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ssapphosviolets · 20 days ago

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Acts of Service

Sevika x gf!reader

Inspired by part of my recent work:

Sevika's job is cruel and grueling, but providing small acts of service makes her feel like a normal person at the end of the day. It's a reminder to herself that she's a lover, that she hasn't lost her way of caring, that she is more than her job. If it was up to her, her girlfriend wouldn't ever have to lift a finger again.

or; Sevika's acts of service

(lowk adhd coded reader bc samesies)

.oOo.

Sevika sighs when she steps foot into her and her partners shared closet, or should she say stepped foot onto her partners clothes. She sighs; not out of annoyance or frustration, maybe a little out of inconvenience, but she's unable to feel any real malice behind it. She's always known, even before moving in together, how forgetful and messy her partner could be.

Messy isn't Sevika's choice of words though. Her girlfriend certainly isn't dirty or slobbish. She just has a tendency to become very easily distracted, often leaving traces of her forgetfulness behind as her brain had already moved on to its next task. Maybe disorganized was a better word. But that didn't seem right either. It's not the first time Sevika has failed to capture her partner in words though.

It's not uncommon that there's forgotten clothes left behind as her girlfriend rushed to get ready for work earlier that morning. Or that there's jackets and sweaters left on the couch and the backs of chairs that had been forgotten about. Or that only Sevika's side of the bathroom sink has more than an inch of visible counter space. Or that there's a pile of laundry sitting on top of the dryer that her partner swore she would put away "tomorrow".

Sevika loves this about her partner. While at first her girlfriend was shameful of this forgetfulness, always profusely apologizing at the realization of her mess, Sevika had done more than enough to reassure her that she really doesn't mind. Sometimes to this day her partner does feel apologetic, but it's no longer from guilt or anxiety, it's more so out of frustration with herself.

Sevika appreciates that it gives her an easy service to do. For most people, coming home from work to almost tripping over a small pile of clothes would be enough to set them off. When Sevika comes home from a long day to a pile of clothes, she uses this task to allow herself a release from that hard and rough front she puts on all day at her job. It took 10 seconds to put away her girlfriend's clothes, and 10 seconds to be reminded of who she really is. She's still a human who has the ability to do no harm. Who is not only capable of loving, but also of being loved.

This mess is an indicator of her and her girlfriend's safety. She's safe, in their own home, where expectations and pressures are non-existent. Her girlfriend is safe, even feels safe enough to leave a mess in the first place. The ability to let yourself be messy around someone is something only a deep trust can bring about.

Sevika turns those 10 seconds into 30 as she chooses to fold up one of her own shirts, placing it on top of her girlfriend's side for when she gets home from work.

.oOo.

While her partner may be forgetful, Sevika always remembered. She never minded having to remember for the both of them. Though sometimes the questions of "Do you know where-?" can get quite repetitive, Sevika knows it's only asked because her girlfriend knows she has it handled. Sevika takes great pride in the underlying confidence and trust that her girlfriend has in her to take care of things.

"Do you know where my lighter is?" Sevika looks up from her place on the couch, where her eyes were buried in a book. "You have probably 10 around the house, babe. Which one?" She easily averts all of her attention towards her partner, not minding the interruption one bit. Not from her, at least.

"I don't know, just any of them?" She hears the opening and closing of drawers as she searches. Sevika sighs and shifts, her hand grasping onto the circular clipper lighter, and she gets a quick flash of pink and grey in between her fingers as she pulls it out. It's one of her girlfriend's lighters, to be exact.

"Here, Hun." She holds the lighter above her head so the girl can see it from behind the couch. She hears the immediate footsteps on the creaking wood of their living room, until the lighter is gleefully snatched from Sevika's fingers. Her partner leans over the back of the couch, pressing a kiss to the top of Sevika's head. Sevika's own hand snakes around to hold the back of her girlfriend's neck, and she tilts her head up to capture her lips before she has a chance to pull away.

"I want that one back though, it's always my backup for when you lose your other nine." Sevika teases, nothing but adoration showing through not only her eyes but her tone as well. She can't hide the smile that graces her dark tinted lips when she sees how flustered the girl gets.

.oOo.

Sevika has a love-hate relationships with mornings. She loves the quiet moments she spends with her girlfriend as they get ready together, but hates when they inevitably have to part ways for the day. So she cherishes every second of their quiet mornings.

She finally rolls out of bed when the bathroom light has remained on for a couple minutes too long, sleepily trudging through their shared bedroom to reach the light. She's met with her favorite sight: her girlfriend leaned over the sink as she does her makeup for the day.

Sevika was never one for makeup, but there was something so attractive to her about watching a partner do it. Maybe it was because she loves the femininity of it, or maybe it was the intimacy of being allowed to share such an important part of a daily routine with someone. She's too tired to really consider the "why's" at the moment.

She takes a step towards her girlfriend and presses her own front to her back, her arms wrapping around the girls waist. Sevika watches in the mirror as her girlfriend's smile grows. "Morning, Vika." Her partner mumbles tiredly, adoringly. "Morning, hun." Sevika responds in a similar tone.

She stays where she is as she watches her girlfriend brush on her mascara, before deciding she should stop being a lovesick little puppy and actually help out a bit. She pulls back only slightly, just enough to reach for the necklace laying down on the counter beside her. The necklace her girlfriend has had for years, that one piece of staple jewelry that she is never seen without.

Sevika wordlessly wraps it around her girlfriend's front, and carefully clasps it around her neck. Her girlfriend had moved on to her lipstick by the time the chain and charm rested firmly against her chest. Sevika grabs her rings next, and once she's sure her girlfriend can finish her task with a single hand, she softly grabs the other in her own.

She slides on each of the rings, knowing the exact placement of each one. She intertwines her fingers as the last ring is in place, and repeats the same process on her other hand as soon as the lipstick is set back down on the counter. Not a single word has to be spoken, but when they lock eyes in the bathroom mirror, a silent appreciation is made known.

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floweryanarchy · 2 months ago

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Astarion Rewritten Outlaws Au Lore Dump

(gonna give a little content warning before you start reading because this does go over some heavy topics. Basically Cazador coded abuse, heavy manipulation, canon-typical trauma, process of inflicting scarring, character death... If that’s not something you wanna read I’d stop here and scroll.)

HERE WE GO.

Backstory⬇️

Astarion has no papers—no birth certificate, no record of citizenship, nothing. That wasn’t always the case. But after Cazador pulled him out of prison with a forged pardon, he ensured every trace of Astarion’s true identity was erased. With his wealth and connections, it was easy for Cazador to bribe officials and have the original records destroyed. Astarion became a ghost in the system—a body without a name, as if he had never existed at all. Astarion having no proof of citizenship means he can’t appeal to the law. He’s not a person in the eyes of the state—he’s property of Cazadors.

Cazador saw potential in him right from the start, because Astarion was beautiful. Striking. The perfect doll for his high-end parlor house. All Astarion had to do was endure what came next. A test. Proof that he was worthy of serving Cazador, that he could properly atone for his supposed crimes. After all, Cazador had bailed him out, hadn’t he? Spent a small fortune, pulled strings, gone through great effort just to see him freed. He had saved Astarion from the miserable life he’d known before—given him a new purpose, a place, a reason to be wanted.

And so, Cazador marked him. A ritual of scarification, done with meticulous care and deliberate precision. His initials “CS” etched into the skin of Astarions back.

When it was over, Cazador tended to him with soft hands and quiet praise, barely heard over Astarions sobs.

In his eyes, Astarion had passed.

The Parlor House was a gilded cage, draped in silks and perfumed with expensive scents to mask the stench of sweat and desperation. A place where men and women of status indulged in pleasures with no consequence, where Cazador’s spawn were paraded before them like prized animals. The moment Astarion was brought upstairs, cleaned and dressed in whatever finery Cazador saw fit, his life was no longer his own.

But Cazador’s empire was built on more than just flesh. His influence spread far beyond the parlors walls, weaving into the underbelly of the city. Hidden among the pleasures the spawn were forced to provide was another service: ensuring Cazador’s clients got hooked on more than just their bodies. The spawn were tasked with discreetly dealing with his supply, slipping small doses of a potent, addictive substance onto eager tongues, ensuring that patrons return.

Every time Astarion tries to imagine a life outside the parlor, he remembers: no name, no coin, and nowhere to go. And worse—if he runs, there’s a bounty waiting to be reinstated, and a dozen corrupt lawmen ready to drag him back… or bury him in the desert. But then again, prison treated him better than here. Alas even if he wanted to, there were always guards posted at the doors, watching.

Sebastian—young, kind, and foolish—had offered to help. He was a regular at the parlor house, one of the few who saw past the makeup and charm to the hollow ache beneath. He promised Astarion money, a train ticket, a way out. Safety. And asked for nothing in return.

Cazador found out.

Sebastian disappeared not long after, and no one asked questions. But Astarion knew. He knew because Cazador put the gun in his hand, pressed a finger over his own, and pulled the trigger.

“You belong to me, boy.”

Astarion wished that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. That same night, Astarion was dragged from his room and taken to the outskirts of the city. Cazador didn’t scream. He didn’t strike. He just watched as his men forced Astarion into a narrow wooden box and shut the lid. They buried him 6 feet, leaving only a narrow pipe for air.

He stayed underground for two full days.

By the time they dug him up, Astarion was barely conscious—starving, dehydrated, broken. From that day forward, he never dared speak of escape again.

Cazador made sure of it.

He had Astarion’s entire back redone, claiming the scars had healed too cleanly, too neatly. Adding additional lines to his artwork, a punishment for Astarions misbehavior. This time, he packed the fresh wounds with ash, ensuring the marks would stay—sharp, raised lines etched into his skin, permanent. And, as always, he was tender afterward, sitting beside him with a damp cloth and that infuriatingly soft voice.

“If only you’d stop acting out,” he murmured, gently dabbing at the angry red flesh. “We could be so happy. A real family. Don’t you want that, my boy? To be treated well? You’re the one making this so difficult. You bring these punishments on yourself. I only ever do what’s necessary.”

The scars stayed, just like he wanted—crisp, deliberate lines that pulled taut when Astarion moved or stretched.

Years later.

Business had been slow at the parlor, which meant the favored spawn were allowed outside for a bit-to lure in the rich types passing by. Of course, they were never alone. There was always an assigned escort hanging back, watching from the shadows, making sure no one tried anything stupid like running.

Astarion had been playing by the rules for a while, his back nearly healed from Cazadors last punishment. So he’d been rewarded with a little taste of freedom more or less. He was out there, mid-conversation with some pompous noble- laying on the charm, smiling enough to draw them in- when suddenly all hell broke loose. Screaming, people running, complete chaos.

And Astarion? He didn’t think twice. He bolted. Took his shot in the midst of everything, if he got out of the escorts line of sight and vanish in the crowd, he could finally be free-

One moment, he’s sprinting for his life- the next, everything went black.

(I will be nice to Astarion from now on.)

^^^

(Me when I lie)

#bg3 outlawsau #baldurs gate 3 #astarion bg3 #astarion fanart #bg3 art #astarion ancunin

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sflow-er · 1 month ago

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A few notes on Linda's salary and the Erikssons' financial situation

I looked into this topic when @crownedwille brought it up in some tags a while ago. I abandoned it because I didn't think it would be that interesting after all, but the discussion started by @mydignityisinflames on @young-royals-confessions inspired me to finish the draft.

I was going to copy and paste it all in a reblog, but it got too long so... Here it is as a separate meta post!

Linda's job

As of S2, we know for sure that Linda is a registered nurse (sjuksköterska). This means she's completed a three-year (180 credit) higher education programme in nursing. We don't know if she's completed a specialist nurse's programme on top of that, but it isn't required to work at the youth clinic (ungdomsmottagningen or UMO).

Youth clinics are public clinics for people aged 12 to 22, primarily providing services related to sexual and mental health. Nurses there examine patients and take samples for lab testing etc., but they also counsel and reassure young people who come to them with concerns. (This explains why Carmen's post-S1 interview with the PRP actually gave me the impression that Linda was a youth counsellor instead.)

Anyway, Linda herself confirms in S3 that she works at the UMO. Both the Swedish CC and the subs have her telling Simon to be glad she doesn't make him "go" there every week for drug testing - but if you listen to her words, she actually says come in (komma in). This indicates that she works there.

Linda's monthly income and how it compares

We can estimate Linda's salary quite confidently by looking at relevant statistics from 2020 and 2021 when the show is set.

As a registered nurse working at a youth clinic, Linda is employed in the public sector. More specifically, by the municipality.

As of S3, we also know she is working in the region that is called Östra Mellansverige (Eastern Central Sweden) in the statistical data. Bjärstad's location was kept vague for a long time, but the letter that Simon received in S3 included their address. Bjärstad's post/zip code was written as 58581 - a made-up code that puts them in the Linköping area. The closest real-world equivalent (58580, Ljungsbro) is just northwest of Linköping itself.

Here are the most relevant stats on monthly income (before taxes):

The average monthly income in Sweden was SEK 36,100 in 2020 and SEK 37,100 in 2021.

For non-specialist registered nurses employed in the municipal sector, specifically in Östra Mellansverige, average monthly income was SEK 38,300 in 2020 and SEK 40,000 in 2021. Their average base salary in this region (without any additions for evening/night shifts, weekends, experience etc.) was SEK 37,000 / 38,500.

In other words, Linda's monthly income should be pretty close to the national average. Maybe even slightly higher based on region, even though she may not work in the evenings or weekends as the UMO may not be open.

In a survey conducted in 2022, a household with children was considered low income if two parents' combined monthly income before taxes was less than SEK 42,000, or if a single parent's monthly income before taxes was less than SEK 29,500.

So, the Erikssons are not low income by definition. This fits the impression we get from their house, as well as details such as Sara having learned how to ride before Hillerska.

However, it is also clear from the show that they cannot necessarily afford larger surprise expenses such as Simon's tutoring. That makes sense when Linda is paying for everything herself. Her income may be slightly above the national average, but it falls between the numbers considered low income for a single-parent vs. two-parent household.

I guess we could call them a medium-income household, but towards the lower end.

About the house

It was indirectly revealed in S3 that Micke was the one who moved out when he and Linda separated. That's the only way Simon can have lived in their current house for fourteen years (i.e. since 2006/2007):

Back in S1, when Sara said Linda should have left Micke when everything started, Simon protested that they wouldn't have had anywhere to live. This sounds like Linda was still financially dependent on Micke when the kids were small. It was probably Micke who originally bought or rented the house for his family (although the property, mortgage and/or lease could have still been in both their names).

Linda and Micke's assets will have been split 50:50 at the time of their divorce. If the house was bought rather than rented, she likely had to take out a new mortgage to buy him out. Mortgages in Sweden typically have very long payment terms, so it's likely there was still quite a bit left to pay, and the value of the property had increased in the meantime.

If the house is a rental, the rent will have gone up over the years. Based on a quick look at places for rent in Linköping, many terraced house units of that size currently cost SEK 11,000 to 18,000 per month. We don't know what the rent would have been in 2020/2021, but we can assume it would have taken a pretty big chunk of Linda's single income.

Anyway, it is a nice house. Especially if it's a rental, paying for it does put a strain on the Erikssons' finances, even though they aren't struggling as such.

About Hillerska

I had not meant to include this at all, but as there was some confusion on the confessions blog, it should be noted that Linda doesn't have to pay for Simon and Sara to attend Hillerska. Even private schools in Sweden haven't been allowed to charge tuition fees since 2014. They do charge very high boarding fees, but that's why Sara got a grant to board in S2. So in principle, Hillerska shouldn't be more expensive than Marieberg, although it is possible that school outings may cost a bit more and there may also be other more or less voluntary extra costs (e.g. private tutoring or equipment for extracurriculars).

If you want to read more about the boarding school fees, you can check out this post.

About Simon's summer jobs

I don't think Simon's lines here are meant to be taken as in, "Simon has to contribute to the family economy" or "Simon has to pay for all his own stuff." Linda keeps her children clothed, buys the things they need for their hobbies and presents for their birthdays (e.g. Sara's jodhpurs), and based on her phone call in S3, is even planning to take them abroad to see family.

The key here is the line about Wille and the other rich kids getting everything they want for free, including designer clothes or spontaneous trips to New York. Simon is simply saying he and Ayub need to make some money of their own to do activities and buy things they don't strictly need but want.

Simon and Ayub have been applying for summer jobs hos kommunen, with the municipality. These jobs are only offered for part of the summer (typically three weeks) because the municipality has a limited number of positions available and they want to employ as many applicants as possible. The duties usually involve helping out at municipal services and facilities, e.g. preschools, care facilities for the elderly, facilities for sports and leisure, museums, public parks, and so on. The municipality may also support local businesses and non-profitable associations in offering some positions as well.

Some examples by age:

14-year-olds: simple duties, e.g. mowing lawns or distributing newspapers; reasonable hourly wage SEK 50–80

15 to 16-year-olds: more complex duties mainly in the municipal sector, e.g. working with children, in leisure activities or with the elderly; reasonable hourly wage SEK 80–100

17 to 18-year-olds: increasingly complex duties and more opportunities to find work in the private sector, e.g. cashier work, customer service, simple administrative tasks, hospitality industry; reasonable hourly wage SEK 100–140

I wonder what kind of summer jobs Simon, Sara and Ayub have been doing (and Rosh too, other than the football camp). When outlining my post-S1 summer fic, I had imagined Simon applied to work with children while Sara chose park/garden maintenance because she found it calming after the stormy spring, but that was a long time ago (and the details never even made it into the fic).

Anyway, I think that was all the stuff I meant to cover! As always, I may well be wrong about something, and further discussion is very welcome.

#young royals #young royals meta #linda eriksson #simon eriksson

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months ago

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Defense (of the internet) (from billionaires) in depth

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

The only way to truly billionaire-proof the internet is to a) abolish billionaires and b) abolish the system that allows people to become billionaires. Short of that, any levees we build will need constant tending, reinforcement, and re-evaluation.

That's normal. No security measure (including billionaire-proofing the internet) is a "set and forget" affair. Any time you want something and someone else wants the opposite, you are stuck in an endless game of attack and defense. The measures that block your adversary today will only work until your adversary changes tactics to circumvent your defenses.

For example, mining all the links on the internet to find non-spam sites worked brilliantly for Google, because until Pagerank, there were zero reasons for spammers to get links to point to their sites. Once Google became the dominant way of finding things on the internet, spammers invented the linkfarm. This principle can be summed up as "Show me a ten-foot wall and I'll show you an eleven-foot ladder."

Security designers address this with something called "defense in depth": that's a series of overlapping defenses that are meant to correct for one another's weaknesses. Your bank might use a password, a 2FA code, and – for extremely high-stakes transactions – a series of biographical questions posed by a human customer service over a telephone line.

I've written extensively about defending a new, good internet from billionaire enshittifiers. For example, in this post, I described how Bluesky could be made enshittification-resistant with the use of "Ulysses Pacts" – self-imposed, binding restrictions on enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

A classic example of a Ulysses Pact is "throwing away the Oreos when you go on a diet." Now, it doesn't take a lot of work to devise a countermeasure your future, Oreo-craving self can take to defeat this measure: just drive to the grocery store and buy more Oreos. This even works at 2AM, provided you live within driving distance of an all-night grocer.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't throw away those Oreos. Depending on how strong your Oreo craving is, even a little friction can help you resist the temptation to ruin your diet. We often do bad things because of momentary impulses that fade quickly, and simply airgapping the connection between thought and deed works surprisingly well in many instances.

This is why places with fewer guns have fewer suicides of all kinds: there are plenty of ways to kill yourself, but none are quite so quick and reliable as a gun. People in the grips of a suicidal impulse who don't have guns have more chances to let the impulse pass (this is also why gun control leads to fewer all-cause homicides). So just because a measure is imperfect, that doesn't make it worthless.

If you're trying to give up drinking, you throw away all your booze, but you also go to meetings, and you get a sponsor who can help you out with a 2AM phone call. You might even put a breathalyzer on your car's ignition system. None of these are impossible to defeat (you can get an Uber to the liquor store, after all), but they all create friction between the thing you want, and the thing your adversary (your addiction) is trying to get. They strengthen the hand of you as defender of the sober status quo, against the attacker who wants you to relapse.

Critically, all these defensive measures also buy you space and time that you can use to organize and deploy more defenses. Maybe the long Uber ride to the liquor store gives you enough time to think about your actions so you call your sponsor from the parking lot. Defense is useful even when it only slows your adversary, rather than stopping your adversary in their tracks.

Scaling up from personal defense to societal-scale security considerations, it's useful to think of this as a battle with four fronts: code (what is technically im/possible?), law (what is il/legal?), norms (what is socially un/acceptable?) and markets (what is un/profitable?). This framework was first raised a quarter-century ago, in Larry Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Code_And_Other_Laws_of_Cyberspace_Version_2_0.pdf

Lessig laid out these four forces as four angles of attack that challengers to the status quo should plan their strategy around. If you want to liberalize copyright, you can try norms (the "Free Mickey" campaign), laws (the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court case), code (machine-readable Creative Commons licenses) and markets (open access/free software businesses). Each one of these helps the other – for example, if lots of people believe in copyright reform (norms), more of them will back a Humble Bundle for open access materials (markets), and more lawmakers will be interested in changing copyright statutes (law), and more hackers will see reason to do cool things with CC licenses, like search engines (code).

But the four forces aren't just for attackers seeking to disrupt the status quo – they're just as important for defenders looking to create and sustain a new status quo. Figuring out how to "lock a system open" is very different from figuring out how to "force a system open." But they're both campaigns waged with code, law, norms and markets.

We're living through a key moment in enshittification history. Millions of people have become dissatisfied with legacy social media companies run by despicable, fascism-friendly billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and are ready to leave, despite the costs (losing contact with friends who stay behind). While many of them are moving to group chats and private Discord servers,tens of millions have moved to new social media platforms that advertise (though they don't necessarily deliver) decentralization: Mastodon (and the fediverse) and Bluesky (and the atmosphere).

Decentralization is itself a defensive countermeasure (code). When a service has diffuse power, it's harder for any one person to take it over. Federation adds another defensive layer, because users who don't like the way one server is run can move to another server, with varying degrees of data- and identity-portability. That makes it harder for server owners to squeeze users to make money (markets), and gives them an out if server owners try it anyway.

Federation with decentralization is my favorite anti-enshittification defense. It's powerful as hell. It's the main reason I endorse Free Our Feeds, an effort to (among other things) build more Bluesky servers to decrease the centralization and give users dissatisfied with Bluesky management an alternative:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

That said, decentralization and federation are not perfect, set-and-forget defenses. Take email – the oldest, most successful federated system of them all. Email is nominally decentralized, but most email traffic goes through a handful of extremely large servers run by a cartel of companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, and a few ISPs). These companies collude (or, more charitably, coordinate) to block email from non-cartel companies, in the name of fighting spam. This makes running your own mail server so hard that it is nearly impossible (that is, if you care about people actually receiving the email you send them):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

What's interesting about enshittified email is that it didn't start with corporate takeover: it started with volunteer-maintained blocklists of untrustworthy servers that most email operators subscribed to, defederating from any server that appeared on the list. These blocklists of bad servers were opaque (often, their maintainers would operate anonymously, citing the threat of retaliation from criminal scammers whose servers appeared on the list). They had little or no appeal process, and few or no objective criteria for inclusion (you could be blocklisted for how your email server was configured, even if no one was using it to send spam). All of this set up the conditions to favor large email servers, and also had the effect of immunizing these large servers from appearing on blocklists. I mean, once three quarters of the internet is on Gmail, no one is going to block email from Gmail, even if a ton of spam is sent using its servers.

The lesson of email doesn't mean email is bad, nor does it mean decentralization and federation are useless. It doesn't even mean that blocklists of bad servers are evil. It just means that federation and decentralization are imperfect and insufficient defenses against enshittification, and that blocklists are useful, but very dangerous. It means that we should strive to keep our systems federated and decentralized, and watch our blocklists very carefully, and not rely on any of this as the only defense against enshittification.

Likewise, both Mastodon and Bluesky are built on free/open code and standards. That means that anyone can fork them, fix them or mod them. What's more, the licenses involved are irrevocable, making them very effective Ulysses Pacts. No one – not a CEO, not a VC investor, not a court or a blackmailer – can order someone to make their GPL code proprietary. The license is perpetual and irrevocable, and that's that.

Free/open licenses are excellent Ulysses Pacts and great code-related defenses against enshittification, but they, too, are imperfect and insufficient. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have all figured out how to enshittify services that are built on free/open code:

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/libreplanet-2018-keynote

And then there are all the companies that use free/open code and defeat the freedom and openness by simply violating the license, on the grounds that a decentralized, federated development community can't figure out who has standing to sue, and also can't afford to pay for the lawyers to do so:

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/may/16/vizio-remand-win/

That's not to say that code-based antienshittification measures are pointless – only to say that they need other measures to backstop them, as defense in depth. Let's talk about law, then. Both Mastodon and Bluesky are governed by legal entities that are, nominally, organized by charters that oblige them to eschew enshittification and be responsive to their users (Bluesky is a B-corp, Mastodon's code is overseen by a US nonprofit).

These structures are very important. I've been a volunteer board member for several co-ops and nonprofits (I was even once a volunteer for a nonprofit co-op!) and I'm familiar with the role that good governance can play in defending a project from internal and external pressures to betray its mission. That means I'm also familiar with the limits of these governance measures.

Take nonprofits: nominally, nonprofits are legally bound to serve their charitable purpose, and technically, stakeholders have legal recourse if they stray from this. But you don't have to look far to find nonprofits that have violated their charter and gotten away with it. Take the Nature Conservancy, which has become a key player in the market for fake "carbon offsets" that are used to justify everything from fossil fuel extraction to SUV manufacture:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing

Or think of ISOC, who get tens of millions of dollars in free money every year from their stewardship of the .ORG registry, but who decided to hand over control of the nonprofits' TLD of choice to a shadowy cabal of hedge-fund billionaires:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-review

Co-ops, too, are powerful but wildly imperfect. REI is a member co-op that does lots of great things…and also busts unions:

https://prismreports.org/2024/07/17/rei-workers-unionizing-fighting-for-agreemment/

But REI is a paragon of social virtue compared to its Canadian equivalent, Mountain Equipment Coop, whose board was taken over by corrupt assholes who then sold the whole thing to a US private equity fund and change the name to "MEC":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/16/spike-lee-joint/#casse-le-mec

B-corps are far from perfect, too: while they are nominally required to serve a positive social purpose, in practice, they can violate that purpose with impunity, whether that through greenwashing:

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240202-has-b-corp-certification-turned-into-corporate-greenwashing

Or Kickstarter insiders taking a $100m bribe to help Andreesen-Horowitz do a crypto pump-and-dump:

https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/03/11/kickstarter-blockchain-a16z-crypto-secret-investment-chris-dixon/

None of this is to claim that B-corps, co-ops, and nonprofits are useless. Maybe we should just give up on organization altogether and have some kind of adhocracy? If you're thinking this will help, then you need to read Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" and learn how a "leaderless" group is actually led by its least scrupulous, most Machiavellian schemers:

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

At this point, you might be mentally designing a new corporate structure, one that's designed to correct for both the tyranny of structurelessness and the brittleness of co-ops, nonprofits and B-corps. Please don't do this. Rolling your own corporate structure is like rolling your own cryptography or your own free software license. It always ends in tears:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-remove-non-profit-control-give-sam-altman-equity-sources-say-2024-09-25/

I like co-ops, nonprofits and B-corps. They're powerful – but insufficient – weapons against enshittification. They need to be backstopped by other measures, like norms. Normative measures are very powerful! Of course, mass revolts of angry users don't always keep companies from enshittifying:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/30/reddit-moderator-protest-communities-social-media

But sometimes they do. The C-suite of Unity was shown the door after enshittifying their flagship product:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23911338/unity-ceo-steps-down-developers-react

As was the enshittifying CEO of Sonos:

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342179/sonos-ceo-patrick-spence-resignation-reason-app

And of course, these defensive measures reinforce one another. The public outcry against the .ORG selloff (norms) led to California's Attorney General stepping in (law), and after that, we more-or-less romped to victory:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/17/icann_california_org_sale_delay/

Markets are the final antienshittificatory force. If a social network is designed to be surveillance-resistant, it will be (very) hard to implement behavioral surveillance advertising. If a network is designed to support a many clients, it will be easy to implement an ad-blocker. Both factors make advertising-based businesses very unattractive to individual server operators, spammers, and VCs who back companies that operate elements of a federated server.

Same goes for systems that allow users to control the recommendations and other algorithmic aspects of their feeds (including switching these off altogether). The fact that Tiktok's users overwhelmingly use an algorithmic feed that they have no way to control or even understand is an anti-Ulysses Pact, an irresistible temptation for Tiktok to enshittify itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

By contrast, it's much harder to pull those shenanigans with services that technologically devolve control over recommendations (code), making it less profitable to even try to attempt this (markets). And of course, if users refuse to tolerate this kind of thing (norms) and can hop to other servers (code), then any system that pulls that nonsense will lose lots of users and go broke (markets).

This defense-in-depth approach to decentralized social media pushes us to analyze both Mastodon and Bluesky through a tactical lens – to identify the weak parts in the defenses of each and shore them up.

Take Free Our Feeds and its attempt to stand up more Bluesky servers. This addresses one of the serious technical deficiencies in Bluesky (the lack of federation), and if lots of Bluesky users try it out, it will normalize the idea that Bluesky is a constellation of independently managed servers (norms). It also creates Bluesky alternatives with radically different commercial imperatives (markets), because the main Bluesky server is backed by venture capitalists, who are notorious for their enshittifying impulses.

But security isn't static – a tactic that works today won't work tomorrow if your adversary can figure out a way around it. Bluesky is a B-corp with an excellent board with some names I have profound trust for, but B-corps can abandon their public benefit purpose, and boards can be fired (and also even people you trust can talk themselves into doing stupid and wicked things, see .ORG).

If millions of Bluesky users flock to a rival service, one run by a nonprofit (markets), Bluesky's investors might be tempted to sever the link between Bluesky and that new server (code). That's what Facebook and Apple did to XMPP, an interoperable, federated messaging system that used to connect Apple users, Facebook users, and users of many other servers. They did this for commercial reasons (markets), to trap and lock in their users (code), and they got away with it because not enough users were outraged by this (norms) that they could get away with it.

When Bluesky's VCs fire the CEO, kick people like Mike Masnick off its board, and then defederate from Free Our Feeds' server, how do we make that more like Sonos or Unity (where the corporation capitulated to its users), and not like Reddit (where the user revolt was crushed)?

With social media, it's a numbers game. Social media grows by network effects: the more users there are in a system, the more valuable it is. It's not merely imperative to create alternative Bluesky servers, it's imperative to make them populous enough that cutting them off from the first Bluesky server will inflict more pain on the company than it inflicts on those other users. That's not a guarantee that Bluesky's future, enshittification-bent management won't go ahead and do it anyway, but it does increase the chances that if they press on, their users will take the hit to defect to free/open servers.

Bluesky has other problems besides its centralization, of course. The reason Bluesky is so centralized is that it's really expensive to run an alternative Bluesky server that provides a home for users who have left the main server (a "relay" in Bluesky-ese). Partly this is down to tooling: because no one has done it, Free Our Feeds will have to invent a lot of stuff to get that server up and running, but people who come later will benefit from whatever Free Our Feeds develops along the way.

But mostly, this isn't a tooling problem – it's an architecture problem. The way that Bluesky is structured demands a lot more of relays than Mastodon demands of "instances" (a loose Fediverse analog to relays):

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/21/the-technological-poison-pill-how-atprotocol-encourages-competition-resists-evil-billionaires-lock-in-enshittification/#comment-4253477

This is a code problem, and it's a hard one, but it's not insurmountable. The history of networked tools is the history of developers figuring out how to break apart large, monolithic, expensive services in cheaper, smaller, easier to develop. In other words, our defense in depth of Bluesky militates for more than one project – not just a "Free Our Feeds" but also a software development project to make it easier for anyone to free those feeds.

Which raises some important questions, the biggest being "Why bother?" After all, there's already a perfectly good Fediverse that could sure use the money and effort that Free Our Feeds is proposing to put into Bluesky. My main answer here is that the point of disenshittification is an enshittification-free internet, not a better Mastodon:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

We want to set Bluesky users free because the problem with Bluesky isn't its users, it's the fact that there's no fire-exits those users can avail themselves of if Bluesky's VCs set it on fire:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

But there's another good reason to do this, one that involves people who have no interest in using Bluesky: even if you don't want to use a better Bluesky, you likely have very good reasons to reach Bluesky users. Maybe you want them to help you organize against enshittification! Or maybe you just want to operate a real-world venue where people can gather and have a great time and support performers, and right now you're stuck advertising on Facebook and Instagram, and you don't want to end up being forced to use an enshittified, fire-exit-free Bluesky in the future:

https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2025/01/13.html

Of course, there's plenty of reasons to want to make Mastodon better. Many of Mastodon's features are absurdly primitive – the lack of threading support and quote-boosting sucks, and the supposedly opt-in system-wide search doesn't work, even if you opt in. Masto could sure use some of the money that Free Our Feeds is asking for to spruce up Bluesky.

This is true, but also irrelevant. Mastodon is stuck at around a million active users, while Bluesky has twenty times that amount. Crowdfunding a couple dollars per user to pursue software development is a reasonable goal, but raising twenty times that much is a lot harder:

https://mastodon-analytics.com/

The money being raised for Free Our Feeds isn't money that had been earmarked for Mastodon development, nor will abandoning Free Our Feeds redirect those funds to Mastodon development.

Which isn't to say that we shouldn't chip in to fund Mastodon development. I donated to the Kickstarter for Pixelfed, a Fediverse Insta replacement that has Meta so scared that they'll suspend your account if you even mention it:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks

Adding Insta-like features to Mastodon is great. Fixing search, quoting, and threading would be great, too. We probably need some kind of governance efforts to keep volunteer-run, good faith defederation blocklists from exhibiting the same dynamics that email went through during the spam wars. There's some Bluesky features I'd love to see on Mastodon, like composable moderation and user-controlled, user-tunable recommendations. We also probably need some kind of adversarial press that closely monitors the governance structure for the Mastodon codebase and reports on process in standardization (I cannot overstate how much fuckery can take place within standards bodies, under cover of a nigh-impermeable shield of boringness).

Breaking Bluesky open is a priority. Keeping Mastodon open is a priority. But neither of these are goals unto themselves. The point is to set people free, not set technology free. Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is." Right now, I'm interested in anti-enshittification measures for Bluesky because "that's where the people are."

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/23/defense-in-depth/#self-marginalization

Image: Mike Baird (modified) https://flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/2354116406

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

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wearepaladin · 14 days ago

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Something that astounds me is that there hasn’t been any serious attempt by anyone to depict a young Aragorn story. More specifically, of his adventures under the name Thorongil, Eagle of the Star, during the period between the Hobbit and Fellowship. Let me outline what takes place here.

From 2957 to 2080, Aragorn served in the courts of both Rohan and Gondor at a critical time, as this not long into Sauron’s return as a power in Middle Earth, and being an existential threat to both kingdoms. That’s 23 years of interesting stories to tell, showing several critical details about his development.

1. It shows him learning how to be a leader outside the confines of either Elrond’s or the Dunedain’s influence, where his role was known, if kept secret, and immediately respected once he took his role of chieftain, while in Gondor and Rohan under an assumed name and initially an outsider, his eventual leadership and trust had to be hard earned and genuine. This would prove critical in the War of the Ring, as he would be able to rally both Rohan and Gondor at their times of greatest need.

2. He also learns the ways of Gondor and Rohan as a government servant, earning the respect of both kingdoms Thengel and Steward Ecthellion, and thus know both the culture and the way these kingdoms were run. If you have ever heard someone sneer at Aragorn’s leadership lacking an understanding of the Gondorian Tax Code, just point to this fact.

3. All of the above situates Aragorn to be in a story that contains both courtly intrigue and a long war against the existential threat of Sauron. While he was beloved by Ecthellion for example, Denethor had no such warm compunctions towards him, and that had to lead to some tense moments that could translate well into a story of court intrigue.

4. Aragorn also lead a critical victory against the Corsairs of Umbar, Allies of Sauron, destroying Sauron’s primary naval attack force and slowing the plans of Conquest considerably. Umbar had a long history of those among Númenor who cleaved close to Sauron, and any depiction of them would provide an antagonist that hasn’t received as much focus as other servants of Sauron, allowing for some interesting exploration.

5. At the end of the 23 years of service, Aragorn went East, into enemy Territory, and it’s from his recounting of this we know a bit about Rhun, the home associated with the Easterlings, and where the stars appear different in the night sky. Outside of Mordor, are whole groups of people that have never received a fair look on what life is like under Sauron, and would not make peace with the men of the west until Sauron’s defeat. Here we could see not only men but the dark elves who never went west to see the light of the trees, who could have a culture quite different front their western cousins, and where the two blue wizards fought a unknown war against Sauron.

6. When Aragorn returned home via Lothlórien , he reunited and began the process of courting Arwen and gave her the Ring of Barahir, and she in turn abandoned her mortality for him. A powerful ending that heralds all the future events to come.

In short, you got character growth, you have conflict of intrigue and against evil, foes and cultures previously unexplored, and potential for new faces and heroes to invest in and hope for. When the Legendarium becomes open for all to write and publish, that is the novel I want to read and maybe even write myself. I’m amazed no one else seems to have hit on it.

#lord of the rings #legendarium #Tolkien #Aragorn #thorongil #the paladin rambles

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payblogs · 10 months ago

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prpservicesin · 1 year ago

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long code sms

Long code SMS refers to the use of traditional, full-length phone numbers for sending and receiving text messages, as opposed to short codes, which are typically shorter numbers used for mass messaging campaigns. Long-code SMS provides businesses with a familiar and reliable means of communication with their customers, allowing for two-way communication that is convenient and cost-effective. Unlike short codes, long codes are often used for more personalized interactions, such as customer support inquiries, appointment reminders, and order confirmations. Additionally, long codes can be easily integrated into existing systems and workflows, making them a versatile tool for businesses looking to enhance their communication strategies.

#long code #long code service #long code service provider

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outsource-medical-billing · 2 months ago

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Chiropractic Billing Services in Long Beach, California (CA) - 24/7 Medical Billing Services

Leading Chiropractic billing services provider in Long Beach, California (CA). Boost your practice revenue with 24/7 Medical Billing Services.

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naamahdarling · 1 year ago

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Maybe it isn't that I actually hate medical professionals? They just suck and are weird sometimes, and a lot of them shouldn't be practicing, but I don't hate them as a group, like, personally.

What I hate is their ability to make my life harder in ways that are often completely opaque to me, and a lot of the crap things they do are not really possible to challenge. And I hate the fact that holding them responsible fort dogshit behavior in any way that will actually benefit me is almost always impossible.

And I also hate the fact that they have to do stupid things sometimes because that's how the system is set up, and those things sometimes mean patients actually get harmed. They aren't fond of that part either! They don't want the system to be the way it is! But they don't have a choice, so sometimes people like me get forced by bureaucracy into doing things that are re-traumatizing. And I can't imagine that feels good for them at all, knowing that their patients are sometimes only "consenting" because that bureaucracy will not let them be helped in any other way. Which isn't consent at all. I imagine that must be pretty traumatizing for them, too, sometimes.

If it were easier to actually access medical care without tremendous delays in this country right now I would have much less trouble finding providers who are good at what they do and are not horrible people, and who have clinic staff who can do their fucking job.

Oh and I also don't appreciate how evasive and unwilling to commit they are out of fear of being held to an answer that turns out to be inaccurate, but I can't make an informed decision about my own care unless they give me at least some information about probabilities and trajectories and typicalities. Genuinely, how the fuck am I supposed to navigate that shit. I get that some patients are really fucking difficult, but I should be able to get a special stamp on my file or something that says I understand that sometimes medicine isn't an exact science and the best answers that my doctors can give may not always prove to be accurate in the long term. I know they don't like being in that situation either.

A lot of medical professionals are fucking assholes, and unfortunately the ones who are not are still hamstrung by a system set up to actively prevent people from getting care.

I miss my old doctor. He gave no shits about anything that wasn't the patient. He prescribed scheduled meds based on what the patient needed and not based on fear of consequences potentially being imposed on him by the punitive patient-hostile drugs-are-bad moral panic machine developed to force suffering people into buying more dangerous drugs off the street in order to prevent far fewer people from maybe getting high off of drugs that at least weren't laced with lethal substances. (The purpose of a system is what it does.) Did he get sanctioned and become locally unhireable? Unfortunately yes he did. Does he now provide concierge care to rich people? Yes he does. He found a way to make it work, God bless him.

Everything about the medical system in this country is fucked. Hospitals, doctors, nurses, pharmacies, pharmacists, pharmacy techs, phlebotomists, clinic administrative staff, insurance companies, medical schools and schooling, licensing boards, drug advertising to both providers and patients, pharmaceutical reps, researchers, research, publishing, medical trials, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers and distributors, medical equipment, charting software, billing and billing codes, diagnostic criteria, charity and low income services, accessible transportation, home care, the lack of independent individual patient advocates, dietitians and nutritionists, access to physical and occupational therapy and physical and occupational therapists, the massive bigotry of every kind rampant in every corner of the medical field, social work, senior care and assisted living, deprioritization of informed consent and harm reduction, disability applications, inaccessibility of medical records, especially psychiatric notes which are specifically allowed to be withheld from patients, lack of continuity of care for disadvantaged people, care that is equitably accessible to disabled people, telemedicine, patient portals, phone systems, clinic hours, every single aspect of inpatient and outpatient psychiatry, facility security, all sorts of things going on with therapists who are nevertheless probably the least malicious group of people in this entire charade, aaaaaand patients themselves.

Also hospital toilets that are too tall and make it literally physically impossible for me to poop while I'm there waiting for somebody to come out of surgery. I just needed to take a crap, guys. You didn't need to make the toilets so tall that my feet didn't even touch the floor. It is very clean but there is no shitting for short people at St Francis.

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blackpearlblast · 2 years ago

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a rundown on the listed e-sim platforms from this tweet from mirna el helbawi. visit esimsforgaza to learn about this effort. (they also have a tutorial on how to purchase an esim and send it to them)

update v12 (5/21/24) holafly (israel and egypt), nomad (regional middle east), simly (palestine and middle east), mogo (israel), and airalo (discover) are currently in the highest in demand. if it has been more than 3 weeks since you initially sent your esim and your esim has not been activated, you can reforward your original email with the expiration date in the subject line. you can see gothhabiba’s guide for how to tell if your esims have been activated. if your esim has expired without use, you can contact customer service to renew or replace it.

troubleshooting hint 1: if you are trying to pay through paypal, make sure you have pop-ups enabled! otherwise the payment window won't be able to appear. (this issue most frequently seems to occur with nomad)

troubleshooting hint 2: if you are trying to purchase an esim using the provider's app, it may block you from purchasing if your phone does not fit the requirements to install and use their esims. use their website in your browser instead and this problem should go away.

nomad

for the month of may, first time referrals give 25% off for a person's first purchase and 25% off the referrer's next purchase! it's a great time to use someone's referral code from the notes if you are a first time buyer.

you can use a referral code to get $3 off your first purchase and also make it so the person whose code you used can buy more esims for gaza. many people have been leaving their referral codes in the replies of this post and supposedly a referral code may eventually reach capacity so just keep trying until you find one that works! BACKPACKNOMAD is another code to get $3 off your first purchase, it's been working for some people but not others so try out a referral code instead if you can't get it to work. NOMADCNG is a code for 5% off any middle east region nomad esims posted by connecting gaza. it can be used on any purchase, not just your first but is generally going to give less off than the first-purchase only codes, so use those first. it can be used in combination with nomad points. AWESOME NEW CODE: nomad esim discount code for 75% off any plan, NOMADCS25 do not know how long it lasts but this is an amazing deal esp. since they are really low on esims right now! (nomad promo codes do not work on plans that are already on sale, unlimited plans, and plans under $5)

weekly tuesdays only code on nomad web, PST timezone! it gives 10% off plans 10gb and above. NOMADTUE

nomad also seems to be kind of sluggish sometimes when it comes to sending out emails with the codes. you can look for them manually by going to manage -> manage plans -> the plan you purchased -> installation instruction and scroll down to install esim via QR code or manual input then select QR code to find the QR code which you can screenshot and email to them. often just the act of logging back into your nomad account after purchase seems to cause the email with the code to come through though.

mogo

mogo's website is fucking annoying to navigate and i couldn't find any promo codes, but their prices are massively on sale anyway. you have to pick if you want your esim to be for iphone, ipad, or android for some reason. according to statcounter, android makes up approx. 75% of mobile markets in palestine while iphone represents approx. 25%. so i would probably recommend prioritizing donations of android esims but if you can afford multiple, try buying an iphone one too? if i can find any official direction from the connecting gaza crew on this i will update with it.

a good referral code to use for mogo is 8R29F9. the way things are worded are confusing but as far as i can tell, if you use it we both get a 10% discount on your first purchase. (the referrer gets a 10% voucher that allows them to top up in use esims, they are someone who i know has bought a lot of esims and will be able to make good use of the top-up discount vouchers!) also upon signing up it automatically generates a password for you which you can change by downloading the app. (check your email to find your account's current password)

holafly (also looking for holafly esims for egypt now)

holafly is pricier than the others and the only promo code i could find was ESIMNOW for 7% off. someone in the tags mentioned GETESIM7 as another 7% off code they had received, so if you have already used ESIMNOW or can't seem to get it to work, try GETESIM7. another 7% off code is HOLAXSUMMER7 which is valid until june 2nd. referral codes only seem to give 5% off and they don't stack. (i don't remember the source, it was on some sketchy coupon site i don't want to link to and only can recommend because i tried it myself) you can also use my referral link for 5% off if you can afford the 2% worse deal on your end, it will give me $5 credit which i can put towards buying more esims. connecting gaza has also posted the promo code HOLACNG for 5% off but since it is less than the 7% off codes and as far as i can tell does not give credit towards others to buy esims like the referral links, i would consider it lower priority for use.

simly (note: simly must be downloaded as an app to be used, the website link is to help people confirm they are downloading the right app)

i have not personally used simly so i am going to be going off of the sixth slide of mirna el helbawi's instagram guide, with some corrections from someone who has successfully purchased an esim from simly. after downloading the app and making an account, search for palestine or middle east and purchase your preferred package. the page the app takes you to after your purchase should have the QR code to send to the esimsforgaza email, it won't show up in your email receipt. someone kindly left her referral code in the tags of this post, it gives $3 off your first purchase and will give her $3 credit to put towards purchasing more esims for gaza. the code is CIWA2. (if this referral code doesn't work, try one from the notes of this post!) according to someone in the notes, ARB is a simly promo code for 25% off esims that is still working as of march 3rd.

airalo

some people have noted issues trying to sign up for airalo using the browser version of the website, it worked for me but if you are struggling you can give the mobile app a try and that should work. you can use a referral code to get $3 off your first purchase and give the code suppler a $3 credit for buying more esims. KARINA9661 is a code sourced from this post which is also a wonderful example of how using people's referral codes can really make a difference. if for some reason that referral code isn't working, you can find more in the notes of the original esim post i made here.

@/fairuzfan also has a tag of esim referral codes for various platforms!

(note: mogo and holafly both link to israel esims as there are no general regional packages for the middle east like on nomad and the esims for gaza website specifically linked to the israel package on mogo, so i linked to the equivalent on holafly.)

#esims for gaza #esims #gaza #palestine #free palestine #connecting gaza #despite not having used simly myself i'm fairly experienced with esim services at this point so i will likely be able to answer some #questions and i also have someone familiar with simly i can ask if i am not sure of the answer myself. so please go ahead and ask questions #if you're struggling with donating an esim from any of these sources!

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bumbldee · 6 months ago

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Gristol, Head of HR AU

Where Gristol bitched too much about how poorly ran the Psychonauts is, even citing his sources, and inexplicably gets hired as the Head of HR for his community service.

Some doodles before i go off for holiday, wont be back for like another week

Anyways ramble about this under the cut

Basically, before Gristol gets his verdict, Sasha's assigned to see what's up w him to figure out what's a good punishment.

Gristol spends like a long time ranting about how piss poor the Psychonauts is managed. As he was supposed to blend in, he researched EVERY ethic and code that the psychonauts were oblidged to as he wanted to fit in. His mother never wanted him to end up like his father, so she forced him to learn management and strategy as a kid, and he's DAMN well good at it, except for being a leader. As a stress reliever he'd written down everything wrong with management, and how he'd fix it, for the past 3 years of him working there. Employee's who constantly breached conduct, how shit the hiring security was, etc etc

Sasha sees his manifesto and is like, somewhat impressed with it. He sends it off to Truman, whose also surprised with it.

At first, Gristol tries to escape for like, a month. But then he realized this was the best he was going to get, seeing that he did not have any other skills than management and planning, or even a certified high school degree.

He's actually good at his job, improving employee wellfair and turnout by around 12%. He takes it extremely seriously but at the same time he doesn't want to be there, he's grumpy and it kinda puts everyone off.

Even though he's lived through the life of the common person and what they need, he still believes in Grulovia's dictatorship. His empathy and sudden want for change in management was a result of going through it himself, so he's mostly just serving what he would've wanted. Big ol hypocrite.

Managing a single department has kind of turned him off the idea of trying to be Gzar entirely. He realized the hard way he's not suited for leadership roles.

For like the first few months, he's forced to sit in a little desk next to Truman's with a shitty little typewriter. He's put there because Truman needs to see his performance + it's funny to him. Eventually though he gets really bad backpain from crouching over to type on his little typewriter, and does get his own little office.

Hollis NEVER agreed to hiring him, and was really pissed when Truman did it without her input. They spend a lot of their first interactions arguing, but they do eventually get along somewhat, sharing the same annoyance on dumb decisions Truman or Employees did. They're still hostile but like, they won't try to kill each other anymore.

Gristol has what he needs, he's provided simple accommodations (a small room with a shitty kitchen and a small bathroom) and an allowance (300-500 a month, it's mostly fun + food money).

Lori was originally going to give him a "Best Mail Clerk!" mug, but then the events of Psychonauts 2 happens and she never gets to give him his mug. When he gets hired as head of hr, she cancels out Mail Clerk from the mug and written down "head of HR"

One of Gristol's duties is to water Truman's plants in his office.

Gristol initially tried to have Raz fired, (everyone thought it was because he was salty Raz ruined his plans, nah it's because y'know he's 10) but with Truman's insistence he stayed on, Gristol had updated his contract. Raz is only permitted to go on less dangerous missions and more frequent mental health inspections. He might've had to forge some documents to be able to register Raz to work. Maybe.

#psychonauts 2 #gristol malik #sasha nein #Truman Zanotto #hollis forsythe #arty farty

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laika290 · 1 year ago

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ever wonder why spotify/discord/teams desktop apps kind of suck?

i don't do a lot of long form posts but. I realized that so many people aren't aware that a lot of the enshittification of using computers in the past decade or so has a lot to do with embedded webapps becoming so frequently used instead of creating native programs. and boy do i have some thoughts about this.

for those who are not blessed/cursed with computers knowledge Basically most (graphical) programs used to be native programs (ever since we started widely using a graphical interface instead of just a text-based terminal). these are apps that feel like when you open up the settings on your computer, and one of the factors that make windows and mac programs look different (bc they use a different design language!) this was the standard for a long long time - your emails were served to you in a special email application like thunderbird or outlook, your documents were processed in something like microsoft word (again. On your own computer!). same goes for calendars, calculators, spreadsheets, and a whole bunch more - crucially, your computer didn't depend on the internet to do basic things, but being connected to the web was very much an appreciated luxury!

that leads us to the eventual rise of webapps that we are all so painfully familiar with today - gmail dot com/outlook, google docs, google/microsoft calendar, and so on. as html/css/js technology grew beyond just displaying text images and such, it became clear that it could be a lot more convenient to just run programs on some server somewhere, and serve the front end on a web interface for anyone to use. this is really very convenient!!!! it Also means a huge concentration of power (notice how suddenly google is one company providing you the SERVICE) - you're renting instead of owning. which means google is your landlord - the services you use every day are first and foremost means of hitting the year over year profit quota. its a pretty sweet deal to have a free email account in exchange for ads! email accounts used to be paid (simply because the provider had to store your emails somewhere. which takes up storage space which is physical hard drives), but now the standard as of hotmail/yahoo/gmail is to just provide a free service and shove ads in as much as you need to.

webapps can do a lot of things, but they didn't immediately replace software like skype or code editors or music players - software that requires more heavy system interaction or snappy audio/visual responses. in 2013, the electron framework came out - a way of packaging up a bundle of html/css/js into a neat little crossplatform application that could be downloaded and run like any other native application. there were significant upsides to this - web developers could suddenly use their webapp skills to build desktop applications that ran on any computer as long as it could support chrome*! the first applications to be built on electron were the late code editor atom (rest in peace), but soon a whole lot of companies took note! some notable contemporary applications that use electron, or a similar webapp-embedded-in-a-little-chrome as a base are:

microsoft teams

notion

vscode

discord

spotify

anyone! who has paid even a little bit of attention to their computer - especially when using older/budget computers - know just how much having chrome open can slow down your computer (firefox as well to a lesser extent. because its just built better <3)

whenever you have one of these programs open on your computer, it's running in a one-tab chrome browser. there is a whole extra chrome open just to run your discord. if you have discord, spotify, and notion open all at once, along with chrome itself, that's four chromes. needless to say, this uses a LOT of resources to deliver applications that are often much less polished and less integrated with the rest of the operating system. it also means that if you have no internet connection, sometimes the apps straight up do not work, since much of them rely heavily on being connected to their servers, where the heavy lifting is done.

taking this idea to the very furthest is the concept of chromebooks - dinky little laptops that were created to only run a web browser and webapps - simply a vessel to access the google dot com mothership. they have gotten better at running offline android/linux applications, but often the $200 chromebooks that are bought in bulk have almost no processing power of their own - why would you even need it? you have everything you could possibly need in the warm embrace of google!

all in all the average person in the modern age, using computers in the mainstream way, owns very little of their means of computing.

i started this post as a rant about the electron/webapp framework because i think that it sucks and it displaces proper programs. and now ive swiveled into getting pissed off at software services which is in honestly the core issue. and i think things can be better!!!!!!!!!!! but to think about better computing culture one has to imagine living outside of capitalism.

i'm not the one to try to explain permacomputing specifically because there's already wonderful literature ^ but if anything here interested you, read this!!!!!!!!!! there is a beautiful world where computers live for decades and do less but do it well. and you just own it. come frolic with me Okay ? :]

*when i say chrome i technically mean chromium. but functionally it's same thing

#txt #long post #permacomputing #sustainability

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heirhonkful · 4 months ago

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Commission Info!

This post is going to go over my commission information. Mostly for character illustrations, but there will be other kinds of commissions included. I'll be breaking up the information and prices into chunks based on: - Art Style - Pose - Additional Elements (i.e. backgrounds, props, additional characters...) - Experimental Commissions (i.e. comics, animations, etc...) - Terms of Service. There will be example images provided and a short paragraph explaining the information. Should be a long post so it will all be under the read-more.

Art Style

The style decides the base price of your commission. Sketch: $15

The sketch style means I only do a sketch of the character. I generally will keep it clean but they will often have a rough feeling to them still. I am generally okay with the inclusion of one, somewhat sparse color in a sketch commission used for occasional detailing. Colored Doodle: $20

With a colored doodle, you get a rough and sketchy drawing but with some simple coloring. The amount of detail and complexity depends on additional commission add-ons. However, I get a lot more say in how the end result looks with these, meaning the general "roughness," presence/amount of shading, etc are all at my own discretion. Flat Colors: $30

This style means I keep it to flat colors only. The line art will be cleaner than the sketch or colored doodle. However, there will be no shading whatsoever. Rendered: $50

A fully rendered commission includes full color and shading. I will often use textured brushes in these, but if you want something smoother then you can ask for that. I include Disco Elysium styled portraits here and not in "style imitation" (further down) generally because I feel better attempting that style as I've had attempts with it in the past.

Pose

From here on, prices are considered "add-ons" meaning they are added on to the base price from the selected commission style. Bust: +$0 A bust commission includes the head, shoulders, and sometimes chest of a character. Half Body: +$10 Half body commissions can include hips and above on a character. If you want a bust commission but also wanted to include a character's hands in the pose, it is considered a half body commission. Full Body: +$20 Generally includes anything beyond the hips. If you can see the whole body, it feels self explanatory that a full body commission is what you are looking for.

Additional Elements

Backgrounds Transparent/Single Color: +$0 If nothing is specified for the background, the commission will simply have whatever color my default "paper" layer current is set to as the background. If you want something different feel free to ask, you can even send a specific hex code if you'd like. A transparent background is available to all commission levels, just ask me to also send a version without a background. Simple Design: +$5 This generally includes things like simple shapes or more complex multiple color backgrounds. Complex Background: +$20 A simple background can include a few objects/background elements. Generally if you want you character sitting in a chair, at a table, under a tree, leaning against a wall, etc, you'd be asking for a simple background. Scene: +$50 If you would like a whole scene, covering the entire background with many complex and sometimes intricate elements then would like a Scene background. This would also include whatever props your character would have, so if you get a Scene commission, you can ignore the next "Props" section. Props (Price covers one to three props) Simple Prop: +$5 A simple prop often just includes something the character is perhaps holding or a larger prop with a simple design. Complex Prop: +$10 If the design for the prop is more intricate then the price is increased. Additional Characters: +$15 Any additional character is another $15.

Experimental Commissions

Experimental commissions are commissions I would like to start doing, but don't have much experience doing for other people. As such, they generally include a few additional caveats when compared to a normal commission.

Style Imitation: +$20

I can attempt to imitate a style, the "Style" base price is dependent on the style I will be imitating. This is just something I'd like more practice with to be honest. I also really only would consider imitating the styles from famous cartoonists or the styles of certain games, comics, or animated shows. I won't imitate another random online illustrator's style. Simply because it feels a little rude lol. Examples provided include: Peanuts and The Far Side (both showing scenes from the Maia Kobabe memoir, Gender Queer), Deathloop, Darkest Dungeon II, and Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. Comics: $20

The styles are limited to Sketch, Colored Doodle, and Flat colors for the time being. They are also intended to be more like a comedic webcomic, and not something like a comic book or graphic novel. I may include stuff like that in the future though, priced per page. For now, the base $20 includes up to 4 panels and another $10 per additional panel. Animations: $35 per ten frames I am still somewhat new to animating, so the style for these are limited to only the Sketch style. Since this is a skill I am learning you should keep the request somewhat simple. (For now there are no example to show because my only animations are NSFW in nature. When I have more SFW examples to show off here, I will add them. For now, you will just have to look for the animations I have already done in my #animation tag) PNGtubers:

The price for these can vary. The style is limited to Flat Colors and the poses are limited to Bust or Half Body. Those decide the base price. Additional expressions (blinking, open mouth, etc) are +$5 because these are often simple and easily made changes just on the face. Additional poses (hands up, additional props, etc) are +$10 The backgrounds are of course Transparent.

I am fine drawing most anything (so NSFW is allowed), just ask to be sure.

I can refuse a commission for any reason

Please have references for me. - If you are having me design a character with no official design be sure to bring reference of examples of what you want your character to look like (like hair and facial features).

Delivery time - Commissions will be done in the order they were received. - For especially complex commissions, expect a few months for completion simply because of my schedule. I do these in my free time. - Simpler commissions can take a few days or maybe weeks. - Please be aware, just because I upload a personal drawing does not mean I am not working on commission.

Revisions - I will check in with you on occasion to ask for input or desired changes. - Please keep bigger changes towards the early parts of the process. As the commission progresses I will be less willing to do larger changes to the commission.

Payment - I only accept payment via Paypal Invoice (you don't need a Paypal account, it will be sent to you via email and you can pay in the link sent) and Ko-fi. - Also, if you are especially happy with you commission, you can even leave a tip on Ko-fi ;3

#honkful art #commission info #making a whole post dedicated to this as opposed to just an image or series of images is far better i think #now if i ever need to update the information i can just edit this post as opposed to having to make new little graphics

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