#and don't give this user interaction

[intern-seraph]

PSA: there's someone on ao3 advertising an ai-generated story site via "fanfic"

Okay so. I cannot prove that this person is a bot, but they're either a bot or someone who works with the site they're advertising. Either way, they're... not very good at hiding the scheme once you dig a little. With a fucking spoon. Long post beneath the cut.

The user in question goes by FantasiaStories, which happens to also be the name of the website in question. Funny, that. They have posted 38 works in the past 2 months for a variety of fandoms, including TWST, which is how I found them. Other fandoms include CoD, Genshin Impact, JJK, and Marvel. The works are pretty much solely NSFW reader-insert fics. First red flag: in the notes of EVERY fic, beginning or end notes (it varies), they advertise their website. Examples (WARNING: suggestive text):

Okay. Weird. Suspicious, even! I am, of course, wary of weird links to unknown sites (as we should all be!). We will talk about that site in a bit.

Now, like, this isn't bad in and of itself. Whatever, maybe it's a personal site or something. Now, I took a look at one of the Malleus fics they put out a couple weeks ago.

First person POV isn't really my thing, so I ended up not finishing it beyond the first few sentences. Forgot about it, put it out of my mind, whatever.

Today, I was once again trawling the tag, looking for some good stuff (or for updates of the fics I'm following), and I see this:

Oo, looks fun! The tags sound familiar, though... Whatever. Let's take a look, see if it seems good —

And I immediately noticed: THIS IS THE SAME FUCKING FIC???

EXHIBIT A: THE RECENT FIC

EXHIBIT B: THE EARLIER FIC

IT'S THE SAME FUCKING FIC!!! I literally checked the author's profile to see if they were, perhaps, stealing from another writer, but NO! THEY JUST COPY-PASTED THE DAMN THING!

Okay. So now I'm confused. Upset, even. What the fuck is going on here? Who is this "FantasiaStories", and what is this site they keep hawking?

Well.

Ahah.

After sending some baffled texts to my friend, reporting the duplicate fics to Ao3 T&S for advertising, and several hours of waffling (and playing vidya games) about whether or not to click the link, I clicked the fucking link. I need to know what's going on. This is WEIRD.

WELL! The site is janky as all hell, first of all. Like, look at this shit:

Yeah, probably optimized for mobile but that is UGLY on desktop. And yes, that horribly-stretched png is a functional button! Shockingly. Let's go "learn how to play".

ah yes. the user guice. Welcome to visit our website :)))

So I scroll past the instructions on how to create an account, because I am not here to make an account. I am here to find the fucking truth. At first, the instructions give off the energy of this being an erotic mad libs site.

There's a feature for a narrator to read the text out loud to you as well. Personally I would crawl out of my skin but to each their own —

Oh. Ohhhh. Oh I see.

Now, when I look back at the Malleus fic that started all this, I noted something that, to anyone who has not played TWST, would go completely under the radar. I have helpfully highlighted this issue in the following screenshot:

The fic describes his eyes as being "gold and amber"

Any self-respecting TWST enjoyer knows that Malleus hAS GREEN EYES HOLY SHIT HIS WHOLE COLOR SCHEME IS BLACK AND GREEN YOU FUCKING SHAM! YOU CHARLATAN! YOU SCAMMER! This is SUCH a basic fact about his design that I simply cannot believe an actual human fan wrote this shit. ALSO the whole thing is generic af and it feels like malleus was just put in there because name recognition. this shit isn't malleus.

IN CONCLUSION: FANTASIASTORIES ON AO3 IS ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT WRITING THE STORIES THEY POST THEMSELVES, THEY ARE USING THEIR DOGSHIT WEBSITE THAT THEY KEEP ADVERTISING IN THE NOTES TO GENERATE AI SLOP FICS!! OH MY FUCKING GOD!!

[dropoutposts]

After trying and utterly failing to sign up for Apple TV+, all I can say is it really makes me appreciate Dropout's interface more.

[copia]

sleep token rituals 11/? ☼ source {@twilighttowayvision} — "Will you cleanse me with pleasure?"

[bespectacled-bookwyrm]

If I had a penny for every time a spam bot said my writing was done by AI and that it sucked, I'd have two pennies.

It's not a lot, but it's really annoying that it's happened twice.

[discluded]

.

[ms-demeanor]

Do you have thoughts about the changes to Firefox's Terms of Use and Privacy Notice? A lot of people seem to be freaking out ("This is like when google removed 'Don't be evil!'"), but it seems to me like just another case of people getting confused by legalese.

Yeah you got it in one.

I've been trying not to get too fighty about it so thank you for giving me the excuse to talk about it neutrally and not while arguing with someone.

Firefox sits in such an awful place when it comes to how people who understand technology at varying levels interact with it.

On one very extreme end you've got people who are pissed that Firefox won't let you install known malicious extensions because that's too controlling of the user experience; these are also the people who tend to say that firefox might as well be spyware because they are paid by google to have google as the default search engine for the browser.

In the middle you've got a bunch of people who know a little bit about technology - enough to know that they should be suspicious of it - but who are only passingly familiar with stuff like "internet protocols" and "security certificates" and "legal liability" who see every change that isn't explicitly about data anonymization as a threat that needs to be killed with fire. These are the people who tend not to know that you can change the data collection settings in Firefox.

And on the other extreme you've got people who are pretty sure that firefox is a witch and that you're going to get a virus if you download a browser that isn't chrome so they won't touch Firefox with a ten foot pole.

And it's just kind of exhausting. It reminds me of when you've got people who get more mad at queer creators for inelegantly supporting a cause than they are at blatant homophobes. Like, yeah, you focus on the people whose minds you can change, and Firefox is certainly more responsive to user feedback than Chrome, but also getting you to legally agree that you won't sue Firefox for temporarily storing a photo you're uploading isn't a sign that Firefox sold out and is collecting all your data to feed to whichever LLM is currently supposed to be pouring the most bottles of water into landfills before pissing in the plastic bottle and putting the plastic bottle full of urine in the landfill.

The post I keep seeing (and it's not one post, i've seen this in youtube comment sections and on discord and on tumblr) is:

Well-meaning person who has gotten the wrong end of the stick: This is it, go switch to sanguinetapir now, firefox has gone to the dark side and is selling your data. [Link to *an internet comment section* and/or redditor reactions as evidence of wrongdoing].

Response: I think you may be misreading the statements here, there's been an update about this and everything.

Well-meaning (and deeply annoying) person who has gotten the wrong end of the stick: If you'd read the link you'd see that actually no I didn't misinterpret this, as evidenced by the dozens of commenters on this other site who are misinterpreting the ToU the same way that I am, but more snarkily.

Bud.

Anyway the consensus from the actual security nerds is "jesus fucking christ we carry GPS locators in our pockets all goddamned day and there are cameras everywhere and there is a long-lasting global push to erode the right to encrypt your data and facebook is creating tracking accounts for people who don't even have a facebook and they are giving data about abortion travel to the goddamned police state" and they could not be reached for comment about whether Firefox is bad now, actually, because they collect anonymized data about the people who use pocket.

My response is that there is a simple fix for all of this and it is to walk into the sea.

(I am not worried about the updated firefox ToU, I personally have a fair amount of data collection enabled on my browser because I do actually want crash reports to go to firefox when my browser crashes; however i'm not actually all that worried about firefox collecting, like, ad data on me because I haven't seen an ad in ten years and if one popped up on my browser i'd smash my screen with a stand mixer - I don't care about location data either because turning on location on your devices is for suckers but also *the way the internet works means unless you're using a traffic anonymizer at all times your browser/isp/websites you connect to/vpn/what fucking ever know where you are because of the IP address that they *have* to be able to see to deliver the internet to you and that is, generally speaking, logged as a matter of course by the systems that interact with it*)

Anyway if you're worried about firefox collecting your data you should ABSOLUTELY NOT BE ON DISCORD OR YOUTUBE and if you are on either of those things you should 100% be using them in a browser instead of an app and i don't particularly care if that browser is firefox or tonsilferret but it should be one with an extension that allows you to choose what data gets shared with the sites it interacts with.

[morlock-holmes]

To quote myself, imagine if you bought a pocket calculator at the store in 1980, and then in 1981 Texas Instruments sent you a letter saying, "The terms of use for our calculator have changed, in order to use the calculator you agree to waive any right to a jury trial or class action suit against Texas Instruments or any of its parents or subsidiaries. Continued use of the calculator constituted a binding agreement to these terms. If you do not agree you must immediately stop all use of your pocket calculator. No refund will be provided."

Seriously, writing that out really made it strike me even more how utterly abusive the modern age is to consumers.

The EULA, or End User License Agreement is a binding contract which one party may unilaterally change at any time for any reason and in any way they choose; the counterparty may not negotiate or change the terms of the contract and their only remedy in the case of changes that they don't like is to withdraw entirely from the contract.

Such contracts govern all use of software, which, since software governs the majority of our lives, mean that they now govern the majority of our lives.

Want to order a pizza? Better send the legal contract with the pizza company to the lawyer you keep on retainer and after looking over the documents he'll advise you on the legal ramifications of the pizza transaction.

Oh, you don't keep a lawyer on hand to advise you about ordering pizza or playing video games?

Well, then you can't complain if you don't like something buried in page 20 of the contract you signed with the pizza delivery company.

One of the massively dehumanizing things bureacracy does is demand something that is in practice impossible, like, "Keep a lawyer on retainer to scrutinize the terms of every pizza delivery contract, video rental, major appliance, and video game you interact with." and then condescendingly tell you,

"Well, if you don't do something as simple as that, whatever happens next is *your fault* and blaming someone else shows a weakness in your character."

One of the confounding problems if you want to argue with people who have some kind of luddite leanings is that, well, new technology feels nowadays like an imposition from hostile forces who know that they have you over the barrel because, uh, it is that thing. It is deliberately designed to be that thing.

I like having a cell phone. I hate waiving my right to a jury or to participate in a class action lawsuit. I would pay more, as a consumer, for a phone contract that did not have a binding arbitration clause. I couldn't find one.

So I decided that owning a phone was the lesser of two evils, and that will now be treated as a free choice which I have no right to complain about.

After all, if I wanted the right to join a class action suit I could simply forgo phone service and conduct all communications by the post.

And since I am allowed to choose whether I wish to have legal rights or a telephone, I am not allowed to complain about missing one or the other. After all, *I agreed* to give one of those things up :) :) :) :)

I think this move towards mass abuse of consumers really is one of the more underrated factors in, say, modern American politics.

[dirtcube]

Minecraft Wiki is independent again!!

Yahoo!!! No more FANDOM wiki!!! Find the new minecraft wiki at minecraft.wiki!!

I thought it would be good to make a little PSA post with summarised information on why they moved from FANDOM!

Why did they move?

FANDOM is notoriously a bad wiki for both readers and editors alike. This is due to the insane amount of ads, the site layout, the lag, the fact that FANDOM can just take your wiki from you, etc has made the minecraft wiki decide to move

Because of the lack of agency the minecraft wiki has over its own wiki, they had a long discussion and vote with the community on what wiki platform to move towards. You can view both discussions here and here

By moving to a more independent wiki, they can provide a much better and friendlier service.

What's improved with the new wiki?

New site look, lacking the ugly FANDOM yellow sidebar and removing all other unnecessary bloat! This also includes a dark mode option and other custom settings.

Faster load times! I have incredibly good internet, and even I notice the STARK difference between the load times of FANDOM and the official wiki!

Less ads! At the moment they have no ads, but they do intend to have at least one. The placement of which will be discussed with the community to ensure minimal disruption to the user.

Better search functionality! FANDOM's search is notoriously bad at giving you the answers you need. Now they can have a more robust search function that more accurately brings users to what they are looking for.

No age popups- Unlike FANDOM this wiki does not need to know if you're a child or adult.

Anonymous editing has returned! Users can now once again anonymously contribute to the site!

HOWEVER. THE MINECRAFT WIKI NEEDS YOUR HELP!

FANDOM refuses to close old wiki's that have moved away, and so they will continue to show up in search domains. The old domains such as minecraft.gamepedia.com and minecraftwiki.net are also permanently attached to the FANDOM wiki.

In order to help the new wiki be successful, you can help out in the following way:

Spread the word!

Don't interact with FANDOM links. The less people interact with FANDOM, the more google knows that people are looking for the official wiki and not the FANDOM one!

Dont use the old links, again for the same reason as above!

And of course, improve the wiki :D! Since you don't need an account to make edits, see what you can contribute!

[ink-flavored]

i'm as upset as any 10+ year old tumblr user to see the degradation of ask culture. since i've been making my own games, i get people in my notes reblogging one game regularly—weekly, daily, sometimes multiple time a day—desperate for interaction that their followers simply won't give them, even as those same followers reblog the game from them. it's awful to see people crying out for connection only to be ignored by people who can obviously hear them. it makes me sad!!! and it's frustrating!!!

but at a certain point, we have to accept that yelling about how things were 10 years ago isn't going to change people's behavior. a vast majority of tumblr users simply do not send asks, don't intend to, and will reblog ask games without sending any questions no matter how much we insist it's impolite. it's time for a new approach—so to that end:

for everyone reading this, i give you permission and highly encourage you to copy and paste my ask games (any ask game tbh) into a blank document, fill out every single question for the OCs or WIPs of your choice, and post it. without getting a single ask from anyone, share it anyway. one question at a time, everything in one giant text post, whatever. there's a good chance people who are too shy to send asks will appreciate getting to learn about your characters and stories, and maybe even encourage them to ask you for more details. and even if they don't, maybe you'll build the confidence to post whatever you want about your characters, whenever you want.

be free.

[eikotheblue]

How do you *accidentally* make a programming language?

Oh, it's easy! You make a randomizer for a game, because you're doing any% development, you set up the seed file format such that each line of the file defines an event listener for a value change of an uberstate (which is an entry of the game's built-in serialization system for arbitrary data that should persiste when saved).

You do this because it's a fast hack that lets you trigger pickup grants on item finds, since each item find always will correspond with an uberstate change. This works great! You smile happily and move on.

There's a small but dedicated subgroup of users who like using your randomizer as a canvas! They make what are called "plandomizer seeds" ("plandos" for short), which are seed files that have been hand-written specifically to give anyone playing them a specific curated set of experiences, instead of something random. These have a long history in your community, in part because you threw them a few bones when developing your last randomizer, and they are eager to see what they can do in this brave new world.

A thing they pick up on quickly is that there are uberstates for lots more things than just item finds! They can make it so that you find double jump when you break a specific wall, or even when you go into an area for the first time and the big splash text plays. Everyone agrees that this is neat.

It is in large part for the plando authors' sake that you allow multiple line entries for the same uberstate that specify different actions - you have the actions run in order. This was a feature that was hacked into the last randomizer you built later, so you're glad to be supporting it at a lower level. They love it! It lets them put multiple items at individual locations. You smile and move on.

Over time, you add more action types besides just item grants! Printing out messages to your players is a great one for plando authors, and is again a feature you had last time. At some point you add a bunch for interacting with player health and energy, because it'd be easy. An action that teleports the player to a specific place. An action that equips a skill to the player's active skill bar. An action that removes a skill or ability.

Then, you get the brilliant idea that it'd be great if actions could modify uberstates directly. Uberstates control lots of things! What if breaking door 1 caused door 2 to break, so you didn't have to open both up at once? What if breaking door 2 caused door 1 to respawn, and vice versa, so you could only go through 1 at a time? Wouldn't that be wonderful? You test this change in some simple cases, and deploy it without expecting people to do too much with it.

Your plando authors quickly realize that when actions modify uberstates, the changes they make can trigger other actions, as long as there are lines in their files that listen for those. This excites them, and seems basically fine to you, though you do as an afterthought add an optional parameter to your uberstate modification action that can be used to suppress the uberstate change detector, since some cases don't actually want that behavior.

(At some point during all of this, the plando authors start hunting through the base game and cataloging unused uberstates, to be used as arbitrary variables for their nefarious purposes. You weren't expecting that! Rather than making them hunt down and use a bunch of random uberstates for data storage, you sigh and add a bunch of explicitly-unused ones for them to play with instead.)

Then, your most arcane plando magician posts a guide on how to use the existing systems to set up control flow. It leverages the fact that setting an uberstate to a value it already has does not trigger the event listener for that uberstate, so execution can branch based on whether or not a state has been set to a specific value or not!

Filled with a confused mixture of pride and fear, you decide that maybe you should provide some kind of native control flow structure that isn't that? And because you're doing a lot of this development underslept and a bit past your personal Balmer peak, the first idea that you have and implement is conditional stops, which are actions that halt processing of a multiple-action-chain if an uberstate is [less than, equal to, greater than] a given value.

The next day, you realize that your seed specification format now can, while executing an action chain, read from memory, write to memory, branch based on what it finds in memory, and loop. It can simulate a turing machine, using the uberstates as tape. You set out to create a format by which your seed generator could talk to your client mod, and have ended up with a turing complete programming language. You laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

[sbcdh]

You know where the word cocaine comes from? Its Quechua. Just the name of the damn plant. I think it was 1971, maybe 72. I dunno- 

Could you start at the beginning?

Huh? Yeah, sure. Course. Uhh. Lets see…

Take your time. 

Woof. Lets see…I started in uhhh, 72. Some tiny little bottle-rocket firm sweatin for talent, head broker was this big red fatass named Ron Spade, hell of a guy, but the place got bought out by Bear Stearns in 73 when the shit really hit the fan. It was a rough time to be on a trade floor. IRS just put out the whole hypnoeconomics thing. Half the big firms were runnin’ around with their hair on fire, the other half felt invincible. Every day was a party. Party party party. 

Was that your first interaction with hypnostimulants? 

I guess. Its funny. First guy to give me quori was a cop. 

You mean an agent of the FDA? 

No no, like an old fashioned NYPD beat cop. Met him in the bathroom at Pink during a bender. Moron was so faded he thought I was his informant. Just gave me a phial. 

And you tried it?

Not right away no. To be honest I thought it was kinda faggy. Sorry. Its just what I thought at the time. The shit was sparkly, you know? What kinda drug comes in phials? Shoulda known something was up. 

Would you say hypnostimulants were popular at the time? 

At the time? Depends what you mean by popular. People didn’t know about that shit yet. You heard stories, dudes shooting up in the woods upstate, gettin found with their eyeballs exploded. It was early days, ya know? But like, that didn’t happen. That was urban legends. You know who was actually fucking around with the early stuff? Accountants. 

Accountants?

Yeah, you know, the bookkeepers. See,  I’m really just a plumber. I move money from one pipe to another pipe. But instead of wrenches and sprockets or whatever, I use charm. Its pretty easy if you ask me. Imagine if you could just tell water where it already wanted to go. You’re water’s best pal. Nah. It was those nerds in the basement, the spreadsheet guys that figured out how to expense shit so the IRS couldn’t get ya. Those were the fuckers who really dove in. 

What got you using regularly? 

Same shit as everyone else. Makes the job easier. 

How so?

You can feel the money in their pocket. Its like, I dunno how to describe it. Its like…Its like, a turd sitting in a hammock. You can feel how the money bends everything around it. You can see it, smell it. You can hear it over the phone. You can’t ignore it. Shit is nuts. You take enough, and its like you can’t see anything else. Or. No. Its like…You see that you don’t need to see anything else. Money is everything. You’re money. I’m money. Its all just rivers of money flowing through everything. 

By 1973 you were a regular user yes?

Regular makes it sound normal. But yeah I know what you mean. “Regular user.”  76 was the sweet spot. The drugs were good, but the regulators hadn’t stepped up yet. You and some buddies could set up in a club bathroom with nothing but a blindfold and a pile. You ever seen a stock floor with a headfull of that fancy government shit? 

Would you like to discuss the raid? 

No. Not really. 

I understand you were the only one in a sub-emmanation state when Hypnoregulators arrived on the scene. 

I don't want to talk about it. 

Very well then, my associate will be happy to take you to prison as per the agreement you signed. 

Alright alright, Christ. 

Please. In your own words. 

From what I understand, you pulled spade outta bed. Got a confession and everything that morning. 9 fuckin AM, and 200 IRS agents come busting in the doors. I was in the bathroom seeing shit. It's marble lined, lots gold filigree. All that jazz. Special made. Listen. I'm serious about the stock floor shit. Whatever you guys have, it's different than what we had back then. I mean, the shit was still cut with cocaine. A stock floor wasn't a stock floor, it was like…

The raid, please. 

I'm getting to it! You gotta know this shit okay? I need you to understand what you goons fuckin wrecked. It was perfect okay? A garden of Eden . Ripe fruit. Everything just works. You don't have to worry about shit. You're a hunter, a killer, the great fuckin god pan, and the floor is your field of delights. It's like being a beating heart, like being struck by lightning. You can feel the sun in your pocket, and how it's all flowing through everything. And then you fucks showed up. 

It was cold. I felt it first. Like I just threw the biggest party, and mom and dad were coming home early. But you know what I saw? You know those Chinese dragon dancers? Or, lions, or whatever they are? You know how there's two guys in the costume? I saw a dragon, a beast with eyes like the sun, teeth dripping gold, a bunch of IRS suits holding its pelt on their shoulders like you carry your baby home. 

Your statement alluded to some additional information. 

Yeah…there was something else… I dunno how to describe it. The fuckin…eyes, like the sun. Thats how you feel when you're on this shit. You're seein’ gold. I looked into the dragons eyes, and it's like, it's like I saw me. Like I was the dragon, and I was looking at me. Or…no. I was the sun. I was looking at myself. It was like, in that moment I knew something. I learned something. 

What exactly is that?

I dunno. It doesn't fit into words. But like. You aren't regulating shit. 

I'm sorry? 

Yeah. All this shit. The dragon. The field. The dancers. It's all just the sun.

[chrome-barkz-aac]

i made this instagram post !!! there isn't as big of a community of AAC users on instagram so I thought I would share this on my instagram (@cytochromesea).

EDIT: i got an ask that states that not everyone knows what AAC is which is an oversight on my part, it stands for alternative and augmentative communication!

Image ID:

A light blue background with a rainbow and a cloud and some stars. There is a blue border collie with wings holding an aac tablet that says I love you! Text reads: AAC etiquette. Do’s, Don’ts, and other stuff. By cytochrome sea.

The same background appears in every following slide. Text reads:

AAC is my voice! It is not a toy or accessory

Don’t touch my AAC without my permission

Don’t take my AAC away from me, for any reason (joke, punishment, etc)

Don’t press buttons randomly or flip through my communication cards without permission

How would you like it if I randomly poked you on the mouth and throat (or on your hands if you sign)? It would be unpleasant, so don’t do that to me

Some AAC users can speak sometimes. It is not your business why someone can or cannot talk

Don’t ask questions about why an AAC user cannot speak. 

Do let us communicate however is best for us in that moment

Don’t ask us if or when we will be able to speak verbally. It’s not your business 

Do not value verbal speech more highly than AAC. Any communication is good communication

Some of us never talk, either, and that’s ok! Those of us who can talk sometimes are not better than those of us who can’t. None of us owe you an explanation for our use of AAC.

Don’t look at my screen until I show you. It feels really invasive!

It feels like when someone is looking at your phone screen over your shoulder, so please don’t do this

This applies to low tech AAC as well, don’t look at someone’s cards or letter board until they show you

You have the dignity of forming your thoughts in your head before you say them, whereas my thoughts are all on display. Please afford me the same dignity that you get automatically.

Don’t shame someone for not being able to speak verbally. It makes us feel horrible

We are real people with thoughts and feelings. Please treat us with kindness. 

We are trying our best

Don’t shame someone if their device mispronounces a word. It’s quite literally out of our control.

Other Don’ts. Don’t

Don't Treat an AAC user as childish or stupid for not being able to speak. Our ability to speak does not define our worth

Don't Show frustration at the way someone communicates

Don't Make comments about how fast or slow we communicate

Also don’t…

don't Act surprised when we swear or talk about adult topics like sex, drugs, or violence. We are not pure uwu precious smol beans, we are normal fucking people

don't Assume what is “wrong” with us. There are about a hundred reasons for someone to use AAC and you probably aren’t the expert in any of them.

“OK, so what CAN i do?” im glad you asked! When interacting with an AAC user, DO…

Ask us how we prefer to communicate and support us as you are able

Assume that we are competent

Talk to us with the same respect, tone and vocabulary that you would for any one else

Give us money (this one is a joke)

Understand that AAC grammar isn’t perfect and we are doing our best

Is it rude if…

I can’t understand your device? Not rude! Misunderstandings happen all the time in any conversation, just be patient as you would normally. 

I want to complement your AAC? Not rude!

I ask to see your AAC and understand how it works? This isn’t rude if you are already talking about AAC, but don’t ask random strangers this. They don’t owe you an AAC tour. 

Thank you for listening! This post is for the community! If you are an AAC user, let me know if I missed something in the comments and I will pin it! I hope you are filled with peace and love and I hope something good happens to you today! End ID. 

[officialclangen]

CLANGEN UPDATE: CLANCOPHONY

(Download the update here, or via your in-game auto-updater!)

Hello furriends and Clanmates! We hope you have all lined your nests with feathers and moss; leaf-bare is here, and so is our next release!

Our lovely developers have been reinforcing the camp walls with new features for moons now. With the new release, you can direct your warriors' focus, befriend/antagonize the other Clans, invite in outsiders, choose symbols for your Clans, experience our new sound system, and more! ❄️

If you are having issues with your anti-virus flagging ClanGen, please look to this post for a guide on how to fix it.

Our changelog is very long, so it will be below the cut ❤️

Features

CLAN FOCUS: New feature accessed via the Warrior's Den. Direct your warriors' Focus towards specific goals, such as feeding the Clan or sabotaging other neighboring Clans. When the Focus is changed, there is a cooldown of 3 moons before it can be changed again, so choose wisely! Please note that some Focuses aren't accessible in Classic mode and that some Focuses require certain cat ranks to be present.

PRONOUNS: Wow! The cats have pronouns other than they/them? Yes it's true! Cats can now naturally generate with they/them, he/him, or she/her pronouns. Want a cat to have different pronouns than those options? You can do that to! Check out their profile page and the Change Gender option to add any pronoun under the sun. These pronouns will be used in text throughout the game when referring to that cat (give a big hand to our writing team for the monumental amount of work they did to get pronouns integrated into all the text!) Please note a new game setting to revert the game to only generating they/them pronouns for all cats.

LEADER'S DEN: You can now access the Leader's Den to view the other Clans neighboring your Clan as well as the known Outsiders. Decide how you want to interact with these other cats: will you appease the hostile Clans? Or antagonize them further? Will you hunt down that one pesky rogue? Or perhaps you've decided an exiled Clanmate should be allowed a second chance…

CLAN SYMBOLS: You can now choose a Clan symbol during Clan creation. Other Clans also generate with symbols, which you will see in the Leader's Den. There are currently 484 symbols available to choose from, a roster that we plan to continue expanding with each stable update. Please note that old Clan saves will not be able to choose a Clan symbol in-game, though save editing to change the symbol is relatively simple. When loading an old save, the game will attempt to assign a symbol matching with it's prefix, if no symbol exists then it will randomly choose a symbol.

CLASSIC CONDITIONS: Classic mode can now access illnesses, injuries, and permanent conditions! Please note that this still differs in some ways from Expanded mode. In Classic Mode, a single medicine cat can care for the entire Clan, specific herb amounts are not displayed on the med den screen, an herb will treat a condition regardless of the Clan's actual herb amounts, the Clan's herb supply is randomly generated and is not dependent on events.

AUDIO: What in StarClan?? Clangen with sound!? Clangen now comes with shiny new sound effects and one very lovely music track that plays during Clan creation. More music is on the horizon… and don't worry! There is a handy dandy mute button in the corner of the screen and audio settings to control music/ambiance and sound effects volume separately.

QoL

Fullscreen new and improved! Art no longer looks oddly crunched and the black frame has been replaced with pretty background art. This comes with a new setting to turn off anti-aliasing and a setting to ignore fullscreen scaling rules, just in case you want it a little extra large (please note that this setting will come with some visual quirks if enabled)

You can now search cats on the mediator page

More special characters are allowed in user notes

Leaders can now be affected by mass extinction events

Mass extinction events are now limited to affecting 11 cats at most, but they can occur multiple times in a single moon.

When leaders die of starvation, they now revive with enough nutrition to bring them up to malnourished, giving a little extra time to find food before starving once more.

Moon events that previously mentioned an Outsider, but did not generate an Outsider cat, will now generate an Outsider

Moon events that mention an Outsider can now pull an Outsider from the existing list of Outsiders, rather than generating a new one

War events will now match with the affect of the overarching war event for that moon (i.e. if the Clans are having peace talks that moon, no clan relation lowering events will occur at the same time)

More moon events are now recorded in the relationship log if they changed a relationship

"show dead/living" button on cat list is now "view dead/living"

"filtered by" button on cat list is now "sort by"

Last and First page buttons are now available on the cat list screen.

Players can now input a page number on the cat list screen to move to that page immediately

Leader death history now displays as a single sentence for each death, rather than one long run-on sentence

Custom cursor setting now comes with a warning about increased chance of crashes

All text (or at least, the vast majority) can now be copy-pasted!

Buttons on moon events that lead to the profiles of cats involved now generates a horizontal scroll bar if the buttons go off-screen

If a moon event had no cats specifically involved, the involved cat button no longer displays

Alert exclamation marks now persist until the tab is clicked

When keybinds are on, you can now use the arrow keys to move up and down the event tab buttons, and the enter button to switch to the selected tab

Cats can now be quickly added to and removed from patrols via double clicking

Herb moon events no longer destroy herb supplies in their entirety (with the exception of one war event) and any large destruction events no longer occur if herb stores are already low

Herb gained on moonskip and patrols has been slightly buffed

Relationship value changes when cats break up is now dynamic, meaning some break ups have larger impacts than others

Newborn kits are now listed in the involved cat buttons on moon events

Quick start! You can click Quick Start at the beginning of Clan Creation to skip to the end. All choices will be made randomly

Content

100s of new patrol art additions

Many many new patrols! Many requiring specific traits or skills.

New outcomes for existing patrols! Many requiring specific traits or skills.

New Camps! The Mountainous camp, Ruins, and the Beach camp, Fjord.

New moon events, such as murders and new ways to gain accessories.

Literally 1000+ new relationship events

Many many new thoughts, many of which are exclusive to certain traits, ages, conditions, seasons, and skills

New leader ceremony possibilities, many of which are exclusive to cats of certain traits (both the dead cats and the new leader)

Prefix list updated to include new canon names (looking at you, Stretchkit)

Many new loner/kittypet names

Many outcomes for Leader Den events, many of which are specific to certain skills, traits, and ages

New events for pregnancy announcements and speculations

New grief events and thoughts

New accessories!

Bugfixes

Murders will no longer occasionally crash the game

Fixed a bug caused by the training app murder event

You can no longer sort living cats by death date

Players no longer get stuck in the med den backrooms (when accessing the med den through cat profiles, the back button would return you to the cat profile. attempting to back out of the cat profile would take you back to the med den. rinse and repeat, it's a loop)

Buttons now disable/enable properly when closing relationship logs on first and last cats in the cat list

You can no longer enter negative page numbers by clicking the back button very very fast

Leaders now receive appropriate birth event text when dying from childbirth

Outsider kittens can no longer join as warriors

Long term conditions, like wasting disease, will now display in leader's history if they took a life

When leaders are lost on patrol, patrol result text no longer mentions them by their warrior name

Litters can no longer spawn with duplicate names (i.e. two kits named Stonekit)

Medicine cats captured by twolegs no longer have their role erased

Cat history no longer lists cats as murdering themselves

Kicked cats out of the walls (fixed some possible cat positionings on camp screen)

Adolescents can no longer be considered "normal adults" in patrols simply because they graduated to warrior early.

Kits adopted during moon events now receive correct inheritance info and begin with a positive relationship toward new adoptive parent(s)

Mates of adoptive parents now automatically adopt any newly adopted kits received on moonskip

Check added for matching age when assigning random romantic relationship values at Clan creation

When assigning random relationship values at Clan creation, the Guide cat will now only generate relationships with living cats old enough to have known the Guide in life.

Adopted litters now always generate with a bio parent, ensuring their inheritance lists them as littermates

The generation of half-clan litters no longer assumes the birthing parent can only be the (biologically) female parent (this is important for "ignore biology" game setting)

Cats with no romantic interest in each other will no longer receive romance decreasing events

Poly cat love confessions no longer read as though one cat is asking their dead mate for permission before accepting a new cat into the polycule.

Rosemary is no longer applied to the "dead body" of a lost cat

Affair birth events no longer mention nonexistent mates

Fixed mistagging in patrols that would lead to unintended effects

Many small UI issues

Many small sprite fixes

Many typo fixes

[foone]

why are printers so hated? it's simple:

computers are good at computering. they are not good at the real world.

the biggest problems in computers, the ones that have had to change the most over the time they've existed, are the parts that deal with the real world. The keyboard, the mouse, the screen. every computer needs these, but they involve interacting with the real world. that's a problem. that's why they get replaced so much.

now, printers: printers have some of the most complex real-world interaction. they need to deposit ink on paper in 2 dimensions, and that results in at least three ways it can go on right from the start. (this is why 3D printers are just 2D printers that can go wrong in another whole dimension)

scanners fall into many of the same problems printers have, but fewer people have scanners, and they're not as cost-optimized. But they are nearly as annoying.

This is also why you can make a printer better by cutting down on the number of moving elements: laser printers are better than inkjets, because they only need to move in one dimension, and their ink is a powder, not a liquid. and the best-behaved printers of all are thermal printers: no ink and the head doesn't move. That's why every receipt printer is a thermal printer, because they need that shit to work all the time so they can sell shit. And thermal is the most reliable way to do that.

But yeah, cost-optimization is also a big part of why printers are such finicky unreliable bastards: you don't want to pay much for them. Who is excited for all the printing they're gonna be doing? basically nobody. But people get forced to have a printer because they gotta print something, for school or work or the government or whatever. So they want the cheapest thing that'll work. They're not shopping on features and functionality and design, they want something that costs barely anything, and can fucking PRINT. anything else is an optional bonus.

And here's the thing: there's a fundamental limit of how much you can optimize an inkjet printer, and we got near to it in like the late 90s. Every printer since then has just been a tad smaller, a tad faster, and added some gimmicks like printing from WIFI or bluetooth instead of needing to plug in a cable.

And that's the worst place to be in, for a computer component. The "I don't care how fancy it is, just give me one that works" zone. This is why you can buy a keyboard for 20$ and a mouse for 10$ and they both work plenty fine for 90% of users. They're objectively shit compared to the ones in the 60-150$ range, but do they work? yep. So that's what people get.

Printers fell into that zone long, long ago, when people stopped getting excited about "desktop publishing". So with printers shoved into the "make them as cheap as possible" zone, they have gotten exponentially shittier. Can you cut costs by 5$ a printer by making them jam more often? good. make them only last a couple years to save a buck or two per unit? absolutely. Can you make the printer cost 10$ less and make that back on the proprietary ink cartridges? oh, they've been doing that since Billy Clinton was in office.

It's the same place floppy disks were in in about 2000. CD-burners were not yet cheap enough, USB flash drives didn't exist yet (but were coming), modems weren't fast enough yet to copy stuff over the internet, superfloppies hadn't taken over like some hoped, and memory cards were too expensive and not everyone had a drive for them. So we still needed floppy disks, but at the same time this was a technology that hadn't changed in nearly 20 years. So people were tired of paying out the nose for them... the only solution? cut corners. I have floppy disks from 1984 that read perfectly, but a shrinkwrapped box of disks from 1999 will have over half the disks failed. They cut corners on the material quality, the QA process, the cleaning cloth inside the disk, everything they could. And the disks were shit as a result.

So, printers are in that particular note of the death-spiral where they've reached the point of "no one likes or cares about this technology, but it's still required so it's gone to shit". That's why they are so annoying, so unreliable, so fucking crap.

So, here's the good news:

You can still buy a better printer, and it will work far better. Laser printers still exist, and LED printers work the same way but even cheaper. They're still more expensive than inkjets (especially if you need color), but if you have to print stuff, they're a godsend. Way more reliable.

This is not a stable equilibrium. Printers cannot limp along in this terrible state forever. You know why I brought up floppy disk there? (besides the fact I'm a giant floppy disk nerd) because floppy disks GOT REPLACED. Have you used one this decade? CD-Rs and USB drives and internet sharing came along and ate the lunch of floppy disks, so much so that it's been over a decade since any more have been made. The same will happen to (inkjet) printers, eventually. This kind of clearly-broken situation cannot hold. It'll push people to go paperless, for companies to build cheaper alternatives to take over from the inkjets, or someone will come up with a new, more reliable printer based on some new technology that's now cheap enough to use in printers. Yeah, it sucks right now, but it can't last.

So, in conclusion: Printers suck, but this is both an innate problem caused by them having to deal with so much fucking Real World, and a local minimum of reliability that we're currently stuck in. Eventually we'll get out of this valley on the graph and printers will bother people a lot less.

Random fun facts about printing of the past and their local minimums:

in the hot metal type era, not only would the whole printing process expose you to lead, the most common method of printing text was the linotype, which could go wrong in a very fun way: if the next for a line wasn't properly justified (filling out the whole row), it could "squirt", and lead would escape through gaps in the type matrix. This would result in molten lead squirting out of the machine, possibly onto the operator. Anecdotally, linotype operators would sometimes recognize each other on the street because of the telltale spots on their forearms where they had white splotches where no hair grew, because they got bad lead burns. This type of printing remained in use until the 80s.

Another fun type of now-retired printers are drum printers, a type of line printer. These work something like a typewriter or dot-matrix printer, except the elements extend across the entire width of the paper. So instead of printing a character at time by smacking it into the paper, the whole line got smacked nearly at once. The problem is that if the paper jammed and the printer continued to try to print, that line of the paper would be repeatedly struck at high speed, creating a lot of heat. This worry created the now-infamous Linux error: "lp0 on fire". This was displayed when the error signals from a parallel printer didn't make sense... and it was a real worry. A high speed printer could definitely set the paper on fire, though this was rare.

So... one thing to be grateful about current shitty inkjet printers: they are very unlikely to burn anything, especially you.

(because before they could do that they'd have to work, at least a little, first, and that's very unlikely)

[an-au-blog]

I'm about to nerd-out about the Fan Letter project:

The one piece fan letter project is so genuinely beautiful. I'm not even talking about the jaw dropping animation and the comeback of the art style. The very idea of this - the perspective of civilians, non-power/haki users and just random people in a world that's already so wide is so cool. And the way we got to experience the main characters of the main series - their impact on the world and the collateral. I particularly loved how they were still there but in the way their faves were obscured, never fully shown (other than the last scene) you could tell they weren't the focus even if the whole episode was a tribute to them and their fans.

(This is what I mean by the faces thing)

This entire scene is just the girl and Usopp (I can talk about the symbolism in colors and shading/the parallels of the marine literally casting a shadow on her while one of the strawhats gives her a helping hand, but I digress) - the focus is still on her, regradless of the speaker and the camera is only following her movements and facial expressions. We only get a clear view of Usopp's face a second before the scene changes.

This too, Luffy is the only one on the screen but we don't get to see him, not fully(even in the closer shots), because it's not about him.

I also loved how funny they made the power scalers in the bar (and he way we saw Zoro and Sanji interact with them. As they are probably one of the usual ones to be compared by dude-bros, it was like an inside joke for the fandom and I love it to bits!)

Truly amazing.

Or the little fanboying moments, so cute!

And I can't believe I'm just now hearing of the theory that Chopper's bounty is always this low because the mariens love him so much they don't want the high bounty to put him in danger!

There's so much to be implied/confirmed! For example, we get to see how many people love Brook because for some reason we keep forgetting he's a world-famous rockstar. He has his own merch, he started a trend with afros and those glasses he has on the poster, his fans picked up his puns,

It was also touching how Luffy touched lives without even trying (not that he usually does), as the marine brothers. Even though the older one claims he doesn't like his brother, he loves him enough to appreciate him being alive when he witnessed an entire war for someone else's. Even if he doesn't want to admit it, it's clear he cares about his brother deeply. It's just so amazing seeing it :''))

(Bonus to this is the little monologue Nami's fangirl has that adds so much about their relationship :))

I'm so looking forward to more ;;--;;

[purlty23]

Have you had Nazi propaganda blazed onto your dashboard? Me too.

Its no secret that Tumblr doesn't give a damn about its user base. It's been made abundantly clear to me that not only do they not care. Tumblr is allowing posts with direct links to nazi propaganda and chatroom sites to be blazed!

The only reason I found this post? Because Tumblr put it in front of my face on my dashboard.

In the notes of this post there were dozens of reblogs with things like "is this an ARG?" "Oh whats this, save for later". One comment that said "tempting".

This is a neo nazi trying to recruit you.

Report this immediately. Do not click links. Email support@tumblr.com telling them that you don't want neo nazis paying them to show us this garbage.

If you want to know how I figured out what this was in more detail, I'll put it under a read more so that everyone can be a little safer and a little smarter out there.

First: I went to the persons blog.

This one in particular is clever enough to have an ask about palestinian donations as their first post. The second is the one screenshot above.

I kept scrolling. Most are youtube links posted with 0 notes or interaction. This is another link to the same site here.

If you scroll far enough, you'll see they've reblogged an original post.

If you directly copy and paste this text into google, you'll find exactly one result. A PDF in Bulgarian hosted on a website named aobg.org.

Sounds legit, right?

Its the official website for the Bulgarian Society of Anthroposophy. A 'new age spiritual movement based on German idealism'. A cult.

As soon as I made the connection, I knew that clicking the original link would lead me to something similar. I felt confident enough to click it safely (DO NOT TRY AT HOME), and was launched into the shittiest little pro Nazi website with a live chatroom on the side.

There are always signs, always queues. Do not be stupid out there. These are NOT ARGs. If you aren't sure, block and move on.