#label it some shit like ''trending'' or ''popular tags''

[hxneylavendxr]

I was genuinely starting to hallucinate last night from how tired i was but look i changed my theme now^_^

beautiful... it suits you so well i'm glad i accidentally found that screenshot

[gay-otlc]

Keepers Of The Chaos (3)

Summary: Tam, Linh, Dex, Keefe, Biana, and Fitz are part of the tiny fandom for Keeper of the Chaos, and Tam and Linh’s podcast convinces some of their other friends to watch it as well. The group finds themselves strangely invested in this show, where students at Tumblr High School who work together to write about an elf named Sophia, cause incomprehensible chaos, and fight their rival Pinterest High School.

Content warnings: Cursing, religion (Jewish Vackers), and Amsterdam (just in case, I know that was stressful for some people).

Word count: 1621

Notes: Most of the episodes are just events stolen from Lynn's roundup, Dex's memes are here

(Read on AO3)

The life of an amateur meme maker on dumbles dot com was a strange one, that was for sure. After finishing xyr favorite show- Ze-Ra: Monaerchs of Powhir- for the third time, Dex had searched for another show to fill the void in xyr soul. Biana recommended this show called "Keepers of the Chaos" and described it to xem. Xe was doubtful at first, but after watching the first episode, xe was hooked.

Xe used to not have many friends at xyr school, so xe did what every neurodivergent queer teen would do- made an account on dumbles dot com. People seemed to like xem- or at least, they liked dizznee-plus's memes and edits of Ze-Ra characters. Even after Dex befriended xyr squish, Fitz, thons sister, Biana, and aer girlfriend, Sophie, xe continued making content on dumbles. Around that time, the Ze-Ra fandom started dying off, and xyr memes started getting fewer note

In a sudden, two am burst of inspiration, Dex made edits of some of xyr favorite characters, like Ref, Akki, and Rose, with their respective pride flags (all of them bi) over them, and captioned it "we must be gay." The post blew up, or at least, what could be considered blowing up in Keeper of the Chaos's tiny fandom, and that was how Dex found xyr calling as an amateur meme/edit maker for KOTC.

History had been repeating itself, with the KOTC fandom starting to die off, until it was revived by an announcement from creator Saturn Nolastname- a season two would be released soon. Frantically, Dex made a meme about season one episode two, with the car salesman meme. Xe edited "chaos keepers" onto the car salesman, "the rarelynoticed" on the car, and "this bad boy can fit so many stripper outfits into it."

That had been... an interesting episode, to say the least. The chaos keepers had been talking about the antagonists of "Sophie and the Dark Duck"- a rebel group called the Rarelynoticed. In the information packet they'd been given, it was confirmed that the Rarelynoticed wore black cloaks and armbands, but no other clothes had been mentioned. Somehow, the chaos keepers came to the conclusion that the Rarelynoticed really wore neon pink leotards and green stripper heels, then drew this idea.

Needless to say, the Tumblr staff did not let them write that into the book. Nor did Lynn, the unofficially chosen leader of the group. Unfortunately for her, this didn't stop the chaos keepers from drawing more of these- or the fandom from making a ton of memes. In addition to the car salesman meme, a post with Drake saying no to "wearing normal fucking villain outfits" and yes to "leotards and stripper heels" gained popularity within the small fandom.

Though nothing could match the absolute shock of seeing the Rarelynoticed stripper outfit for the first time, Dex decided to rewatch the episode anyway- it was funny to see the chaos keepers freak out, and maybe xe could get some good screen captures. The good Saturn Nolastname indulged xem, and xe captured an excellent scene of most of the chaos keepers either laughing or screaming at the Rarelynoticed stripper outfits, with Kimber- one of xyr favorites- sitting on the side, explaining to Juno and Kaitee why Bianca Cracker was bisexual.

Xe went over to dumbles, posted the picture, added an image description, and captioned it "Live photo of me not caring when my friends talk about sex/romance." Xe chuckled to xemself- this really was how it felt to be aroace. Xe tagged it as aromantic and asexual as well, since dumbles added flag colors. Smiling, xe went to go check xyr notifications.

Xyr jaw dropped when xe saw that @lordofthesnuggles- Fitzroy (Dex didn't know thons middle name) Vacker thonself had liked and reblogged all three of xyr memes, even adding compliments in the tags! Xe'd had a bit of a platonic crush on Fitz for... a really long time, but xe always felt too awkward to talk to thon, so it was nice to see that thon appreciated xyr humor.

Feeling energized- and excited to procrastinate on xyr math homework- Dex went to watch the next episode: Dark Duck Is Jewish Now. Being Jewish xemself, this was a really funny episode to xem.

Lynn had been writing a sort of spinoff- it would be called fanfiction, but it was for her own story- about some of the Dark Duck characters celebrating Christmas, and added a throwaway line about Bianca and Finn Cracker celebrating Hanukkah. Then, her fiance, Shai, had taken that idea and run with it, writing a list of ideas about what would happen if the Cracker family was Jewish. Hir friend Sam had jumped on the idea, and soon they had abandoned writing the actual Dark Duck in favor of writing a story about Jewish Dark Duck characters. Some of the other Jewish chaos keepers, like Ref and Cat, helped out.

To be honest, it kind of surprised Dex that no one had made a joke about the Jewish Crackers just being matzah, so xe supposed xe would have to be the first.

Xe posted that observation, quickly getting a like from Fitz- which made xem smile. After a few minutes, Dex posted another meme: Shai and Sam standing in front of a door with a sign that read "elves don't have religion," and them saying "This sign won't stop me, because I can't read!"

It was accurate.

While that episode was great for Jewish representation, and funny, the Banana Noir episode was just plain weird.

It focused less on the Dark Duck than most of the other episodes, and was more about the crazy interactions of the chaos keepers. The episode was named for Banana Noir, who was really Cat Noir, but in a banana suit. Banana Noir was the son of Mellie, who looked like a shark, and Nora, who had platonically married faer. The mothers tried to arrange a marriage between him and Akki, who loved the side characters of the Dark Duck series. However, Akki wanted to marry Amelia. After a lot of shit that basically no one understood, Banana Noir's attempts were thwarted, and Lynn officiated the wedding between Akki and Amelia.

Yeah, Dex had no idea what the fuck was going on either. Xe'd watched an episode of Twins of the Chaos and a youtube video by arsonpog analyzing the Banana Noir chronicles, as it had been dubbed by the chaos keepers, and both expert opinions seemed to agree that Saturn Nolastname and the rest of the writers had probably been on crack when they made that episode.

The next episode made slightly more sense, though it was a low bar. After taking a break from the "official" Dark Duck story, the chaos keepers began collectively writing a Cinderella story about the characters Sophia and Bianca. People weren't allowed to be queer in the official story, but the chaos keepers still wanted to have fun with their obviously gay characters.

Even to the viewers of the show, who only received secondhand information about the Dark Duck characters, knew there was no way any of them, let alone all of them, were allocishet. The exact identities weren't entirely clear- when Dex had made edits of the characters' official art and xyr headcanons for their pride flags, a few people had disagreed- but both the chaos keepers and the fandom knew that despite what Shannon said, Sophia and Bianca were in love, and their Cinderella story should have made it in to the official Dark Duck story.

While excerpts of the Cinderella story were quoted in the show, most of it was left unclear, so Biana had taken it upon aerself to write aer own version of it. Dex was expecting an update later  that day, actually, or maybe the next. Ae wasn't always 100% reliable with aer update schedule. Still, Dex looked forward to when it eventually did come.

After the brief calmness from the Sophianca Cinderella episode, season one episode six, Amsterdam, exploded back into chaos. A few of the chaos keepers decided to discuss a fake scene in the book in which crazy shit went down, with the scene supposedly being located in Amsterdam. It had never been written and was never going to be, but everyone discussed it like it was real. Some of the highlights involved all the Dark Duck girls having swords (and the chaos keepers being gay for them), and a speedboat chase scene through the canals. Fitz had a popular theory that the chaos keepers would actually travel to Amsterdam in order to commemorate this crazy part of their lives. Almost as popular as that was a meme Dex made, with a man labeled "chaos keepers discussing amsterdam" and gesturing feverishly to a wall covered in papers and red string.

Of course, episode seven (Dark Duck Disney) was chaotic too. Everything was chaotic with this group, it was in the title. Shannon announced that the winning Dark Duck story would be adapted into a Disney movie. After past experience with terrible book to movie adaptations, the chaos keepers panicked. They panicked so much that it became major news within their school, which until then, had been largely ignoring the chaos keepers. Once the discussion about the movie settled down, they talked a lot about how in awe they were that their Dark Duck shenanigans were trending within the school.

But of course, none of that compared to the last episode of the season...

Dex changed xyr profile picture to include an ominous pair of teal eyes and sighed.

[rpbetter]

Hey there, check out this pinned post first!

Thanks for visiting Roleplay Better, where I believe that you can fucking do better! That kind of language, however, is why it is important for you to read this post before proceeding.

This blog and its posts are meant for an adult RPing audience; be over legal, adult age in the USA, 18+. Do not interact by submitting, asking, reblogging, commenting, or liking unless you are over eighteen years of age. By interacting with RPB or me, Vespertine, you are assumed to be following this rule. If you are breaking this rule, you will be blocked.

I have that rule because this blog can/will/does address topics inappropriate for a younger audience. Those can include, but are not limited to:

not safe for work - violence, injury, sexual language, smut, substance use

“dark topics” and themes like violence, unhealthy relationships, mental illness, trauma, graphic injury, dubious consent, substance use, and so forth addressed realistically

foul, sexual, and otherwise “Adult” language

 unpopular opinions and approaches about writing, RP, fandoms

“negativity” since literally anything can be, and my whole point here isn’t about holding back; it is likely that, at some point, in some post or another, a shoe will fit you-you need to be mature enough to handle that without taking it as a personal attack on you

images and links that may contain things inappropriate for a younger audience

this blog is founded upon the idea that fiction has reflections in reality, but that fiction does not utterly equate to reality. You should write with realism, your characters should be people in their own right, and you should absolutely be addressing many popular topics responsibly, which is to say realistically. I do not support or otherwise condone purity culture, so while realism is a big deal here, fiction = reality arguments are a no

seriously, you have no idea how fucking salty I am! I try to be fair, reasonable, and mellow with everyone, but it can and does come out.

This blog tags for common, major triggers, but it is not for those easily triggered or particularly sensitive. By proceeding, you take responsibility for yourself...like a mature adult. I expect you to utilize blacklist, unfollow, and block. Tag format is simple, it is literally just the word in most cases, with “cw” and “tw” added to particularly common things. Example, a post containing a breakdown of forms of dubcon will be tagged #dubcon #dubious consent. If that was specifically of a sexual nature, since tumblr is unfriendly to using Not Safe For Work now, I will be using #notsafe for sexual topics. In the event that this needs to change, it will be posted about, the previous tag left intact, so that you may update your blacklist.

You are always welcome to send me an ask or private message requesting a particular trigger be tagged for you. I try to check blogs I see following, especially if I follow back, so that I can tag what you require. However, I’m a person, I’m an ND, ill, busy person though, I do make mistakes!

If you find yourself desirous of telling me to tag in a hateful way, don’t. You will not be responded to with an apology and kindness. Do not be rude, it’s uncalled for when informing someone of a problem or making a request.

I will run the blog largely on a queue, and will not be following many people back. This is not personal! I just like to try to provide content at many different times, have a life elsewhere, and I am so happy that you love your fandom, but it might not be something I’ve enough interest in to have on my dash.

Don’t tumblr message me. Use the inbox or submit.

Due to recent events, I am changing this rule. It’s hard for me to receive messages unexpectedly, and I hate to imply that I’ll be able to get to these quicker because it isn’t the truth. Quicker, better responses come from the inbox. However, there have been too many incidents lately in which people needed to speak privately and had to make that a request. If you’re having a problem and need to vent, request sensitive advice, etc.? It’s alright, go ahead and drop me a PM, y’all. I’ll get back to you as soon as I am able. Please, do not be angry with me if I respond to inbox things or my queue is running! You’re important to me, I just might not have the requisite social cognition and energy you deserve at that time.

Aggressive inbox messages will be responded to in kind. I don’t care if you are on anon or not, if you haven’t an ounce of polite communication skills, I won’t have them either. This is not a “we don’t publish anon hate” blog.

I highly encourage asks and submissions on any and all RP topics, and it’s perfectly alright to be salty as fuck in them, you can totally vent here, but don’t take out your frustration on me or be demanding of me. I am always happy to help with information, advice, or just a response to your venting-it’s important to know someone is listening. However, it may take me a few days to a week to get to you, be patient. 

If you are going to vent, leave out usernames. This isn’t a callout or burnbook blog. It’s fine to state characters and fandoms, but if this becomes a problem, it’ll have to change. I don’t want this becoming a salt blog for one or two fandoms I very likely can’t even stand. Practice the fine art of alluding to things, its good experience for your writing! Besides, RPC problems are RPC problems, I promise. It might feel like it’s just your fandom, but there is something relatable in all corners.

I will not overly police comments. Keep the slurs and shit out of it, though. If there is an issue going on pertaining to a serious instance of hate speech, or behavior I, personally, deem as too inappropriate and/or immature to be taking place on my post, I will step in. Otherwise, I expect everyone to be adults in the comments and reblogs too. If you want to argue with each other, that’s your business. If you want to argue with me, I’m not sorry in advance.

Addition to the above: this is not a blog in which it will be tolerated that commentators or those submitting with the URLS are targeted for callouts, shaming, or other instances of bullying. No, I cannot make those people stop bothering you by blocking them, but the least I can do is address that by shutting down their access to this blog and it’s posts by blocking on the URLs I have for them. And I will. Fuck that “we can’t be responsible for” shit. It’s my blog, it’s my content I’m putting out there, I’m not going to just ignore shit like what went down over on COAR, thanks. Not. Cool.

This is definitely not a place for:

people who think giving muses labels, including top/bottom “dynamics,” is a good substitute for character traits, personality, and development

those with no reading comprehension skills

folks dependent upon aesthetics and aesthetics-based purple prose as filler for actual writing

anti-original character/just wants to fuck a FC or canon character club, get the fuck out immediately

y’all who see writing as an obstacle to getting down to action, be that smut, drama, or fight scenes...it’s literally a writing hobby

politics, any manner of phobe or ism, violent/non-inclusive feminists, purity/rpc/fandom/content police of any manner, and exactly any manner of racism, sexism, or religious intolerance - I give not a shit if it’s popular to hate the straights, for example, I neither believe in nor tolerate reactionary classifying of any group as blanket-statement evil

people who are going to tack onto my posts shit like, “it’s okay, OP, you can say x character.” Trust me, if I were talking about one character, I fucking would name drop them, don’t bring me into your fandom drama, I doubt I know or want to know who that anime guy is who looks like 12 other anime guys to me.

About Vespertine

You can call me that, Vespertine. I’d rather you didn’t go with Vesper, but as it is unfortunately so likely to happen, I won’t feed you to the dogs over it either. RPB Mun is also acceptable.

I’m alright with either she/her or he/him, they/them is also fine. Apparently, that was big enough clue-in for the poor reading comp crowd, so while I feel it is not of importance, I’m nonbinary, yes.

Late 30′s, chronically ill but still working adult with neurodivergence. I’m both busy and Busy, and always sick. This limits my brain power and ability to be here. I have an active RP blog that I won’t be sharing to keep responsible distance. That is always going to be my priority, it is my primary hobby.

Please, don’t tumblr message me totally random things if we don’t have that kind of relationship! I’m too ill and busy, and it really fucks my nerves to have a bunch of messages/have to suddenly interact socially with people. Don’t do it. Use my inbox, use the submit, comment on posts. I cannot do random messages of “hey” and so forth.

I only do written RP, don’t expect me to understand much of anything from tabletop. I’ve RPed for the last 23 years consistently, on every platform from AOL chats to forums to messengers and here. I also don’t do RP in discord, so I’m sorry, but I can’t advise you much on anything with a word count, except to stop it for serious RP. Other than that, I promise you that I’ve seen the trends, the drama, the fandoms. I can give a lot of advice and perspective on a wide range of topics, situations, and characters! When I don’t have a clue at all, I’ll try to do enough research to give you an answer.

Do I come off as a horrible, strict asshole? I do! I’m not going to say that I am just a shy bean who is more scared of you than you are me. I’m not. I’m honestly feral, but have common decency, compassion, and sense. All of which are lacking in the general RPC. So, if you can inbox/common/otherwise interact with anyone else on this site, you can totally handle me!

Honesty and openness are policies.

And in the spirit of that, I repeat; you can fucking do better, tumblr RPC!

[ungracefulace]

You know, even if we ignored exclusionists constantly being aphobic, they're still just such a shit group that's extremely toxic. We've got constant enbyphobia, policing nonbinary identities and the language they use for their attraction to the point of TELLING CIS PEOPLE THEY SHOULD CALL OUT "MOGAI GENDERS". Perisex people holding themselves as authority on intersex issues and our community's inclusion even though it's quite literally Not About Them. Constant racism, from using POC as pawns for why ace headcanons are harmful and desexualizing (which really just sexualizes their identity and shows how you think actual aces of color are desexualized somehow), to saying that ace and aro are "white identities" and then saying aces and aros of color "have a white mentality" when you are white, to constantly appropriating AAVE and refusing to acknowledge it, to "well black people are oppressed and not LGBT so why would aces be" bullshit arguments, and more. We've also got a shit ton of ableism, constantly calling autistic and ND people the r slur and then saying it's okay if they're autistic (And it's not because they don't understand how reclaiming slurs work either, becaus they will be the same ones that say it's wrong for someone who reclaimed queer to use it in someone else) and a still extremely popular exclusionist blogger dead ass applauding making fun of someone's debilitating disability. There's wishing harm, death, and rape on aces. There's harassment, concern trolling, and just straight up false accusations that'll be treated like facts. There's also panphobia now too, with exclusionists proudly calling themselves panphobes and calling pan ~mogai~, which in exclusionist speak, means fake identity.

Like... its just extremely gross shit thats happening constantly. If you checked the tags, there's always at least 2 of these happening every time and the fact that they are holding themselves up as some type of protector for the community. They aren't protecting anyone with this, at all. They're just making anyone who disagrees with them, and some people who do hold the "cishet aces aren't LGBT" mindset feel incredibly unsafe. And this is why I have a really hard time trusting anyone who chooses to label themselves as an exclusionist.

And for the record, this isn't me saying all inclusionists are good. There are plenty of inclusionists who are shit people. When I see them I call them out. However there's not a trend, a culture of most of the shitty things inclusionists do through the community. There's definitely a culture of casual lesbophobia, more with fear mongering than leaving out the flag in things imo because there's a lot of lesbian flags out there, but it's still there. Unlike what many claim there's not a lot of pedo apologist inclusionists, and in fact most of the gross inclusionists who are lile that distance themselves from other inclusionists because we make it clear that we don't like that shit. That's just not happening in the other end. For every one post going "hey maybe don't be dicks to aces?" There's 12 more doing exactly that or something else on that list. It's a real problem that y'all refuse to actually address.

[thclcstgirl]

So I’m just going to let loose with some potentially unpopular opinions about our deteriorating rpc and what I- both personally and based on talking with others- think is our problem, which of course is us.

Story time, when I first started writing roleplay online the people I met used this as a hobby, a break from life, a way to enjoy characters outside of media. Was there discourse? Sure, occasionally. But they didn’t put much stock in this because it was a hobby and they didn’t have to care about these random online presences they met through writing, they just had to enjoy the writing. And they were so much happier than we are now, guys.

The tumblr community seems to operate under the exact opposite of that theory. People use this as a validation for when life isn’t going smoothly. Which alone is a whole other can of worms because tumblr is that kind of toxic that pretends it’s progressive but really it’s just toxic.

The tumblr rpc takes characters/the show plot way too seriously (I say fully aware of my intense love of Bellamy Blake and my subsequent dislike of t100 s5) but there seems to be a trend of letting this affect you on and offline, and affect those around you. You can’t stand seeing this Thing, it makes you sad/upest/angry/ick/ect. But instead of blacklisting or tublrsavior’ing your way away from it, you don’t want to because some of your friends talk about it and it feels “rude” and you end up feeling disgusted on your own dash. It’s not rude to not talk about shit that annoys you. This is a hobby. You shouldn’t feel annoyed doing your hobby.

On that note, no one treats this like a hobby anymore. They treat it like a job, a popularity contest, an all-inclusive-or-you’re-a-giant-bag-of-dicks kind of thing. You can’t just write what you like, or what you’re feeling, because then you’re labeled “elitist”. You can’t just write with your friends for the same reason. You HAVE to write with everyone who wants to write with you or you’re labeled “unfriendly” or “bitchy”. You HAVE to respond to threads in a timely manner or you’re accused of “ignoring” people or “forgetting” them which seem to be equal insults whether or not it’s true. You HAVE to be nice and friendly and peppy all the time or you’re labeled “mean” or again, “bitchy”.

Now, best case scenario if any of the above happens, you get a few bratty people or a few bratty anons and life goes on. Worst case scenario the guilt tripping and the vague posting starts, and once it starts it rarely ends. People put so much importance in being important to online presences on tumblr, and when they feel wronged/upset/ignored/invalidated/ect the ooc posts start up, designed to entice sympathy but really just making people uneasy and uncomfortable because these posts are directed at them as though they’ve done something wrong to make someone feel this way, but it’s almost never about them, it’s about the poster.

You’re not allowed to like certain things. You’re not allowed to dislike certain things. You’re not allowed to say this, or that, because it’s offensive. And I’m not talking ‘you can’t make a racist joke’ I’m talking ‘you can’t dislike this character over a personality because they’re a poc and that makes you racist’. That’s what tumbr is guys. It is the extreme leftist, where everything you say is potentially offensive and you’re surrounded by literally millions of people with the protective cover of internet anonymity who are just waiting to crucify the next person for the next perceived slight.

As though there haven’t been enough rules, there’s the rules about following/writing with people. You can’t unfollow people, at least not without A. having to explain yourself to them or B. inspiring a string of guilty-trip/sympathy posts painting you as the bad guy who made this person feel so shitty about their life and themselves. You can’t just not want to write with a certain character, because that’s reflective of your feelings about the mun apparently. You can’t just not see yourself writing against a style, because that’s reflective of your feelings about the mun apparently. If you DO end up writing because you don’t want to be painted as an asshole, you can’t stop writing, because then it’s indicative that the mun has somehow offended you and angered you. You can’t ask to change shit in a thread because then you’re saying the mun can’t write right. And the breaking of any of these rules end up in vague, guilt-trippy posts that “aren’t about you” but we all know they are, even if we can’t prove it because they were deliberately vague. And a lot of these guilt-trippy posts are tagged with ‘delete later’ ‘idk why i’m saying this’ ‘it doesn’t even matter idk why I’m upset’ ‘i dont’ want to talk about it’ but like, those are clear lies because why make the post in the first place then? You want the attention, you just don’t want to explain why you made a post rather than spoke to someone directly. Which I mean, we all want attention that’s why we write on a public forum. Just own up to it.

Even the supposedly simple concept of friendships isn’t exempt from being poisoned by the tumblr mindset. You can’t just have internet friends anymore. And that’s largely because of what I outlined earlier about this not being treated as a hobby and people putting their self-worth into the internet ( again, extremely unhealthy please for all that is good go outside, make in-person friends, find a different hobby, love yourself bc the internet will not ). The friends you make on here have to be important to you, have to be a priority, have to be loved and cherished and doted on and you have to do this for eeeeveryone. You can’t just be vague ‘we write together’ friends, you have to be best friends. And while yeah, you will definitely bond with some people on here in a way that translates offline, the statistical probability of that happening with every single solitary person you ever meet around here ( especially given that you have to try to give everyone a chance or you’re an asshole ) is astronomical. And for those that you don’t end up bonding with in that way? You guessed it: sad, guilt-trippy posts about how they’re not worth being special to people.

I might be paraphrasing here, but it seems to me a lot of the issues people have on tumblr can be solved by simply caring less. Not to be confused with not caring, don’t misunderstand. Sill try to be nice, try to be a decent person, don’t go out of your way to be an asshole and if you find yourself hitting the anon button for anything other than sending an ask from a sideblog, you’ve done something wrong.

But this is a HOBBY my guys. Let it be a hobby. Let it be something innocuous and easy and mindless and fun. Not everything that someone does is a direct shot at you, your self confidence, or should have this big an impact on your self worth. Because these are just people on the internet, and in the rpc we’re just connected by a love of writing… or procrastinating writing, which lbr is way more common.

#preachover

[nevertobeships]

Do you have any writing advice for someone who really struggles with writing body language? I have a hard time reading it in the real world and I'm lost on how to write it in my fics. I think my dialogue is fine it just seems like everything else is lacking. The transition from rp writing to fanfiction is really tough, and I can't seem to adapt to the now popular fanfiction trends of the way things are written. I'd be very grateful for any advice.

Anon, do not worry! Many people, including myself, strugglewith this. I’m going to make a couple of assumptions to get us started (if theyare incorrect just shoot me another ask and I can go in a different direction).I assume that if you are coming to me then you have read some of my writing andtherefore I also assume that you enjoy supercorp. With those two assumptions inmind I’m going to use that arena to give my advice. But please keep in mindthat this is only MY opinion. I’ve been writing pretty much my whole life andI’ve learned that there really is no right or wrong way to go about writing.Sure, there are preferred styles, grammatical rules, trends that may bepopular, etc…but essentially you have to find YOUR flow and style. Writing andwhat is considered the right way to write so subjective.

And just as a quick note I have never done rp writing sokeep that in mind.

Here is my advice (and I explain each point below):

1. Keep trying at the real life body language and understandthe pros and cons of having that information.

2. Use the resources you have (e.g., the show and gifs).

3. Find actors/actresses to use as muses and inspiration whoare really talented and who also put everything into their characters.

4. Read! 

Reading body language in the real world is hard. When youare interacting with another person there is so much else going on. Not onlyare you most likely participating in that interaction but you are trying toprocess what the other person is saying and doing on top of consideringenvironmental/situational variables, analyzing your own intentions while alsotrying to gauge the other person’s intentions – its crazy! This is why so fewpeople are good at this. Yet body language is crucial in many cases. Hell, in apersonal example of mine just recently – I was saying everything I could tosomeone, being EXPLICIT with my diction and my intentions and they just didn’tget it (or chose to ignore it for what it was :/) and…*sigh* well it’s a messlet me tell you. And I wonder if the interactions between us had happened inperson where there was body language (i.e., extra data) to process then perhapsthings wouldn’t have become so convoluted? There has been a lot of research thatshows we humans are not really good at conveying what we mean in simple text.If someone sends you a text that IS IN ALL CAPS you know something is going onout of the ordinary. They are excited, angry, etc… and are trying to getcertain information across in that way. That helps to a point. And its funnythat the rise of emojis was supposed to help us communicate better, beyond capsand punctuation, in written form but new research is showing that we evenmisinterpret those as well lol. So obviously body language can help us withthis problem but again for many of us that can be overwhelming to deal with inthe real world. That being said, writing body language still needs to berealistic and convey important information but in fiction we can process iteasier than if it was happening live in front of us.

Lucky for us, we are writing fanfiction and we have thosecharacters on our screen where we can watch them over and over in the privacyof our own homes with little distractions. If you are in the supercorp fandomthen even more lucky because we have some of the best gif makers in the entireSupergirl fandom and they are an absolute blessing. I think gifs are underratedwhen it comes to character analysis but they are so good for body languagestudy because you have a small amount of data input, three to ten seconds orso, and it automatically repeats so no pausing and rewinding back on Netflix oryour stream. So let us look at an example:

These gifs were created by @brielarsan and you can find the original post here.

Holy shit. This is a writer’s gold mine. I mean look atthis: we know Lena doesn’t have a lot of friends (really none at this point inS2, our poor precious baby *cries*). We know she only ever felt accepted by Lexand look what he did to the world and ultimately her. And we’ve seen the longgazes, the smiles, the lip bites between her and Kara/Supergirl. We alreadyknow all of this – we have this data! So in that mindset, what does this mean?What does that sudden breath mean for Lena when Kara finally opens the doorknowing what we know? She has found acceptance in someone else – Kara – someonewho knew she was a Luthor from the start but has put her belief in Lenaregardless. But even if you don’t know or don’t use all of this data look ather body! Look at her hands, for example. They are in a classic worry positionone that other characters have done (see Meredith Grey from Grey’s Anatomy asjust one example) and Lena has done this herself several times across many episodesbecause she is a soft precious baby who is really worried how others perceiveher. Now look at her facial expression. You can tell exactly when Kara openedthe door and realized it was Lena. Even though we can’t see Kara’s face we cantell from Lena’s face when Kara smiles because we see that relief on Lena’sface. And then in that second gif what does that little shy sway mean? What doyou pick up from her doing that? To me, she is not only relieved that Kara isletting her in her home and doesn’t seem at all freaked out that she is there butalso in a way she is in a giddy disbelief that she’s not being turned away akashe feels accepted (and of course these two fools love each other and we cansee that here). And look how we can see all of that in how her hands start torelax too! My biggest piece of advice is to study stuff like this and/or mimicit in your own fics. Also look at what people say about gifs in the tags! Its so frustrating when people don’t put anything in the tags and I can be guilty of it but some people do the type of interpretation I just did above in the tags of gif posts and you can learn a lot by seeing how others are interpreting a scene.

You really can’t do anything that I just mentioned above ifyou don’t have that talented person on your screen though. Lucky for us we havethe one and only Katie McGrath who conveys more character information in twoseconds of acting than some of the other characters on Supergirl do in anentire episode. I could probably write two pages of description based on thetwo short gifs above and that is all in thanks to Katie and her wonderfulness. Katieis also a perfect example at someone who puts her heart and soul into hercharacters. You can tell that by how she does her interviews and the in-depthanswers she provides. She really IS Lena on screen. Chyler is another greatexample on Supergirl. I mean, Chyler should be earning Emmys for her portrayalof Alex in both Season 1 and 2 but I’m biased (and Katie too for Lena’s character). Sasha Alexander as Maura Isleson the TNT’s now concluded show Rizzoli and Isles is yet another example thathas benefitted me. When you have amazing characters and actors/actresses behind them they can inspire you to write your best stuff and give you so much to workwith. 

Lastly one of the other things you can do is to read.Whether its published fiction or fanfiction just read and see how others are conveyingbody language. When you read a section and get that vivid imagery as a readerstop and evaluate that section. What did that author do to set up that scene foryou? How do they have the characters interacting with one another and theenvironment around them? If you ever get to beta for somebody take thatopportunity! It will give you the chance to read someone’s fic and be in themindset of editing where you are looking at how the story is coming togetherthrough dialogue and body language. Or you can even contact one of yourfavorite writers and just tell them about your favorite sections of their pieceand list the reasons why. Not only will you make that author’s day but that mayalso help get a conversation started where you can discuss the intricacies ofthe characters including body language. This is really how @stennnn06 and I gotstarted talking. We squealed about Katie (as we still do) but then we startedlooking at each other’s writing, beta-ing for one another, and collaborating. Ican’t speak for sten but I know that I write better after discussing Lena andour headcanons with her. You can try to get a beta for your stuff too! Whenyour beta starts analyzing your stuff and asking you questions it really putsit in perspective for you and you can learn so much. I can tell you right nowthat I learned more about one of MY OWN stories by having @mssirey beta it andgive me feedback.   

On another note, also check out some writing blogs for tips. @heywriters is a great source and would be a good start for you. You can alsogo to my blog on tumblr (not tumblr mobile) and I have a page on the right handside labeled ‘Writing References’ and you’ll find a bunch of sources. Just out ofcuriosity I searched ‘body language’ on the search function on my blog and itbrought up some good posts so maybe check those out too! 

I know this is long and probably not anything you wanted butthere is my advice :)

[graciecatfamilyband]

I truly hate to put myself at risk of the label of “shit-starter”, but I couldn’t disagree more about the way forward- possibly because I think we have very different perceptions of what has occurred in the recent past. In general I prefer working things out via PM but this whole thing has been dragged out pretty publicly and I feel I must respond in-kind, especially since I don’t think I’m the only person feeling the way I do. And if other people get to put themselves and their thoughts out there like this, I do too.

It’s ironic to me, because on Sunday night I went to bed deliberately refraining from posting something I thought was innocuous but that I feared could be taken as inflammatory regarding an issue that was dying down. I awoke Monday to see that other people had no such hesitance, and some of them felt very comfortable directing their statements at me. I mention this because I am continually finding no benefit to staying silent except perhaps avoiding labels like attention-seeker or shit-starter (literally among my top 5 fears lol), but I am also finding that people will think what they will think, and I have very little control over it. I still feel some views are more welcome here than others, and that some people can behave far less charitably without any consequences while others have to crawl on the ground to make sure their statements aren’t taken the wrong way and then are still expected to apologize when people willfully twist them. When I point this out, I’m told that I can’t understand because I have only been a fan for 20 years, and that’s not long enough to understand people’s attachments and emotions and reactions. It feels like my behavior is something I’m held accountable for under a critical lens, while older fans cannot help themselves and should be given a pass. Older fans will be older fans, as it were, despite the vast majority of them being kind and affable people who don’t engage in this kind of pearl-clutching behavior when other people have different opinions. And when this dynamic finally makes me feel so bad that I speak up, thats suddenly the time for us all to unite, pretend no individuals bear responsibility or that everyone has engaged in the same behavior- and to create rules about what we can and can’t talk about! Which is frankly in my view what started everything in the first place- some headcanons being seen as outright offensive, off the table, inherently diminishing of our favorite pairing, or indicative of not being a real fan. To me this has never been about which headcanon is “right” or “best”- obviously all headcanons are valid!- but about which headcanons are allowed a voice. To me, “I don’t give a fuck” therefore misses the point (I hope very, very few people actually give a fuck); it becomes downright baffling when it is used to justify telling someone to STFU about their own headcanons or thoughts. This began far off Tumblr but has finally reached our shores and I know the bad feelings from elsewhere are one of the things that have poisoned and amped up this discussion beyond what seems (or is) reasonable. But that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the things that have occurred here that have in my view deliberately fanned those flames.

I am still raw, and hurting, as you see. That hurt is not the kind of thing I usually share publicly or even privately outside of my closest friends. Creating that post about how I was feeling was exceedingly difficult for me. But I was frustrated with the sense that I should suck up everything and be fine while other people get to play the victim, and genuinely shook by the idea that perhaps many, many people felt I was violating our norms of respectful fandom behavior in pretty drastic and mean-spirited ways. Yet other people who, in my view, have clearly been treated the same way and who did not make public posts have been left with nothing but the comfort of anons who also recognize shitty behavior when they see it. They’re left just as alone and unsupported as they were before because they didn’t want to appear to be calling anyone out. Where are their hugs? Heck, where are their apologies?

Shit got stirred, and I don’t particularly feel like swallowing it.

Of course no one should call out individual fics or fic writers during fandom discussions, and I believe our community largely does a good job of this. Not a perfect job, certainly a job that could be improved upon. Based on my personal observations, I think where we do struggle is in issues of word choice or squicks as much as anything related to anything socio-political (though obviously there is a real feeling about the latter being a major struggle at the moment). Major issues have come up in the past related to what baby names Han/Leia writers “should” or “should not” use or what canon they “should” or “should not” be writing in that have not been very empathetic in nature. I think for the most part people have been largely respectful on this issue though. I think the sense of tension has been related to real or perceived disagreement even when that disagreement has been polite, as disagreement is always uncomfortable for people by nature as a potential threat to harmony, and I think a very small number of few people have been very willing to fan those flames either within themselves or publicly, largely going off on interpretations and assumptions that are in fact wrong.

I take issue with the idea that no one can speak generally about fic because they must be talking about one of ten or twenty “current” writers, as there are far more people publishing Han/Leia stories at present than that, and a backlog of fic that is actively read and generally treasured (some of which admittedly ages better than others).

Unity is great but I don’t think my behavior is the problem and I don’t think those who have, in my view, made this discourse so toxic have made serious amends or see themselves as anything but victims. The current calls to banish certain kinds of discussion from fandom seem to me to be misguided; “apolitical” views really just mean the status quo- which is very much political. The reality is when you write any fic that goes against this grain (and I am expanding way beyond virginity discourse here), you do get pushback, and criticism, including from the same people who I’ve seen saying that we should never engage critically with a trope or a trend- yet who are very comfortable publicly saying that fics that involve certain real-life elements that are underrepresented in fic are “politicized” and “agenda”-filled! And how that’s off-putting thing to see in fandom!!! And people should just stick to telling stories without dragging that stuff into it! (And again I want to stress I’m expanding far beyond virginity discourse here.) Leia making one decision is “apolitical”; Leia making the opposite decision is “political,” regardless of how realistic that decision might be, and you’ll be publicly taken to task for that. I know you’d probably agree that’s wrong and I would too, but it’s the reality. To say we can’t talk about “the political” really means that we can’t talk about that environment in fandom in which certain views are actually uncommon or marginalized and people’s diverse reactions (some positive, some neutral, some vehemently opposed) to their being written in fic. It means we cant say, “it was so nice to see this done so incredibly differently or to see a character make this choice for once.” It means we can’t talk about why we prefer our own headcanons when they go against the status quo, or talk about our own controversial choices in stories- simply because no matter how respectful we are, someone who wrote a different story in which different choices were made might take it upon themselves to get hurt. That is… beyond frustrating to me.

I think it’s also worth noting that some of these same people seem all too happy to talk about the politics of pairing Rey with her kidnapper and torturer, or of Finn’s erasure from fandom, or of fetishistic portrayals of gay relationships, or of minor white male characters being more popular than leads of color and/or female leads. Real issues! That deserve discussion! I understand wanting Han and Leia to be sacred because they’re so special- they are incredibly special to me- but they aren’t inherently different from any other character or fandom issue.

At the end of the day, refraining from certain topics out of fear of being bullied and refraining from certain topics because engaging in them puts you at risk of being called a bully seem like the same thing to me. I really can’t see it another way, and believe me I’ve tried. I would rather see us united in our willingness to extend olive branches and engage with each other politely than in an agreement not to talk about certain subjects. The latter seems to me to be both superficial and incredibly unevenly applied. I intend to continue to conduct myself the way I have always done, which includes openness to respectful discussion. I love discussion, I’m here for discussion, including public discussion that remains within respectful bounds. This is a great way to connect with people I might not otherwise connect with, including with those who don’t have a tumblr for fear of how they might be treated here or for any other reasons. It’s a great way to exercise parts of my brain that I don’t get to use in other facets of my life. While I am not perfect and I do make mistakes, I don’t believe I have violated those bounds of respect in any of my recent discussions. Others may disagree, and they are free to disengage from me or my blog as they will. Those who don’t wish to see such discussions in general may unfollow me or blacklist the discourse tag (and I will do my best to tag)- or simply not read those posts. I will also never stop reading many different iterations of these characters rendered in many different colors and shades and choices, or encouraging authors to write what’s meaningful and true to them, or to just write, period- getting something, anything on the page is a huge victory for a new (heck, for any) writer, and one I would never seek to diminish.

I look forward to continuing to share fandom spaces with those of you who wish to share them with me in a courteous and kind way, and I promise to do my very best to extend the same to you. I am open to PMs about this but I am incredibly stressed out and also sick and may not be able to respond to them in a timely manner. The support that I have received has been truly appreciated.

[kingteeshops]

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A great way to Senior Class of 2020 The Year When Shit Got Real Graduation shirt . Add an extra branded touch to your shirts is by having custom clothing labels sewn onto the shirt. We can put them in the neck of the shirt, but we can also put a hem tag on the sleeve or at the bottom of the shirt. KingTee does not manufacture these, but if you supply them we will take care of adding them to your shirts. There is an ongoing debate over the best way to screen print. KingTee has been working to develop an answer so that we can continue to deliver the best possible product to our customers. What we’ve found is that each style has its pros and cons and there is not one perfect process. It also comes down to who is doing the actual printing (there are good printers and bad printers) and what the customer is looking for. Personally, I like my prints to be soft, either no-feel or with a slight hand (barely any feel). However, some customers associate a thicker print with higher quality. Senior Class of 2020 The Year When Shit Got Real Graduation shirt, hoodie, sweater, longsleeve and ladies t-shirt

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Senior Class of 2020 The Year When Shit Got Real Graduation shirt

A great way to Senior Class of 2020 The Year When Shit Got Real Graduation shirt . Add an extra branded touch to your shirts is by having custom clothing labels sewn onto the shirt. We can put them in the neck of the shirt, but we can also put a hem tag on the sleeve or at the bottom of the shirt. KingTee does not manufacture these, but if you supply them we will take care of adding them to your shirts. There is an ongoing debate over the best way to screen print. KingTee has been working to develop an answer so that we can continue to deliver the best possible product to our customers. What we’ve found is that each style has its pros and cons and there is not one perfect process. It also comes down to who is doing the actual printing (there are good printers and bad printers) and what the customer is looking for. Personally, I like my prints to be soft, either no-feel or with a slight hand (barely any feel). However, some customers associate a thicker print with higher quality. Senior Class of 2020 The Year When Shit Got Real Graduation shirt, hoodie, sweater, longsleeve and ladies t-shirt

Classic Ladies

Hoodie

Sweatshirt

Unisex One of the things I love about screen printing is the science behind it Senior Class of 2020 The Year When Shit Got Real Graduation shirt . The ink, as well as the shirt itself, have such an effect on the end result. The shirt color and fabric can affect the outcome of the print. An experienced printer knows this and can help you better understand what results you will get. For example, some people believe you can only use discharge on 100% cotton shirts. This is not true; however, discharge does work “best” on 100% Cotton. On tri-blends or 50/50 blends, a discharge print will come out looking faded and vintage which may be the look you are going for. If you are not looking for a vintage print and want to use discharge ink, 100% cotton is the only option. So, let’s take a look at the 4 most popular print styles today: plastisol, waterbase, discharge and hybrid. You Can See More Product: https://kingteeshops.com/product-category/trending/ Read the full article

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When Blockchains Go Down: Why Crypto Outages Are on the Rise

Berniesanders (not to be confused with former presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders) is an institution on blockchain-based blogging platform Steemit.

Steemit allows content creators to earn crypto – at least, crypto that’s native to the Steem blockchain, of which there are three – for popular posts. While recent successes include waffle recipes, romantic fiction and crypto punditry, berniesanders gets a pretty steady paycheck (about $30 at a time) for his single sentence, self-described “shit posts.”

A recent sampling: “Are you having fun? I’m having fun.” ($60), “I’m on a boat!” ($31), “Show me your shoes.” ($30) and “How many comments can a shit post get?” ($263 and 319 comments).

But for a few hours on September 17, the Steemit community was deprived of berniesanders’ wisdom.

On that day, Steemit became unavailable when Steem suffered an outage and stopped adding new blocks. The blockchain and the apps on top of it had gone dark.

Steem’s outage, the company explained, was related to an upcoming hard fork update. The code for the fork was being run by some nodes in advance, and as such, these nodes split off onto an incompatible chain when certain safeguards failed. The nodes accidentally hard forked the network early, and as a result, the nodes couldn’t come to consensus on new blocks.

“The blockchain was the piece that was halted in this case,” Ned Scott, the founder and CEO of Steemit, told BTC News Today. “But it caused a ripple effect, a domino effect on all the apps built on top.”

For the Steem blockchain, that’s 400 applications, according to Scott.

And several of those applications likely had confused, worried and sometimes angry users wondering why they couldn’t interact with their favorite blockchain-based tools. Case in point, once the Steemit network began functioning normally again, berniesanders returned with a post tagged “testingshitsteem,” “amateurshitdevs” and “deadchain.”

That’s perhaps a bit harsh.

Sure enough, other users weren’t quite so critical. A Steemit user going by “alphasteem” (she of the waffle recipes) said:

“I guess that’s the way things work with new technology.”

The only problem is, that’s not how things are supposed to work with this particular piece of new technology. One of the most frequently cited advantages of blockchain networks is that they suffer zero downtime – or close to it.

For example, there’s a website dedicated to tracking bitcoin’s uptime since its launch in January 2009: 99.992559576 percent, at the time of writing. And the Ethereum Foundation describes the network’s applications as running “exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.”

In recent months, though, major blockchain networks have seen downtime, and the trend has some people wondering, WTF?

More outages

The incident on the Steem network is not the only recent example of a blockchain going down (in fact, it’s not the only time Steem has gone down in recent months).

In March, Neo’s blockchain was temporarily halted. This can happen, the project’s senior research and development manager Malcolm Lerider initially explained, “when a consensus node gets disconnected during the consensus.”

In response to pointed criticism – to the effect that, if just one of only seven consensus nodes on the Neo network can pause the chain by going offline, Neo is highly vulnerable – Lerider stepped that response back a bit. He said Neo could handle the loss of a consensus node, and that the circumstances leading to the incident were more complicated.

A few months later, the EOS blockchain also saw the production of new blocks halted for nearly five hours.

According to Thomas Cox, who at that time was the vice president of product at Block.One, the company behind the EOS protocol (he’s since left the company), the deferred transactions weren’t being checked correctly, which led to a “weird state” and “prevented further blocks from being created.”

This incident occurred just a couple of days after the EOS network went live in June.

Federated and delegated

These examples raise the question of why, nearly a decade into the existence of blockchains, the promise of zero downtime is starting to show cracks.

The answer may have to do with the emergence of new ways of achieving consensus: the process by which all the participants in a blockchain system come to agreement on the state of the network.

In bitcoin, ethereum and other proof-of-work (PoW) systems, the way consensus is achieved makes it extremely unlikely that a network will come to a halt – even if a high number of nodes drop off.

Speaking to this, Riccardo Spagni, project lead at monero (a proof-of-work cryptocurrency), told BTC News Today:

“PoW can handle things like the network partitioning and coming back together after some time. It’s incredibly robust.”

In contrast, a newer method – versions of which Neo, EOS and Steem all employ – designates a certain set of specialized nodes to determine the state of the network. Rather than “mining,” these nodes come to agreement through quicker and less energy-intensive processes, enabling faster and cheaper transactions than bitcoin or ethereum.

These systems are broadly known as federated or delegated protocols, with more specific labels applying based on the exact cryptographic methods involved: delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) for Neo and delegated proof-of -stake (DPoS) for EOS and Steem.

Neo’s Lerider disputed the idea that federated blockchains are more susceptible to downtime in general. “Different consensus algorithms may be used in a federated chain,” he told BTC News Today, and “to know which ones that have potential to go down,” it’s necessary to look at the specific implementation.

Broadly, though, delegated consensus has brought something new to cryptocurrency: the potential to scale enough to accommodate use cases that only centralized providers were previously able to handle. For instance, Steem and EOS can support millions of transactions per day, according to the website Block’tivity.

Yet, at the same time, these new protocols have reintroduced a foible of centralized providers to the world of blockchain: downtime. When key nodes in a federated system go down or fall out of sync, the entire network can grind to a halt.

Accessibility or consistency?

That’s not to say these systems are necessarily inferior to traditional proof-of-work, however.

There is an important tradeoff at work, according to Eric Wall, blockchain and cryptocurrency lead at the Swedish fintech firm Cinnober.

“All distributed systems are fundamentally limited by the CAP theorem,” he told BTC News Today.

According to this theorem, which is often cited in discussions of blockchain networks, a given system can only optimize for two of three characteristics: consistency, availability and partition tolerance (hence the acronym “CAP”).

Although, in reality, the range of choices is narrower. Partition tolerance – the ability to run a blockchain over a network that loses some messages, as the internet does – is “non-negotiable,” said Wall. So engineers can either favor accessibility, as in bitcoin and ethereum; or favor consistency, as in EOS, Steem and Neo.

Wall described what these options look like in practical terms, saying, “Many federated systems will simply halt in contingency situations, often requiring manual intervention to start running again. Bitcoin, on the other hand, will typically not halt, but instead bitcoin forks into two blockchains for a short period of time a couple of times a month.”

In other words, from the user’s perspective, the bitcoin network may never go down, but there’s no guarantee that a user hasn’t found themselves on a fork that will eventually be abandoned in favor of a canonical chain.

Most of the time, Wall continued, bitcoin’s lack of consistency isn’t a big deal. The network “does have eventual consistency,” he said, “which comes from the fact that the forks resolve themselves automatically after a short while.”

He added, “So while Bitcoin is not a true CAP system, it’s practically as good as one.”

Then again, certain incidents have shown that favoring availability over consistency can get blockchains into trouble. Steemit’s Scott pointed to an incident in March 2013, when bitcoin forked in what Vitalik Buterin – then a journalist – called “one of the most serious hiccups that we have seen in the past four years.”

Echoing that, Wall suggested that such incidents may be an argument for consistency-favoring “CP” systems over accessibility-favoring “AP” ones:

“Two conflicting forks are a much bigger danger to the network than a single halted one.”

Showing off scars

What might seem notable here, though, is that bitcoin hasn’t suffered a similar incident since 2013, while younger networks continue to experience “hiccups.”

“The reason why these bugs have been more prevalent in federated systems than in PoW-based systems recently boils down to the fact that the Bitcoin codebase is more battle-tested, more stringently vetted and of superior quality than its federated counterparts,” Wall said.

Indeed, when the oldest dPOS blockchain, Bitshares, launched in 2015, bitcoin had already been live for more than six years.

But the younger networks might well catch up. “Steem is now a very battle-hardened blockchain,” Scott said following the recent outage.

“I don’t look back and say there weren’t bumps in the road,” he continued. “I look at those bumps and bruises as testament to our strength and resilience and our drive for innovation.”

Steem still plans to go ahead with the planned hard fork update – its 20th – on September 25.

It is also notable that, grizzled veteran though it may be, bitcoin narrowly avoided terrible consequences from a severe bug discovered this week, which could potentially have taken down large swathes of the network for a relatively low cost.

Speaking to this, Zooko Wilcox, founder and CEO of the Zcash company (zcash, like bitcoin, is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency), told BTC News Today that at the end of the day, no network is perfectly safe.

He concluded:

“There is a risk of software failures taking down any software system, including any blockchain such as Bitcoin, Ethereum or Zcash.”

Light image by Artur Matosyan on Unsplash

The leader in blockchain news, BTC News Today is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. BTC News Today is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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[click2watch]

When Blockchains Go Down: Why Crypto Outages Are on the Rise

Berniesanders (not to be confused with former presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders) is an institution on blockchain-based blogging platform Steemit.

Steemit allows content creators to earn crypto – at least, crypto that’s native to the Steem blockchain, of which there are three – for popular posts. While recent successes include waffle recipes, romantic fiction and crypto punditry, berniesanders gets a pretty steady paycheck (about $30 at a time) for his single sentence, self-described “shit posts.”

A recent sampling: “Are you having fun? I’m having fun.” ($60), “I’m on a boat!” ($31), “Show me your shoes.” ($30) and “How many comments can a shit post get?” ($263 and 319 comments).

But for a few hours on September 17, the Steemit community was deprived of berniesanders’ wisdom.

On that day, Steemit became unavailable when Steem suffered an outage and stopped adding new blocks. The blockchain and the apps on top of it had gone dark.

Steem’s outage, the company explained, was related to an upcoming hard fork update. The code for the fork was being run by some nodes in advance, and as such, these nodes split off onto an incompatible chain when certain safeguards failed. The nodes accidentally hard forked the network early, and as a result, the nodes couldn’t come to consensus on new blocks.

“The blockchain was the piece that was halted in this case,” Ned Scott, the founder and CEO of Steemit, told CoinDesk. “But it caused a ripple effect, a domino effect on all the apps built on top.”

For the Steem blockchain, that’s 400 applications, according to Scott.

And several of those applications likely had confused, worried and sometimes angry users wondering why they couldn’t interact with their favorite blockchain-based tools. Case in point, once the Steemit network began functioning normally again, berniesanders returned with a post tagged “testingshitsteem,” “amateurshitdevs” and “deadchain.”

That’s perhaps a bit harsh.

Sure enough, other users weren’t quite so critical. A Steemit user going by “alphasteem” (she of the waffle recipes) said:

“I guess that’s the way things work with new technology.”

The only problem is, that’s not how things are supposed to work with this particular piece of new technology. One of the most frequently cited advantages of blockchain networks is that they suffer zero downtime – or close to it.

For example, there’s a website dedicated to tracking bitcoin’s uptime since its launch in January 2009: 99.992559576 percent, at the time of writing. And the Ethereum Foundation describes the network’s applications as running “exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.”

In recent months, though, major blockchain networks have seen downtime, and the trend has some people wondering, WTF?

More outages

The incident on the Steem network is not the only recent example of a blockchain going down (in fact, it’s not the only time Steem has gone down in recent months).

In March, Neo’s blockchain was temporarily halted. This can happen, the project’s senior research and development manager Malcolm Lerider initially explained, “when a consensus node gets disconnected during the consensus.”

In response to pointed criticism – to the effect that, if just one of only seven consensus nodes on the Neo network can pause the chain by going offline, Neo is highly vulnerable – Lerider stepped that response back a bit. He said Neo could handle the loss of a consensus node, and that the circumstances leading to the incident were more complicated.

A few months later, the EOS blockchain also saw the production of new blocks halted for nearly five hours.

According to Thomas Cox, who at that time was the vice president of product at Block.One, the company behind the EOS protocol (he’s since left the company), the deferred transactions weren’t being checked correctly, which led to a “weird state” and “prevented further blocks from being created.”

This incident occurred just a couple of days after the EOS network went live in June.

Federated and delegated

These examples raise the question of why, nearly a decade into the existence of blockchains, the promise of zero downtime is starting to show cracks.

The answer may have to do with the emergence of new ways of achieving consensus: the process by which all the participants in a blockchain system come to agreement on the state of the network.

In bitcoin, ethereum and other proof-of-work (PoW) systems, the way consensus is achieved makes it extremely unlikely that a network will come to a halt – even if a high number of nodes drop off.

Speaking to this, Riccardo Spagni, project lead at monero (a proof-of-work cryptocurrency), told CoinDesk:

“PoW can handle things like the network partitioning and coming back together after some time. It’s incredibly robust.”

In contrast, a newer method – versions of which Neo, EOS and Steem all employ – designates a certain set of specialized nodes to determine the state of the network. Rather than “mining,” these nodes come to agreement through quicker and less energy-intensive processes, enabling faster and cheaper transactions than bitcoin or ethereum.

These systems are broadly known as federated or delegated protocols, with more specific labels applying based on the exact cryptographic methods involved: delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) for Neo and delegated proof-of -stake (DPoS) for EOS and Steem.

Neo’s Lerider disputed the idea that federated blockchains are more susceptible to downtime in general. “Different consensus algorithms may be used in a federated chain,” he told CoinDesk, and “to know which ones that have potential to go down,” it’s necessary to look at the specific implementation.

Broadly, though, delegated consensus has brought something new to cryptocurrency: the potential to scale enough to accommodate use cases that only centralized providers were previously able to handle. For instance, Steem and EOS can support millions of transactions per day, according to the website Block’tivity.

Yet, at the same time, these new protocols have reintroduced a foible of centralized providers to the world of blockchain: downtime. When key nodes in a federated system go down or fall out of sync, the entire network can grind to a halt.

Accessibility or consistency?

That’s not to say these systems are necessarily inferior to traditional proof-of-work, however.

There is an important tradeoff at work, according to Eric Wall, blockchain and cryptocurrency lead at the Swedish fintech firm Cinnober.

“All distributed systems are fundamentally limited by the CAP theorem,” he told CoinDesk.

According to this theorem, which is often cited in discussions of blockchain networks, a given system can only optimize for two of three characteristics: consistency, availability and partition tolerance (hence the acronym “CAP”).

Although, in reality, the range of choices is narrower. Partition tolerance – the ability to run a blockchain over a network that loses some messages, as the internet does – is “non-negotiable,” said Wall. So engineers can either favor accessibility, as in bitcoin and ethereum; or favor consistency, as in EOS, Steem and Neo.

Wall described what these options look like in practical terms, saying, “Many federated systems will simply halt in contingency situations, often requiring manual intervention to start running again. Bitcoin, on the other hand, will typically not halt, but instead bitcoin forks into two blockchains for a short period of time a couple of times a month.”

In other words, from the user’s perspective, the bitcoin network may never go down, but there’s no guarantee that a user hasn’t found themselves on a fork that will eventually be abandoned in favor of a canonical chain.

Most of the time, Wall continued, bitcoin’s lack of consistency isn’t a big deal. The network “does have eventual consistency,” he said, “which comes from the fact that the forks resolve themselves automatically after a short while.”

He added, “So while Bitcoin is not a true CAP system, it’s practically as good as one.”

Then again, certain incidents have shown that favoring availability over consistency can get blockchains into trouble. Steemit’s Scott pointed to an incident in March 2013, when bitcoin forked in what Vitalik Buterin – then a journalist – called “one of the most serious hiccups that we have seen in the past four years.”

Echoing that, Wall suggested that such incidents may be an argument for consistency-favoring “CP” systems over accessibility-favoring “AP” ones:

“Two conflicting forks are a much bigger danger to the network than a single halted one.”

Showing off scars

What might seem notable here, though, is that bitcoin hasn’t suffered a similar incident since 2013, while younger networks continue to experience “hiccups.”

“The reason why these bugs have been more prevalent in federated systems than in PoW-based systems recently boils down to the fact that the Bitcoin codebase is more battle-tested, more stringently vetted and of superior quality than its federated counterparts,” Wall said.

Indeed, when the oldest dPOS blockchain, Bitshares, launched in 2015, bitcoin had already been live for more than six years.

But the younger networks might well catch up. “Steem is now a very battle-hardened blockchain,” Scott said following the recent outage.

“I don’t look back and say there weren’t bumps in the road,” he continued. “I look at those bumps and bruises as testament to our strength and resilience and our drive for innovation.”

Steem still plans to go ahead with the planned hard fork update – its 20th – on September 25.

It is also notable that, grizzled veteran though it may be, bitcoin narrowly avoided terrible consequences from a severe bug discovered this week, which could potentially have taken down large swathes of the network for a relatively low cost.

Speaking to this, Zooko Wilcox, founder and CEO of the Zcash company (zcash, like bitcoin, is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency), told CoinDesk that at the end of the day, no network is perfectly safe.

He concluded:

“There is a risk of software failures taking down any software system, including any blockchain such as Bitcoin, Ethereum or Zcash.”

Light image by Artur Matosyan on Unsplash

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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[theripertoire]

Trolls: Not the Movie 

Disclaimer: I guess you could consider this a rant. And I guess I say the word “bitch” at least 10 times in this post. So, If you’re among the faint-hearted and self-righteous, I guess you would enjoy reading a billboard or box of cornflakes instead. Thank you.

Ever since I became active on social media, I’ve been so blessed to receive a loyal following from some incredibly amazing women – some of which I’ve become friends with too. I make sure to keep my channels of discussion open with them so that we are able to communicate on a daily basis. I receive tons of praise, advice and tips, which I’m so lucky to be getting, but I also get the occasional trolls who feel entitled to express their rubbish opinions because they have bitter lives and feel safe behind their phones, laptops or computers. In the past seven years, I’ve been asked a plethora of ridiculous questions and given countless uneducated remarks that I have maturely ignored. But, today, I have decided to share some of them with you and respond to them, one by one. Yes, I’m stooping all the way down to their level because it’s fun to be immature every once in a while.

You see, the more “known” you become, the more you have to filter your life, words and reactions. You need to think twice before saying or doing anything to avoid sending out the wrong message, and you have to be mindful of whose feelings you may accidentally hurt. It takes a lot of effort to be this mature and responsible the whole time – to be the bigger person and not care – but in fact, sometimes, it’s draining.

This is certainly a major downside of being active on social media. Stupid people are unavoidable. In fact, there’s an overabundance of stupidity in this world – now more than ever – and an idiot never realizes just how idiotic they are and sound.

If I were to state one thing I miss the most, it’s me saying whatever the hell I want to say without worrying about the repercussions. I used to get away with anything. I have a very dark sense of humor and wicked sarcasm that I have to control on a daily basis. It’s painful.

But, I’m going to go all out today and let my inner bitch shine.

Here are some of the smartest questions and remarks I’ve ever received ... and my “would have been” responses:

You look so skinny. Go eat a burger.

Well, how would you like it if I called you a whale and advised you to dive back into the ocean and diet on water and only water?

Your boyfriend will never marry you because you look like a girl that’s only for fun.

Oh looky here. He married me, and I bet you’re still as single and bitter AF.

Can I ask you something?

No. 

Your lips are disgusting.

You follow and worship Arab celebrities who look like blowup dolls. You seem to love their over inflated lips and plastic surgery abuse. What are you picking on me for? Would you like me to express how ugly that thread-like line you call a mouth is? No? So shut up.

You are so ugly.

Do you own a mirror, sasquatch? 

You are so rude.

Thank you.

I sent you a THOUSAND messages and asked you a THOUSAND times, where is your shirt from?

1.     I don’t work for you. 2.  It’s tagged in the photo, where you only had to look ONCE. 3. You need to buy reading glasses or learn how to read a caption.

Why do you look so ugly on Snapchat?

It’s my special fuck you – from me to you.  

You call yourself a fashion blogger?!?!?!?!?!

No bitch, I don’t. But that’s the only label sheep seem to know these days.

What is so stylish about you? You’re always in jeans!

I post my daily personal style, bitch. Do you want me to wear ball gowns every day so you don’t pop a vein in your neck?

Where is the “anaka”? 

You and this word are vulgar.

He doesn’t love you. 

Thank you Nostradamus. I shall break up with him now. 

Who wears a cape on their wedding dress? You’re not superman. Yuck! I’m so disappointed!

Sorry Anna Wintour. You clearly know all about fashion. And while I was planning my wedding, my sole aim was to not disappoint you. I’m immensely disappointed in myself. I should die now. 

Why did he marry you? He’s so much better looking than you!

I’m sure you received an excellent education both at school and at home.

I used to like you, but not anymore! I’m going to unfollow you!

While I wipe my tears, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Why did you block me on Snapchat?

Cause you were either a rude bitch, a delusional bitch, or a stupid bitch. Pick one.

Why do you keep wearing the same clothes?

Do you wear each item once then throw it? No? Then shut your face.  

Can you please do a contouring tutorial?

Why are you following me? Lost? And: No. 

How dare you?!?!?!

OH, I AM SO SORRY. PLEASE DON’T STOP PAYING MY BILLS BITCH.

Who do you think you are?

Beyonce.

Do you think you’re funny?!?!?

Yes actually, very much.

I followed you because your husband is so handsome. 

No. You followed me cause you’s a thirsty hoe. 

I find you very offensive!

Please, stop finding me.

DID YOU DO YOUR LIPS?

Will my answer change anything in your life? No? Go away now. 

WEIN EL ANAKAAAAAAAA

Why am I attracting people like you? Die.

Your knees are black. You have hair on your arms. You are not “aneeka”.

1. It’s called sharpening and adding contrast to a photo. 2. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you’re a fucking dolphin with no hair from the forehead down. 3. You are so goddamn creepy for even focusing on these things. Creepy ass dolphin. 

YOU ARE A BITCH!

Thank you!

How dare you show your followers there is traffic in Lebanon? You are ruining the image of our country!!!

Do you watch the news, bitch? There are bigger fish to fry.

Why are you always speaking English? Are you trying to look western?

1.     English is my first language. 2. You watch too many movies and have become a cliché. 3. You are a goat.

I’m going to block you.

Honey, who are you? 

How can you post videos without makeup and brushed hair?!?!

Because you are all that is wrong in the world. And because I love myself, no matter how I look. And because you clearly hate yourself so much, you probably go to sleep wearing makeup so that your cat doesn’t see how ugly you are in the morning and run away. 

You are so judgmental and aggressive.

Oh bestie, you know me so well! 

I can’t believe you answered me this way!

I can’t believe I answered you at all. Go away. 

You owe it to us to…

No honey, I don’t owe anyone anything. 

Stop complaining about haters. You’re the one that decided to make your life public.

And you’re the one that decided to follow me. If you don’t like me, unfollow me.

You call that fashion?!?

(Seven months later) Well it’s a trend now, isn’t it sheep? Get back to following your herd.

Get off Snapchat and go enjoy your day!

I’ve snapped 10 minutes of my 24-hour day. I can assure you, I’m enjoying my ass off. How about you get off my Snapchat, enjoy YOUR day, and spare me your stupid comments.

You complain too much. Stop nagging.

It’s called exaggeration, sarcasm, and fuck you. 

You are Arab and dress like that?!?!?

No. I’m human and dress however I please. Now go judge someone else, you decent, lovely person. 

Does your husband follow you on Snapchat? Does he see how you act? Stop pretending to be so cool and western. You’re a Middle Eastern, married woman!

And you’re a cow. I know because I found you on Facebook and saw your photos. What I didn’t know is that I’m not allowed to have a sense of humor If I’m Middle Eastern. What I would like to know is if your husband realizes he’s married to a creepy ass cow who harasses strangers on social media. 

I’m so sick of fake people! 

{**calls me fake, yet continues to follow and worship every fake person on Instagram**} 

It’s one thing when someone insults, attacks and says the most hurtful things and gets away with it, but it’s another ball game when the receiver answers back and puts turds in their place. I speak on behalf of many when I say this: WE ARE HUMANS JUST LIKE YOU! WE CAN READ, UNDERSTAND AND FEEL THE SHIT YOU ARE WRITING!

My social media accounts portray exactly who I am. Yes, I filter my words and actions, but I’m sharing who I am, how I think and what I do with you. Growing up, I never had an older sister to advise me on what to do. I wish I had someone that told me that it’s OKAY to gain weight, have stretch marks, cellulite, hips, bad hair days and acne. I wish there was someone who had told me that breakups, two-faced friends, and disappointments are only a passing phase and inevitable part of growing up. I wish I had known from early on that the secret to happiness is loving yourself and what makes you different. I wish I had someone that explained the most trivial things to me, such as how to wear new trends or what hair style suited my face; and the most fundamental things, like not having to pressure yourself into getting married to the wrong person by 25...or how to dress for a night out without looking like a two-dollar hooker. So, this is why I’m here. I’m here to be that honest, true, real, whatever person that you can virtually depend on. You can come to me when you’re down. My blog posts, captions and daily encounters will make you feel better or give you guidance; whether it’s through empowerment or a comic relief. One thing I will not be though, is someone that will just sit here and let bitter nobodies insult me or tell me how to live my life - simply because I’m exposed. I will always welcome constructive criticism and opposing opinions. I also accept and understand that many don’t like me for whatever reason, and I honestly won’t ever try to change that. This isn’t a popularity contest for me, and I’m not here to compete for love, acceptance or followers. I’m here to connect with those who can relate to me and see the good in me without me even trying.

On a final note, here’s an interesting fact for online trolls and rude people: your words will never change me. I will always be this way. I will always be happy. I will always read your comments and laugh at you with my friends. I will always try to be more and do more, regardless of how many people try to stand in my way. You may be very bothered by my existence, but I don’t even know you exist. Five minutes after seeing your insulting comment, I wont remember your name, where you’re from or what you look like. But you know what, one of these days, when I’m very, very bored and someone gives me a smart remark, I may decide to stalk their very existence online (same way they do), know all I need to know about them, figure out their insecurities, and punch back right where it hurts. Let’s see how it feels like to be given stupid, unasked for opinions from a complete stranger. Sounds psychotic, right? 

At times, I may be rude, sarcastic, politically incorrect, loud, and brutally honest, but I am always kind. Kindness is becoming a rare trait these days. These days, WOMEN are the ones trying to put other women down. And when I come across “women” like that, yes, I do enjoy giving them a harsh taste of their own medicine. Stay posted, cause I ain’t goin’ nowhere :-)

XX -R