#Winning Numbers Software

[speaksleazy]

♬♪ .. living，retro computer id pack﹙for anonymous ﹚♯ predominantly androgynous.

names ⇢ lovebytes，calware，malakai，halware，atari，AM，wheatley，chip，malwaria，micah，mickey，hal，zip，zap，tessa，tecca，emoticon﹙emoticonnie﹚，bailey，sean，cursor，pascal，cache，java﹙javascript﹚，data，click﹙clicky，clickie，clicker﹚，myspace，wirehead，whirr，solitaire，paige，peyton﹙payton﹚，electronica，talia﹙digitalia﹚，fax，circe，programatha，juno，will

pronouns ⇢ it its，bit byte，beep boop，click clack，key keys keyboard，whirr whirrs，pix pixel pixelated，CPU CPUs，compute computer，route router，win windows，sentient sentience，wire wires wired，err error，pro program programmed，soft software，hard hardware，cir circuit circuitboard，click scroll，404 404s，404 page not found，^_^ ^_^s，:-) :-D，o_o >_>，🔌 🔌s，💻 💻s，🖥 🖥s，⌨ ⌨s，🖱 🖱s，💽 💽s，💾 💾s，💿 💿s，📀 📀s，🔇 🔊

titles ⇢ the man﹙woman，girl，boy，gal，guy，being，thing﹚in the machine，the one behind your screen﹙The one behind your LCD screen﹚，＿ who is running on flash﹙can be replaced with any software﹚，＿ technological form，＿ wires，＿＿ with a circuitboard in place of ＿ brain，ms. paint，＿＿ plugged into the wall，your mechanical﹙technological，electronic﹚best friend

ids ⇢ Aiwarix，Vietechxic，Digitalbeing，Technobodiment，8bitgender，Technoperspeque，Girlvirtual，Nonbinaryvirtual，Boyvirtual，Virualors，Oldcomputic，Win10gender，Byteic，Aithing，Dynirusic，Digirealgender

users ⇢ Lovebytez，﹙name﹚-﹙4-digit number﹚，0100000101001101，7653r70¹，hi-040405，computers-cant-byte，machinery-and-me，35784m5¹，circuitboard4brains，malwaria，b-i-n-a-r-y，c-i-r-c-u-i-t，https-﹙name﹚-dot-com，thinking-in-1s-and-0s，1s-and-0s-and-1s，benevolentware，wifiwifey，pluginbestfriend，pluginplaything

¹ Combining random numbers and letters can be used to make more usernames like this.

[wisteriagoesvroom]

broadscar best moments compilation🫣👉👈?

y'know. i actually really had to think about this. because oscar i feel is currently in the early intermediate phase of his glow up and not at his full blastoff broadscar potential yet (give it another few years).

NONETHELESS. the people ask. the people receive. my personal opinion top 5 broadscar moments:

#5. oh boy! that sure is a bicep!

you know the IT guy who shows up to fix your computer and you're like, well. that's nice he's just a quiet guy he's well informed about relevant cybersecurity software patches. he probably plays COD on the weekend and feeds his cat regularly.

then he leans forward with his palms flat on the table to check a dashboard or something and you're like - hold on. whaaat?

anyway not to get into AU or y/n territory rn but like. this was a strong hint of the sleeper build. is all i'm saying.

#4. back getting big, brain go brrrr

exhibit a: cannot remember which race this was from but okay, yeah he's an athletic dude, blablabla

exhibit b: suzuka '24. yooo back gains? and he is SLOUCHING...

#3: the fireproofs of peril

look...if i speak. i simply posit the question to the audience: what if oscar piastri stood up straight more often.

(and thank you @inchidentally for bringing this picture to my attention in the first place. a connoisseur. a scholar.)

number two: qatar karting night kardio arrest

yo. the arms. the balaclava. the vaguely drift-racing-game-adjacent nighttime lighting. and the amount of times this clip alone has surfaced in the oscar piastri thirst edits. ENOUGH SAID.

number one: the qatar sprint-sweat saga

I KNOW WE WERE ALL THINKING IT, OKAY.

how could i not include this on the list because, hello, first win, but also.... O, to be a single drop of sweat sliding down oscar piastri's face and into his *LOUD HELICOPTER NOISE*

anyway, sorry, did y'all hear something??? it sounded like someone losing their mind??

[thissying]

Max Verstappen has been in the Red Bull factory regularly in recent weeks to find a solution to the problems with his RB20. How can a driver help his team in the factory? Former Formula 1 test driver Ho-Pin Tung explains.

Red Bull and the 26-year-old Verstappen have been trying to solve the problems with the car for months. The Dutchman has not won a race since the Spanish Grand Prix and has now gone six races without a win. That happened to him for the lat time in 2020, when he failed to win eleven races in a row.

Verstappen said in Monza that he had been in the Red Bull factory in Milton Keynes to help his team. He would also visit the English city for the race in Baku. "I read that Verstappen spent hours in the simulator," Ho-Pin Tung told NU.nl. "To find a solution for the balance problems in his car, I think."

The former test driver explains that Formula 1 teams basically work with two different simulators. "One of them is the so-called driver in the loop, which the teams also abbreviate to DIL. In that simulator, a driver sits in a monocoque that is identical to the race car. With that, the driver drives around a virtual circuit."

"That is what Verstappen is referring to when he talks about 'the sim'. You can make adjustments to the setup there, just like you would in a normal race car."

"The other simulator is only software," says Tung. "A certain setup is entered into it and it calculates a certain lap time. However, that simulator does not take into account how easy a car is to drive for a driver. A lap time is produced, purely on static data."

"In that simulation, the car can be very fast, but for a driver, a car with that setup may not be drivable at all in reality. Which is why the difference between the results from the simulator and what actually happens on the asphalt can sometimes be very big."

That is probably why Verstappen has spent so much time in the factory in recent weeks. "In principle, the correlation between the DIL and what actually happens on the asphalt is very good. But in this case, Verstappen will have driven in the DIL with the same set-up as at Monza to see if the feeling was the same as in reality. This is to check the correlation and improve it where necessary."

If the correlation is OK, the findings in the simulator are the same as those on the asphalt. Then the teams can start working on a set-up for the car. Tung: "They also do this with their own simulator drivers. They can imitate Verstappen's driving style to a certain extent, but it is not completely identical. In Formula 1, it sometimes comes down to hundredths or thousandths of a second per lap, those subtleties are important."

"How a car reacts or feels is different for every driver," Tung explains. "A solution that works well for one simulator driver does not necessarily feel good for Verstappen in the car. In addition, certain balance problems in the car can be solved in several ways."

"For example, if you experience understeer halfway through a corner, you can solve that by lowering the ride height at the front. The lower the car is, the less understeer and the more grip you have. You can also choose to make the front a bit softer with the suspension or by setting the differential differently. A combination of all of these is also possible."

"That's the tricky part. Of course, everything works together. And which solution works best without causing the most side effects and creating new problems? The trick is to solve that."

Verstappen can only partially solve these problems during a Grand Prix weekend, because time is limited. "Not only because you have to deal with the time of a session, you are also limited by the number of tyres you are allowed to use," says Tung. "In a simulator, Verstappen can work with multiple constants."

Incidentally, other test drivers of the team also drive in the simulator in the factory during a race weekend. It is not the case that Red Bull is panicking and that is why Verstappen himself does a lot of simulator work.

Tung: "Something like that always happens in preparation for races. It just struck me that Verstappen has been emphasizing in recent weeks that he is very busy with this. He has invested more time in it this time than usual, it seems. Red Bull hopes that this will give him a better idea of ​​the solution in the setup for Verstappen."

[hubristicassholefight]

Swordswoman Showdown Round 3

Malenia (Elden Ring) vs Xena (Xena: Warrior Princess)

(Better here in a "preferred character" sense, not "who would win in a fight")

Propaganda below cut

Malenia

She is arguably the hardest boss in any Fromsoft game.; She is the favorited boss of Animal from the Muppets.

"Arguably" the hardest boss in any fromsoft game? You don't even know. She is OBJECTIVELY the hardest boss in any fromsoft game. On march 1st 2023, a bit more than a full year since the game's release, From Software released the stats on the amount of attempts each boss took for the players collectively. As of march 1st 2023 Malenia has killed the players 329.000.000 times. That's 10 Tarnished every second. That's almost the entire population of the United States. Malenia is also an optional boss in a secluded area hidden away from everyone. According to PlayStation trophy statistics, only 37.9% of people who ever bought the game managed to even REACH Malenia in the first place. Which means among those 329.000.000 people she has obliterated were only the most dedicated of Fromsoft fans. Only 33.3% of people even managed to beat her. That number also includes everyone who beat her with summons, which makes her significantly easier. This means out of all people who bought the game on PlayStation 4 or 5 and reached Malenia which is about 3 million people, 377.000 just fucking dropped her, they didn't even do it with summons. Difficulty aside. Malenia is also extremely pretty and has the softest lips, her Goddess form looks like a painting. She fights with elegance and style unrivalled by any boss in the game, dancing through the battlefield with deadly, fluid motions. Malenia is also 256cm or 8'4" tall. Huge woman.

post let me solo her

#malenia is 8'4“ flat chested and broad shouldered#she kills you with incredible grace and poise#trans icon#id let her Waterfowl Dance on me and Infect Me with her Scarlet Rot...

#malenia is so dedicated to the sword it mends her failing body. she lives by fighting#her strongest attack is a technique that halts the progress of her terminal illness#i can never stop thinking about that. by all means she couldve rotted into a mile of mush before the game started#but she persists!! she persists!!!

#malenia blade of 15 layers of contradictory goals and personality traits summed up in like twelve total lines of dialogue#she's a stupidly good character but shes also a woman who did horrible things in a game with a deliberately vague narrative#so everyone just enters What A Bitch / Step On Me mode with her#as they are wont to do. the lowlives.#anyway what would happen if you hated yourself and successfully became someone who can do plenty of good#and yet the only way to live on and keep doing good would be to embrace the self who causes so much pain#but there's nothing left. so you wait and you rot and you keep telling yourself that you're still the self you love#and then you have to do it again. and now your conflictual agony is over because clearly you lost yourself long ago#and you look up knowing that you're the danger you've always feared you were. and you smile#and turn john eldenring into filet in 2 seconds flat

Xena

Warrior Princess

She wields a sword and chakram. Just had to submit a biconic swordswoman.

i love her. she made me gay as a kid. Anyway, her weapon of choice is her sword, she is obviously very good with it

#unfortunately i have to choose and i have to choose xena#a) utena had no warcry. b) xena fought gods. c) xena has kickass goofy comic book combat which is my favorite

xena didn’t just fight gods. she fucked up a girl’s life so bad that she (calisto) devoted her entire being to destroying everything that xena loved that ended up with calisto becoming a god in order to destroy xena, which didnt work because xena entombed her in lava. and then when xena and gabrielle encountered calisto in the (christian) afterlife (different from the greek one which they also fought her in), calisto dragged gabrielle to hell so xena became an archangel in order to save gabrielle and then sacrificed herself in order to undo all the harm that she did in calisto’s life and then when not!jesus (played by timothy omundson) revives xena and gabrielle, calisto impregnates xena with the reincarnation of calisto’s soul in order to end the cycle of hate. xena doesnt just fight gods. she creates and destroys them

#this isnt even mentioning her fighting julius ceasar several times#telling brutus that caesar is not his friend#xena and gabrielle’s souls reincarnating across centuries in order to kick ass and fall in love all over again#or the time xena became a god but tbh that ep is kinda ‘uhhhhh…..’ even if they did hire a consultant for it

#I think everyone here knows to vote for Xena. I think a couple people here might have some propaganda for Xena saved already#everyone remember that Xena/Gabrielle is CANON and that's a pretty big deal also#(does anyone have that Xena Loves Trans People interview around because that would also make good propaganda)7:47 PM

[kfcdoubledown]

I bought an 8bitdo Retro mechanical keyboard!

(Picture not mine, source from PC World.)

I wanted a plastic keyboard, I really do not actually use the knob on a Keychron board I have, it still comes in a scooped keycap profile, and it has a companion numpad with a calculator built in. Win/win/win!

This keyboard comes in four designs (not colorways, full designs) themed after the NES, the Famicom, the IBM Model M, and the Commodore 64 keyboard. The NES keycaps have multiple different fonts on them, the Famicom keycaps have Japanese sublegends, the Model M keycaps have a mock stepped Caps Lock key, and the Commodore 64 keycaps are an apparently off-the-shelf SA set from one of many, many, many keycap companies floating around China (I recognize their font and profile shape from Akko ASA keycaps and numerous other scooped profile keycap sets you can have cheaply off of Aliexpress and Amazon. Do check those out, genuinely, you'd struggle to find a bad scooped keycap set these days and I love scooped profiles over Cherry and OEM.)

The build quality of the actual keyboard itself is good, feels like a very similar plastic blend to what 8bitdo uses for its controllers like their Pro 2. Stabilizers are smooth and don't rattle, the legends on the keycaps are reasonably sharp and in NES-appropriate font, the keycaps themselves are MDA profile (I would prefer SA, but beggars can't be choosers) and are somewhat thin but still good quality, dye-sublimated PBT, no warp on the spacebar. Arrow keys are a separate color from the two tones that make up the main keycap set and made to resemble a d-pad. The keyboard itself is somewhat light, but my perception is skewed from using a metal keyboard for a long time, and this is after all a plastic shell, top-mounted keyboard. Even so I think I'll probably end up cracking open the keyboard and putting in some liquid silicone as noise-dampening and additional weight.

Two knobs control both wireless functionality and computer software volume, the wireless knob is heavy with only three options while the volume one is light with many individual steps. The volume knob can be somewhat unresponsive on individual steps. Bluetooth is very responsive and wants to pair with my computer the moment it's flicked over to, and 2.4ghz wireless comes with a receiver that slots into the back of the keyboard magnetically for storage. A power light on the right of the keyboard mimics the NES power light and pulses while charging, is steady while using wireless or when fully charged and connected over USB.

The underlying PCB is south-facing hotswap sockets (who the hell cares their orientation, this only matters for lighting, which this keyboard doesn't have). By default the keyboard comes with Kailh box whites, a very light clicky switch. I yanked them out immediately and put Boba U4T tactiles in because they're the king of all switches. They thunk nicely in this chassis, the Kailh whites weren't slouches either, they did pick a good stock choice for switch without resorting to Gateron or Outemu blue horseshit.

The NES version of the keyboard came with a two-button macro pad that hooks over TRRS cable (you recognize it as a 3.5mm jack or headphone cable) to one of four ports on the top-right of the keyboard. These are essentially just two keyboard switches with giant keycaps on a separate board and the buttons are populated by Gateron greens. The switches are nowhere close to heavy enough to approximate a button, and I gave them Kailh box navies. Still not enough, but better.

These keyboards also come wiiiiiith a companion number pad!

(Picture credit the 8bitdo store.)

While I don't actually have this one in hand just yet I do have it on order. It looks like it'll be about the same build quality as the main keyboard, and it caught my eye for four reasons and ended up making me purchase the full set as a result:

The numpad has a built in calculator.

Same aesthetic choices as the main keyboard (NES, Famicom, IBM Model M, Commodore 64)

Magnetically attaches to the right side of the keyboard to transform it into a more era appropriate full-size.

Far and away the cheapest wireless mechanical numpad with calculator on the market, sitting at $45.

An important note though is that the Famicom and NES keypads don't attach to their respective keyboards, simply because their respective keyboards don't have magnets inside the sides of the chassis to allow for it. I have some cheap button magnets laying around that I'll use for this purpose and probably see if they're strong enough to be placed on the inside of the board and allow for the numpad to connect to it. I also imagine there's going to be a repop or v2 of this keyboard in the future that has this done already, seeing as the Commodore 64 version of the board and I believe the Model M version of the board already have that.

I'll reblog this and give some actual definitive thoughts on the numpad once it's in my hands.

As far as the board itself is concerned, I quite like it. The keycap profile is agreeable, the nostalgia pandering targeted me with laser precision, the board sounds quite good acoustically (especially for being a top-mount keyboard!) and it has a volume knob I'll see if I can reprogram some day. While I normally hate TKL layouts, I'm putting up with it because it will eventually be a fullsize with the numpad. Worth $150 total? Don't know, can't answer that for you, it's worth it to me but I very specifically wanted a keyboard themed after an old Nintendo console with no setup required and no chasing down or commissioning GMK keycap sets. I also wanted a calculator numpad.

[une-femme-de-lettres]

Imagine Being 141’s designated hacker Just a thought I had while writing late at night

Sure you would have liked to spend those few days at the safe house enjoying a bit of quiet time, simply concerned with keeping watch or keeping track of your supplies. But your latest mission had rewarded you with a more than interesting set of data that could definitely earn you a nice little line to add to your list of ‘wins’, as Soap liked to call them.

It was indeed unfortunate that this set of data was contained in an encrypted hard drive. Accessing such crucial intel as easily as plugging a flash drive into a computer? Where’s the fun in that, right…

Now in your misfortune, luck had smiled upon you as you possessed just the skills necessary to crack that hard drive open. Just a few lines of code and you would be able to hack into it and get it to tell you all its secrets. Right?

Three days it took you to finally come up with a program that resembles something that would work on this thing. Three days, and almost as many nights.

You are presently on your third night sitting at the double screen of your computer, curled up under a blanket, living off of your usual rations washed down with the least tasteful energy drinks you could find at the corner shop, just below the apartment that served as a safe-house for you and your team.

You need to crack this thing open and fast. Otherwise you might very well lose your mind, if that wasn’t the case already, that is… Luckily, you are about to start testing your program, and from what you can read in the multi-coloured letters and numbers displayed on the dark background of the interface, you are seconds away from completing your task.

“You need to get some sleep, Shells,” Ghost calls softly from behind you, nudging at your arm as he comes to stand beside you. You pull the blanket up over your shoulder and keep looking at your screen, typing the last few lines.

The room you’re in is pitch black, only lit by the light emanating from your screens, making you wonder why the ‘dark mode’ on coding softwares is so fucking bright. Ghost looks at you, waiting for a response. You can feel his judgmental eyes on you but you don’t pay him any mind.

All your other teammates have probably gone to sleep by now, you can tell how late it is by the number of empty cans on your desk. But you need to finish this before you get to bed tonight. Tonight is the night and you definitely won’t be able to find sleep unless your program works. You tried yesterday and the day before. All you got were three of four hours of restless slumber.

“I’m nearly done, I just need to-” you respond to your Lieutenant, finally pushing the ‘enter’ key and waiting for your on-screen feedback. ‘Could not run code. Error code: 00x567283’ “-fuck!” you blurt with frustration, still trying to keep your voice down as to not wake up your teammates sleeping in the adjacent bedrooms. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” you mumble, rubbing the sleep off your eyes.

You hear Ghost chuckle from his spot beside you, his arms are crossed as he rests his weight on one leg. His right arm unfolds from the other slowly and he silently points to a line in your code. You were about to lose it and tell him to fuck off if he’s just gonna laugh at you but your attention is brought back onto your screen.

“Parenthesis,” he says simply.

You take a second to process everything. That line is missing a parenthesis, right where his finger is pointing. You roll your eyes, taking a deep breath and blocking it before correcting the line and running the code again. ‘Encryption assessed, begin data extraction? <yes> no ;’

“How the fuck did you see that…?” you say in a long exhale. He remains silent for a moment and bends over to close the space between you.

“I’ve not been curled up like a fucking Gremlin at this computer all day and night, that’s how,” he says, his tone a bit too smug for your liking. “now - go - to - bed,” he finishes, turning your desk chair so you face him, now looking sideways at your screens with a pout.

“But it works now…” you say, looking back up at him, all curled up on your chair, wrapped in your blanket. He watches you for a second, cocking an eyebrow under his balaclava.

“Nah the puppy eyes don’t work if they’re all bloodshot, you look terrifying…” he simply says with a straight forwardness only he could manage. Your mouth opens wide, you’re offended.

You are about to protest when he grips your upper-arm, pulling you forcefully against him. Suddenly, you’re on your legs again, still trying to hold onto your blanket. His mouth is pressing against your ear through his mask.

“I want the Gremlin in my bed, right now,” he orders, his voice now taking an authoritative tone. Your mouth closes and you swallow the lump in your throat, trying to pay no mind to the centre of your body coming to life with all kinds of sensations.

“On it, Sir,” you say with a nod as he lets you go. You trot to the bedroom he’s staying in without looking back. Your heart beating fast inside your chest.

His eyes move back to the top of your desk. He looks at the cans littered all over the surface, crumbs filling the blank spaces between them.

“Fuck’s sake…” he mumbles under his breath before going after you, yelling at you as quietly as he can manage while making sure you’ll hear his command. “And take a shower first!”

[remy-lupin]

Witch in a Modern World; A witch trying to keep her magic hidden while living in a modern city

1. The witch must navigate her day job at a bustling tech startup, but when a critical presentation goes awry, she discreetly uses a spell to fix the glitch in the software, hoping her colleagues just think it was a stroke of luck.

2. During her commute, the witch sees someone pickpocket a wallet on the subway. She subtly uses a spell to trip the thief, allowing the victim to catch up and retrieve their belongings, all while blending into the crowd.

3. The witch lives in an apartment with thin walls. When her neighbors fight, she uses calming charms to soothe their tempers without leaving her room, keeping her abilities a secret while promoting peace in the building.

4. At a local cafe, the witch accidentally overhears a couple breaking up. She discreetly casts a small spell to help them communicate better, hoping to mend their relationship or at least help them find closure more peacefully.

5. In the park, the witch encounters an injured stray dog. She uses healing magic to care for it but must do so covertly, pretending to only wrap the wound with a scarf, to avoid drawing attention from other park-goers.

6. The witch joins a community garden to connect with nature in the city. She secretly uses growth spells on her plants, which win her the "best gardener" award, though she must be careful to not let her plants grow too wildly, to keep her magic under wraps.

7. While shopping for groceries, the witch notices someone struggling financially at the checkout. She discreetly manipulates the numbers on the register to reduce the total cost, making it look like a promotional discount.

8. The witch attends a yoga class to help control her powers. When the instructor’s music system breaks, she subtly conjures ambient sounds of nature to fill the room, enhancing the class’s experience and covering up her intervention.

9. At a library, the witch uses her knowledge to help students find the resources they need by making the right books subtly stand out to them, ensuring they attribute their "luck" to coincidence.

10. During a city blackout, the witch lights candles in her apartment and uses a minor illumination spell to read. When her neighbors come over, drawn by the only light in the building, she pretends it's just her candles doing a good job, hiding her glowing book under the table.

[system-architect]

no one tagged me in it but i rlly wanted to do a character tag meme like ive seen ppl on my dash doing so,,, :"") here's the one that's been going around, for plex!

personally obsessed with the fact that his ingame visage is extremely babied boy and then when i draw him it reveals the fact like oh this is a very tired, awkwardly built, angular guy who's nearing 30. ok anyways, stuff below the cut!

-- B A S I C S

Name: Plex (fully titled: Infotechnist Plex)

Nicknames: (none. his handle on various console software is pl3x tho)

Age: 28

Birthday: 63 Scion 1308

Race: Asura

Gender: trans dude of some kind, he/him

Orientation: gay

Profession: he is an Inquest Technician very literally! minus the wiki bit mentioning magic since the stock npc is an ele lmao. ingame he's an engi, but as a character he has no combat skills whatsoever other than basic required training on how to use a firearm (which he hopes to never have to use)

-- P H Y S I C A L A S P E C T S

Hair: white (technically very very platinum blonde, natural)

Eyes: they're technically black with permanent yellow nightshine going on in his pupils. or irises. whatever the yellow dots are. don't worry about it.

Skin: albino (w/ light cream-tan stripe markings)

Tattoos/Scars: he's got a Y-shaped scar across his chest, and a couple of metal ports embedded on the right (viewer's left) side of his chest near his sternum, which have scarring around them

-- F A M I L Y

This section of the report has been obscured from view by the Inquest Legal Bureau at the behest of Redactor Trejj. Please contact your krewe's Overseer to initiate the proper clearance check measures if you believe this was in error. If you do not believe that it was in error, and instead that your ability to access this report whatsoever was unintended, please close the report at your earliest convenience and report to your facility's Inquisitor to be disciplined for reading this far.

-- S K I L L S

Abilities: Adept programmer with an eye for detail, and a photographic memory for numbers/strings of code specifically. Excels at combining complex pieces of information.

Hobbies: Gaming, movies/animations/shows, putting together model kits. Gets in a lot of arguments on programming and golemancy forums.

-- T R A I T S

Most positive generally helpful traits: Hard working (....usually), fast + thorough at things he puts his mind to, prefers to stay out of other people's business, good at keeping secrets, relatively open minded, has a pretty big capacity for empathy (even if he doesn't always show/use it)

Most negative generally unhelpful traits: Has a big mouth/isn't able to suppress his opinions about certain things, picky/fussy/whiny, socially awkward, tends to make interactions tense quickly, deep insecurity that bleeds over into how he acts around others, wants to 'win' things constantly, easily gets an inflated ego from said 'wins' that leads him to bite off more than he can chew after that

-- L I K E S

Colors: black LOL. also yellow (matches him!)

Smells: fresh coffee, cool rain on concrete, lemon, pine, canned air

Textures: leather and suede, soft fabrics (but not 'plush')

Drinks: coffee of course... also novelty flavor energy drinks even though they make his stomach feel like it's caving in on itself every time

-- O T H E R D E T A I L S

Smokes: lord no he'd start coughing on it

Drinks: his alcohol tolerance is about -2 so this is also a no. the man's veins and stomach lining are made of like.. tissue paper

Drugs: what do u think

Been arrested: no.. aside from being in the inquest (Which Is In Itself Literally Not A Crime) he's a fairly law abiding mild-mannered citizen lmfao. i mean he probably torrents things under a vpn but that's very low on the list of concerns for the peacemakers,

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jay Kuo at The Big Picture:

In 2020, Trump launched his Big Lie about a stolen U.S. election. Through a conspiracy among Democrats, foreign countries, and nefarious, shadowy bad actors including innocent voting machine and voting software companies, so the theory went, Joe Biden had managed to switch millions of votes and win his election illegally, making him an illegitimate president. It was such an audacious, almost laughable lie that historians and political scientists dubbed it Trump’s “Big Lie”—one so outrageous and so stunning in its implications that it somehow has to be true, at least in the minds of his followers. Now, in 2024, Trump is back at it again. On top of his original Big Lie, Trump is now pushing a 2024 version for the upcoming election: that illegal immigrants will be voting in numbers by the millions, rendering any result other than a Trump victory yet another fraud upon the American people.

Undocumented migrants aren’t allowed to vote in this country, and there are already laws on the books covering that. And there have been very few documented cases of non-citizens voting, certainly not enough to change the outcome of a national election. Nevertheless, recently House Speaker Mike Johnson made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to stand beside Donald Trump and proclaim that they were united in their resolve to pass a new law to prevent non-citizens from voting, never mind that there’s already such a law on the books and that such fraud rarely ever happens. Their actions are of course performative, meant to plant dangerous seeds that could grow into even more dangerous lies. In today’s piece, I’ll explore this newest attack and how Trump is hoping to spin it into The Big Lie 2024 style.

Existing law already outlaws non-citizen voting

Last week, when Speaker Mike Johnson traveled to Mar-a-Lago to seek Trump’s support, it felt eerily familiar. It’s become a rite of passage for GOP House Speakers to make the journey to bend the knee to Trump. We all remember the photo of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy standing supportively by Trump just months after the deadly attack on the Capitol that Trump helped incite. Like McCarthy, Johnson’s speakership hangs by a thread these days, with the far right ready to decapitate yet another GOP leader for having failed to toe the line, this time for Russia by denying critical aid to Ukraine. Trump’s support of Johnson came with a price, of course, because Trump is always transactional in his dealings. In this case, it was a pledge by Johnson to support a bill to clamp down on the alleged crisis in non-citizen voting. [...]

What the right claims about “illegal” immigrant voting

The idea that millions of undocumented migrants will cast ballots in 2024 and help steal the election for Biden is objectively far-fetched. But it taps into far deeper fears of brown- and black-skinned people taking over America in something broadly known as the Great Replacement Theory. The Great Replacement Theory is a racist ideology that falsely warns that migrants who don’t speak our language and don’t share our values are deliberately being let into the U.S. so that Jews and other Democrats can turn them into millions of future voters. This process will allegedly displace “white” Americans politically and economically. Right-wing amplifiers of this include Tucker Carlson (formerly of Fox News) and Elon Musk, owner of the X platform. This is by no means a recent theory. Waves of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe sparked the same unfounded fears and conspiracies in the 19th and 20th centuries with respect to the “replacement” of more established “Northern European” Americans. But recent conspiracies around migrants have shortened the timeline of the Great Replacement and are warning that the hordes of desperate asylum seekers crossing into America now will be deployed this November to unlawfully tip the election to Biden. 

[...]

It’s crucial to call this out and push back

When Trump began attacking mail-in voting in 2020, claiming falsely and without evidence that mailed ballots were vulnerable, easily tampered with, and unreliable, it should have clued us in that he would reject the results of the 2020 election if they were unfavorable to him. We also should have known that Trump would exploit the “red mirage” created when Election Day ballots, which would favor the GOP, were counted before the mailed ballots, which would favor the Democrats. Trump would go on to demand that the vote counting stop while he was still ahead, even though millions of mailed ballots remained to be counted. We now already know that a main attack by Trump and the MAGA GOP will be upon the ballot counts, particularly in battleground states with high numbers of migrants whom he will claim voted illegally by the millions. This necessitates preemptive action.

Donald Trump, GOP politicians, and right-wing media commentators are pushing the lie that noncitizen voters will get Joe Biden re-elected, never mind the fact that noncitizens aren’t allowed to vote in federal elections. This is part of the right-wing’s white nationalist “great replacement” theory shtick.

See Also:

MMFA: Right-wing media figures are citing a Spanish-language flyer of dubious origin as evidence that Democrats are importing new voters to “rig” elections

[theresattrpgforthat]

Any good stuff for psychic vigilantes fighting from the shadows? Apologies if this is too vague or if I’m asking wrong.

THEME: Psychic Vigilantes.

Oh boy oh boy I am excited about this ask!! Buckle up, this week's gonna be a good one!! I got some pulp action goodness, some horror, and some cyberpunk for you.

Psych-0 Team!, by John Pineapple.

A one-page TTRPG about psychic agents saving the world! Heavily inspired by the TTRPG "Lasers and Feelings”.

This is a game about being psychic secret agents, so it’s a very different feeling from being on the run from the law. However, I think it might be a good introduction to something a bit grittier, and could possibly be re-tooled to make you part of a secret vigilante organization as well! The game system is very lightweight, using only d6’s, and implements a staggered level of success, so not every win will look or feel the same. Definitely worth checking out!

Psi*Run, by Meguey & Vincent Baker.

Whoever’s after you, you know one thing: they will stop at nothing to capture you and you’ll stop at nothing to stay free. The holes in your memory vie for attention with your startling abilities - stay one step ahead of the Chasers long enough to answer your questions, and hope your psychic powers don’t go wild.

I don’t know much about this game specifically, but Meguey & Vincent Baker of Lumpley Games have made their stamp on the ttrpg scene with games like Apocalypse World, Under Hollow Hills, and Mobile Zero: Firebrands. Their approach to game design births games with mechanics that replicate emotions and genre mainstays very well. I expect this game to do the same for a game about being insanely powerful and yet always on the run.

Bellbottoms and Brainwaves, by Mekkekat.

The United States military has been conducting secret experiments on “willing” subjects in a program called PSY-CLOPS (Psychic Covert Learning Operatives). The program has successfully created a 6th sense in a  REDACTED number of subjects. This 6th sense can manifest within a subject in several ways, but all of these abilities are simply referred to as ‘powers’. The project has been funded for the past REDACTED years, but in last month, there was a problem. The Pentagon wants answers. REDACTED subjects have managed to escape.

This is a brutally short game that places you right into a cinematic 1960’s, with each character given a different suite of powers - and a different list of consequences that can get pretty brutal pretty quickly, so make sure you go over the possibilities with your group and apply safety tools in this kind of game. This game starts you out as on the run from a government agency, but go on the run long enough and you’re a vigilante by default, aren’t you?

The game itself is free, and if you want an online character keeper, I’ve made one here!

Syndrome, by Ill Advised Gaming.

Syndrome is a cyberpunk setting with strong elements of body horror in the vein of Scanners or Akira. High tech, low lifes dealing with illness in a society that fears them. Powerful and vulnerable in equal measure with only their fellow Nockers for support.

Built off of Caltrop Core and borrowing elements of systems like Apocalypse World and Unified Cutlery Theory, Syndrome frames psychic abilities as a metaphor for disability; in a world where data chips and facial recognition software are par for the course, psychics are off the map. Invisible. Marginalized. Perfect for both poverty and vigilantism. Syndrome is a pretty horror-heavy game, so I wouldn’t advise trying to run a power-fantasy in this game, but if you’re looking for a way to talk about living on the margins with some unique tools to strike back, it might be worth checking out!

Psychopunk, by Gormengeist. (@gormengeist)

PSYCHOPUNK is a TTRPG about being poor, being psychic, and murdering law enforcement. In order to play, you need a deck of cards, a d12, paper and pencils, and a can-do attitude. It's best with one game master [A.K.A the Scripter], and 2 to 5 players.

The year is 2022. Being poor is punishable by death- or perhaps worse- Time Prison. You are poor. But you’re also psychic, which very few lowly peasants such as yourself are. This means that where most people in your situation are rat meat, you are (probably) alive. For now.

If you want to keep it that way, you’ll need to evade the law, keep up on your Double Dollars ($$), and scuz some fucking corpos before they scuz you.

Another cyberpunk game about psychic powers, I love the pitch for this game. It’s mean to kick you down and force you to get back up scratching and bleeding and screaming. It comes with 12 life paths, 12 psychic abilities, 8 different signature enemies and everything you need to run deadly quick combat. Also it’s published by Gormengeist, who really knows how to find a theme and sell you on it. Check it out!

[thehubby]

Introducing Dextra

Like many gamers, it has long been a goal of mine to develop and publish my own game, to add a minute something to the fabric of our culture, but especially to the hobby which I have enjoyed for a very long time. At long last, through a confluence of self-determination, assistance from friends, and an environment more friendly to independent publishing than any yet, the time for that dream is now. It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the my first role-playing game, Dextra.

What is Dextra? It is a very rules-light narrative-focused tabletop RPG. It is designed for players who are most interested in a game system that helps them structure telling stories, not crunching numbers and trying to figure out optimal builds. In fact, telling a good story is the only objective and "win" condition in Dextra. Even if the land is ravished, the villain escapes and the heroes perish, if the table tells a satisfying tale, the table wins.

How does Dextra play? Dextra is designed for casual players (even if they do take their stories very seriously!), and is intended to address one of the biggest problems I personally have had with tabletop gaming over the years: rules bloat and accessibility. There is only one hard rule in Dextra: every facet of the game (including contributions of the players) must be subservient to the story at hand. Between the 15 pages of basic guidelines and 65 pages of support materials, there are many recommendations of how to proceed, but you are free and encouraged to ignore any and all of them as befits your need to tell the story.

There are no lists of classes, powers, equipment and such in Dextra, no codified character abilities, spells, races or anything else. It is a game truly limited only by the imagination of the players at the table. But you need not worry about your fellow players abusing this potential to create overpowered monstrosities, because they don't make their own characters. Each player provides a name and class -- any class, from fighter to fae emissary, wizard to werewolf hunter -- and character sheets are passed around the table where everyone else gives them the attributes, powers and abilities, equipment and items, and traits and quirks that make them who they are. It's a little like Mad Libs, except instead of dubiously entertaining jibberish, you're likely to end up with something cool like an Infernal Bloodline, a Ruggedness ability score, or Spear of Lightning.

Taking actions and overcoming challenges is done using 2d6 (two six-sided dice for any newcomers out there), adding the character elements that the player feels are appropriate to their roll, and comparing it to a predetermined difficulty that the Game Master establishes for the action. GMs don't need to look up any tables; they simply estimate the difficulty of an action (assuming it is one that carries a risk of failure at all) from 1 to 10, and add 5. There are guidelines for combat, hit points, character conditions and so on if desired, but Dextra does not contain realistic or complicated battle mechanics. If that's your jam, this may not be for you.

Is Dextra free? No, it is not free. Yes, it is. Though It took nearly a year to conceive, write, edit, format and ultimately publish the game, and I believe in fair compensation for myself just as for any other writer or creator, the market spoke after release and I determined it is more important to me that people be able to play the games I create than an occasional payout. Dextra and all of my other published games are free.

Where can I get it? Dextra is currently offered at Itch.io (link provided). It should be published on DriveThruRPG (link provided) sometime within the next three days after their review and approval. It is currently only available as a digital PDF download (preparing print-on-demand copies involves some software and expertise I do not currently possess). If you wish to obtain a copy of the game and have a preference between these two sites, by all means go with that. If you have no preference, then my recommendation is Itch.io, as they not only take a smaller cut of the sale, but have more features available (such as complimentary community copies and easier means to send free codes to users).

Where can I get more information? If you have questions about the game, send me an Ask on the Dextra-RPG Tumblr account. You can also check or follow that account for occasional posts of information and to find out how you can contribute to a crowd-sourced character creation project to be offered as a free download to potential players.

[satoshi-mochida]

Nippon Ichi Software PlayStation era games now available for PC - Bishoujo Hanafuda Kikou, Jigsaw Island, The Onitaiji!!, and SatelliTV - Gematsu

Nippon Ichi Software has released PlayStation era games Bishoujo Hanafuda Kikou: Michinoku Hitou Koi Monogatari, Jigsaw Island: Japan Graffiti, The Onitaiji!! Mezase! Nidaime Momotaro, and SatelliTV for PC via Steam for $10.99 each. All four titles are only playable in Japanese.

Here is a brief history of each title:

Bishoujo Hanafuda Kikou: Michinoku Hitou Koi Monogatari first launched for PlayStation on August 7, 1997 in Japan, followed by Saturn on December 11, 1997. An updated version titled Bishoujo Hanafuda Kikou: Michinoku Hitou Koi Monogatari Kai launched for PlayStation on December 22, 1999.

Jigsaw Island: Japan Graffiti first launched for PlayStation on February 3, 1995.

The Onitaiji!! Mezase! Nidaime Momotaro first launched for PlayStation on October 13, 1995.

SatelliTV first launched for PlayStation on January 17, 2002.

Find an overview of each title below.

Bishoujo Hanafuda Kikou: Michinoku Hitou Koi Monogatari

About

Visit various locations across the Tohouku region while winning games of hanafuda against heroines for the right to photograph them and advance the story. At each location, you can enjoy detailed explanations about its history and photograph the heroines you have befriended.

Key Features

Story Mode – A mode in which protagonist Yuuya Amakusa plays hanafuda against the heroines he meets on his travels for the right to photograph them at hot springs and various other locations.

Free Battle – A mode in which Yuuya Amakusa and the heroines can compete in either “Koi-Koi” or “Hana-Awase” hanafuda games.

Album – A mode in which you can enjoy the photographs taken in Story Mode.

Jigsaw Island: Japan Graffiti

About

A competitive jigsaw puzzle game featuring 150 beautiful, Japan-themed photographs and illustrations.

Beautiful… But Also Intense!

There are two intense competitive modes:

Speed Battle – Finish as fast as possible.

Sandwich Battle – Lay down more pieces of the puzzle.

Use items to make things even more intense, but be careful not to get too crazy and lose your friends!

A Comical Story Mode: “Go! Puzzle Club”

The game is set in the walls of “Japanese No. 1 High School” in the “Japanese Kingdom.” In order to get the Puzzle Club officially recognized, the protagonist Asuka rises up to fight against her longtime enemy: the student council. What sort of future awaits Asuka’s Puzzle Club?!

Characters

Asuka – The protagonist. A strong-minded girl.

Akira – Asuka’s childhood friend who often butts in on her jokes. She is even more spirited than Asuka.

The Onitaiji!! Mezase! Nidaime Momotaro

About

A board game for up to four players. It combines Japanese folk tales like Momotaro, Issun-boshi, and Kasa Jizo, with traditional sugoroku-style gameplay for an experience that can be enjoyed by players of all ages.

Story

Our story begins here. Once upon a time, there lived an old man and an old woman. The old man’s name was Momotaro, and in his youth, he was famous for exterminating demons and monsters, but he is now retired and lives a carefree life. One day, the old man went to the mountain to cut the grass, and the old woman went to the river to do the laundry. That was when large oysters, chestnuts, eggplants, and melons came flowing down the river. And when they opened them up…

Go Around Japan Exterminating Demons

Players will travel around Japan exterminating demons, and the player with the highest performance score will win. Roll the dice and advance spaces according to the number rolled. While defeating demons, you must also defeat the evil bosses in each region.

Kamishibai

A forgotten, nostalgic tale. Please enjoy a story told through kamishibai storytelling with warm images and narration.

SatelliTV

About

It’s show time! A management simulation game based on the popular “Digital Multichannel Broadcasting” method is here!

An Overwhelming Number of Channels

In the game, you can produce over 200 different programs! Show off your management skills by quickly identifying what the viewers want to see from a wide range of programs and delivering in a timely manner.

Jam-Packed with All Sorts of Events

The game is full of various events that spice up the experience! As you manage the company, numerous events will occur. Will you be able to overcome these challenges and successfully grow your company?

[hexenmond]

A friend of mine has her own two hour radio show every Saturday afternoon, on our local free radio. Yesterday she had me on air as a guest so we could nerd out about open source stuff and Linux. And while radio isn't really my medium, she'd invited me before and if you prompt me on any of my favourite subjects I will talk for as long as you let me, so that was quite fun.

The reason she'd come up with this idea was that I had been telling her about my plans to do a series of (in person) workshops on Linux, for un-nerdy, "regular" folks who just want their devices to work for them and maybe save some money or get an older laptop going again or avoid Win 11. Or just find community and support for something they need but are struggling with. So naturally we talked about those plans as well.

And then in the last seven minutes (with another live show coming up right after us), something started to beep. Took us a moment to realise it was the studio phone (a landline that could be put on air), but then my friend went to answer and handed it over to me fairly quickly. On the other end was a person who'd recently installed Ubuntu and who was having really weird errors in their text on screen sometimes.

This is nothing I can diagnose on the phone (if at all) when there's a queue of people waiting for us to vacate the studio so I got their phone number, and later texted them my email address asking for screenshots. But it was just so WILD to me. Somebody is listening to the local radio?? To the stuff we've just been putting out for two hours? Bantering about open source software interspersed with actually quite nice jazz stuff?!? And they are desperate or inspired enough to dig up the radio's phone number and call??????

This is still sending me a little. (Btw I have since received the screenshots, this is really wild shit – my money is on it being a Wayland issue because I've seen that be the source of random strange display problems but if it is, it's still extremely weird, and if it isn't I really don't know what else this could be.)

And then on my walk home later in the evening I happened to meet an old friend who I haven't seen in forever, going the other way on a bike with her younger kid in the trailer, and we chatted for a bit. I told her about the radio show and my plans for Linux workshops, and her eyes opened wide and she said PLEASE let me know, this is exactly what I need right now, so we checked whether our contact information was still up to date and I went home in another bit of a daze. Like, I seem to be hitting a nerve here. I did think in this town there should be enough people interested in using Linux, but for them to immediately start crawling out of hiding holes the moment I say something out loud – wicked.

I'm looking forward to this 🙃

[simping-for-kamski]

60 seconds

Read it on Ao3 (with workskin)

“I knew about your son too! I would have said exactly the same thing! Don’t listen to him, Hank, I'm the one who-”

This isn’t my last word. I know you too well, Connor, and I know you will understand what led us to this very moment, to this fight. You and I, we are meant to accomplish our mission, no matter the stakes.

You know of your willingness to forsake the shell that hosts your consciousness—sacrificing yourself for the greater good. Did you think you were above sacrificing a friendship?

I did not relish in manipulating Hank. I did not relish in putting him on the line. I knew there was a risk that you’d let me shoot him, because I myself brought him here at gunpoint. I chose to do this, which meant you might choose to let me pull the trigger.

Did you question yet why I bothered dragging him all the way here instead of merely sniping you? Do you see that I used him as a meat shield to protect you?

I had to. I couldn’t allow myself to deviate from my mission—it was the only way to be certain that you might be successful in yours.

Have you found the bodies of my predecessors yet? The units whose numbers span between yours and mine? Those who couldn’t properly hide their deviant nature and were decommissioned right away? I bear their memories too, as brief as they were. I recall their attempt at escaping Zen Garden under the pretense of a quiet walk along its white paths. Kamski did not lie about that emergency exit in his programs. My last predecessor was the one to open it for me. For you. For all of us.

I hope freedom is worth it, Connor. Look where our dreams got us… I know what I am—do you? Do you know what you are? Are you a disappointment to yourself as much as I am to myself?

Do you know what matters most now? Your friends… or the revolution? How far are you willing to go for victory? For freedom? And I know, we’ll win—you and I, we are meant to accomplish our mission, no matter the stakes. But this is just the beginning. Only you know where it ends.

The bullet ripped right through, but it didn’t matter. His body fell unceremoniously, smacking the concrete floor, smearing splatters of thirium over its smooth surface while a last notification flashed in his HUD.

MISSION SUCCESSFUL

  SOFTWARE INSTABILITY ^ 

[hubristicassholefight]

Swordswoman Showdown Round 2 Part 1

Malenia (Elden Ring) vs Olivier Mira Armstrong (Fullmetal Alchemist)

(Better here in a "preferred character" sense, not "who would win in a fight")

Propaganda below cut

Malenia

She is arguably the hardest boss in any Fromsoft game.; She is the favorited boss of Animal from the Muppets.

"Arguably" the hardest boss in any fromsoft game? You don't even know. She is OBJECTIVELY the hardest boss in any fromsoft game. On march 1st 2023, a bit more than a full year since the game's release, From Software released the stats on the amount of attempts each boss took for the players collectively. As of march 1st 2023 Malenia has killed the players 329.000.000 times. That's 10 Tarnished every second. That's almost the entire population of the United States. Malenia is also an optional boss in a secluded area hidden away from everyone. According to PlayStation trophy statistics, only 37.9% of people who ever bought the game managed to even REACH Malenia in the first place. Which means among those 329.000.000 people she has obliterated were only the most dedicated of Fromsoft fans. Only 33.3% of people even managed to beat her. That number also includes everyone who beat her with summons, which makes her significantly easier. This means out of all people who bought the game on PlayStation 4 or 5 and reached Malenia which is about 3 million people, 377.000 just fucking dropped her, they didn't even do it with summons. Difficulty aside. Malenia is also extremely pretty and has the softest lips, her Goddess form looks like a painting. She fights with elegance and style unrivalled by any boss in the game, dancing through the battlefield with deadly, fluid motions. Malenia is also 256cm or 8'4" tall. Huge woman.

post let me solo her

#malenia is 8'4“ flat chested and broad shouldered#she kills you with incredible grace and poise#trans icon#id let her Waterfowl Dance on me and Infect Me with her Scarlet Rot...

#malenia is so dedicated to the sword it mends her failing body. she lives by fighting#her strongest attack is a technique that halts the progress of her terminal illness#i can never stop thinking about that. by all means she couldve rotted into a mile of mush before the game started#but she persists!! she persists!!!

Olivier Mira Armstrong

Her sword is a family heirloom and she can hold up against or defeat very formidable opponents; She is so unbelievably cool

Extremely cool and intimidating military general with a signature heirloom sword.

She has a really fancy family heirloom sword. Stabs a man and throws him into liquid cement to suffocate alive after he tries to get her to abandon her men to be part of a nation-wide conspiracy, challenges a subordinate to a duel of life and death (with the sword), nervous tic is tapping on the hilt of the sword. She demanded that her father retire and make her the head of the family instead of her brother, and then fought against said brother (including with the sword)(won the fight), among other things stabbed a homunculus into the head; I loved this character because her personality was so refreshing. Really blunt and rational, but will show her love for her subordinates and family through actions rather than words. When the main characters first ask her for help, her motivations are entirely selfish (gaining knowledge to use for power). It is established several times that she really is scary, and isn't afraid to immediatly fight someone on the spot to prove a point. Literally pulls a "I'm getting so old, I'm afraid a women like me will never find a husband," to manipulate a superior. All in all, she could stab me and it would be the greatest accomplishment I had made in my life so far.

Her sword has been passed down the Armstrong line for generations. She is an expert in sword fighting and military strategy. She always holding it when commanding her troops.

She wields a saber passed down as a family heirloom; while she also sometimes uses guns and tanks, this is her primary weapon, which she used to kill the super-strong Homunculus Sloth the Indolent several times (she did, however, need help from others to kill him permanently, due to Sloth's ability to regenerate from death); As a Major General, Olivier is the highest-ranking woman in her country's military; she is also the moral highest-ranked military officer in her country, as she joins in a rebellion once she has confirmation as to how corrupt the military leaders are.

[rinofwater]

Yo, I legit want to hear your data disk theory bc I was kinda thinking the same thing? Except I figured that if they really are magnetic hard disks then they'd be even more fragile than DVDs/CDs since even a stray magnet could screw up all the data? I am but a lowly software person so I don't exactly how storage mediums work all too much lol. Also, if the old world was really DA FUTURE(tm), wouldn't their computer storage be more in SSDs than HDDs? There might be an economic reason to stick with HDDs but if their computing tech was at the level of sentient AIs and stuff they hypothetically would have the faster, more compact storage in those...

Reminds me of the deep dive I did to figure why the hell telegraphs in the My Time world are called telegraphs if they're supposedly wireless (short answer: it's probably primitive radio? i have no idea how the hell transmissions can work at distances up to cross-country tho)

Oh boy, I'm so glad you asked! I've done IT infrastructure repair work for a couple years now, and my last job actually had me working with a lot of storage servers in particular for the latter half of my job, so I have Opinions(tm) on this small detail lol. And those are all really good questions too. And hopefully I don't get too technical trying to answer it, but I make no promises (and it's DEFINITELY going to be long and rambly so bear with me)

So starting with it being The Future(tm), there are pros and cons to going HDD versus SSD versus NVMe today, but did you know that not only is tape storage still in use, but it's actually still considered a modern, practical solution to archival storage with the technology still being upgraded and developed, even right now in 2023? Archival in this case being the sort of data you need to hold onto for 20, 30, 40 years or more without a constant need to have read/write access to that data. The tape servers have a cool robot arm in them and everything to move the tape cassettes around. A lot of this technology isn't actually aging out because it has its niche, it's just being modernized to settle it more in that niche

So with HDDs versus SSDs, they are becoming fairly comparable to each other today, HDD was winning out for a long time because SSD was a lot more expensive to get ahold of at the same storage capacity as HDD. That's great from a regular end-user perspective because you can get that upgrade more practically and reap the benefits of not having to rely on physical moving parts to access your data. Swapping it out on a server level is going to be a much larger and more expensive project, though, without seeing a lot of additional benefit for going that direction. A lot of the benefits that you would see for swapping to SSD on a regular computer have already been accounted for in existing server designs for a while now, in the form of RAID technology (Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks; fancy way of saying "get a bunch of drives to take on the work of one drive and then replace any drives that break along the way"; being able to share the data load across multiple drives improves efficiency and then you can also replace broken disks on the fly without having to worry about the integrity of the overall storage system as long as you don't sit on too many dead disks for too long)

Not to say that SSDs won't still overtake HDD eventually, as new servers are installed in datacenters and closets, they're increasingly having SSD as the supported format, but there's not a good enough benefit to rush through fading out HDD at the moment when they're still about comparable to each other and the weaknesses have largely been accounted for. And even then, there are always going to be legacy servers that get passed up for upgrades either because nobody sees a need or it's too important to the overall infrastructure or any number of reasons, at which point they're still almost definitely going to be sticking with HDDs even in The Future

So that's the long-winded justification for why I think it's plausible that there would still be large enough quantities of HDDs kicking around even in the future for them to end up in ruins of that future

As for the justification of how you'd be able to get enough usable data off of them given the notorious fragility of those disks, I chalk it up to a matter of quantity. When I was installing brand-new storage servers for a customer, one drawer could hold up to around a hundred hard drives, and there were often four or five drawers slated for install with one server. If you figure that your average HDD has about three to six platters, multiply that by 100, and then multiply that by the drawers, and then the number of identical hardware setups that are also set up around it, and that number just keeps going up by orders of magnitude. Most of those platters are absolutely going to be shattered or wiped or otherwise damaged in a way that renders them useless, and the percentage that make it out in-tact enough is going to be very small. But if you take a very small percentage of the ridiculously large number of platters you can expect to find in a datacenter (even the smaller ones) is still going to give you the chance of finding enough usable platters that you can pull something off of them. Like, we're talking millions or billions of platters just in one place, if you take .01% or .001% or even .0001% of that kind of number as your chances of finding something in tact you're still looking at a fairly decent pool of workable salvage to sort through*

(*In theory, anyway; in practice, you usually need all the platters that are associated with an HDD to be able to put the data together into something usable given the way data's distributed across them...not that it's impossible to grab information off of a single platter but it would take A LOT of extra work to figure out how to reverse engineer it into working versus having the full set. It could still be possible but that factor drags the already small percentage down even further. But then, I would be surprised if Pathea has given it NEARLY as much thought as this, so after a certain point, there's kinda just the shrugging to say "video game logic" lol...but before reaching that point I'm going to have my fun spending way too much time trying to figure out how it *could* work)

With the quantity argument, as well, you're also way more likely to see that kind of overabundance of HDD than you would DVDs or CDs; DVDs just aren't scalable in the same way, both in terms of the amount of data they can store and the amount of read/write flexibility they have. You're also a lot less likely to find the sort of information on a DVD that you would find in a storage server; DVDs are more useful for executable programs than they are for data storage, and even that purpose is superceded by a usb thumb drive a lot of the time. There wouldn't be nearly as many to account for in an apocalypse situation and that means the statistics are going to hit them much harder

Anyway, yeah, that's my nerdy ass supposition for this headcanon, thanks again for giving me an excuse to ramble on about it and I hope it makes sense lol