#and got invested in their shenanigans

[bam-monsterhospital]

okay realtalk? i much prefer live action garp. he's a better (and more interesting) character.

i was only exposed to animu garp, so take that how you will, but him showing up after a bajillion episodes post water 7, out of fucking nowhere, AFTER going through a bunch of worldgov bullshit getting robin back and all i wanted to do was fucking never see marines ever again... out comes this tie to luffy who's like 'welp guess i'm fighting you now, lol JK not really, gonna wreck this property, let's continue this fight in a few days when you get your new ship'.

it's-it's so fuckin annoying-anime-trope #658. he comes out of nowhere, contributes nothing, interrupts the flow, serves his singular meta purpose in the most clumsy slapped-on way possible, then leaves, no lasting impact, nothing.

I understand people having beef with this more antagonistic garp in the live action, but holy fucking shit is he ever a breath of fresh air. Here lies a goddamn CHARACTER with so many layers that are constantly showcased. Here lies a character with PURPOSE, with SO much purpose, who is written so beautifully into the narrative to fulfill so many needs. Live action garp sold me on his stupid horrible tough 'love' attitude (it's not boring trope bullshit, you can actually see the trauma behind it, the horrible reasoning), sold me on coby and helmeppo's story, sold me on actually giving more than zero shits about world-happenings away from the strawhats.

[gingergari]

i loved @peaches2217's expectant mareach stuff and when they posted picrews of the gang i knew i had to draw at least one so hereeee's cocoa!

(don't worry about the fire, it'll go out soon. she hopes)

[aethernoise]

wolmeric week day 3: AU

An adventurous ram inspires a chance meeting of strangers in the Shroud... and the DoH/DoL AU I never knew I wanted until now.

[monamipencil]

stalker! wonwoo fic on it's way <3 (+ghostface! wonwoo? but not rly)

[sysig]

Giving nicknames, testing boundaries (Patreon)

[kelvingemstone]

a starstruck odyssey is for lovers

[bloodwards]

when you have an incredibly stressful d&d session and come away from it frustrated and dreading the next one and two days later your DM has a Talk with you about you playing or not playing your character a certain way ✌

[bandtrees]

its not like i dont agree with all those posts about how bsd season 5 finale is bad and stupid and was a big let-down and everything. cuz i do - but also... i'm not really upset with it in the way a lot of people are, tbh.

cuz if you're only now realizing bsd isn't a good mystery series and it has a lot of cheap shock value and forgoes interesting character development in favor of showing off how smart dazai or fyodor are... uh, welcome to the club? the season 5 finale is not really unique in this regard.

bsd, to me, though it has moments of compelling writing, and overall compelling characters (people Like its characters so much for a reason!), etc, has always been a low-expectations watch. it's always been the "oh what's kafka asagiri doing to his weird ocs now" show - from the start, it's done this. so much of season 1 reeks of the same "random out of nowhere twist to make the writing feel clever", and it's something the show's had a problem with, and continues to have a problem with. forever. to the point where to enjoy the series you just kinda have to meet it halfway and have fun with it.

when i first got into bsd in, like, 2017 or so, i hated dazai a lot. both because of personal reasons and because i just didn't like smug genius types who know everything. with him being such a major character, this led to a shallow perception of the show, as you'd expect. then, i rewatched it this year, and i went in with those same feelings - but i wanted to like bsd, and dazai by extension, so i just kinda... got used to him, because you can't fully appreciate this series and not. (that and i'd just matured as a person since 2017 and could look at him with more nuance lol)

like, i get being upset this season didn't end the way you anticipated. i loved the meursault arc, and season 5 episode 10 was one of my favorite episodes of the entire series i was genuinely excited to see a follow-up on. but also, if you know bsd does deathfaking and stupid silly plot twists that weren't telegraphed in the least, and you're genuinely mad every time they're pulled, then... maybe you should just watch a different show, yknow?

i don't say this to excuse the shitty writing, but rather, it's not really new, and buckling in for the absurd ride is part of the bsd experience, that it goes from a genuinely thrilling and gritty episode 10 to a completely batshit episode 11 that has the main antagonist quote jesus christ before dying in a helicopter explosion, is, like, really fucking funny. i can't even be mad. that episode is some of the most entertained i've been by this show, not even in its contents but laughing as i try to explain it to people and scream incredulously with my friend - it's a series where the good is good and the bad is, if nothing else, never boring. it's the series with the giant moby dick whale mech. it's the series that now has vampires in it for some reason. i think if you're looking for top tier character development and stimulating mysteries and peak fiction... you're looking in the wrong place, imo.

[emo-shenanigans]

samyan character design is coming along uwu

[egirl-vrissy]

I’m kind of a scared failgirl but if the situation called for me to bust it animal style I would in a moments notice as to outrun my crippling anxiety 

[scoups4lyfe]

When I watched the episode I was 100% Haruka 😆

LOL!

You truly winning 💯 then

The fact I had to tag myself as Shinichi got me fvcked up 🦆

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

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

[iholli]

☃️ Do you and your F/O prefer to stay at home or to play in the snow?

🌲 Do you and your F/O enjoy horror movies? If so, what are some of your favorites?

☃️ --

They have very different opinions almost the entire winter season 😔 Rat HATES it. "snow" is like a swear word, heaters make her sick, she's just miserable until the holidays roll around. Meanwhile J'onn prefers a little cooler temps and rather enjoys snowy weather! And well, Rat just can't say no to her beloved when J'onn talks about taking trips to a cozy cabin in the mountains 💙 it's really cute, J'onn tries all the different snow traditions he's heard humans do, so he'll just... be out in the snow trying to build a snowman. Totally unphased by the cold. Rat does not understand at all how he can stand it but she'll sit by the window watching him anyway bc it's just precious 😭😭

🌲 --

Nope 😭 Rat's already VERY easily startled, and the slightest scary thing makes her insomnia that much worse 🫠 J'onn is kind of neutral about them, horror isn't his favorite, but he'll watch if he's pulled into it. He'd just prefer a good old noir.

[viscountdeborel]

[GENERAL INFO]

🛡️ Light RP

🛡️ Open to gpose collab (SFW only)

🛡️ Location: Dynamis - Seraph

🛡️ IC in "quotations", OOC after //

🛡️ WoLmeric with Lumeria de Borel ♥️⚔️💙

🛡️ Mun: hydaelynsfavoritedumbass

🛡️ Aym is 32, Aymeric is 38

[mayvnwrites]

Just a weird au i have to unload from my head or else I'll never get anything done.

The System screws up and sticks SY in the wrong qi-deviating Peak Lord, freaks out and tried to undo it, and x number of svsss shenanigans later, there are two Qi Qingqis staring at each other from their sickbed.

SY promptly freaks out and outs himself as a dude in a lady's body, which QQQ is understandably pissed as all hell about ... until SY's very modern politically correct upbringing starts freaking out about how it's a betrayal to the girls on xian shu peak if he's allowed in it and how absolutely disrespectful this is to QQQ that some dude can see a perfect copy of her body etc etc ... and then she's like, oh no, he's *pathetic* and it's *adorable*.

SY is QQQ's didi now, but he still has to be rigorously tested for demonization and is declared to be just a poor wandering soul that got yoinked into a weird situation thanks to QQQ's qi deviation. MQF tries various things to help SY adapt to the body, but SY is all female all the way now, which, when he finds out he can avoid periods bc cultivator, he's all for since QQQ's body is way better than his prev one. The tincture that tries to meld body and soul does at least reduce his breast size, which thank GODS bc holy hell jiejie, how do you even deal with these?

SJ is his normal bitchy self... except he can't help but be a little curious about what it's like being a woman, and having been there for SY's freak out he feels... the slightest bit of a kindred spirit to a man who holds women in such high regard (bc ancient china). Also SY is a woman now, although he still calls himself a didi instead of a meimei, so... anyway, SJ's walls are slowly torn down and it ends in Shenbros somehow, with SJ and QQQ competing for title of best elder sibling. (SJ is aroace in this au.)

No one tells LQG about the two QQQ's for the longest time, and he is extremely confused at the softer(in personality) vers and why her boob size keeps fluctuating. He is very torn between his "just bros" sparring buddy (QQQ) and the... one who makes him feel... things (SY) and is not-gay panicking like crazy.

The System blocked SY's knowledge of PIDW and fked off in terror of the Main System finding out about its screw up, so SY didn't realize anything until LBH appears and his memory is unlocked (bc deus ex binghe), but by then he's invested in Cang Qiong and the Peak Lords' wellbeings, Jiu-ge is a lot more well-adjusted, and all the Xianshu ladies are addicted to trashy romance novels and have no time for rl pretty boys so...

[collecting-dustbunnies]

The longer I play Obey Me, the more I feel like Obey Me is a story about how the MC, in their quest to seek acceptance by the people they care about, ends up destroying themselves in the process and losing the very thing that made them so special and loved in the first place.

In the beginning of OG, they started off as just a normal human who got whisked away to a weird ass world where literally nobody respects them. Despite this, they recognised from the beginning that these demons and angels were not so different from humans. MC's ability to see the demons as actual people and not just beings controlled by their sins was what allowed them to form close bonds with them. They had good intentions to reunite the demon brothers who had undergone centuries of misunderstanding, resentment, and pent up grief. Even though they were excessively nosy, MC's unique position as a complete outsider allowed them to see just how much love the demon brothers had for each other, and how they can become closer if everybody would just better communicate with each other. Serving as the bridge to better improve the brothers' relationships was what convinced the demon brothers to also see MC as a member of their family.

But as the MC became more involved in the Devildom's problems, they started to adopt the same toxic traits that had created wedges between the brothers in the first place. From relying heavily on their pacts to subdue the brothers, to allowing a curse to control Barbatos (even though they had the ability to break it), to going along with the brothers' manipulative scheme to trick Satan into reconciling with Lucifer when Satan ran away to the human world -- it's almost like MC has unconsciously picked up on some of their loved ones' behaviour. Gone are the days where MC brings in a new perspective to problems. Now, they just embrace the chaos and their more darker traits, for that is what is expected of them to survive in the Devildom. And since everyone within their circle puts them on a pedestal, this further affirms to the MC that this is how they should be.

Dealing with the affairs of the Devildom had also caused the MC to grow more apathetic. In the beginning, they had been actively taking steps to form pacts with the brothers and were generally very invested in freeing Belphie from the attic. They remained true to themselves and insisted that they form a pact with Satan based on mutual trust and understanding, and not just as a means to smite Lucifer. Despite being in a helpless situation, MC never refused to give up their agency. But the longer MC gets involved with these shenanigans, the more they grew... numb to everything.

Solomon bringing me back to the Devildom unannounced? Oh, sure. Diavolo and Solomon hiding the reasons for my sudden return? Not my problem.

Simeon facing a problem to the point of having a quarter of the cast acting as his bodyguards? Eh, I'll just ignore it until I can't anymore.

Watching and waiting. That's what they have resorted to doing.

And that mindset of kicking problems down the line until it lands on MC's doorstep and they have no choice but to act -- that's exactly how they have been acting when they were stuck in NB, hasn't it? MC didn't bother forming pacts with the past version of the brothers until they were given an ultimatum, and even then, they simply relied on the convenient timing of each brother struggling with an inner crisis to swoop in, resolve the situation and tick them off their checklist.

MC in NB seems like an unfortunate culmination of everything they faced so far. They're too apathetic to care about getting sent to an unfamiliar place once again, too desensitised to life in the Devildom to reclaim their agency, and too desperate to earn the love of their former family to even think about anything else. They became so co-dependent to the demon brothers that they seem to think they cannot live without them or their affection, even if the ones they are living with in the past are different people from the ones they grew to love in the present.

The phrase "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" fits way too perfectly for the Obey Me MC. After all, MC keeps getting rewarded every time they try to get themselves killed (or even when they actually got killed). Maybe that's the only way they know how to resolve problems.

So if they can't die as the hero, they'll just learn to live as the villain.