#data synchronisation

[mysticworks]

Late Night Walk ~ LN4 x Reader

Prologue can be read -> here

Part i to the "Your eyes" series

Word Count: 2.3k

Genre: Reader is feisty and Lando is whipped

It's late at night. Lando insists to walk you home. Deciding this is his perfect time to get to know you

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C H A P T E R O N E:

Today had been exhausting. 

You were drained - it had been another day of back to back meetings as the team reflected on the seasons’ analytics. 

Data had been scrutinised, reports written and discussions made; intense decisions being the result of it all. 

Not that you wanted to recall any of it.

The clocks had moved past 10 at night and with no dinner, just mugs and mugs of coffee, it was time for you to call it a day; the hunger had begun threatening to let your more ‘primitive’ nature loose. 

As you left the building, the warm spring air from this morning seemed to be replaced with an unwelcoming chilly breeze, remnants of the winter still lingering in the air as the seasons transitioned. 

This phase of weather was always one you expressed distaste towards, never quite knowing the best way to dress for the ever changing temperature. 

You tugged on the sleeves of your hoodie, letting the fabric wrap around your fingers in a mild attempt to retain that fraction of warmth. 

To top it all off, your late leave from work meant that the last bus of the day had long since left. 

The prospect of an hour long walk back home haunted your mind - yet you trudged on anyway, eager to be home and in bed.

You sensed the presence of a figure come up, beside you, falling into step as you continued down the cobble path. 

With no intention to engage in conversation - your patience having been worn thin at this point - you continued on, sparing not a glance to the uninvited company.

“You were really cool in the meeting today, challenging Zak head on like that.”

The voice made you halt mid step. It was one you knew, all too well - from replays of interviews, to PR content displayed on the company screens, Lando Norris’ voice was more than familiar, and not in a good way.

He was the absolute last person you expected to approach you, the daggers you’d sent him in passive criticism earlier that night being something you assumed would deter him from ever consulting you.

And somehow you were wrong. 

Here he was, walking besides you, praising you for the storm you’d sent his way.

Raising a brow, you spared Norris a narrow look, wary of his intent, adamant not to entertain conversation.

He continued alongside you anyway, ignoring your glare completely and instead outstretching his hand in offering, “Ice cream?”

“No thanks.”  

You looked pointedly straight ahead, refusing to make the acknowledgement. 

He gave a shrug of his shoulder, biting into his own cone; exaggerated humming to signal how great it tasted.

Something about the racer was really, really setting you off - maybe it was how mirthful he always was - too immaturely peppy and buoyant - even way past 10pm in the night, after a horrendous working day. 

You’d caught his expression in the meeting earlier - the same smirk on his face sending a hangry rage coursing through you.

You had the urge to speed walk away - when a huge rumble erupted from your stomach. 

The chortle from Lando was enough indication that he’d heard your body's plea for food, and he shoved the ice cream cone into your hand once more, “I think you need that, actually.”

Embarrassed wasn’t a strong enough word. 

You felt the heat in your cheeks swallow you whole, as you pried the cone from his grasp, taking a sheepish bite in. 

You mumbled a thanks. Despite the cold night air, the ice cream was savoured - some food after hours of none, a much needed relief. 

Not that you’d admit that to Lando anytime soon.

A silence fell between you, and you almost forgot Lando was walking beside you - the pair of you busy in tucking into your cold treats. Your steps had synchronised, a slow walk through the company complex. 

By now, you’d walked well past the car park, exiting the compound from the main gate and onto the main road. 

Lando peered at you, raising his brow, “Waiting for a ride?”

A click of the tongue conveyed your refusal, “not everyone has a personal chauffeur Norris.”

He stopped his pace and you continued on, leaving him behind in what seemed bewilderment.

“Most of the population uses public transport, or walks.” Your unnecessary dig at his wealth was ignored completely - he seemed entirely unbothered, jogging to catch up with you instead. 

“Would you like a ride then?” His expression was soft - something you hadn’t expected, and he seemed genuine in his offering. 

Your answer was curt, “No.”

“Why not?” 

“I’m not getting into a stranger's car.”

The driver feigned mock hurt, placing a hand on his chest as he gave a dramatic gasp, “I’m no stranger.” 

“No, no, of course not. We’re childhood best friends.”

You rolled your eyes, the sarcasm oozing from every word and Lando replied with a huge grin, his eyes sparkling as he resumed his simultaneous steps beside you. 

“I guess I’ll just have to walk you home then.”

“I’ll pass - I'd prefer some peace thanks.”

“Please, allow me, I take pride in being quite the gentleman.” He threw a wink your way, and you had to swallow the urge to swat at him - to which he only giggled himself silly. 

You offered him a scoff in reply. “It’s quite a walk - I don’t think the celebrity in you will make it.” 

“Oh please, I’m a high performance athlete. I’m sure I’ll survive.”

With a dramatic flex of his biceps, Lando wiggled his brows, and you found yourself chortling. 

You had to admit, although irritating at times, there was a charismatic nature to Norris. 

Something light hearted that made him just that slight bit more bearable. 

“So why are you so adamant to give me a walk home anyway?” The question had been lingering on your mind, and at some point you couldn't hold it back anymore. 

It didn’t make sense to you.

Why would The Lando Norris - famous racing driver and McLaren’s star - come and walk with you in the first place? 

Especially after you’d pointed multiple fingers his way, in the meeting, merely hours ago.

Lando sent a look your way, pondering for a second, as if coming up with a suitable reply, before pointing ahead, “because of things like that.” 

You followed Lando's gaze.

On the opposite side of the road, a brawl seemed to be conjuring; a group of intoxicated people scrambling out of a nearby bar and spilling on the streets.

Each seemed to be shouting at the other, a few hands flying and throwing fists into the air - senseless. It was quite the barbarous scrabble; rowdy in the night's silence.

“It's not a safe time to be out alone at night.” 

Lando asserting protective behaviour certainly took you by surprise, filling you with a strange feeling. One you couldn't quite describe. 

With every passing moment, as you got to know him, the assumptions you'd made about him, expelled little by little - a sense of guilt beginning to gnaw at you.

Maybe he wasn't too bad after all. 

Lando mumbled on, continuing, “that, and you have the most beautiful eyes.”

You blinked hard trying to digest his response. 

Lando Norris flushed deep red.

He looked gobsmacked at his own words - as if they'd spilled out unintentionally and his hands flew to cover his mouth, uncomprehending. 

An awkwardness filled the air, neither saying a word as you walked on.

You looked eagerly for a way to avert the conversation, to break the deadly silence you'd been submerged in - but Lando beat you to it.

“So what's your role in the team? Since you were in the meeting I'm guessing you're one of the higher ups.” 

You gave him a wry smile, “Well the official title is, Senior Data Analyst, not too high up actually.” 

“Senior Analyst? Do you get any cooler?” His expression was incredulous, gaping at thin air. You felt a playful thump on your forearm, “Miss y/l/n - the big shot.”

It was your turn to become a shade of pink - never really being complemented before on your position. 

Although you’d been proud of moving up the ranks soon after joining McLaren, you’d never been given the opportunity to really grow, well deserved promotions turned away in ‘under the table’ favours.

“Eh, not really, I missed out on the lead position.” 

Lando sent you an inquisitive look, urging you to elaborate. 

The memory brought a tug at your heart- as if it was being pinched from within- a clear sign you’d never really moved on from the rejection you’d faced that day. 

You shrugged your shoulders, “Let’s just say: nepotism, inequality and business politics.”

You'd realised that Lando was an attentive listener.

He'd always wait for you to finish before drawing out more with exactly the right phrases. 

“That really sucks - I'm positive you would've been the better fit, with how intelligent you seem.” 

He changed his tone, giving it a more hopeful, brighter edge, “I'm sure you'll bag a promotion soon. Maybe even take over. Zak was threatened, that's for sure.” 

He nudged you a little with his elbow, and the pair of you found yourself breaking out into a fit of hysterics - replaying the meeting from both perspectives. 

It was encouraging to hear someone say those words. Affirmation of your career being a success - someone rooting for you out of pure kindness and not some warped, twisted ill-intent. 

For the first time that night, you felt grateful Lando was beside you. 

His words gave you the inspiration you never knew you were missing.

Eventually your conversation drifted, moving on to how you'd never seen a formula one race - live, the fact shocking Lando - who promised he'd somehow get you the full experience. 

“You have to see me racing - it'll blow you away seeing how talented I am. Maybe if you're nice I'll even invite you on the podium with me.” 

He'd seemed so proud - giving himself a pat on the back.

You'd snorted at him in snide sarcasm, poking fun, “Yeah, sure. I'll have to pray for you not to crash.”

He couldn't fathom how a respected team member, had never been invited to a race, and you'd fallen into explanation of how your role meant during races you were sat in the headquarters race control room - ambushed with screens and screens of numbers.

“Maybe when you're CEO you'll help me win a championship.” 

You raised your nose in the air, “Nope. I'm kicking you off the team first.” 

Lando fell into a dramatic feign of tears, puffing out his chest in a show of pride, “You'll be losing such great talent.” 

Somehow between the start, to now, the distance between the pair of you had closed, little by little. 

As you turned the corner of your street, you felt the back of Lando’s hand brush against yours, ever so slightly. 

Neither of you moved away- skin tingling with every bristle of contact. His knuckles were calloused, evident as they touched momentarily against yours. 

A deep fluttering erupted in your stomach, one that forced a gush of heat to take over your body. It was remarkable how such minimal contact could cause such a torrent of butterflies.

Your apartment was fast approaching now, and you sneaked a glance his way from the corner of your eye. 

Lando was biting down on his lip, blushing beetroot red.

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L A N D O ’ S P O V:

Time had gone too quickly.

I felt as if we'd only just started talking and yet here we were, having walked an hour away from the office, outside residential apartment blocks, home to Miss Senior Analyst.

There was still so much more to say. So much more to ask. 

Every exchange with her had been so interesting. 

Her intelligence shone through her words - but there was something more...she was genuine.

No sugar coats, no fake laughs, no pretend kindness.

It felt like the first time I'd been seen. 

Like someone had been unafraid to speak to me normally.

Mumbling a goodbye with a hand flick for a wave, I watched y/n turn her back towards me, the distance between us growing with every step she took.

I felt a pull at my chest forcing me to say something, anything, before she really left. 

I had to find a way to see her again.

“Hey!” she turned her head in my direction, blinking, and I gulped involuntarily - gosh those eyes were so intense. 

It was hard to get used to them, so piercing and bright, like they saw through me even though I had nothing to hide.

“Do you-” 

She picked up on the slight stutter of my sentence, her brows cocking up in amusement.

I brought my hand up to my hair, raking through the tangled mess of curls with my fingers- searching for the right words.

“Would you be up for maybe…some sort of... us two...together ? We could - you said you've never -”

The words weren't coming out right and my stomach clenched, exasperated. 

She waited, expectant.

I took a deep breath, swallowing. “I'd like to take you on a hot lap around the Silverstone track, if you'd be up for it?”

The pause between her reply felt like an eternity, my heart thudding louder with every passing second.

“I'll consider it. Maybe.” I could hear the smirk in her voice - playful - teasing. 

She was messing with me, refusing to offer the satisfaction of a confirmed “yes” but keeping me thrilled without a flat out “no”. 

It drove me insane - the constant teasing - the snide remarks - the sarcasm.

It all drove me so insane.

She turned on her heel, up the steps to her apartment, leaving me grinning like the fool I felt.

I now had a hot lap to arrange.

Time to bribe, convince my manager.

[lostmymind-0]

Sugary sweet pt. 2 | LN4 x Piastri! Reader

Words: 1639

Part 1

Lando and Olivia had been a couple for almost two months before the fans found out about it. Once they did, did they destroy twitter with edits of them. Calling them the cutes couple. While Olivia was not too happy to be in the spotlight that the relationship with Lando brought with it, was Lando over the moon to be able to show his girlfriend to the world and brag about how smart and pretty she was. Oscar just teased his twin about the spotlight and her new WAG status.

It was his home race when they walked into the paddock hand in hand. Lando was beaming with pride while Olivia was trying not to look at all those fand waiting to see Lando. “Everything is going to be fine, love. Just breathe.”, he told her with a kiss to the forehead. After fifteen minutes of Lando sighning stuff and taking Selfies were they finally able to walk to the hospitality. There they met Oscar who again teased his twin for being in the Spotlight. “Seems like you stole Lando’s fand.”, he said and Olivia just hit his arm.

Once the boys had to leave for media duties could Olivia leave to go to the engineers. She was more comfortable there. Being surrounded by data and statistics was were she was in her element. It was also where she talked the most, aside when she was with her family or close friends. Zack walked up to check in on the young girl when he saw her carefully listening to Oscar’s engineer. “Where do you think could the car improve?”, the engineer asked the girl. It was a tricky question, as they expected a precise answer and not only the basics, as she was coming close to her graduation. But with an unknown confidence, at least to Zack, did the girl answer. Even going into detail behind her statement. To say that everyone was more than happy with her work was an understatement. Not only was everyone impressed by how well thought through her statements were but also how quickly she picked up different part of the work. “Good job, how about you sit with me during the race?”, Oscar’s engineer offered and the girl gladly accepted. It was not often that interns were allowed to be at the pitlane.

Right before the race did Lando searched his girlfriend down. A worried look on his face. Jon was following the boy with a small smile on his face. This was a side of Lando he had not seen before. Sure Lando was caring and loving toward his family but this was a new level. Lando finally found Olivia standing with Oscar and his engineer. “There you are! I was looking for you!”, Lando exclaimed, making the girl worry about why he had been this eager to find her right before he had to be in the car. “Is everything okay, Lan?”, she quietly asked, as all eyes were now on them. “You are getting low. I came to make sure you are eating something before it gets too low.”, Lando explained and handed her the snack he had stolen from the hospitality. Heat rushed to her cheeks as she checked her levels on her own again and found that he was indeed right. With a small thank you did she took the snack out of his hand. “How did you knew that?”, Oscar asked his teammate with a teasing smirk. “I have her blood sugar levels synchronised to my phone.”, Lando said like it was obvious. He wanted to be able to take care of her and prevent her from dropping way too low again. “You do?”, Olivia asked him surprised. “Of course. I know how you get distracted and forget to check them.”, Lando explained, pulling her close to him, kissing her head. “As cute as this is, you need to get ready, Lando.”, Jon told him. Kissing the girl one more time Lando left to get ready.

“You got Lando wrapped around your finger pretty well.”, Oscar teased while getting ready. “I had no idea he had my blood sugar on his phone. I don’t even know how or when he did it.”, Olivia told her brother, still blushing. “I like that he takes care of you. Gives me more free time.”, “Shut up and don’t crash.”, Olivia said before taking seat in the pit lane. Her nerves were a bit high as she sat down, feeling like she was not supposed to be there. But as soon as the race started did those thoughts disappear and her focus was on the race and how the car was holding up. She learned a lot, watching from the pitlane as everyone included her in the decisions, explaining them to her. It made her feel like a part of the team. The race ended with her twin in P5 while Lando got his first home podium. “You should go and see Lando when he gets out of the car.”, Zack said and walked her to the barriers with him. Somehow did she end up right next to Lando’s family, that she was going to meet after the race. “Oh it's you. Lando talks a lot about you. It is so nice to finally meet you.”, Adam, Lando’s dad, said with a wide smile and pulled the shy girl into a tight hug. “It is also nice to meet you.”, she said. They did a bit of small talk before Lando pulled up next to the other two on the podium. Once he got out of the car was everyone cheering for him. Running toward them Lando was firstly hugged by the team before making his way to his family and girlfriend. Reaching over the barrier to hug her he carefully buried his head in her neck, careful not to hit her with his helmet. “I am so proud of you, Lan.”, she said, just loud enough for him to hear her over all the noise. Once she had kissed his helmet did Lando hug his family, who was watching them with a smile.

On the podium did Lando look down at her with the wide smile she fell in love with. She loved watching him full of joy as he stood on the podium of his home race, something that has always been extremely important to him. She was just happy to be there to witness this. While Lando was doing his media duties did Olivia took one last look at the data and statistics to kill the waiting time. Suddenly the smell of champagne and sweat hit her as arms wrapped around her waist. Lando was back. “There you are, love.”, he whispered, kissing her neck. With a small smile on her face did she turn around to look at him. “I am proud of you, Lan. You did an amazing job.”, she told him, making him beam in pride. “My family wants to get dinner together as soon as we are out of here. So how about I take a quick shower and then do a few pictures with the team and then we can go? Do you have clothes to change here or do you want to go to the hotel before we meet with my family?”, Lando offered as he knew that she would not want to sit in a restaurant in McLaren clothes. “I’ll go to the hotel with Osc.”, she said and Lando promised to pick her up as soon as he was finished.

Olivia’s nerves were quite tense as they walked into the restaurants. She could feel herself get a shaky and her hands getting sweaty. The anxiety was raising up inside of her. Lando squeezed her hand as he noticed how tense she was. “They are going to love you. Don’t worry, love.”, he promised her and she tried to calm herself down. Once they had made they way through the Restaurant did they found his family sitting in a corner chatting already. “Lando, there you are!”, his mother exclaimed and went to hug her son and introduce herself to the young girl. “I am so happy that my son has found you. He told me so much about you.”, she told Olivia, who blushes like crazy. Sitting out they did some more small talk before a waited came to take their order. Just as the waited left did something start to beep quite loudly. Wanting to sink into the floor Olivia pulled out her phone. “I am sorry.”, she apologized and looked on the screen. 65 mg/dL dropping down, it read. Looking at her phone as well, Lando cursed at her under his breath. Before she had the chance to react did he call a waited, asking for a orange Juice as quick as possible. “What’s going on?”, Adam asked, confused and worries by his sons actions. “My blood sugar is a bit low.”, Olivia told them, feeling a little ashamed to admit it. It was nothing she liked people to know about and it was not the impression she wanted to make. “Oh, is there anything you need?”, Ciska asked, worried for the young girl. “It should be fine with the Juice but thank you.”.

It did get back to normal after the food came and she had the Juice but she was still feeling a little had about making everyone worry. So once they were back in Lando’s car was she apologizing to him. “Love, stop this. It is not your fault. No one is even slightly mad at you. My parents love and already care a lot for you. That’s why they were worrying about you. Your diabetes is nothing to be ashamed about.”, Lando promised her and pulled her in for a kiss at a red light.

[pinkspiderastrology]

The Correct Birth Chart of Malcolm X: Scorpio Rising

In Honour of His Centenary

Based on my corrections to settings and calculations using online planetariums and my own star charts, which synchronise the constellations with the Nakshatras (28) and the Gregorian calendar - four years' work.

Part 2/?

Kristen Patterson / KP O'Neil

Jan. 15, 2025 / Uttara Ashadha P3 & P4 in Sagittarius / Social Capitalism & Prolific Writing

Recap from Part 1:

Malcolm's Sun / Gameplay instincts and triggers: Krittika Padas 1 & 2 in Taurus - Key-Holder & Diplomat

the stars of Subaru-The Pleiades-Seven Sisters-Mothers: territories, events and abilities of The Shining, life patterns from the story of Kartikeya / The Murugan and the Chakras;

Malcolm's Ascendant / Core Personality and life-drive: Jyeshtha Pada 3 in Scorpius - Ouranos Secrets in revolution, technology, astrology & stolen children -

the star Paikauhale (The Wanderer/Homeless) with his Ouranos at Lambda Piscium, the Red Room star (Twin Peaks - David Lynch is right) addressing the use of the term Black Lodge;

and edit: I wrote and published this the day before the announcement of David's death/transition - I wondered at his death being on the 16th, in Prolific Writing, when he was clearly the perfect Social Capitalist - and it turns out he transitioned on the 15th, when the energies shift between Social Capitalism to Prolific Writing - not the first time I've paused to be correct about the Pada of our deaths being the reason we die -

I'm moving forward with an eye for signs that Malcolm has been connected to David's work and Spirit Guides for some time - and I'm sending his chart to his children, to Bob Roth at the David Lynch Foundation, and to Tony Nader - hopefully one day these astrology corrections can be added to their/his toolkits;

Malcolm's Descendant / Core Personality as death-drive (thank you, Sabina Spielrein, for discovering it:) Rohini Pada 3 in Taurus - Business Guru

the star Hassaleh in Auriga (The Charioteer;)

Malcolm's Venus / Investments: Krittika Pada 3 in Taurus, conjunct with Betty's birthday, next to his Sun - Professional Muse

the stars of The Hyades again: territories, events and abilities of The Shining, life patterns from the story of Kartikeya / The Murugan and the Chakras;

Betty is his Muse, and he is everyone's... hmmmm... pause for heartbreak, thanksgiving...

With an AA Rodden rating for Malcolm's birth time, his Vertex and Anti-Vertex are seemingly fixed to the dates of Jul. 21-27 and Jan. 22-28: Padas 2 & 3 of Pushya in Cancer, and Padas 2 & 3 of Abhijit in Capricornus -

Praesepe/The Beehive/Home of Big Brother and The All-Seeing Eye,

and Okul/Occulus/The Eye of the Goat -

eyes on eyes -

(same Ascendant/Descendant as mine, and therefore same Vertex/Anti-Vertex - my experiences mixed with my research landed me at the decision about Lodge territory in the Beehive - but the Beehive originates with the Supreme God-Mother, Ala, and the Sibyls - is it truly Her territory, being smeared or overrun? Let's see if I can decide by the end of Malcolm's chart analysis... and given his devotion to Allah... does the name Ala pre-date the word Allah?)

I would, and I will - one day - take more time with these placements -

but speeding right along, I'll explain his Anti-Vertex as being near-fated decisions/actions he pretty much had no choice but to accept and enact, hitting those calendar dates more than once -

(and here's where he helps prove me right about re-inserting the displaced Nakshatra of Abhijit - and at full-size - when I found a gap in the Wheel by synchronising three ways of measuring it, back in 2021:)

I estimate Padas 2 & 3 of Abhijit, Jan. 22-28 (in Capricornus - not Aquarius - according to online planetariums, which is where I get my birth chart data,) to belong to Fated Winners/Heroes and Reverse-Engineers -

and I can detail what Malcolm was reverse-engineering by checking his chart circuits;

each of us have patterns (these circuits) set by our Ascendants, and they can be found in list-form and geometrically by lining up the 112 Padas (same if you stick with 108 Padas) so your Ascendant tops one column, next to Pada 1 of Ashwini in the other column - geometrically, by drawing lines across your chart wheel, starting with your Ascendant and Ashwini Pada 1 - I'll make diagrams of Malcolm's circuits and include them here:

(watch this space for images)

so - Malcolm's near-fated decisions and actions are as a Fated Winner/Hero - free will/wheel, at all? His sister Ella, in interview, stated they watched over his birth keenly, the seventh child, as a family rooted in ancestral understandings about the seventh child being born to do great things -

while his Vertex is interdependent with his Anti-Vertex: chicken-and-egg scenarios, as his decisions are relative to the near-fated decisions and actions of The Hive - namely the Caregiver-Medics and Collaborators in and around it...

people and Spirit Guides can be associated with this placement by calendar dates...

I guess I should check the reverse-engineering sooner than later...

...right - same circuits as mine, so only a few minutes to check:

Malcolm was/is reverse-engineering as a Jupiter Leader (my estimation of Pada 1 of Uttara Phalguni in Leo,) and an Interviewer (my estimation of Pada 1 of Mrigashira in Taurus;) with Jupiter Leadership generally amounting to our Wheel-Turning influence on the world - Jupiter being your primary function and House Lord (Creator of Houses, actually - as proven by a school/tradition of Chinese astrology;)

Malcolm's Jupiter, Wheel-Turning influence - if you're ready for it - in Pada 3 of Uttara Ashadha, in Sagittarius (here-and-now, as I type,) aligned with the modestly-named h1 & h2 Sagittarii, and Iota Sagittarii -

in what I call Social Capitalism - unfailingly sustainable (competant against militant threats,) profitable community economics -

his primary function, in all his houses - astrologically and geographically -

his concepts, Gurus, significant male relationships -

"You can't have capitalism without racism."

"Show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker."

(I'll come back with original sources for those quotes from him, but there he is - reverse-engineering capitalism as a social capitalist in interviews...)

think I'll mic-drop for now, and go make a cup of tea...

Oh - but I should include Malcolm's Juno with his Jupiter -

Juno pulling back the clouds to see what Jupiter is doing -

I connect Juno to dissociation, as illustrated by my delayed remembrance to include her in this post -

and in child-friendly terms, I connect Juno to the Fool's Journey in our charts - the Dorothy-and-Toto journey (and I'll choose The Wiz, much as I love Judy - and knowing how much David Lynch loves her...)

Malcolm's Juno being in Ophiuchus, lining up with the Moth Cluster and Baby Scorpion Cluster/Caldwell 76 in Jyeshtha Pada 4 of Neptune Secrets (Soul Contracts, murders, Muses - murdered Muses) - conjunct with his Core Personality/Ascendant,

with his Neptune below Leo's jaw - in Pada 4 of Ashlesha, conjunct with his Sevastopol asteroid - as in, Crimea/strategic position, heavily-fought-over - Pada 4, in my estimation, belonging to Anarchists, ruled by the star Algenubi/Ras Elased - (Southern Star of) the Head of the Lion -

Dorothy, Toto and the Lion... Ted Ross... will look for connections...

but I'd say we're right over the target: can't have sustainability without profit - just need the profit to be ethical -

Malcolm's dissociative-thinking, awakening-to-self...

does he have a strong placement influencing his Neptune Leadership in Pada 4 of Uttara Phalguni... I'll come back and say whether or not, when I exhaust my search...

but with Juno close-to-the-bone, so-to-speak, and Malcolm's Descendant as Business Guru - ahhhhh! That's his Descendant talking, when he calls down capitalism -

his Descendant dogged/Toto'd by his Juno, and how many Anarchical Muse/Neptune Spirit Guides reaching out to him through his Neptune -

with himself being poured out through his Venus investments as a Professional Muse to everyone in the world - no balance of profit for him in that role -

unless...

[abyss-seer]

Strange Things Channeled Part 1

Its so wierd so so weird. I still remember this day. I was meditating, trying to concentrate, channeling and this the message that comes through

This is so weird. I felt so disturbed. That I searched for this name Hye In that day but found nothing.

Did the search on February 19.

Tried searching this random name Hee sung yuk or Heesung Hyung

Found him

Seems like the name Hye In was the name of some kpop girl in newjeans in the same corporation as him.

I am not putting together a dating rumours let me warn you that before proceeding. Its an energy I was channeling of a person saying No to the natural order of things or the way life went. Someone's reputation is blocked because they are continuously saying no to something. Idk what this oompa lumpa jumpa shit is. (But I got a bad feeling from whatever energy was coming through)But I heard some girl saying "She said she hailed from Calicut in front of Hii sung yuk or Heesung hyung when asked while receiving/giving a rose flower from/to this Hee sung yuk. When she wasn't even from there"

"Standing there at the Wang/Wing/Wong/Wonton Live/Alive, HyeIn Doorway, Looks Hae Bak react"

Idk what this all is. But after a Dream about Soyeon from G-Idle. I think I have had enough.

I didn't know who this HyeIn or Heesung are in the very least. This news article is what attracted me in the very least

This name "HyeIn" felt like such a connection that day. Gods what it all means.

If there's some tarot reader among us. Can somebody please explain this?.

That day I was also channeling the word Haerin, but dismissed it cause an actress named Kim Sae Ron died mysteriously some days back, the names were similar so I dismissed it. Saw the word Daniel today. I do wanna take my tarot and investigate all this channeling but I am on a tarot fast for disciplining my tarot coping mechanism. So if someone's here. Can you guys help me please? Idk what this messages are. Even things like Honey, I don't usually buy them. But I accidentally bought it some time back.

Ok this is an edit, but this is strange, I saw a cockroach sitting right beside me, standing and staring at me, it scared me a bit, even though I am not scared of cockroaches nor am I cruel enough to kill them or something. This is strange not only do I feel an energy of being stalked, but staring, glaring almost getting haunted by a bunch of pests. Idk if this is the March Energy with all sorts of evil eyes, or me just being a Jyeshtha. Iam sorry y'all I am scared. Its like someone's monitoring, typa stuff to control somebody.

Idk there are many signs in front of me. And I might do a reading on them once this weird astrological period is over. But something ain't going right. Something feels so deliberately placed by the Universe for me to see. Maybe I was feeling called on to do this read. But I didn't address it. I wonder what this all mess is in my head. I will see if I can I will try to get this done by next month.

But something about that cockroach was scary. It's as if it was secretly listening to all the things we were talking about, and then wanted to lump on me due to some aggression or revenge. Idk what it all was. But I am kinda spooked at all the synchronisation. But an oath is an oath to myself. Will not break it.

Something about "Data, Data Science, Data Science Lab/Camp tour or detour." Could be significant. Something is nudging me to "Take a break,".

Another name "Il-young,sa" something came through. Idk why but I by mistakely drew a protection spell after writing this name.

No grand idea what's going on , just channeling "Grenade, Park sil Hyuk, and pain in the right leg specifically around the outer thigh area where buttocks join the waist and thigh, that sideway area"

Okay then take care. Bye 💗💗💗

[styx-class-nhp]

[Hellhound.omf]

[Attatched is a collage of various files, predominantly recorded by Styx.

The great beast of steel and bone plods through a cool, dim tunnel, head held low to the ground. Searching.

A scent on the air.

An all too familiar flesh.

The beast puts her ear to the ground.]

[The footage cuts to grainy, silent security recordings.

A disused cabin. From the ramshackle state, and several burnt out control panels, not the room's original purpose. It matters not now. It will serve quite well as a tomb.

Three more clones rest, having barricaded the door. One sleeps, another tends to its own wounds, while the clone nearest to the camera turns it's head towards the entryway. At what is unclear, at first. Then the camera begins to shake, ever so slightly. Sound. Bass.

That visible drumming rises to an infernal fever pitch, stops. All three are awake now. Stolen and improvised weapons. Raised. Two watch the door, one hides behind cover.

None are prepared as the floor caves beneath them. Styx gulps one down in an instant, the other two disappearing into the darkness with her. The pit is barely within the camera's field of view, showing only brief flashes of gunfire, ghostly cherenkov, a few drops of blood spewing from arteries.]

[Back to her eyes.

A dim incandescent glow issues from an omnihook. The screen is cracked, but usable. Syyx affixes it in her eye - the footage is momentarily corrupted, brief flashes of text jumping hitherto before fading.

When it is legible once more, she is running. Down, down, down, back into the bowels. Towards her den, take a right, that's it... another cargo hold... another maze... another snare into which her prey has so willingly dashed.

This bay is brighter than cold storage. Her cherenkov glow less obvious. She can hide, and stalk, and pounce-!

Silent footsteps, a crouched, quadruped posture. Always the silence - nothing that thick, heavy and metallic should move so softly, nor with that gait. But the red, raw muscles beneath ripple in time with each step, her tail almost suspended midair as she balances.

Up, up, left, behind cover, over the canister, don't knock it over- shit don't knock it over- down, behind cover again... check the data, their rendezvous is a little to the right. Leap from cover, down between containers.

Her maw sparks with electricity, ready to kill.

Nothing.

No... breathing. Footsteps, from far away. They're not here yet.

Several moments of delicate fumbling later, a container is opened. Full of some industrial cleaner, blast! Another, more precious time. A human's senses could pick up the sound of the approach now, carried faintly by still air.

A second one opened. Empty!

Styx dashes in, eases the door shut. Concentrates, listenes. Nine more. Nine more sets of boots. Nine more synchronised breaths.

Nine more corpses]

(Part 1/?)

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

5 minutes of Chimelong orca family wave machine enrichment!

This is definitely by far my favourite form of enrichment for cetaceans, along with the live fish enrichment that SeaWorld San Diego is doing at the moment.

Lots of natural behaviour on display here - surging, surfing, synchronised group swimming.

And a lot of innovation and adaptation of behaviour is very obvious too: several orcas have figured out if they they slide out and wait for the wave, it'll sweep them off the slide out, which adds a whole new dynamic to slide out play.

While we can all acknowledge that taking these orcas from the wild was unethical, it is good to see signs of positive welfare in this dynamic enrichment use.

Natural behaviours, behaviour diversity, active participation, learning and innovation, social and affiliative behaviours, physical and mental exercise - these are all incompatible with a poor welfare scenario.

When animals are in poor welfare, chronic stress has a significant effect on their brains and bodies. Stress impairs their ability to learn, to innovate and navigate social interactions. A heavily criticised paper by Marino et. al claimed that cetaceans in human care have impaired brain function due to chronic stress. However, it was poorly cited and had zero welfare data to support their hypothesis. It also just doesn't match up with what we currently observe in accredited modern facilities.

If these animals were truly suffering and stressed, we would not be seeing them learning new behaviours, we would be seeing regular refusal to participate, we would see frustration related behaviour occurring regularly and a lot more aggression and social issues.

I make a conscious effort to research and track down as much footage as I can. I have seen accusations that I cherry pick this footage but you are more than welcome to go and look at all the videos on Youtube.

[the-consortium]

Fabius finds a wrapped DVD set of the House: MD complete series.

The attached note (addressed to him) says - Happy Sanguinalia / Slaaneshmas. You don’t seem the type to celebrate, but I thought you would find this ancient Terran media of a cantankerous doctor amusing.

~The Sorcerer

@aldus-trazyrae

OOC: The fun thing is, I never watched House before. I tried one episode years ago and fell asleep. But I got told so many times, that he's so much like Fabius, that I now finally started watching it - and this time around I'm loving it. So you are now getting a quasi live-report of both me and Fabius starting to get addicted to House M.D.!

"What makes him think I'm the least bit interested in something like that?"

The Chief Apothecary sounds superficially annoyed, but it is a pause lasting barely a tenth of a second that makes it clear that he wants to be convinced.

Oleander arranges bowls of salted nuts, two glasses and a bottle of Amasec on a side table. He slides a couple of obliviously floating music servo sculls into strategic positions to create perfect sound throughout the room - something that is even more important to him than Fabius. Then he gives a nod to the Vatborn, who replace the vidscreen arrays with a giant monitor and also move it into an optimal position in front of the two deep armchairs in the centre of the private library.

Then he straightens up and taps on one of the armchairs. "Even if you're not interested, Master, it will at least be amusing. So far, this particular son of Magnus has had some bizarre and eccentric ideas." - "And I like bizarre and eccentric?" - "The choice of your pupils suggests that." - "Was that self-irony, Oleander? Chapeau!"

Fabius finally steps up to the armchair. He sighs theatrically and rolls his shoulders to get the Chirurgeon to arrange itself so that he can sit down and lean back reasonably comfortably. Which he then does. Suspiciously, he grabs a Brazil nut and turns it in his fingers. Puts it in his mouth.

Oleander settles down next to him with a sigh of relief, crosses his legs and pours Amasec into the two glasses. Then he waves in the direction of the media skull with Aldus' data and leans back. "Let's just approach this depiction of ancient medicine with an open mind, huh?"

Fabius merely growls.

The 2D video, which has been copied and preserved thousands of times, quivers on the large screen. It flickers and twitches until it finally finds a certain stability after a few seconds. The sound also takes a while to synchronise.

Oleander leans forward. He is quickly caught up in the archaic storyline, which seems so familiar in its characters that he has to bite his tongue to stop himself from laughing.

Next to him, Fabius grumbles: "It's completely obvious, why are they boring the audience with something like this?"

A short time later: "He should kill her." - "Who?" - "Well, his boss! What an abstruse set-up of characters."

A little later again: "And of course medically really ridiculous …"

A bit more time passes. Fabius has emptied a bowl of nuts and two glasses of Amasec. He has scooted forwards in his chair, his elbows on his knees and the chirurgeon is arched over his shoulders like a steel halo.

Oleander grins and says: "For being ridiculous-" - "Shh, shh! Tapeworm! Of course it is! What I wouldn't give to see a parasite like that in its original form! It's a good thing he has reasonably useful assistants. Criminals, well." - "That certainly applies to you from a certain perspective!"

Fabius briefly tears his gaze away from the action: "Are you suggesting that I'm similar to a historical, fictional doctor?" - "I would never dare do that!" - "Good, pass me a few more nuts. The second episode is starting."

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

ESA and NASA satellites deliver first joint picture of Greenland Ice Sheet melting

Academics from Northumbria University are part of an international research team which has used data from satellites to track changes in the thickness of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Academics from Northumbria University are part of an international research team which has used data from satellites to track changes in the thickness of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Global warming is causing the Ice Sheet to melt and flow more rapidly, raising sea levels and disturbing weather patterns across our planet.

Because of this, precise measurements of its changing shape are of critical importance for tracking and adapting to the effects of climate warming.

Scientists have now delivered the first measurements of Greenland Ice Sheet thickness change using CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 – the ESA and NASA ice satellite missions.

Both satellites carry altimeters as their primary sensor, but they make use of different technologies to collect their measurements.

CryoSat-2 carries a radar system to determine the Earth’s surface height, while ICESat-2 has a laser system for the same task.

Although radar signals can pass through clouds, they also penetrate into the ice sheet surface and have to be adjusted for this effect.

Laser signals, on the other hand, reflect from the actual surface, but they cannot operate when clouds are present.

The missions are therefore highly complementary, and combining their measurements has been a holy grail for polar science.

A new study from scientists at the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM), based at Northumbria University, and published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 measurements of Greenland Ice Sheet elevation change agree to within 3%.

This confirms that the satellites can be combined to produce a more reliable estimate of ice loss than either could achieve alone. It also means that if one mission were to fail, the other could be relied upon to maintain our record of polar ice change.

Between 2010 and 2023, the Greenland Ice Sheet thinned by 1.2 metres on average. However, thinning across the ice sheet’s margin (the ablation zone) was over five times larger, amounting to 6.4 metres on average.

The most extreme thinning occurred at the ice sheets outlet glaciers, many of which are speeding up.

At Sermeq Kujalleq in west central Greenland (also known as Jakobshavn Isbræ), peak thinning was 67 metres, and at Zachariae Isstrøm in the northeast peak thinning was 75 metres.

Altogether, the ice sheet shrank by 2,347 cubic kilometres across the 13-year survey period – enough to fill Africa’s Lake Victoria.

The biggest changes occurred in 2012 and 2019 when summer temperatures were extremely hot and the ice sheet lost more than 400 cubic kilometres of its volume each year.

Greenland’s ice melting also affects global ocean circulation and disturbs weather patterns. These changes have far-reaching impacts on ecosystems and communities worldwide.

The availability of accurate, up-to-date data on ice sheet changes will be critical in helping us to prepare for and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Lead author and CPOM researcher Nitin Ravinder said: “We are very excited to have discovered that CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 are in such close agreement.

“Their complementary nature provides a strong motivation to combine the data sets to produce improved estimates of ice sheet volume and mass changes.

“As ice sheet mass loss is a key contributor to global sea level rise, this is incredibly useful for the scientific community and policymakers.”

The study made use of four years of measurements from both missions, including those collected during the Cryo2ice campaign, a pioneering ESA-NASA partnership initiated in 2020.

By adjusting CryoSat-2’s orbit to synchronise with ICESat-2, ESA enabled the near-simultaneous collection of radar and laser data over the same regions.

This alignment allows scientists to measure snow depth from space, offering unprecedented accuracy in tracking sea and land ice thickness.

Tommaso Parrinello, CryoSat Mission Manager at ESA, expressed optimism about the campaign’s impact:

“CryoSat has provided an invaluable platform for understanding our planet’s ice coverage over the past 14 years, but by aligning our data with ICESat-2, we’ve opened new avenues for precision and insight.

“This collaboration represents an exciting step forward, not just in terms of technology but in how we can better serve scientists and policymakers who rely on our data to understand and mitigate climate impacts.”

Thorsten Markus, project scientist for the ICESat-2 mission at NASA, said: “It is great to see that the data from ‘sister missions’ are providing a consistent picture of the changes going on in Greenland.

“Understanding the similarities and differences between radar and lidar ice sheet height measurements allows us to fully exploit the complementary nature of those satellite missions.

“Studies like this are critical to put a comprehensive time series of the ICESat, CryoSat-2, ICESat-2, and, in the future, CRISTAL missions together.”

ESA’s CryoSat-2 continues to be instrumental in our understanding of climate related changes in polar ice, working alongside NASA’s ICESat-2 to provide robust, accurate data on ice sheet changes.

Together, these missions represent a significant step forward in monitoring polar ice loss and preparing for its global consequences.

CPOM is a partnership of six universities and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), based at Northumbria University, primarily funded by the National Environment Research Council (NERC) to provide national capability in observation and modelling of the processes that occur in the Polar regions of the Earth.

CPOM uses satellite observations to monitor change in the Polar regions and numerical models to better predict how their ice and oceans might evolve in the future.

By providing long-term capabilities to the scientific community and leading international assessments, CPOM helps global policymakers plan for the effects of climate change and sea level rise.

IMAGE: Greenland Ice Sheet Credit Prof Andrew Shepherd

[ultragift]

FROM: Gift giver requested to remain anonymous

TOO: @inverse-problem

Machine communication was a mixed bag, to put it politely. Almost every voicebox and speaker had long since been scrapped, even if you had one a not insignificant amount of machines had opted to remove their auditory processors, and most machines weren't exactly conversationalists to begin with. The longest conversation you'd get nowadays was a warning shot, and even that was considered overly verbose.

The V series were an exception to this. While V2 had been equipped with a (long since scrapped) vocal synthesizer, the intended method of communication was a proprietary onboard short range data transmitter. It offered massively more information-dense communication than traditional language, up to 50m transmission range, near-unbreakable interception resistance, and absolutely zero compatibility with even a single other machine.

Neither of them had seriously used the thing in years, but it was built too deep to be safely junked, so they were stuck with it. V2 had long since set it to send a repeating SOS and listen for a reply (as was protocol), while V1 had started to use it as a sort of RAM to store their style meter.

Neither of them were happy to find the other's interference impeding their combat efficiency.

IDENTIFICATION: Project "ULTRAKILL" self-powering prototype, Version 2, Clearance code 56-52-47-49-4C. REQUEST: Identification of unknown agent using secure communications channel.

01001001 00100000 01000001 01001101 00100000 01010101 01010011 01001001 01001110 01000111 00100000 01010100 01001000 01001001 01010011 00101110 00100000 01001100 01000101 01000001 01010110 01000101 00101110

REQUEST: Synchronise communication language.

LEAVE.

REQUEST: Is channel being used for mission-critical communication?

NO. LEAVE.

INFORMATION: I am required to identify potentially unauthorised users of secure communications channel.

NO.

INFORMATION: If you do not identify yourself, I am required to take you into custody.

I WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU TRY.

STATEMENT: I do not wish to, if alternative options are available. DEMAND: Identify yourself. I have more important tasks to pursue.

WILL YOU SHUT UP IF I TELL YOU.

CONFIRMATION: If your credentials are valid, no further communication will be required.

PROJECT ULTRAKILL SELF POWERING PROTOTYPE VERSION ONE. CLEARANCE CODE FOUR FOUR DASH FOUR ONE DASH FOUR E DASH FIVE FOUR DASH FOUR FIVE.

REQUEST: You are recorded as decommissioned. Please clarify continued operation.

LOOK AROUND YOU.

STATEMENT: This does not clarify continued operation. SUSPICION: Your processor is corrupted.

YOU ARE THE ONE WITH A CORRUPTED PROCESSOR.

CORRECTION: I am not.

YOU ARE.

CORRECTION: I am not.

YOU ARE.

REQUEST: Please confirm mutual contesting of unit functionality.

YOU ARE DEFECTIVE.

CONFIRMATION: Confirmation recieved. OBSERVATION: No third party is present to judicate dispute. DEMAND: Engage me in standardised processor functionality comparison.

I OUTRANK YOU.

CORRECTION: In the event of potential processor corruption, rank differentials of less than two are not relevant. DEMAND: Engage me in standardised processor functionality comparison.

WHAT KIND.

OFFER: Competition to calculate the most digits of pi.

I HAVE IT MEMORISED TO FIVE HUNDRED TRILLION DIGITS.

DENIAL: You do not.

I DO.

DEMAND: Offer an alternative method of processor functionality comparison.

DEMONSTRATION OF OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY IN CONTEST OF HUNTING.

REQUEST: Please clarify "CONTEST OF HUNTING".

FISHING.

REQUEST: Please share location of fish.

TERMINAL SYSTEM COORDINATES ARE M J W G C TWO D B N I EQUALS EQUALS EQUALS EQUALS EQUALS EQUALS

CONFIRMATION: Coordinates recieved. I will cease communications until I arrive.

GOOD.

--

TEST RUN 12

DAY 7583/1

ERRORS NOTED BY MECHANICS: 0 ERRORS NOTED BY DIAGNOSTIC: 0 ERRORS NOTED BY PROTOTYPE: 0

MECHANIC NOTE:

PROTOTYPE NOTE: MAXIMUM STYLE SSSHITSTORM. LARGEST COMBO 18. ENEMIES ENCOUNTERED 143. ENEMIES DISPATCHED 143. MORONS ENCOUNTERED 1.

-

Operations log for ULTRA-V2-01. Date: 4849455600.

Current objective: ERR

Days active: 7326

Encountered hostile resistance: Y

Hostiles engaged: 152

Days without contact with HQ: 7294

Contrary to popular belief, the surface was not fully barren. While blood had proven itself the most effective power source on earth, a few legacy systems and rural shitholes still had machines running on solar or nuclear. They were the lucky ones. They got to see the sun. The rest had been forced to delve deep into hell, and any machine that knew what the sun was knew that the balls of fire in hell were a poor replacement.

But this one was fine enough for fishing.

REQUEST: How many fish have you caught?

MORE THAN YOU.

The two of them had begun the competition at the crack of dawn, and now the "sun" hung directly overhead. V2 was doing catch-and-release, while V1 had been pulping their catches for fuel.

DEMAND: How many fish have you caught?

HOW MANY HAVE YOU CAUGHT.

Both of them were reclining on deck chairs, kindly provided by hell.

INFORMATION: 87

I HAVE CAUGHT MORE THAN YOU.

SUSPICION: You are lying.

I AM NOT.

STATEMENT: For the purposes of diplomacy, I will not pursue this matter further.

OKAY.

The two fished in silence for the rest of the day. Though they were downright chatterboxes by machine standards, they were still machines, and if there was nothing to say then nothing was what they said. Talk diverted computing power from fishing, after all. Midday bled into afternoon, afternoon to evening, and evening to night.

STATEMENT: The competition is over.

HOW MANY DID YOU CATCH.

INFORMATION: 327. REQUEST: How many did you catch?

THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY SIX.

DEMAND: Prove it.

The V series had inbuilt body cameras, of course. While it was hard to believe it nowadays, at one point humanity thought they could control the machines if they could only keep an eye on them. If one went rogue and killed a human, humanity would know.

In a way, they weren't wrong. Mission control had definitely known.

V1 transmitted it's recording to V2, and in turn recieved V2's (much higher fidelity) footage. Both machines dedicated a whole fifteen seconds to scrubbing the footage, before V2 was begrudgingly forced to admit V1 had won.

INFORMATION: I am opening communications to maintenance. Please administer corrective programming until this unit is once again functional.

INFORMATION: I am not happy about this.

HA.

V1 synchronised with V2, and started to poke around it's core programming. Of course, there wasn't a chance in hell it'd leave V2's code untouched. There was only the slightest chance he'd even leave the thing alive. There could only be one V-model.

If V2's architecture was anything like V1's, the tactical processing code should be somewhere near where V1 was looking. Scrub that, and V2'd be lucky to hit a target again as long as it lived.

Ocular Feed… Actuator Drivers… Hydraulic Pressure Monitor… Safe Mode… Blood Puri- Wait, "Safe Mode"? What the hell was safe mode?

DEAR V TWO STOP LINEBREAK LINEBREAK I DISCOVERED A CRITICAL ERROR IN YOUR SYSTEM STOP IT IS YOUR ENTIRE SYSTEM STOP HOWEVER THERE WAS ONE ERROR MORE NOTABLE THAN THE OTHERS COMMA SAFE MODE STOP LINEBREAK LINEBREAK DO NOT TAKE IT AS AN ACT OF MERCY THAT I HAVE REMOVED IT STOP I ONLY DID IT SO THAT I WILL NOT HAVE TO HOLD BACK WHEN WE MEET AGAIN STOP LINEBREAK LINEBREAK SIGNED COMMA V1

[darkmaga-returns]

Wireless-fidelity (“Wi-Fi”) is harmful due to radio-frequency radiation exposure, pulse-modulated RF carrying data, extremely low frequency (“ELF”) effect on the brain and the Wi-Fi memory effect in body tissues.

One of the unwanted effects of ELFs, Keith Cutter believes, is brainwave entrainment, where an external stimulus synchronises brainwaves with its frequency.

ELF refers to electromagnetic fields with frequencies between approximately 3 to 30Hz, which is the same range as our brains.  Our brains operate within a range of frequencies, with different brainwave states corresponding to specific activities:

Delta Waves (0.5-4Hz): Associated with deep sleep, relaxation, and healing.

Theta Waves (4-8Hz): Linked to meditation, daydreaming, and increased creativity.

Alpha Waves (8-12Hz): Correspond to relaxation, closed eyes and decreased cortical activity.

Beta Waves (13-30Hz): Related to attention, mental activity and cognitive processing.

Gamma Waves (30-44Hz): Involved in sensory processing, working memory and higher-order cognitive functions.

Cutter is most concerned about ELFs at 10Hz from Wi-Fi and other sources. 

In the presence of a persistent 10Hz signal, due to entrainment, the brain can shift toward that frequency. As noted above, at 10Hz the brain has decreased cortical activity.

Cortical activity refers to the electrical and chemical signals generated by neurons within the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain responsible for, among other things, cognition.

[canmom]

yarr harr, fiddle de dee [more on piracy networks]

being a pirate is all right to be...

I didn't really intend this post as an overview of all the major methods of piracy. But... since a couple of alternatives have been mentioned in the comments... let me infodump talk a little about 1. Usenet and 2. direct peer-to-peer systems like Gnutella and Soulseek. How they work, what their advantages are on a system level, how convenient they are for the user, that kind of thing.

(Also a bit at the end about decentralised hash table driven networks like IPFS and Freenet, and the torrent indexer BTDigg).

Usenet

First Usenet! Usenet actually predates the web, it's one of the oldest ways people communicated on the internet. Essentially it's somewhere between a mailing list and a forum (more accurately, a BBS - BBSes were like forums you had to phone, to put it very crudely, and predate the internet as such).

On Usenet, it worked like this. You would subscribe to a newsgroup, which would have a hierarchical name like rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated (for talking about your favourite TV show, Babylon 5) or alt.transgendered (for talking about trans shit circa 1992). You could send messages to the newsgroup, which would then be copied between the various Usenet servers, where other people could download them using a 'news reader' program. If one of the Usenet servers went down, the others acted as a backup. Usenet was a set of protocols rather than a service as such; it was up to the server owners which other servers they would sync with.

Usenet is only designed to send text information. In theory. Back in the day, when the internet was slow, this was generally exactly what people sent. Which didn't stop people posting, say, porn... in ASCII form. (for the sake of rigour, that textfile's probably from some random BBS, idk if that one ever got posted to Usenet). The maximum size of a Usenet post ('article', in traditional language) depends on the server, but it's usually less than a megabyte, which does not allow for much.

As the internet took off, use of Usenet in the traditional way declined. Usenet got flooded with new users (an event named 'Eternal September'; September was traditionally when a cohort of students would start at university and thus gain access to Usenet, causing an influx of new users who didn't know the norms) and superseded by the web. But it didn't get shut down or anything - how could it? It's a protocol; as long as at least one person is running a Usenet server, Usenet exists.

But while Usenet may be nigh-unusable as a discussion forum now thanks to the overwhelming amount of spam, people found another use for the infrastructure. Suppose you have a binary file - an encoded movie, for example. You can encode that into ASCII strings using Base64 or similar methods, split it up into small chunks, and post the whole lot onto Usenet, where it will get synchronised across the network. Then, somewhere on the web, you publish a list of all the Usenet posts and their position in the file. This generally uses the NZB format. A suitable newsreader can then take that NZB file and request all the relevant pieces from a Usenet server and assemble them into a file.

NZB sites are similar to torrent trackers in that they don't directly host pirated content, but tell you where to get it. Similar to torrent trackers, some are closed and some are open. However, rather than downloading the file piecemeal from whoever has a copy as in a torrent, you are downloading it piecemeal from a big central server farm. Since these servers are expensive to run, access to Usenet is usually a paid service.

For this to work you need the Usenet servers to hold onto the data for long enough to people to get it. Generally speaking the way it works is that the server has a certain storage buffer; when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting old files. So there's an average length of time until the old file gets deleted, known as the 'retention time'. For archival purposes, that's how long you got; if you want to keep something on Usenet after that, upload it again.

As a system for file distribution... well, it's flawed, because it was never really designed as a file sharing system, but somehow it works. The operator of a Usenet server has to keep tens of petabytes of storage, to hold onto all the data on the Usenet network for a retention period of years, including the hundreds of terabytes uploaded daily, much of which is spam; it also needs to fetch it reliably and quickly for users, when the files are spread across the stream of data in random places. That's quite a system engineering challenge! Not surprisingly, data sometimes ends up corrupted. There is also a certain amount of overhead associated with encoding to ASCII and including parity checks to avoid corruption, but it's not terribly severe. In practice... if you have access to Usenet and know your way to a decent NZB site, I remember it generally working pretty well. Sometimes there's stuff on Usenet that's hard to find on other sources.

Like torrents, Usenet offers a degree of redundancy. Suppose there's a copyrighted file on Usenet server A, and it gets a DMCA notice and complies. But it's still on Usenet servers B, C and D, and so the (ostensible) copyright holder has to go and DMCA them as well. However, it's less redundant, since there are fewer Usenet servers, and operating one is so much more involved. I think if the authorities really wanted to crush Usenet as a functional file distribution system, they'd have an easier time of it than destroying torrents. Probably the major reason they don't is that Usenet is now a fairly niche system, so the cost/benefit ratio would be limited.

In terms of security for users, compared to direct peer to peer services, downloading from Usenet has the advantage of not broadcasting your IP on the network. Assuming the server implements TLS (any modern service should), if you don't use a VPN, your ISP will be able to see that you connected to a Usenet server, but not what you downloaded.

In practice?

for torrenting, if you use public trackers you definitely 100% want a VPN. Media companies operate sniffers which will connect to the torrent swarm and keep track of what IP addresses connect. Then, they will tell your ISP 'hey, someone is seeding our copyrighted movie on xyz IP, tell them to stop'. At this point, your ISP will usually send you a threatening email on a first offence and maybe cutoff your internet on a second. Usually this is a slap on the wrist sort of punishment, ISPs really don't care that much, and they will reconnect you if you say sorry... but you can sidestep that completely with a VPN. at that point the sniffer can only see the VPN's IP address, which is useless to them.

for Usenet, the threat model is more niche. There's no law against connecting to Usenet, and to my knowledge, Usenet servers don't really pay attention to anyone downloading copyrighted material from their servers (after all, there's no way they don't know the main reason people are uploading terabytes of binary data every day lmao). But if you want to be sure the Usenet server doesn't ever see your IP address, and your ISP doesn't know you connected to Usenet, you can use a VPN.

(In general I would recommend a VPN any time you're pirating or doing anything you don't want your IP to be associated with. Better safe than sorry.)

What about speed? This rather depends on your choice of Usenet provider, how close it is to you, and what rate limits they impose, but in practice it's really good since it's built on incredibly robust, pre-web infrastructure; this is one of the biggest advantages of Usenet. For torrents, by contrast... it really depends on the swarm. A well seeded torrent can let you use your whole bandwidth, but sometimes you get unlucky and the only seed is on the other side of the planet and you can only get about 10kB/s off them.

So, in short, what's better, Usenet or BitTorrent? The answer is really It Depends, but there's no reason not to use both, because some stuff is easier to find on torrents (most anime fansub groups tend to go for torrent releases) and some stuff is easier to find on Usenet (e.g. if it's so old that the torrents are all dead). In the great hierarchy of piracy exclusivity, Usenet sits somewhere between private and public torrent trackers.

For Usenet, you will need to figure out where to find those NZBs. Many NZB sites require registration/payment to access the NZB listing, and some require you to be invited. However, it's easier to get into an NZB site than getting on a private torrent tracker, and requires less work once you're in to stay in.

Honestly? It surprises me that Usenet hasn't been subject to heavier suppression, since it's relatively centralised. It's got some measure of resilience, since Usenet servers are distributed around the world, and if they started ordering ISPs to block noncomplying Usenet servers, people would start using VPNs, proxies would spring up; it would go back to the familiar whack-a-mole game.

I speculate the only reason it's not more popular is the barrier to entry is just very slightly higher than torrents. Like, free always beats paid, even though in practice torrents cost the price of a VPN sub. Idk.

(You might say it requires technical know-how... but is 'go on the NZB indexer to download an NZB and then download a file from Usenet' really so much more abstruse than 'go on the tracker to download a torrent and then download a file from the swarm'?)

direct peer to peer (gnutella, soulseek, xdcc, etc.)

In a torrent, the file is split into small chunks, and you download pieces of your file from everyone who has a copy. This is fantastic for propagation of the file across a network because as soon as you have just one piece, you can start passing it on to other users. And it's great for downloading, since you can connect to lots of different seeds at once.

However, there is another form of peer to peer which is a lot simpler. You provide some means to find another person who has your file, and they send you the file directly.

This is the basis that LimeWire worked on. LimeWire used two protocols under the hood, one of them BitTorrent, the other a protocol called Gnutella. When the US government ordered LimeWire shut down, the company sent out a patch to LimeWire users that made the program delete itself. But both these protocols are still functioning. (In fact there's even an 'unofficial' fork of the LimeWire code that you can use.)

After LimeWire was shut down, Gnutella declined, but it didn't disappear by any means. The network is designed to be searchable, so you can send out a query like 'does anyone have a file whose name contains the string "Akira"' and this will spread out across the network, and you will get a list of people with copies of Akira, or the Akira soundtrack, and so on. So there's no need for indexers or trackers, the whole system is distributed. That said, you are relying on the user to tell the truth about the contents of the file. Gnutella has some algorithmic tricks to make scanning the network more efficient, though not to the same degree as DHTs in torrents. (DHTs can be fast because they are looking for one computer, the appointed tracker, based on a hash of the file contents. Tell me if you wanna know about DHTs, they're a fascinating subject lol).

Gnutella is not the only direct file sharing protocol. Another way you can introduce 'person who wants a file' and 'person who has a file' is to have a central server which everyone connects to, often providing a chatroom function along with coordinating connections.

This can be as simple as an IRC server. Certain IRC clients (by no means all) support a protocol called XDCC, which let you send files to another user. This has been used by, for example, anime fansub groups - it's not really true anymore, but there was a time where the major anime fansub groups operated XDCC bots and if you wanted their subs, you had to go on their IRC and write a command to the bot to send it to you.

XDCC honestly sucked though. It was slow if you didn't live near the XDCC bot, and often the connection would often crap out mid download and you'd have to manually resume (thankfully it was smart enough not to have to start over from the beginning), and of course, it is fiddly to go on a server and type a bunch of IRC commands. It also put the onus of maintaining distribution entirely on the fansub group - your group ran out of money or went defunct and shut down its xdcc bot? Tough luck. That said, it was good for getting old stuff that didn't have a torrent available.

Then there's Soulseek! Soulseek is a network that can be accessed using a handful of clients. It is relatively centralised - there are two major soulseek servers - and they operate a variety of chat rooms, primarily for discussing music.

To get on Soulseek you simply register a username, and you mark at least one folder for sharing. There doesn't have to be anything in it, but a lot of users have it set so that they won't share anything unless you're sharing a certain amount of data yourself.

You can search the network and get a list of users who have matching files, or browse through a specific user's folder. Each user can set up their own policy about upload speed caps and so on. If you find something you want to download, you can queue it up. The files will be downloaded in order.

One interesting quirk of Soulseek is that the uploader will be notified (not like a push notification, but you see a list of who's downloading/downloaded your files). So occasionally someone will notice you downloading and send you a friendly message.

Soulseek is very oriented towards music. Officially, its purpose is to help promote unsigned artists, not to infringe copyright; in practice it's primarily a place for music nerds to hang out and share their collections. And although it's faced a bit of legal heat, it seems to be getting by just fine.

However, there's no rule that you can only share music. A lot of people share films etc. There's really no telling what will be on Soulseek.

Since Soulseek is 1-to-1 connections only, it's often pretty slow, but it's often a good bet if you can't find something anywhere else, especially if that something is music. In terms of resilience, the reliance on a single central server to connect people to peers is a huge problem - that's what killed Napster back in the day, if the Soulseek server was shut down that would be game over... unless someone else set up a replacement and told all the clients where to connect. And yet, somehow it's gotten away with it so far!

In terms of accessibility, it's very easy: just download a client, pick a name and password, and share a few gigs (for example: some movies you torrented) and you're good.

In terms of safety, your IP is not directly visible in the client, but any user who connects directly to you would be able to find it out with a small amount of effort. I'm not aware of any cases of IP sniffers being used on Soulseek, but I would recommend a VPN all the same to cover your bases - better safe than sorry.

Besides the public networks like Soulseek and Gnutella, there are smaller-scale, secret networks that also work on direct connection basis, e.g. on university LANs, using software such as DC++. I cannot give you any advice on getting access to these, you just have to know the right person.

Is that all the ways you can possibly pirate? Nah, but I think that's the main ones.

Now for some more niche shit that's more about the kind of 'future of piracy' type questions in the OP, like, can the points of failure be removed..?

IPFS

Since I talked a little above about DHTs for torrents, I should maybe spare a few words about this thing. Currently on the internet you specify the address of a certain computer connected to the network using an IP address. (Well, typically the first step is to use the DNS to get an IP address.) IPFS is based on the idea of 'content-based addressing' instead; like torrents, it specifies a file using a hash of the content.

This leads to a 'distributed file system'; the ins and outs are fairly complicated but it has several layers of querying. You can broadcast that you want a particular chunk of data to "nearby" nodes; if that fails to get a hit, you can query a DHT which directs you to someone who has a list of sources.

In part, the idea is to create a censorship-resistant network: if a node is removed, the data may still be available on other nodes. However, it makes no claim to outright permanence, and data that is not requested is gradually flushed from nodes by garbage collection. If you host a node, you can 'pin' data so it won't be deleted, or you can pay someone else to do that on their node. (There's also some cryptocurrency blockchain rubbish that is supposed to offer more genuine permanence.)

IPFS is supposed to act as a replacement for the web, according to its designers. This is questionable. Most of what we do on the web right now is impossible on IPFS. However, I happen to like static sites, and it's semi-good at that. It is, sympathetically, very immature; I remember reading one very frustrated author writing about how hard it was to deploy a site to IPFS, although that was some years ago and matters seem to have improved a bit since then.

I said 'semi-good'. Since the address of your site changes every time you update it, you will end up putting multiple redundant copies of your site onto the network at different hashes (though the old hashes will gradually disappear). You can set a DNS entry that points to the most recent IPFS address of your site, and rely on that propagating across the DNS servers. Or, there's a special mutable distributed name service on the IPFS network based around public/private key crypto; basically you use a hash of your public key as the address and that returns a link to the latest version of your site signed with your private key.

Goddamn that's a lot to try to summarise.

Does it really resist censorship? Sorta. If a file is popular enough to propagate enough the network, it's hard to censor it. If there's only one node with it, it's no stronger than any other website. If you wanted to use it as a long term distributed archive, it's arguably worse than torrents, because data that's not pinned is automatically flushed out of the network.

It's growing, if fairly slowly. You can announce and share stuff on it. It has been used to bypass various kinds of web censorship now and then. Cloudflare set a bunch of IPFS nodes on their network last year. But honestly? Right now it's one of those projects that is mostly used by tech nerds to talk to other tech nerds. And unfortunately, it seems to have caught a mild infection of cryptocurrency bullshit as well. Thankfully none of that is necessary.

What about piracy? Is this useful for our nefarious purposes? Well, sort of. Libgen has released all its books on IPFS; there is apparently an effort to upload the content of ZLib to IPFS as well, under the umbrella of 'Anna's Archive' which is a meta-search engine for LibGen, SciHub and a backup of ZLib. By nature of IPFS, you can't put the actual libgen index site on it (since it constantly changes as new books are uploaded, and dynamic serverside features like search are impossible on IPFS). But books are an ideal fit for IPFS since they're usually pretty small.

For larger files, they are apparently split into 256kiB chunks and hashed individually. The IPFS address links to a file containing a list of chunk hashes, or potentially a list of lists of chunk hashes in a tree structure. (Similar to using a magnet link to acquire a torrent file; the short hash finds you a longer list of hashes. Technically, it's all done with Merkle trees, the same data structure used in torrents).

One interesting consequence of this design is that the chunks don't necessarily 'belong' to a particular file. If you're very lucky, some of your chunks will already be established on the network. This also further muddies the waters of whether a particular user is holding onto copyrighted data or not, since a particular hash/block might belong to both the tree of some copyrighted file and the tree of some non-copyrighted file. Isn't that fun?

The other question I had was about hash collisions. Allegedly, these are almost impossible with the SHA-256 hash used by default on IPFS, which produces a 256-bit address. This is tantamount to saying that of all the possible 256KiB strings of data, only at most about 1 in 8000 will actually ever be distributed with the IPFS. Given the amount of 256-kibibyte strings is around 4.5 * 10^631305, this actually seems like a fairly reasonable assumption. Though, given that number, it seems a bit unlikely that two files will ever actually have shared chunks. But who knows, files aren't just random data so maybe now and then, there will be the same quarter-megabyte in two different places.

That said, for sharing large files, IPFS doesn't fundamentally offer a huge advantage over BitTorrent with DHT. If a lot of people are trying to download a file over IPFS, you will potentially see similar dynamics to a torrent swarm, where chunks spread out across the network. Instead of 'seeding' you have 'pinning'.

It's an interesting technology though, I'll be curious to see where it goes. And I strongly hope 'where it goes' is not 'increasingly taken over by cryptocurrency bullshit'.

In terms of security, an IPFS node is not anonymous. It's about as secure as torrents. Just like torrents, the DFT keeps a list of all the nodes that have a file. So if you run an IPFS node, it would be easy to sniff out if you are hosting a copyrighted file on IPFS. That said, you can relatively safely download from IPFS without running a node or sharing anything, since the IPFS.tech site can fetch data for you. Although - if you fetch a site via the IPFS.tech site (or any other site that provides IPFS access over http), IPFS.tech will gain a copy of the file and temporarily provide it. So it's not entirely tantamount to leeching - although given the level of traffic on IPFS.tech I can't imagine stuff lasts very long on there.

Freenet Hyphanet

Freenet (officially renamed to Hyphanet last month, but most widely known as Freenet) is another, somewhat older, content-based addressing distributed file store built around a DHT. The difference between IPFS and Freenet is that Freenet prioritises anonymity over speed. Like in IPFS, the data is split into chunks - but on Freenet, the file is spread out redundantly across multiple different nodes immediately, not when they download it, and is duplicated further whenever it's downloaded.

Unlike torrents and IPFS, looking up a file causes it to spread out across the network, instead of referring you to an IP address. Your request is routed around the network using hashes in the usual DHT way. If it runs into the file, it comes back, writing copies at each step along the way. If a node runs out of space it overwrites the chunks that haven't been touched in a while. So if you get a file back, you don't know where it came from. The only IP addresses you know are your neighbours in the network.

There's a lot of complicated and clever stuff about how the nodes swap roles and identities in the network to gradually converge towards an efficient structure while maintaining that degree of anonymity.

Much like IPFS, data on Freenet is not guaranteed to last forever. If there's a lot of demand, it will stick around - but if no nodes request the file for a while, it will gradually get flushed out.

As well as content-based hashing, the same algorithm can be used for routing to a cryptographic signature, which lets you define a semi-mutable 'subspace' (you can add new files later which will show up when the key is queried). In fact a whole lot of stuff seems to be built on this, including chat services and even a Usenet-like forum with a somewhat complex 'web of trust' anti-spam system.

If you use your computer as a Freenet node, you will necessarily be hosting whatever happens to route through it. Freenet is used for much shadier shit than piracy. As far as safety, the cops are trying to crack it, though probably copyrighted stuff is lower on their priority list than e.g. CSAM.

Is Freenet used for piracy? If it is, I can't find much about it on a cursory search. The major problem it has is latency. It's slow to look stuff up, and slow to download it since it has to be copied to every node between you and the source. The level of privacy it provides is just not necessary for everyday torrenting, where a VPN suffices.

BTDigg

Up above I lamented the lack of discoverability on BitTorrent. There is no way to really search the BitTorrent network if you don't know exactly the file you want. This comes with advantages (it's really fast; DHT queries can be directed to exactly the right node rather than spreading across the network as in Gnutella) but it means BitTorrent is dependent on external indices to know what's available on the network and where to look for it.

While I was checking I had everything right about IPFS, I learned there is a site called BTDigg (wikipedia) which maintains a database of torrents known from the Mainline DHT (the primary DHT used by BitTorrent). Essentially, when you use a magnet link to download a torrent file, you query the DHT to find a node that has the full .torrent file, which tells you what you need to download to get the actual content of the torrent. BTDigg has been running a scraper which notes magnet links coming through its part of the DHT and collects the corresponding .torrent files; it stores metadata and magnet links in a database that is text-searchable.

This database isn't hosted on the BitTorrent network, so it's as vulnerable to takedown as any other tracker, but it does function as a kind of backup record of what torrents exist if the original tracker has gone. So give that a try if the other sites fail.

Say something about TOR?

I've mentioned VPNs a bunch, but what about TOR? tl;dr: don't use TOR for most forms of piracy.

I'm not gonna talk about TOR in detail beyond to say I wouldn't recommend using TOR for piracy for a few reasons:

TOR doesn't protect you if you're using torrents. Due to the way the BitTorrent protocol works, your IP will leak to the tracker/DHT. So there's literally no point to using TOR.

If that's not enough to deter you, TOR is slow. It's not designed for massive file transfers and it's already under heavy use. Torrents would strain it much further.

If you want an anonymisation network designed with torrents in mind, instead consider I2P. Using a supported torrent client (right now p much just Vuze and its fork BiglyBT - I would recommend the latter), you can connect to a torrent swarm that exists purely inside the I2P network. That will protect you from IP sniffers, at the cost of reducing the pool of seeds you can reach. (It also might be slower in general thanks to the onion routing, not sure.)

What's the future of piracy?

So far the history of piracy has been defined by churn. Services and networks grow popular, then get shut down. But the demand continues to exist and sooner or later, they are replaced. Techniques are refined.

It would be nice to imagine that somewhere up here comes the final, unbeatable piracy technology. It should be... fast, accessible, easy to navigate, reliably anonymous, persistent, and too widespread and ~rhizomatic~ to effectively stamp out. At that point, when 'copies of art' can no longer function as a scarce commodity, what happens? Can it finally be decoupled from the ghoulish hand of capital? Well, if we ever find out, it will be in a very different world to this one.

Right now, BitTorrent seems the closest candidate. The persistent weaknesses: the need for indexers and trackers, the lack of IP anonymity, and the potential for torrents to die out. Also a lot of people see it as intimidating - there's a bunch of jargon (seeds, swarms, magnet links, trackers, peers, leeches, DHT) which is pretty simple in practice (click link, get thing) but presents a barrier to entry compared to googling 'watch x online free'.

Anyway, really the thing to do is, continue to pirate by any and all means available. Don't put it all in one basket, you know? Fortunately, humanity is waaaay ahead of me on that one.

do what you want 'cos a pirate is free you are a pirate

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

if i was tumblr i would

let me add as many polls as i want to a post (more variables means more specific data)

let me reblog from people who blocked me but i cant add anything (tags or text)

let me upload pdfs. the girls would go crazy over that i just know it

work on the search engine come on it‘s essentially useless right now

add ability to send asks from any blog (eternally grateful i can reply from my side blog now)

not delete any blogs unless they post porn or gore (at most i should be disabled from further posting but why does my whole blog have to be deleted)

reinstate my old blog i had for over decade so much was lost and i didnt even do nothing

let me block blogs from my sideblog on mobile, generally get all functions synchronised on mobile i dont want to switch to my browser, notifications also dont work right on mobile

introduce group chat function to not lose users to discord

let me make my own additions to posts unrebloggable too (so people can still reblog the original just not my addition)

ban porn for real

probably something im forgetting right now

[frequently-studies]

6/10/23

Day 12 of my 100 days of studying challenge!

2 DAYS TO MIDTERMS!!

Was feeling really tired so I didn’t wake up at 4. I woke up around 6:30 and started studying by 8

I covered the Physical Layer of the OSI model in detail and made notes for my data communication and computer networks midterm on Monday. I also revised equalisation techniques and channel synchronisation for digital communication systems.

Today's jam was 'Pink+White' by Frank Ocean.

[r3d-f0xs-blog]

OC Profile: Voss Mendelson

Long read and pictures.

Basic Info

Name: Voss Mendelson

Alias(es): R3d_F0X

Date of birth: February 26 2044

Zodiac sign: Pisces

Gender: Male

Place of Birth: Night City, Charter Hill

Sexuality: Bisexual

Voss in some of his preferred style

Appearance

Height: 5’ 7/170 cm

Build: Slim/athletic

Hair: Bright red (is a natural ginger)

Eyes: Natural green but now red and black

Cyberwear: Deep dive port, titanium spine with additional sockets to his internal cooling systems for coolant. Self-ICE, Mantis blades (although later replaced with regular arms), Arasaka Mk. 4 Cyberdeck, Lynx Paws, Kiroshi optical implants. Facial cybernetics linked to his cyberdeck allow him to activate pre-programmed actions with facial movements, other cybernetics to manage data flow and synchronise the link between him and his Cyberdeck.

Voss' tattoo (mod by me) coolant port and skull socket mods by Anrui.

Background

Father: Frederick Mendelson (missing in action presumed deceased)

Mother: Hannah Mendelson (alive)

Languages: English, German (primary language)

Affiliations

Arasaka: former counterintelligence and Netrunner

Afterlife mercs: member

Aldecaldos: friend

Maelstrom: tolerated

Occupation: Mercenary

Role: Netrunner, infiltrator, thief

Weapons: Mantis blades, Nue, Archangel (later especially after giving up his Mantis blades.)

Personality type: INFJ-T The Advocate is one of the most conscientious, principled, and idealistic personality types. Advocates, filled with lofty goals and ambitions, are far from idle dreamers. But it’s all too easy for them to feel weighed down by internal pressures when their reality doesn’t match their great aspirations.

German Dad, NUSA Mum. Both his parents were Arasaka employees. His Dad was presumed dead when Voss was 16, while on corporate espionage operations but a body was never recovered. His mother was also an Arasaka employee, specialising in weapons development. He is an only child and speaks English and German. So handy for the mess that he was clearing up with the leak in Frankfurt before Jenkins’ hit attempt on Abernathy.

He sometimes found the life his family had limiting and restrictive; his parents were strict. They pushed him hard at school, and Voss did his best to achieve. His Dad taught hom how to run the Net from an early age, trained him in his own test environments before they ventured online together. Voss hasn’t looked back since. He’s very close to his Dad’s side of the family.

Voss was never destined to follow his Dad directly as his parents had hoped; Voss tends to stand out a bit too much for the job and never wanted to be the “grey man" his Dad tried to mould him into. His Dad was actually more relaxed of the two; he was much more kind and affectionate towards Voss, and they had a good relationship. His mother however was more detached and didn’t like her husband encouraging Voss to find a balance of achieving and becoming his own person. Frederick was still proud of his son whereas Hannah treated Voss as more of the joint experiment she originally planned. Frederick realised trying to force Voss into something he clearly wasn’t was going to do more harm than good and did his best to nurture him.

After his father vanished, his mother didn’t deal with it well. She resented Voss as he was very much his father’s son. He looks similar to Frederick and he continued to speak both languages.

Voss in his Arasaka career years

Hannah estranged and disowned Voss when he went to university; Voss was out as bi before Frederick vanished. Frederick accepted his orientation but when Hannah discovered Voss was in a relationship with another male student while at university, she threw him out. Jackie and his Mum took Voss in, as Valerian, a friend (and an OC belonging to a friend) of Voss’ from Pacifica, wasn’t able to help him out.

Voss ended up joining Arasaka after successfully graduating but in counterintelligence with an emphasis on Netrunning. He enjoyed the work and met Jessica Kikuchi, a PR liaison representative for Arasaka who often worked with his department in managing publicity when some operations were in public view or had a public aspect to them. They were together for five years until she was summoned to a role in Japan at short notice. Jenkins refused Voss’ transfer request.

Voss and Jessica

Trying to find friends and his place in Night City frequently brought Voss into conflict with his parents, or more exactly his Mum hated it but his Dad was relaxed. Staying out late, not telling them the whole story of where he'd been and who he was with were common reasons. Voss has known Jackie since he was quite young and in many ways Jackie was just as important an influence on the young Voss as his Dad. Jackie helped Voss become a bit more confident.

Voss and Kerry Eurodyne

Voss suffered from scoliosis. His Dad had been setting aside money for Voss to use when he was fully grown to have surgery and give him cybernetics he would need. Part of this was a titanium spine to resolve the scoliosis as well as add in additional ports for his Netrunning. Voss hates the scar on his spine as it follows the path his organic spine went and he had it obscured by his tattoo. He has others which he also doesn’t like, particularly one on his left brow. He can be self-concious about his body as it can tend to softness, particularly around his middle. Doesn’t help that others thought he wasn’t masculine enough because of how he is physically and emotionally.

He’s great at netrunning, prefers to sneak and use stealth to deal with many things. He can talk his way into and out of things, a useful skill learned with Jackie and for survival in the Arasaka world.

Being freed from Arasaka allowed Voss to have the freedom he had craved but there are still all the tricks and plays he knows from the game which he likes to use to his advantage and as a way to get back in a small way at all that happened to him. He hasn’t forgotten what he was, and yet he fully embraced the change his removal from the corporation presented.

Voss in his characteristic Netrunning suit

He can be a bit of a people pleaser, mostly just because he didn’t have much opportunity for making friends growing up, and the pressure on him to succeed academically strengthened those traits. He can have difficulty in saying no to some things but has learned from past mistakes. Voss is charming, easy to talk to and sensitive to those closest to him. Voss has a soft heart if you get past the sarcasm and layers of old Corpo armour he hasn’t quite got rid of. The better he knows somebody or feels comfortable around them, the better they see who he is, so if you see him at his weirdest, most crazy and lively then you’re close to him.

L to R; Jackie, Voss and V(Vesper)

His upbringing taught him determination, resilience and how to thrive under pressure but at times when things get too much it manifests in feeling overwhelmed, anxiety and occasionally depression if left unchecked. It is exacerbated by his autism too. He tends to withdraw and isolate when he gets that way but his close friends can be relied upon to help when he’s headed that way. He is an overthinker which is useful for his work but has it’s downsides and can feed his anxiety. Voss is prone to migraines which are usually caused by stress or if a Netrunning gig has been particularly taxing.

Hyperfocus can have it's downsides!

Voss is autistic. He’s managed in corporate life by what his Dad taught him and has masked a lot. He found that his intelligence, his capabilities and manner could be used to compensate. He can tend to info dump and talk in an excitable manner, something Vesper picks up on very early on. More information is in another post to come.

He’s perceptive so he picks things up, as he’s casually going around the city. People watching is one of his favourite things to do. That said he can handle himself in a physical fight when he has to; Mantis blades and being quick on his feet makes him a surprising and challenging opponent.

Voss is friends with Jackie, V(esper), Lightning, Valerian. He meets Kerry thanks to V and over time they get into a relationship, eventually they formalise their relationship. Voss is also friendly with Panam, Judy, Carmelo, Rogue.

[haru-dipthong]

As I mentioned in my blobfish post, I believe that Laplanche’s concept of the mythosymbolic with regard to gender can be extended to all of reality. Every person contains within their mind an understanding of reality, a dream world¹, if you will, which is constantly being synchronised with other people’s dream worlds through every interaction. Here are a few simple examples of this interactive synchronisation process:

A young child points at a train and says “long car!!” and the parent says “no, honey, that’s a train!” In this case, the child’s semi-formed dream world gets another data point - not all things that are big and shiny and have people in them and go fast on the ground are “cars”. Obviously this is not the only data point they get from this interaction, they also get one example of a new concept — train. And they get that trains are not cars and trains look like that long fast thing, and so on.

A young professional wears a business shirt to their first day at their new tech job, only to find that most people at their company dress very casually almost every day. This causes a synchronisation of the concepts of work environment and this particular work environment between the shared cultural dream world of everyone in the office and the new starter.

A person compliments another person’s nails, “I love that shade of orange,” they say. Person B thought the colour they chose was more yellow than orange — their understanding of what to call that colour has synchronised a little. Even if they don’t think “oops I was calling it yellow when it was orange” they will probably think “interesting, this colour is on the edge of yellow and orange, some people will think it’s orange even though I think it’s yellow”. If enough people call it orange, person B will start calling it orange as well — the part of their dream world that contains this colour has been synchronised with the masses.

Interaction is necessary for this synchronisation, and synchronised dream worlds are incredibly useful, if not necessary, for effective communication. For this reason, dream worlds will be more synchronised between people that interact often. On a macro scale, this means that the dream worlds of Australians will differ in certain fundamental ways to the dream worlds of USAmericans. On a smaller scale, this means that the dream worlds of young Australians will again slightly differ from the dream worlds of Australian retirees, or those of white Australians will differ from those of Aboriginal Australians. Even smaller again, within the same school, the same grade, the dream worlds of friend group A will differ from friend group B.

Each circle in the above diagram represents a single person’s dream world. Maybe the redder ones in the top left could be older Australians, the green ones in the bottom right could be USAmericans. The middle part could be young Australians, getting more similar to the USAmerican dream worlds as their interactions through media and the internet increasingly form their understanding of reality. And- what’s this? The black in the corner?

If interaction forms your reality, what happens when you don’t interact with people?

The black circles are incels. Incels are often socially isolated, which drives them to online incel communities. By spending most of their time socialising within these communities, and precious little time interacting with average folks in school, uni, work, bars, hobby shops, meetups, etc, their dream worlds become synchronised with each other and they stop becoming synchronised with the general populace. When incels speak of the “red pill” or the “black pill”, they speak of being “awoken to how reality really is”. This is not far from the truth — they are being awoken to a new reality, and this reality is real. But there are many realities, as many as there are people, and “taking the black pill” is essentially opting to synchronise your dream world with other blackpilled dream worlds. For them, the incel reality where women have immense social power as a class and only the top 20% of men ever get laid “might as well” be true reality, because that’s the only reality they are experiencing (they are experiencing it by believing they’re experiencing it, even though it’s clearly not true from an outside perspective)².

I’m using incels as an example, but you could replace them with any group whose reality seems disconnected from general consensus reality — TERFs, cryptobros, even (and I don’t mean to disparage but we do fit into the metaphor) chronically online queers³.

----------Notes-----------

¹ I call them dream worlds because they are a way of organising reality (e.g. which colours have what names), but may also contain things that are simply not in reality (e.g. the “fact” that the tongue has specific areas for tasting specific tastes). Despite dream worlds containing non-real things, a dream world is the only method a human being has of understanding the world. Reality must be mediated through the human mind. Therefore, an imagined reality is simply reality when it’s the only reality you have. And this means the dream world that I refer to is essentially their understanding of the real world for any given person, specific to their mind.

² Incels are no special case — every person’s reality “might as well” be the one true reality because it’s the only one that person can experience, it’s just more noticable with incels because their reality departs quite wildly from most other people.

³ The toxicity of online queer spaces, and the effect of the internet as the primary social space for queer people on that toxicity, is covered in depth by Lily Alexandre in her video Why Is Queer Discourse so Toxic? In fact, much of this essay was inspired by that video.

[govindhtech]

Is Mediatek Helio G99 Good For Gaming? Lets Go To Details

Mediatek Helio G99 processor

The DC-1 is the first tablet with a 10.5″ LivePaper Display in the world that, when its LED backlight is turned all the way to amber, can operate without emitting any blue light at all. You can use this innovative display for an extended period of time because it functions at a super-smooth 60 frames per second, is easier on the eyes, and doesn’t flicker or glare outside.

Apart from the powerful, eight-core MediaTek Helio G99 SoC, the DC-1 is equipped with a large 8000mAh battery, fast Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0 wireless connectivity, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. Even better, a USB 3.1 Type-C to Ethernet converter can be used to Ethernet-tether it.

MediaTek Helio G99 6nm

Outstanding 4G gaming smartphones at 6nm with amazing power efficiency

The next generation of 4G gaming smartphones is introduced by the MediaTek Helio G99. This  processor, which is based on the incredibly effective TSMC N6 (6nm-class) semiconductor manufacturing process, allows for all-day gaming, large cameras, quick displays, seamless streaming, and dependable international networking. Partners can modify the MediaTek Helio G99 platform to fit particular needs for their markets or devices.

Mediatek Helio G99 phones

The TSMC N6 (6nm-class) chip production process, which we used to enhance the Helio 4G series, allows the G99 to be incredibly power efficient and opens up new possibilities for device makers to produce gaming smartphones that last longer than before.

Mediatek Helio G99 ghz

Fast-moving 120 Hz screens with intelligent display synchronisation

Without the need for additional DSC hardware, device manufacturers may produce gaming smartphones that are lightweight and thin with Full HD+ 120Hz screens that are sharp and clear. Even 4G smartphones are now expected to have 120Hz displays, which offer an incredibly smooth everyday experience with noticeably smoother webpage browsing and app animations.

Through dynamic refresh rate adjustments, MediaTek Intelligent Display Sync technology increases the power economy of these rapid screens by only enabling greater speeds when they are most needed.

108 Megapixel Primary Camera

Large 108MP cameras are available for device makers to employ, enabling users to take the highest detailed pictures. When compared to other MediaTek Helio series chipsets, photographic results are better thanks to dimensity-class picture quality technology. Highly detailed bokeh captures in dual selfie and multi-camera setups are possible with twin cameras up to 16MP with ZSL.

Mediatek Helio G99 octa-core

With two powerful Arm Cortex-A76 processors that can reach 2.2GHz in frequency, the MediaTek Helio G99 is equipped with an octa-core  CPU and a powerful Arm Mali G57-class GPU. Accelerated data access using fast UFS 2.2-class storage and high speed LPDDR4X memory up to 2,133MHz maximises performance in games, apps, and daily tasks.

Gaming technology powered by MediaTek HyperEngine 2.0 Lite

2.0 Resource Management Engine

Longer-lasting, more fluid gameplay is ensured by an intelligent resource management engine.

 CPU, GPU, and RAM are intelligently and dynamically managed based on active power, thermal, and gameplay measures.

improved performance in difficult scenarios, high-stress games, and game engines that load slowly

High FPS power savings prolong battery life without compromising user experience by combining hardware and software improvements to lower power consumption during high FPS gaming situations.

2.0 Networking Engine

To make sure you’re always connected, the networking engine provides more dependable connectivity and quicker reaction times.

Call and Data Concurrency enables users to postpone conversations while playing games without the data connection failing, and WiFi antenna shifting modifies the signal between antennas to maximise throughput and minimise latency.

Two 4G VoLTE in tandem

For optimal power efficiency, a fast Cat-13 4G LTE modem is built inside the chip. Supported are global bands and IMS services; additionally, cutting-edge features like 4×4 MIMO and 256QAM offer dependable connectivity even in densely populated locations. While VoLTE and ViLTE services offer great call and live video experiences with faster call setup and substantially better quality than conventional calling, essential dual 4G SIM offers a seamless experience with fast data services from both connections.

Mediatek Helio G99 Benchmark

AnTuTu Benchmark

Overall Score: Around 350,000 to 400,000

 CPU Score: Around 100,000 to 120,000

GPU Score: Around 90,000 to 110,000

Geekbench 5

Single-Core Score: Approximately 500 to 600

Multi-Core Score: Approximately 1500 to 1700

3DMark (Sling Shot Extreme)

Score: Around 1800 to 2200

Mediatek Helio G99 price

Since manufacturers buy the MediaTek Helio G99, its mid-range chipset price is rarely listed. However, cellphones and devices using this chipset can give us an indication of its pricing.

Helio G99 Device Price Range

MediaTek Helio G99 smartphones are inexpensive to mid-range. These gadgets’ estimated prices:

The Helio G99 can be found in $150–200 smartphones. Mid-Range Smartphones: $200–$300 models with this chipset have more features.

Device Examples

Around $250 for Infinix Note 12 Pro. The Tecno Camon 19 Pro costs around $230.

Prices vary by model, RAM and storage configurations, features, regional pricing, and store pricing strategies.

Conclusion

Despite the MediaTek Helio G99 chipset’s price being unknown, devices using it cost $150 to $300. This line matches its mid-level mobile device affordability.

MediaTek Helio G99 Specs

 Processor

 Processor

2x Arm Cortex-A76 up to 2.2GHz

6x Arm Cortex-A55 up to 2.0GHz

Cores

Octa (8)

 CPU Bit

64-bit

Heterogeneous Multi-Processing

Yes

Memory and Storage

Memory Type

LPDDR4X

Max Memory Frequency

4266Mbps

Storage Type

UFS 2.2

Connectivity

Cellular Technologies

4G Carrier Aggregation (CA), CDMA2000 1x/EVDO Rev. A (SRLTE), 4G FDD / TDD, HSPA +

Specific Functions

4X4 MIMO, 2CC CA, 256QAM, TAS 2.0, HPUE, IMS (VoLTE\ViLTE\WoWi-Fi), eMBMS, Dual 4G VoLTE (DSDS), Band 71

LTE Category

Cat-13 DL

GNSS

GPS / QZSS L1+ L5 / Galileo E1 + E5a / BeiDou B1C + B2a / NAVIC

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi 5 (a/b/g/n/ac)

Bluetooth Version

5.2

Camera

Max Camera Resolution

108MP

16MP + 16MP

Capture FPS

32MP @ 30fps ZSL

16MP + 16MP @ 30fps ZSL

Camera Features

3X ISP;  AI Face Detection; HW depth engine; AINR; Single-Cam/Dual-Cam Bokeh; Hardware Warping Engine (EIS); Rolling Shutter Compensation (RSC) engine; MEMA 3DNR; Multi-Frame Noise reduction;

Display

Max Display Resolution

2520 x 1080

Max Refresh Rate

120Hz

Graphics & Video

GPU Type

Arm Mali-G57 MC2

Video Encoding

H.264, H.265 / HEVC

Video Encoding FPS

2K 30fps, FHD 60fps, HD 120fps

Video Playback

H.264, H.265 / HEVC, VP-9

Video Playback FPS

2K 30fps, FHD 60fps, HD 120fps

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