs and decide it's not worth it. But the more expensive – the more painful – a platform can make leaving, the more pain they can inflict on the people who stay.

In other words, there's two ways to keep a customer or supplier's business: you can make a better service so they won't want to leave, or you can make leaving the service so painful that they stay even if you mistreat them.

There's three ways a digital company can make things worse for their customers and users without losing their business.

First, they can eliminate competition (think of Mark Zuckerberg buying Instagram to recapture the users who'd fled Facebook to escape his poor management):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Second, they can capture their regulators and avoid punishment for trampling their suppliers' or users' legal rights (think of how Amazon has raised the price of everything we buy, both on- and off Amazon, through its "most favored nation" deals):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Third, they can use IP law to prevent competitors from modifying their services to claw back some of that value (think of how Apple used legal threats to block an Android version of Imessage, blocking Apple customers from having private conversations that included non-Apple customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Companies can't just use this tricks at will, of course. Antitrust laws can block companies from making anticompetitve acquisitions or mergers. Regulators can punish companies for cheating their customers, workers and users. Technologists can come up with clever ways of modding or reconfiguring existing services with "interoperable" add-ons that let users bargain for better treatment by refusing to accept worse:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Day in, day out, the decision-makers at tech companies test these constraints, twisting the knobs that shift value away from users to shareholders. Their bosses and boards motivate them with "KPIs" that dangle the promise of huge bonuses and promotions for any manager who successfully enshittifies part of the company's products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Decades of pro-corporate, pro-monopoly policy has loosened those knobs. 40 years of lax antitrust meant that companies had a lot of leeway to buy or merge with rivals – that's changing today, but it's tough sledding:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

As sectors grew more concentrated, they found it easier to capture their regulators, so that they no longer fear punishment for price-gouging, spying, or wage-theft, so applying the same amount of torque to the "break the law" knob cranks it a lot further:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Once you've captured your regulators, you can aim them at your competitors. A monopoly-friendly policy environment has transformed IP law into a bully's charter, allowing powerful companies to strangle would-be competitors who dare to offer their customers tools to shield themselves from enshittification, like scrapers, ad-blockers and alternative clients. Big companies can crank the enshittification knob all the way over and know that smaller rivals knobs won't turn at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

At one point, bosses faced one more constraint on knob-twiddling: their workforce. Many tech workers genuinely cared about their users' welfare, something bosses encouraged as a sneaky trick to get techies to put in long hours without exercising their leverage by quitting rather than destroying their lives to meet arbitrary deadlines. These workers would fearlessly slap their bosses' hands when they reached for the enshittification knob, threatening to quit rather than allowing the products they'd given so much for to be enshittified. Today, after hundreds of thousands of tech layoffs, tech workers are far less like to challenge their bosses' right to twiddle, and far more likely to get fired if they try:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

All this means that tech bosses don't have to change their approach at all, and yet, their services will grow steadily worse. The boss who twiddles the enshittification knob in exactly the same way as he did a year or a decade ago will find it turning much further, because his customers are locked into his platform, his regulators won't protect them, the same regulators will stop his competitors' attempts at countertwiddling, and his workers fear losing their jobs too much to speak up for their users.

That's the contagion that produced the enshittocene: the forces that constrained companies (competition, regulation, self-help and labor – all melted away, allowing every company's MBA-poisoned knob-twiddling leaders to shamelessly caress their knobs with every hour that God sends:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

Which is why people want to leave platforms. When a platform loses its users, those users have weighed the switching costs against the pain of staying and decided that it's better to bear those costs than to stay.

So why have Tiktok's younger users found the costs too high to bear, and why have their elders remained stuck to the platform?

For that, we have to look at the unique characteristics of young people – characteristics that transcend the lazy cliche that kids are easily bored, fickle novelty-seekers who hop from one service to another with unquenchable restlessness.

Whether or not kids are novelty-seekers, they are, fundamentally, a disfavored minority. They want to do things that the platforms don't want them to do – like converse without being overheard by authority figures, including their parents and their schools (also: cops and future employers, though kids may not be thinking about them as much).

In other words, kids pay intrinsically lower switching costs than adults, because a platform will always do less for them than it will for grownups. This is a characteristic kids share with other supposedly technophilic, novelty-seeking "early adopters," from sex-workers to terrorists, from sexual minorities to trolls, from political dissidents to fascists. For those groups, the cost of mastering a new technology and assembling a community around it is always more likely to be worth bearing than it would be for people who are well-served by existing tools:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#sex-tech

Pornographers didn't jump on home video because of its superiority as a medium for capturing flesh-tones. Home video was a good porn medium because it was easier to discreetly get into the hands of porn consumers, who could, in turn, discreetly view it. The audience for porn in the privacy of your living room is larger than the audience for porn that you can only watch if you're willing to be seen marching into a dirty movie theater.

Every new technology is popularized by a mix of disfavored groups and neophiles, who normalize and refine it – and yes, infuse it with their countercultural coolth – until it becomes easy enough to use to become mainstream. As more normies drift into the new system, the switching costs associated with leaving the old system declines. It gets easier and easier to find the people and services you want in the new realm, and harder and harder to find them in the old one.

This is why tech platforms have historically experienced sudden collapse: the platform that gets more valuable and harder to leave as it accumulates users gets less valuable and easier to leave as users depart:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

If you're a Gen Z kid on Tiktok, you experience the same enshittification as your Millennial elders. But you also experience an additional cost to staying: as late-arriving adult authority figures become more fluent in the platform, they are more able to observe your use of it, and punish you for conduct that you used to get away with.

And if you're a Millennial who isn't leaving Tiktok, it's not just that you experience the same enshittification as those departing Gen Z kids – you also face higher switching costs if you go. The older you get, the more complex your social connections grow. A Gen Z kid in middle school doesn't have to worry about losing touch with their high-school buddies if they switch platforms (they haven't gone to high school yet – and they see their middle school friends in person all the time, giving them a side-channel to share information about who's leaving Tiktok and where they're headed to next). Middle-schoolers don't have to worry about coordinating little league car-pools or losing access to a rare disease support group.

In other words: younger people leave old platforms earlier because they have more to gain by leaving; and older people leave old platforms later because they have more to lose by leaving.

This is why Facebook is filled with Boomers. Yes, their kids bolted for the exits to avoid having their parents (or grandparents) wading into their sexual, social and professional lives. But the reason the Boomers were late joining younger users' Facebook exodus – or the reason they never joined it – is that they stand to lose more by going. Facebook deliberately cultivated this dynamic, for example, by creating a photo hosting service designed to entice users into uploading their family photos while disguising how hard it would be to take those photos with them if they left:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The irony here is that tech has intrinsically low switching costs. All other things being equal, a new platform can always build a bridge to ease the passage of users from the old one. There's no (technical) reason that moving to Mastodon, or Bluesky, or any other platform should mean cutting ties with the people who stayed behind.

A combination of voluntary interoperability (where old platforms offer APIs to allow new services to connect with them), mandatory interop (where governments force tech companies to offer APIs) and adversarial interop (where new companies hack together their own API with reverse-engineering, scraping, bots, and other guerrilla tactics) would hypothetically allow users to hop between networks as easily as you change phone carriers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Tech platforms tend to offer APIs when they're getting started (to ease the inward passage of new users) then shut them down after they attain dominance (locking the door behind those users). The EU is tinkering with mandatory APIs through the Digital Markets Act (though bafflingly, they're starting with encrypted messaging rather than social media). Restoring adversarial interoperability will require extensive legal reform, which is getting started through Right to Repair laws:

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/13/oregon-passes-right-to-repair-law-apple-lobbied-to-kill/

The people who are stranded on social media platforms shouldn't be mistaken for uncool, aging technophobes. They're not stubborn, they're stranded. Like the elders who can't afford to leave a dying town after the factory shuts down and the young people move away, these people are locked in. They need help evacuating – a place to go and a path to get there.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/21/involuntary-die-hards/#evacuate-the-platformsr

[junakov]

SPOILERSS

FINAL EP 8 THINGS IVE NOTICED and thoughts and idk

i was so excited for this omg

i wonder what was the minus for tho 😔 also for a sec i thought that uzis name got revealed as usi 😭 cus of the s thing above but ig it can work as z

theres also a dead cells reference but its dead batteries 😭 lmao

thats my fav frame ong they look so scruffy AND off topic i love the design of the drones faces in general 😭😭😭 they always have this little goldfish look

this scene was sooo pretty, generally it was a shock how good the animation and render looked like fr i wasnt expecting such an upgrade from ep 7

AND im so glad the physics didnt work at that moment and their hair didnt burn 😔 i would be mourning all ep

honestly ive became a fan of J 😭😭 she got the short end of the stick through all of it

Grumpy Mctraumabot lmao also why their ios is so outdated

a lot of people pointed out that uzi referenced the tpose covers for the OST but i think they did it with khan more accurately 😭

her in those heels was a HARD WATCH like ouch

heres such a great shot, i feel like this is where you can clearly see the animation improved cus omg

omg he shred a tear 😭😭😭😿😿😿the feels guys 🥺🥺🫶🫰🫶

those eyes remind me too much about the instagram icon lmao also what is this windows xp how old the tech was on copper 9

this song hits hard maybe my fav part of the soundtrack

so they didn't make them kiss but they made them netflix and chill smh the priorities these days...🚬 KIDDING

AAHHH are those her moms headphones?? idk

anyway the finale was fun and very pretty, kinda short, wish it could go on for 10 more hours, i also wish they all could get a chance to talk more cus im more for interactions between the characters rather than action but alright alright

[muffinrecord]

Previous pinned post.

Magia Record has announced End of Service on July 31st.

Credit to noobwithnohats for translating the EOS information translation.

1: the EOS itself

the DMM Bluestacks client will end service on 2024-07-01 3:00 PM JST

the iOS and Android clients will end service on 2024-07-31 3:00 PM JST

announcement mentions that "maintaining operations has become difficult," whether this is standard corporatespeak or the truth I cannot say

all purchases have been disabled, though existing stones and Magia Passports are still valid all the way up to EOS

you can apply for refunds for paid Magia Stones between 2024-07-01 and 2024-09-08 for DMM users, and between 2024-07-31 and 2024-10-07 for mobile users

2: what will happen between now and the dreaded day?

"BEYOND MAGIA," a Walpurgisnacht raid remaster

Kagome's Hundred Monsters rerun

Witch Extermination

another Atelier Alina run

one more Ranked Mirrors run

Kimochi Special: The Witch of Happiness

final story

There will also be a 4* rate-up selector and free daily 10x rolls all the way up to the dreaded day The existing Magia Record client will be converted into an Archive App, available to download between 2024-07-31 to 2024-10-14 3:00PM JST This will contain:

Magical Girl info

Memoria info

Doppel, Witch and Uwasa info

based on what you have unlocked some info from our Magia Record accounts will carry over to Exedra via our transfer codes, though how this will work is not explicitly mentioned at this time Terms of Service edit to allow them to use our ingame data "for other services provided by the company related to this app"