#private process servers

[swiftwingsexpress]

Private process servers play a crucial role in the legal landscape, serving legal documents and ensuring due process is carried out efficiently. In Weaverville, one standout company excels in this domain: SwiftWings Express.

[goodmorninglovelies42]

It’s weird to be a Ted Lasso fan and a Jason Sudeikis hater. Idk man; I don’t care what your ex did — serving a custody lawsuit on stage at a public event throws up huge red flags for me. And it’s hard to listen to him talk about the forgiveness and kindness as the thesis of the show when I know he’s done that.

[iwtvbigbang]

"Let the tale seduce you . . . "

Calling all creatives! There's one week left to sign up for the big bang - we welcome all characters, all ships, and all ratings (with applicable tags) - and our goal is to create exclusive content for the Vampire Chronicles fandom uploading all month long in October 2023.

If you'd like to participate, please check out our info page for all the links, and feel free to signal boost! But hurry, our open call applications close on the 31st of December.

[justsquibby]

…

[tacticalhimbo]

covidsafehotties , a blog dedicated to covid pandemic resources run by a trans* woman, was deleted for "harassment" after mentioning that her abusive, tme roommate had drawn a knife on her. she simply mentioned that this roommate was tme (which does not mean inherently mean transmasculine; iirc this roommate was cisgender), received threatening and harassing anonymous asks for simply stating that she was a victim of transmisogyny, and SHE was the one banned.

edit: here is a [link] to the covidsafehotties discord server; and here is a [link] to a follow-up post i made about certain recurring comments/questions!

edit 2: here is a [link] the new tumblr blog, covid-safer-hotties! in case this one also goes down; to find a better archive of information, make sure to check out nadica's proboard dedicated to covid safety, which can be found at this [link] !

while nadica (blog owner) has privately stated that she is attempting to go through the appeals process, tumblr's email from @staff has made it clear that she as a transgender woman is not welcomed on this site.

just as they have numerous trans* women in the past week.

in fact, she received the exact same email as them, stating that "automatic means were not used to make this decision or identify the content at issue", meaning that real. human members of staff saw a trans* woman being harassed, talking about her experiences as a trans* woman, and banned her for daring to say so.

they even went as far as to state that she "[should not] engage in the unwanted sexualization or sexual harassment of others".

how in the FUCK is her sharing these experiences sexual? how in the FUCK is her being harassed by transmasculine folks on this site sexual??

just a reminder: here are details surrounding tumblr’s NYCCHR Settlement, which is publicly accessible information

Summary of NYC Gov. Settlements [ LINK ]

NYCCHR Settlement Documentation [ LINK ]

in case y'all really want to raise a stink over the "queerest site on the internet" raising their transmisogynistic paws (again). and from nadica herself:

" Can we all appreciate that even beyond the transmisogyny of the likely scenario, that this person disliked a single acronym [re: tme] I used so much that they got the most [active] and interacted-with covid blog on the site banned. i can't imagine being so cruel and thoughtless about any resource "

as a tme person, i stand with every fucking trans woman and transfem that tumblr has banned from this site for existing within the content guidelines. i stand with every fucking trans woman and transfem who has been harassed, stalked, and booted from this site because the moderation staff refuses to do SHIT about it.

and i stand with every other group who faces the same treatment. the dozens of black bloggers. the dozens of indigenous bloggers. the dozens of palestinian bloggers.

tumblr is not the queerest corner of the internet. it is not a safe space. and if i get banned for saying that, then fuck it and fuck every one of y'all who let it happen.

[thenalssp]

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[purplealmonds]

Currently, Sky: Children of the Light and Mononoke are my two favorite things and I so very badly want to will this collaboration into existence. 🕯⚖️

Process GIF & artist commentary below the cut!

This began as a self-indulgent costume design project: aMononoke-inspired Sky cosmetic. It was supposed to be a quick-and-dirty mockup that would not be shared outside of private Discord servers, but I got...carried away.

It came out a lot nicer than anticipated. A bit rough around the edges, but when zoomed out clean enough to look like a legit Sky cosmetic. I extracted the high-res Sky and Mononoke logos from their respective websites. I custom-made the handhold collaboration icon. Then I slapped it on top of the costume design. It looked neat!

But then I started having second thoughts. The outfit was quite complex, and it didn't feel right to have it sit in a sterile, empty space like that. It looked half-baked, incomplete. So I used the Mononoke movie poster as inspiration for set dressing and color palette:

There are vestiges of the project's origins scattered throughout this piece - namely that a lot of the visuals were built upon screenshots from Sky. Since it was a costume design project, I didn't feel the need to draw from scratch. They were completely painted over in the final product, but using this technique sped up my process quite significantly!

I went to the Sky Wiki for references. I cobbled together some Season of Revival's kimono cosmetic as a starting point for the outfit. The eyeliner detail Days of Style mask looked similar to the Medicine Seller's face markings, so did a quick photoshoot in the Office to match the camera angle of the previous image.

For the lantern, I made a shared memory in the green room to get the ideal camera angles for each of them:

The grave markers I referenced from a photoshoot in the Hidden Forest's hub:

And the bridge I took from the Sunny Forest:

The butterflies were a last-minute addition - I wanted something to make the composition more sparkly! Then I remembered the end credits of Mononoke had a butterfly too! I figured since I went with the Medicine Seller's new design, this would be a nice homage to his classic look.

[taikeero-lecoredier]

Chat Control in a nutshell (please reblog this, US people)

Find out more about Chat Control here TAKE ACTION HERE ! OR HERE Calling is much more efficient ! The latter link will redirect you to the official websites of your respective reps. Under the "read more", you will find what you need to say/write when contacting your reps. You will also find an alternate format of this comic,and I give explicit permission for people to translate it and spread it anywhere for awareness. Credit really not needed, I don't care about that rn Even if this is a EU proposal, I am urging Americans to also share this, since it goes hand in hand with KOSA. DON'T FORGET TO JOIN OUR DISCORD SERVER AGAINST CHAT CONTROL ! https://discord.com/invite/e7FYdYnMkS

(Latest update on Chat Control was the 12 september 2024) This is a little long, so feel free to shorten it as you wish : Subject line: "2022/0155(COD) Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to express my grave concerns regarding the proposed introduction of "Chat Control" This measure poses a serious threat to the privacy and fundamental rights of all EU citizens and stands in stark contradiction to the core principles that the European Union seeks to uphold. The proposed Chat Control contravenes Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which guarantee the right to respect for private and family life and the protection of personal data. The indiscriminate surveillance of private messages without specific suspicion or cause directly violates these fundamental rights. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets out stringent rules for the processing of personal data. The proposed indiscriminate surveillance and scanning of private messages before end-to-end encryption is fundamentally incompatible with the principles of data minimization and purpose limitation enshrined in the GDPR. Specifically, Articles 5 and 6 of the GDPR, which govern the lawfulness and principles of data processing, would be violated by the introduction of such measures. The implementation of Client-Side Scanning (CSS) on devices means that all messages and files are scanned on the user's device before being encrypted and sent. This effectively nullifies the protection offered by end-to-end encryption and opens the door to misuse and additional security vulnerabilities. Moreover, the technical capability to scan such content could be exploited by malicious actors to circumvent or manipulate surveillance mechanisms. Such far-reaching surveillance measures not only endanger privacy but also freedom of expression. The knowledge that their private messages are being scanned and monitored could significantly restrict individuals' willingness to freely express themselves. Additionally, trust in digital communication platforms would be severely undermined. I urge you to take a strong stance against this disproportionate and unlawful measure. The privacy and digital rights of EU citizens must be safeguarded. It is imperative that we protect our fundamental rights and ensure transparency in the decision-making processes of our leaders. For more detailed information on the proposal and its implications, please refer to the following resource: Link to Netzpolitik article. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/rat-soll-chatkontrolle-durchwinken-werde-jetzt-aktiv/ Thank you for your attention to this critical matter. Sincerely, [Name] Art. 10 GG , Art. 8 & 11 EU Charta , Art. 8 EMRK (Alternate comic here V)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Social Quitting

In “Social Quitting,” my latest Locus Magazine column, I advance a theory to explain the precipitous vibe shift in how many of us view the once-dominant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and how it is that we have so quickly gone asking what we can do to get these services out of our lives to where we should go now that we’re all ready to leave them:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

The core of the argument revolves around surpluses — that is, the value that exists in the service. For a user, surpluses are things like “being able to converse with your friends” and “being able to plan activities with your friends.” For advertisers, surpluses are things like “being able to target ads based on the extraction and processing of private user data” and “being able to force users to look at ads before they can talk to one another.”

For the platforms, surpluses are things like, “Being able to force advertisers and business customers to monetize their offerings through the platform, blocking rivals like Onlyfans, Patreon, Netflix, Amazon, etc” and things like “Being able to charge more for ads” and “being able to clone your business customers’ products and then switch your users to the in-house version.”

Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will “boost engagement” by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable. They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customers’ products they should clone and displace.

But platforms can’t just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye. No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, “No matter who you follow, we’ll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you can’t skip; we will spy on you a lot.” Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was “Our ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and we’ll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business.”

Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platforms’ investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they won’t go elsewhere when the service is enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.

This is where network effects and switching costs come into play. A service has “network effects” if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.

“Switching costs” are what you have to give up when you leave a service: if a service is siloed — if it blocks interoperability with rivals — then quitting that service means giving up access to the people whom you left behind. This is the single most important difference between ActivityPub-based Fediverse services like Mastodon and the silos like Twitter and Facebook — you can quit a Fediverse server and set up somewhere else, and still maintain your follows and followers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

In the absence of interoperability, network effects impose their own switching cost: the “collective action problem” of deciding when to leave and where to go. If you depend on the people you follow and who follow you — for emotional support, for your livelihood, for community — then the extreme difficulty of convincing everyone to leave at the same time and go somewhere else means that you can be enticed into staying on a service that you no longer enjoy. The platforms can shift the surpluses away from you, provided that doing so makes you less miserable than abandoning your friends or fans or customers would. This is the Fiddler On the Roof problem: everyone stays put in the shtetl even though the cossacks ride through on the reg and beat the shit out of them, because they can’t all agree on where to go if they leave:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

So the first stage of the platform lifecycle is luring in users by allocating lots of surplus to them — making the service fun and great and satisfying to use. Few or no ads, little or no overt data-collection, feeds that emphasize the people you want to hear from, not the people willing to pay to reach you.

This continues until the service attains a critical mass: once it becomes impossible to, say, enroll your kid in a little-league baseball team without having a Facebook account, then Facebook can start shifting its surpluses to advertisers and other business-users of the platform, who will pay Facebook to interpose themselves in your use of the platform. You’ll hate it, but you won’t leave. Junior loves little-league.

Facebook can enshittify its user experience because the users are now locked in, holding each other hostage. If Facebook can use the courts and technological countermeasures to block interoperable services, it can increase its users’ switching costs, producing more opportunities for lucrative enshittification without the risk of losing the users that make Facebook valuable to advertisers. That’s why Facebook pioneered so many legal tactics for criminalizing interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures

This is the second phase of the toxic platform life-cycle: luring in business customers by shifting surpluses from users to advertisers, sellers, etc. This is the moment when the platforms offer cheap and easy monetization, low transaction fees, few barriers to off-platform monetization, etc. This is when, for example, a news organization can tease an article on its website with an off-platform link, luring users to click through and see the ads it controls.

Because Facebook has locked in its users through mutual hostage-taking, it can pollute their feeds with lots of these posts to news organizations’ sites, bumping down the messages from its users’ friends, and that means that Facebook can selectively tune how much traffic it gives to different kinds of business customers. If Facebook wants to lure in sports sites, it can cram those sites’ posts into millions of users’ feeds and send floods of traffic to sports outlets.

Outlets that don’t participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please The Algorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.

But ironically, once a critical mass of sports sites are on Facebook, Facebook no longer needs to prioritize sports sites in its users’ feeds. Now that the sports sites all believe that a Facebook presence is a competitive necessity, they will hold each other hostage there, egging each other on to put more things on Facebook, even as the traffic dwindles.

Once sports sites have taken each other hostage, Facebook can claw back the surplus it allocated to them and use it to rope in another sector — health sites, casual games, employment seekers, financial advisors, etc etc. Each group is ensnared by a similar dynamic to the one that locks in the users.

But there is a difference between users’ surpluses and business’s surpluses. A user’s surplus is attention, and there is no such thing as an “attention economy.” You can’t use attention to pay for data-centers, or executive bonuses, or to lobby Congress. Attention is not a currency in the same way that cryptos are not currency — it is not a store of value, nor a unit of exchange, nor or a unit of account.

Turning attention into money requires the same tactics as turning crypto into money — you have to lure in people who have real, actual money and convince them to swap it for attention. With crypto, this involved paying Larry David, Matt Damon, Spike Lee and LeBron James to lie about crypto’s future in order to rope in suckers who would swap their perfectly cromulent “fiat” money for unspendable crypto tokens.

With platforms, you need to bring in business customers who get paid in actual cash and convince them to give you that cash in exchange for ethereal, fast-evaporating, inconstant, unmeasurable “attention.” This works like any Ponzi scheme (that is, it works like cryptos): you can use your shareholders’ cash to pay short-term returns to business customers, losing a little money as a convincer that brings in more trade.

That’s what Facebook did when it sent enormous amounts of traffic to a select few news-sites that fell for the pivot to video fraud, in order to convince their competitors to borrow billions of dollars to finance Facebook’s bid to compete with Youtube:

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

This convincer strategy is found in every con. If you go to the county fair, you’ll see some poor bastard walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that he “won” by throwing three balls into a peach-basket. The carny who operated that midway game let him win the teddy precisely so that he would walk around all day, advertising the game, which is rigged so that no one else wins the giant teddy-bear:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

Social media platforms can allocate giant teddy-bears to business-customers, and it can also withdraw them at will. Careful allocations mean that the platform can rope in a critical mass of business customers and then begin the final phase of its life-cycle: allocating surpluses to its shareholders.

We know what this looks like.

Rigged ad-markets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Understaffed content moderation departments:

https://www.dw.com/en/twitters-sacking-of-content-moderators-will-backfire-experts-warn/a-63778330

Knock-off products:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/08/twitter-is-the-latest-platform-to-test-a-tiktok-copycat-feature/

Nuking “trust and safety”:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-dissolves-trust-safety-council-2022-12-13/

Hiding posts that have links to rival services:

https://www.makeuseof.com/content-types-facebook-hides-why/

Or blocking posts that link to rival services:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Or worse, terminating accounts for linking to rival services:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/12/twitter-suspends-mastodon-account-prevents-sharing-links/

That is, once a platform has its users locked in, and has its business customers locked in, it can enshittify its service to the point of near uselessness without losing either, allocating all the useful surplus in the business to its shareholders.

But this strategy has a problem: users and business customers don’t like to be locked in! They will constantly try to find ways to de-enshittify your service and/or leave for greener pastures. And being at war with your users and business customers means that your reputation continuously declines, because every time a user or business customer figures out a way to claw back some surplus, you have to visibly, obviously enshittify your service wrestle it back.

Every time a service makes headlines for blocking an ad-blocker, or increasing its transaction fees, or screwing over its users or business customers in some other way, it makes the case that the price you pay for using the service is not worth the value it delivers.

In other words, the platforms try to establish an equilibrium where they only leave business customers and users with the absolute bare minimum needed to keep them on the service, and extract the rest for their shareholders. But this is a very brittle equilibrium, because the prices that platforms impose on their users and business customers can change very quickly, even if the platforms don’t do anything differently.

Users and business customers can revalue the privacy costs, or the risks of staying on the platform based on exogenous factors. Privacy scandals and other ruptures can make the cost you’ve been paying for years seem higher than you realized and no longer worth it.

This problem isn’t unique to social media platforms, either. It’s endemic to end-stage capitalism, where companies can go on for years paying their workers just barely enough to survive (or even less, expecting them to get public assistance and/or a side-hustle), and those workers can tolerate it, and tolerate it, and tolerate it — until one day, they stop.

The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, the mass desertions from the gig economy — they all prove the Stein’s Law: “Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.”

Same for long, brittle supply-chains, where all the surplus has been squeezed out: concentrating all the microchip production in China and Taiwan, all the medical saline in Puerto Rico, all the shipping into three cartels… This strategy works well, and can be perfectly tuned with mathematical models that cut right to the joint, and they work and they work.

Until they stop. Until covid. Or war. Or wildfires. Or floods. Or interest rate hikes. Or revolution. All this stuff works great until you wake up and discover that the delicate balance between paying for guard labor and paying for a fair society has tilted, and now there’s a mob building a guillotine outside the gates of your luxury compound.

This is the force underpinning collapse: “slow at first, then all at once.” A steady erosion of the failsafes, flensing all the slack out of the system, extracting all the surpluses until there’s nothing left in the reservoir, no reason to stay.

It’s what caused the near-collapse of Barnes and Noble, and while there are plenty of ways to describe James Daunt’s successful turnaround, the most general characterization is, “He has reallocated the company’s surpluses to workers, readers, writers and publishers”:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

A system can never truly stabilize. This is why utopias are nonsense: even if you design the most perfect society in which everything works brilliantly, it will still have to cope with war and meteors and pandemics and other factors beyond your control. A system can’t just work well, it has to fail well.

This is why I object so strenuously to people who characterize my 2017 novel Walkaway as a “dystopian novel.” Yes, the protagonists are eking out survival amidst a climate emergency and a failing state, but they aren’t giving up, they’re building something new:

https://locusmag.com/2017/06/bruce-sterling-reviews-cory-doctorow/

“Dystopia” isn’t when things go wrong. Assuming nothing will go wrong doesn’t make you an optimist, it makes you an asshole. A dangerous asshole. Assuming nothing will go wrong is why they didn’t put enough lifeboats on the Titanic. Dystopia isn’t where things go wrong. Dystopia is when things go wrong, and nothing can be done about it.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. The social media barons who reeled users and business customers into a mutual hostage-taking were confident that their self-licking ice-cream cone — in which we all continued to energetically produce surpluses for them to harvest, because we couldn’t afford to leave — would last forever.

They were wrong. The important thing about the Fediverse isn’t that it’s noncommercial or decentralized — it’s that its design impedes surplus harvesting. The Fediverse is designed to keep switching costs as low as possible, by enshrining the Right Of Exit into the technical architecture of the system. The ability to leave a service without paying a price is the best defense we have against the scourge of enshittification.

(Thanks to Tim Harford for inspiring this column via an offhand remark in his kitchen a couple months ago!)

[Image ID: The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 397. The Israelites collect manna. Exodus cap 16 v 14. Luyken and son.]

[skele-ghost]

Baby, it’s Hot Outside: Part 4

Welcome to: (Y/N) doesn’t know anything!

MDNI, 18+, Warnings: Omegaverse, dangerous situation, crowds, allusion to r*pe/sexual harassment/assault, heats, stranger danger

Masterlist

It doesn’t take them long to figure out that (Y/N) (L/N) has no idea what courting is.

She’s a beta, sure, and betas haven’t always been courted in the same fashion as omegas or even alphas. But that had changed in the modern age—even Gaz was courted by Price, and König made it a point to give just as much attention to Gaz as Soap while he was courting into the pack.

To be completely fair, they hadn’t yet asked to court her officially. Normally there’s this sort of pre-courting process, flirting and dates and smaller gifts, almost like a hint or a heads up before the formal ask.

Even so, the flirting went right over her head. She would laugh along, joke, tease back—but when someone compliemented her, really called her beautiful—she would blush, say ‘thank you,’ clear her throat and pick up the conversation where it had left of.

They would have thought she was turning them down, if not for her genuine confusion over the courting gifts.

Soap, the good omega he is, offered her a blanket from his nest. An awfully profound gift that spoke volumes, an item from an omega’s safe and private space, doused with the scent from each pack member.

“Oh, but this is one for your favorites,” she frowns, holding the ball of fabric in her arms.

“I ken. It’s the warmest one, too,” Johnny beams at her.

“You don’t want it?” She asks, tilting her head to the side.

“I want you to have it, angel,” he insists.

“Are you sure?” She asks as if he’s a child picking out a flavor of ice cream she knows he doesn’t like. “Because you know I have that big quilt my mama made me—“

“(Y/N), come on,” he laughs nervously, tamping down his growing fear of rejection. “It’s a gift. From me to you.”

She eyes him skeptically, looking at the blanket for a moment. “Alright. But no take-backs,” she jokes. “Thanks, MacTavish!”

And then she just leaves him standing there, a slight hop in her step as she walks down the hall towards the barracks.

Ghost, who had been listening the whole time from an adjourning room, takes to Soap’s side.

“The fuck was that?”

“I ‘ave no fuckin’ clue.”

Maybe it was a bad first gift, in retrospect. Betas didn’t have the same noses as the other designations. She might not be able to smell their scents on it at all. Maybe she just didn’t understand.

They keep trying. König takes her out to lunch, only to come back disappointed because she took the opportunity to talk about her favorite TV show and he couldn’t get a single word in. Not that he had the desire to stop her when her eyes were alight with excitement.

Ghost left her one of his hoodies, draping it over her duffel—and she gave it back to him the next day, thinking he’d put it with her things by mistake.

Gaz gets her a hat with the task force’s insignia…and she looses it the next day to a windstorm. She apologizes profusely, of course, but even with his arm slung over her shoulders, even when he presses a kiss to her temple, telling her it’s no big deal—she just doesn’t get it.

The last time they tried was a month prior, two weeks before the Mexico mission. They invited her out to the pub, adamant that they’d really lay on the flirting, sure that they’d finally get her to understand.

To say it was a disaster would be an understatement.

—

You and Soap head out early, something about getting a table before the pub’s too crowded. The sun periodically casts a golden glow on the buildings when it peeks out from behind the clouds, signaling sunset as the shadows get longer.

You two hold idle conversation, talking about work, mostly. It had been a busy, hectic week, hacking into cartel servers and pinpointing locations.

Every once in a while you bump shoulders to avoid other pedestrians. It makes you realize that some people are staring. Your brow furrows as you follow their gazes, mostly focused on Soap. He does seem a little less energetic than usual. A little less talkative, considering that you were carrying the entire conversation. His cheeks are flushed, but it’s been a hot summer.

“Hey, you okay?” You ask him, head tilted up to look at him properly.

“Yeah. ‘S just hot,” he sighs, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand.

“It’s just 80,” you reply, not completely convinced.

“Fahrenheit. How hot does it get back home?”

“We always get a couple of 100° days in the middle of summer—“

Someone bumps into him lightly, but it sends Soap stumbling. You catch onto his arm and stabilize him, finally noting how hot his skin is.

“Jesus! I think you’re getting heat stroke or somethin,’” you gasp, and he leans on you for support.

“I jus’ needta siddown. Pub’s there,” he points and you have no choice but to go. You try your best to ignore the stares from onlookers as you drag him along with you. They look concerned and it doesn’t help your hammering heart.

You decide that just sitting down won’t be helpful, considering that the sweltering pub isn’t even air conditioned. So you shove past strangers, muttering excuses and apologies, and take him into the women’s bathroom with you. It’s empty and there’s a lock on the inside of the door that you bolt.

“Just lean here for a sec,” you instruct him, leaning him against the wall instead of on your shoulder. You quickly take off your shirt, thankful for the tank top underneath, and soak it with cold water from the sink.

A groan of discomfort has your attention turning back to Soap, just to see him slide down the wall and onto the floor, sitting and plastering himself against the tiled wall.

“MacTavish! You have any idea how many diseases are probably on this floor?!” You curse, guiding his cheek from the wall, wiping his face with the cool cloth.

He chuckles, “yer so cute when you get that furrow in your brow.”

You just purse your lips, keeping the cloth against his jugular while you pull your phone out with your free hand, navigating to the dial pad.

He grabs your wrist. “Call Ghost.”

“I’m calling the police, you need to go to the hospital—“

“Call Simon. That’s an order,” he says, his tone serious although his eyes are half-lidded, cerulean focused on you.

You frown. Technically, he doesn’t have the authority to order you around. On the other hand, if Soap MacTavish was telling you to not call the police, then you weren’t going to.

“Fine.”

You dial the number and return to the sink, soaking it with cool water while the phone rings. It picks up on the second chime.

“What?” Ghost answers gruffly.

“Something’s wrong with Johnny,” you say, wringing out your shirt of excess water.

“What d’you mean? He alright?”

You set the phone on the edge of the sink and put it on speaker phone, kneeling next to your teammate once more.

“I-I don’t know— He all sweaty, his skin’s on fire. I think he’s got heatstroke, I should take him to the hospital—“

“Calm down. Where are you?”

“The bar, the lady’s room,” you say quickly, watching as Soap’s face contorts into anguish, tears spilling past his waterline.

“Lock the door. Do not open it for anyone, understand?”

“It’s locked—“

“Simon,” Soap whines, a whimper following a moment later. You gently shush him, wiping the tears from his face as they come.

“‘S alright, Johnny. Gonna be there soon, you’re gonna be fine,” Ghost soothes on the other end, his voice not losing its softness as he continues. “(Y/N), we’re almost there, darlin. You have somethin’ to defend yourself with?”

“I-I got mace, why?” You stammer, mind reeling with what the hell he could be talking about.

“Almost there. You use it if you need it, okay?”

“I—okay,” you agree, letting Soap pull you closer, his arm snaked around your waist.

You nearly jump out of your skin at the pounds on the door. “Hey! You can’t have him in here like that!” A man shouts on the other side.

“Don’t talk to ‘im,” Ghost instructs just as you open your mouth to speak.

The door shakes with the force of the pounding. “Hey! You hear me, you little—“

You don’t even hear the call hang up as there’s a muted thud from outside. You reach for your mace.

There’s a curt rap of knuckles on the door. “(Y/N)?” You feel your fear dissipate at the sound of Ghost’s voice, “you can open the door now, lovie.”

You have to wrench Soap’s arm off of you to get up and unlock the door. Ghost enters as soon as there’s enough room, no hesitation as he rushes past you and kneels by Soap’s side.

“He just got sick all of the sudden, I don’t know why—one minute he was fine and the next he was all hot. He was fine on the subway, I don’t understand—“ you ramble, only stopping when a hand on your shoulder startles you.

“It’s alright, (Y/N), he’ll be okay,” Gaz reassures you, his presence a comfort of its own. “You did everything right.”

You just nod, watching as Ghost lifts Soap (who seems to have calmed down quite a bit) into his arms and carries him out of the room. The back hallway of the bar is just barely large enough to fit your entire team.

König stands guard at one end but immediately abandons his post when Ghost calls for him, his eyes something dark like you’ve never seen—not that he even seems to see you. They exit the back door where a car’s already waiting in the alley.

The only thing stopping you from following is the captain, his hold on your upper arm keeping you back.

“We’re not going?” You ask, brow furrowed as you watch the door close.

“No, we’ll catch up with them later,” Price says, ushering you and Gaz out of the same back door; the car’s already gone.

“Where—they’re taking him to the hospital, right? I think he’s hyperthermic.”

“It’s just a fever, (Y/N), Johnny’ll be right as rain in a day or two,” Gaz soothes, maneuvering you to walk between him and the captain as you start down the alley.

“It’s happened before?” You ask, shocked.

“Happens four times a year,” Price informs you, a knit in his brow.

“Four tim—what, like every season? That’s so bizarre! What is it?”

“(Y/N)…He’s an omega. It’s a heat,” Price says.

“Ohhhhhh,” you say intelligently, your eyes widening. It certainly silences you, makes all of the pieces click into place—most of them.

You thought heats were only once a year. That’s what your cousin had said, at least. But it doesn’t explain why that guy at the door was so angry, or why Soap didn’t want you to call the police.

It confuses the hell out of you, but in the silence on the walk back and in the metro system, you decide it’s probably better that you don’t know.

You’ve heard some of the horror stories: how omegas used to be treated. How some of them are still treated. A knot forms in your stomach at the thought that someone would want to do that kind of harm to Johnny—at the realization that you were the only thing standing between him and cruelty.

What if the team hadn’t been there in time?

-

A/N: Hello! I hope this chapter gives more insight into the 141 + (Y/N)’s relationship before she presented. It should also explain why the boys were so angry at first when she presented—they thought that she had been lying this whole time, pretending not to know about designations and such. Furthermore, in my humble version of the Omegaverse, suppressants can take away scents and the ability to detect scents. Let me know if you have any questions!

[swiftwingsexpress]

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[esthercore]

E-Whore (GN! Lewd Streamer Reader x HSR men with lewd intentions

Veritas Ratio | Sunday | Blade | Jing Yuan (different scenarios for each men ♡)

Kinda degrading terms used for reader simply because he would do it canonically, and i have a humiliation kink

Being a Trailblazer is amazing, but since it technically made you jobless, you needed some way to fund your shopping sprees when you visit new planets, so while some of your crewmates resort to farming calyx, you chose the easy way.

You had a hot body and you knew how to use it, making you an instant hit on the streaming site, moreover, as the site connected to servers in multiple galaxies, the chances of anyone you knew or will meet in real life knowing your side hustle are slim enough to never happen, right?

Wrong.

Despite Dr Ratio being a man of virtue and self-righteousness, he still has his moments where he is simply Veritas, a man with urges, annoying urges, and hormones that hinder his progress and goals, and despite him being able to overcome those distractions most days, today simply wasn't one of them.

So he reluctantly laid on his bed, putting up whatever porno that could get him going, till his eyes wandered out on the pesky ads flashing on the screen, beside the video he was jacking off to.

An ad for a streaming site, displaying a 'currently live' bouncy little thing stuffing their holes with a sizable vibrating dildo while making the cutest aroused faces as their body shuddered in pleasure. And out of character for him, his fingers automatically pressed on the link before his brain could even process it, as he got redirected to the streaming site.

Blink.

Blink.

"Ohh", he let out audibly, as he felt his dick twitch. It's you, the troublesome little trailblazer that was too foolish and defiant to hear out about their own stupidity, pouting and calling him pretentious (although that one was because of his mask), for when he told you 'how you're a hindrance for the work environment' when he first saw you in Herta's space station prancing around mindlessly, flirting and greeting the scientists during their working hours.

And now here you are, not only are you a pesky idiot, but also, a whore spreading their legs on camera for the whole world to see. But despite how low he thought of you, god did you look so good.

He let out low grunts, as he pumped the length of his shafts, pleased by the soft moans you were making on-screen, cute little whore, whining as a customer sent you a paid request to increase the vibration level, adoring the way your body shuddered.

So, stripping himself of his morals, he opened the token store, fingers moving as fast as possible to finish the payment as his fist was getting tainted by his precum as he sent you a tip, immediately hiking up to the stream's top donor, and despite him never consumed any lewd stream before the way your face lit up when you saw the big tip made him shiver in pleasure, ejaculating hard as you moaned out 'Ver' his username he put up in a hurry.

He laid there for a few minutes his mind hazy, and the post nut clarity hitting in hard, he really spent his money on an e-whore, him, the esteemed doctor ratio wasting his money just to hear you moan out his name.

And the worst of it was he knew he would do it again.

(Ps - He will call you whore or generally call your activities in private when he see you again irl)

[kirbyoctournament]

Hello again everyone,

Over the past 24 hours, there has been a series of misunderstandings regarding the recent poll tampering that we have reported. 

In this post, we hope to clear up some misunderstandings about the server and moderation team as a whole, as well as detail our evidence regarding the poll for those questioning its veracity.

As always, we have a zero tolerance policy for harassment.

>>> MISUNDERSTANDINGS

We would like to begin by stating that with the new year came a new team for the tourney--co-hosts and moderators alike. This tournament has been run and managed very differently from last year’s, and we consider ourselves to be affiliated solely in name and concept alone.

As such, all grievances related to the previous tournament are not related to our current moderation team. If you previously had a bad time in the tourney, we are very sorry to hear that. However, the previous 2023 moderation team is no longer affiliated with running or moderating the tourney.

We would also like to note that last year's host was a minor, and merely wished to help foster a community. They did not expect the event to grow to the size that it did, and do not deserve any amount of hate or contempt for this.

Regarding the Discord server in particular, upon change of ownership, the server eventually underwent an overhaul to better suit the community's new needs. 

One of the changes implemented was removal of an access restricted "Vent Channel" which was created by the previous host when the server still had less than 50 members. The new mods were aware of the risks a vent channel posed in a public server and immediately restricted it to request-to-access. However, as the server grew to foster over 150 members, the channel exhibited constant security breaches and rule breaks, and it had to be removed.

While we care for the mental health of our server members, a large public space is not the place to air private issues. Moderators and server members alike frequently offer support and encourage members to seek aid and consult friends in DMs or personal servers in a safe and private manner.

We also understand that despite the tourney's primary focus being centered around uplifting OCs, the concept remains the same--a "popularity contest” where OCs are matched against one another--which can cause the event to be stressful and mentally draining. We've always encouraged participants to see the competition as lighthearted, to realize that losses do not reflect poorly on their creativity, and to be responsible for their own mental health, as seen in our rules. Any participant can drop out at any time for any reason, a sentiment we reiterate with every new round.

Regarding allegations of bullying and harassing a server member: neither mods nor server members have ever wished the member in question any form of harm, and have frequently offered reassurances and help. No mod has ever sent hateful anons to any of our participants. We request any further allegations regarding this matter to be supplied with evidence, rather than with rumors.

All that being said, we will now share our evidence regarding the tampered poll, including a public catalogue of our minute by minute tracking as well as our calculations of the data.

>>> POLL TAMPERING EVIDENCE

Documentation was not originally released because the moderation team needed several days to analyze, process, format, and present the evidence. While delays are of course not ideal, sharing data with any room for misinterpretation would have been hurtful and harmful to the competitors. To declare a poll tampered with is an enormous action, and not one that we would have done without 100% concrete proof. We received multiple reports from concerned community members regarding abnormal poll behavior, and our moderation team have spent several days working tirelessly around the clock to collect the evidence needed before making any decisions. 

All data was peer reviewed by a team of 7 individuals, and none was falsified.

Firstly, here is a 41 hour graph of the ROUND FIVE: Fylass vs Valfrey poll, from the time we received the first reports of tampering concerns to when we archived the poll shortly after announcing it had been tampered with.

The pattern recorded is mechanical and undeniable.

Any time contestant Valfrey approached or crossed the 50% mark, contestant Fylass would receive a spike of votes within a narrow 10 minute window, surrounded by plateaus on either side. These votes were not accompanied by a boost in public propaganda or reblogs. We recorded this pattern 4 times within a 41 hour period, exclusively when Valfrey approached or crossed the 50% mark.

We reiterate that this pattern had been reported by multiple third party sources prior to our logging, from individuals who saw the spikes happening in real time on the public tumblr post.

Some spikes, especially early on, were smaller, such as the above. Others, such as the final spike below, were significant, recording 18 one-sided votes between 7:51am and 8:00am CDT. As previously, this influx of votes occurred within a ten minute window, and was bookended by a plateau.

What is expected to be seen is a steady fluctuation of votes for both characters. Small spikes are normal. Even a big spike on its own is normal, as someone may have shared their poll in a private space to friends or a separate server, or a piece of propaganda may have rallied potential voters. This was not the activity that was recorded.

Again: we recorded repeated, pattern behaviour of enormous voting spikes within precise ten minute windows, only when Valfrey approached or crossed the 50% marker. The results of these spikes always settled with a slight lead for Fylass, which Valfrey slowly closed; until the spike occurred again like clockwork.

For those who wish to see the numbers and draw their own conclusions, we have provided access to the raw data collected.

Here is our minute by minute screenshot log of this information, publicly available in a channel on our discord server, complete with timestamps. PLEASE BE AWARE that clicking this link will take you to our discord server, where you may choose to join. While the discord server has privacy protection and requires emoji reacts to enter in full, this log is completely public to view and can be accessed by anyone. For the next few days, our Welcome/Join channel will be private, for folks who wish to come and go anonymously, and data will be expunged before reinstatement.

Here is our comprehensive spreadsheet logging information in 10 minute increments, which may be fact checked with the screenshot log, with minute by minute highlights during spikes.

Here are the graphs shown above, within the same spreadsheet.

This was a public poll with many eyes on it, meaning these voting spikes were publicly visible, and could have been logged or recorded by anyone at any time. Tournament mods were certainly not the only people aware of this, especially given the size of the final recorded spike; we were just the ones who catalogued it.

We are saddened and upset to hear that some people took what they saw and attacked our competitors. As we have previously stated many times, we do not believe either competitor was aware of or responsible for the rigging of this poll. To tamper with a poll in this way is terribly cruel to the competitors, even those who it seems to "benefit", as it is an enormous betrayal of their trust. We do not believe anyone competing in this tournament would be happy with a doctored victory. 

We are all here because we love Kirby OCs. Tournament contestants in particular are here to spotlight and celebrate their own OCs in the polls, and rally genuine fans. To take that away is an extreme act of unkindness to our competitors, and we are sorry that it came to pass in such a way. We had previously stated our intentions of rerunning this poll through a more secure platform, in the hopes of creating a more fair and enjoyable environment for our competitors. However, due to a competitor withdrawing, we will no longer be rerunning this poll. We would like to once again request not to use this as an opportunity to harass or attack our competitors. Again, we do not think they are responsible for the tampering of this poll. We genuinely believe that the impacted competitors are hurt by this act of tampering above all others.

Bullying and harassment is, as it has always been, something we have zero tolerance for. If anyone has any evidence of bullying or harassment, we ask you to approach us immediately so that we may address it. Thank you to those kind community members who have already stepped up during this time to share material with us while these incidents unfolded, we are very grateful.

We hope that this has helped clear up any lingering uncertainties or confusion.

For now, we would like to keep all other private issues private, and do not intend to release any further evidence regarding any other allegations towards our moderation team or the tournament as a whole. We believe this is in the best interests of everyone involved, and would like to see these claims cease. However, we will not tolerate the continued public slander of our team; we can and will publicise what we need in order to defend them and clear any remaining doubt.

Thank you for your time, The Kirby OC Tournament Moderation Team

[mochinomnoms]

MOCHI! I want to know your thoughts and concepts on how ptm jade fell inlove with mc like I NEED ITTTTT ITS EATING ME ALIVEEE... PTM JADE IS EATING ME ALIVEEEE

Now it makes me have a thing for prim and proper guys but with a wild side in private oh come on!!!!!!!!

*explodes*

Omgggg no exploding! It's too much clean up!

There will be a chapter dedicated to Jade and his pov on how he fell in love with the mc. So I don't want to say what exactly was the process for him...but I think giving out the ideas I had and letting yall guess which one it will be is fun!

How did PTM Jade fall in love with Yuu/Reader?

He got his head done in with a metal server's plate by Yuu during the fighting in Book 3 and immediately went "oh, am I into this?"

Love at first sight: Jade saw the hot mess that was Yuu falling out of their coffin and their familiar setting everything on fire and just thought, "That's the one I want" because he likes to watch drama

Floyd and Yuu interacted the most during Book 4, so Jade got to hear second hand how cool Yuu was and watched them handle Jamil and kinda just started crushing

Jade's interactions with Yuu during events (Beanfest, Halloween, etc) are more canon in PTM, and it was seeing them in those more relaxed settings that made him fall for Yuu

Jade slowly fell in love with Yuu over the course of the previous year, due to them being unusually perceptive and calling out his true feelings constantly. He was annoyed at first, but came to love them and their ability to just instinctually know him.

[existentialterror]

Do NOT send pictures of your ID card to discord bots!!!!

Or, like, any online rando.

I ran into a server that wanted to make sure that members are over 18 years old. They wanted to avoid the other thing I've heard of, which is asking you to verify your age by sending pictures of your ID card to a moderator. Good! Don't do that!

However, ALSO don't do this other thing, which is using a discord bot that would "automatically verify" you from a selfie and a photo of your ID card showing your birthday. The one they used is ageifybot.com. There's a little more information on its top.gg page. Don't like that! Not using that!

Why not? It's automatic! Well, let me count the ways this service skeeves me out:

How does the verification process work? There is no information on this. Well, okay, if you had more info on what kind of algorithms etc were being used here, that might make it easier for people to cheat it. Fair enough. But we need something to count on.

Who's making it? Like, if I can't understand the mechanics, at least I'd like to know who creates it - ideally they'd be a security professional, or at least a security hobbyist, or an AI expert, or at least someone with some kind of reputation they could lose if this turns out to not be very good, or god forbid, a data-stealing operation. However, the website contains nothing about the creators.

The privacy policy says they store information sent to them, such as your selfie and photo of an ID card, for up to 90 days, or a year if they suspect you're misleading them. It sure seems like even if they're truly abiding by their privacy policy, there's nothing to stop human people from looking at your photos.

The terms of service say they can use, store, process, etc, any information you send them. And that they can't be held accountable for mistakes, misuse, etc. And that they can change the bot and the ToS at any times without telling you. The terms of service also cut off midway through a sentence, so like, that's reassuring:

In conclusion, DO NOT SEND PICTURES OF YOUR ID CARD TO RANDOM DISCORD BOTS.

Yes, keeping minors out of (say) NSFW spaces is a difficult problem, but this "solution" sucks shit and is bad.

Your ID card is private, personal information that can be used by malicious actors to harm you. Do not trust random discord bots.

[deepdreamnights]

Hey, you know how I said there was nothing ethical about Adobe's approach to AI? Well whaddya know?

Adobe wants your team lead to contact their customer service to not have your private documents scraped!

This isn't the first of Adobe's always-online subscription-based products (which should not have been allowed in the first place) to have sneaky little scraping permissions auto-set to on and hidden away, but this is the first one (I'm aware of) where you have to contact customer service to turn it off for a whole team.

Now, I'm on record for saying I see scraping as fair use, and it is. But there's an aspect of that that is very essential to it being fair use: The material must be A) public facing and B) fixed published work.

All public facing published work is subject to transformative work and academic study, the use of mechanical apparatus to improve/accelerate that process does not change that principle. Its the difference between looking through someone's public instagram posts and reading through their drafts folder and DMs.

But that's not the kind of work that Adobe's interested in. See, they already have access to that work just like everyone else. But the in-progress work that Creative Cloud gives them access to, and the private work that's never published that's stored there isn't in LIAON. They want that advantage.

And that's valuable data. For an example: having a ton of snapshots of images in the process of being completed would be very handy for making an AI that takes incomplete work/sketches and 'finishes' it. That's on top of just being general dataset grist.

But that work is, definitionally, not published. There's no avenue to a fair use argument for scraping it, so they have to ask. And because they know it will be an unpopular ask, they make it a quiet op-out.

This was sinister enough when it was Photoshop, but PDF is mainly used for official documents and forms. That's tax documents, medical records, college applications, insurance documents, business records, legal documents. And because this is a server-side scrape, even if you opt-out, you have no guarantee that anyone you're sending those documents to has done so.

So, in case you weren't keeping score, corps like Adobe, Disney, Universal, Nintendo, etc all have the resources to make generative AI systems entirely with work they 'own' or can otherwise claim rights to, and no copyright argument can stop them because they own the copyrights.

They just don't want you to have access to it as a small creator to compete with them, and if they can expand copyright to cover styles and destroy fanworks they will. Here's a pic Adobe trying to do just that:

If you want to know more about fair use and why it applies in this circumstance, I recommend the Electronic Frontier Foundation over the Copyright Alliance.