#sorry anyway I got sidetracked

[maliceofminds]

watch out corporate got me guys

[shirojikimattari]

Hey

ⱽᵃᵐᵖᶦʳᵉ ˢʰᵃᵈᵒʷʰᵉᵃʳᵗ

Reference after cut uwu

By columbo (@thisuserisalive)

[linkyu]

tell me about your defense contract pleage

Oh boy!

To be fair, it's nothing grandiose, like, it wasn't about "a new missile blueprint" or whatever, but, just thinking about what it could have become? yeesh.

So, let's go.

For context, this is taking place in the early 2010s, where I was working as a dev and manager for a company that mostly did space stuff, but they had some defence and security contracts too.

One day we got a new contract though, which was... a weird one. It was state-auctioned, meaning that this was basically a homeland contract, but the main sponsor was Philip Morris. Yeah. The American cigarette company.

Why? Because the contract was essentially a crackdown on "illegal cigarette sales", but it was sold as a more general "war on drugs" contract.

For those unaware (because chances are, like me, you are a non-smoker), cigarette contraband is very much a thing. At the time, ~15% of cigarettes were sold illegally here (read: they were smuggled in and sold on the street).

And Phillip Morris wanted to stop that. After all, they're only a small company worth uhhh... oh JFC. Just a paltry 150 billion dollars. They need those extra dollars, you understand?

Anyway. So they sponsored a contract to the state, promising that "the technology used for this can be used to stop drug deals too". Also that "the state would benefit from the cigarettes part as well because smaller black market means more official sales means a higher tax revenue" (that has actually been proven true during the 2020 quarantine).

Anyway, here was the plan:

Phase 1 was to train a neural network and plug it in directly to the city's video-surveillance system, in order to detect illegal transactions as soon as they occur. Big brother who?

Phase 2 was to then track the people involved in said transaction throughout the city, based on their appearance and gait. You ever seen the Plainsight sheep counting video? Imagine something like this but with people. That data would then be relayed to police officers in the area.

So yeah, an automated CCTV-based tracking system. Because that's not setting a scary precedent.

So what do you do when you're in that position? Let me tell you. If you're thrust unknowingly, or against your will, into a project like this,

Note. The following is not a legal advice. In fact it's not even good advice. Do not attempt any of this unless you know you can't get caught, or that even if you are caught, the consequences are acceptable. Above all else, always have a backup plan if and when it backfires. Also don't do anything that can get you sued. Be reasonable.

Let me introduce you to the world of Corporate Sabotage! It's a funny form of striking, very effective in office environments.

Here's what I did:

First of all was the training data. We had extensive footage, but it needed to be marked manually for the training. Basically, just cropping the clips around the "transaction" and drawing some boxes on top of the "criminals". I was in charge of several batches of those. It helped that I was fast at it since I had video editing experience already. Well, let's just say that a good deal of those markings were... not very accurate.

Also, did you know that some video encodings are very slow to process by OpenCV, to the point of sometimes crashing? I'm sure the software is better at it nowadays though. So I did that to another portion of the data.

Unfortunately the training model itself was handled by a different company, so I couldn't do more about this.

Or could I?

I was the main person communicating with them, after all.

Enter: Miscommunication Master

In short (because this is already way too long), I became the most rigid person in the project. Like insisting on sharing the training data only on our own secure shared drive, which they didn't have access to yet. Or tracking down every single bug in the program and making weekly reports on those, which bogged down progress. Or asking for things to be done but without pointing at anyone in particular, so that no one actually did the thing. You know, classic manager incompetence. Except I couldn't be faulted, because after all, I was just "really serious about the security aspect of this project. And you don't want the state to learn that we've mishandled the data security of the project, do you, Jeff?"

A thousand little jabs like this, to slow down and delay the project.

At the end of it, after a full year on this project, we had.... a neural network full of false positives and a semi-working visualizer.

They said the project needed to be wrapped up in the next three months.

I said "damn, good luck with that! By the way my contract is up next month and I'm not renewing."

Last I heard, that city still doesn't have anything installed on their CCTV.

tl;dr: I used corporate sabotage to prevent automated surveillance to be implemented in a city--

hey hold on

wait

what

HEY ACTUALLY I DID SOME EXTRA RESEARCH TO SEE IF PHILLIP MORRIS TRIED THIS SHIT WITH ANOTHER COMPANY SINCE THEN AND WHAT THE FUCK

HUH??????

well what the fuck was all that even about then if they already own most of the black market???

[veemimis]

Chapter 12 : For a Friend

[lostgracestories]

Morgott Romantic headcanons-ish (because I said so)

OKAY so I'm impatient and I'm writing this to tide me over until the poll for a fanfic choice is over AAA (also, I often write for chubbier characters so enjoy fellow girlies) most of this is just word vomit lol

ALSO MARRIAGE AND CHILDREN HEADCANONS IN HERE (they're labeled so skip if not interested <3)

WC: 969 TW: Pregnancy (skip the pregnancy+children section)

~Romantic Relationship Headcanons~

At first, when Morgott enters a relationship, he FOR SURE struggles with self-worth. He is 100% terrified of intimacy like; "No don't touch me, I'll taint you/ruin you"

He definitely still calls you tarnished but adds a little endearing term before or after it (Little tarnished, sweet tarnished, etc.)

After a while, Morgott will eventually become accepting of fleeting touches (and by a while I mean a WHILE) he'll give in every once in a while to a hug or even more rarely a kiss (only on the cheek) if you give him those eyes...

You can BEG and BEG but he will NEVER flirt with you. At least, not like a normal person (because he's far from normal) instead of pick-up lines, cheesy compliments (okay, maybe a couple), or fleeting touches, he always offers you gifts based on things he hears you talk about. There's a book you mention you want? It's in your hands the next day. You want to try a new chocolate shop? There's a giant heart-shaped box on your nightstand waiting for you in the morning, maybe even with a love note.

After finally getting comfortable in the relationship (he's rough around the edges so it takes at LEAST quite a few months) he finally lets you truly kiss him. It startles him at first and he won't look at you as if the golden order is going to smite him for indulging himself in such a thing and when nothing happens, it's like a weight is lifted. Now, whenever he sees you, public or not, he has to steal a kiss.

Even though he still struggles with his own image, he absolutely praises you like a Goddess. Your hip dips? Perfect for him to hold while dancing in the kitchen. The roundness in your cheeks? Perfect for kisses, squishy and cute. The pudge of your lower stomach? The perfect pillow. And he means it. He will lay against your stomach whenever he can. He can't get enough.

Although he denied every request you ever made to touch his horns, afraid you would realize how disgusting he truly was if you touched them, when he wakes up from a night terror one night to find your gentle hands tangled in his hair and horns, a look of soft worry on your face, he feels like his heart is going to leap out of his throat. It is quite possibly the most comforting thing he had ever experienced. Now, when you asked to touch them, he would eagerly oblige you, laying his head in your lap.

~Marriage Headcanons~

When Morgott proposes to you, he is a nervous wreck. It takes everything in him not to retreat into his self-loathing, something that you had worked on with him so hard. He takes you out to his erdtree flower garden and it is beautiful. All the flowers are in bloom and they glow golden under the beginning of the sunset. After offering you a hand-crafted golden ring with intricate designs like vines in it and asks the question, his heart nearly explodes with relief when the answer is yes.

The first year of marriage is hard on Morgott. He feels deep regret that he can not be at your side as much as he wishes to be and so, whenever you come into his study late at night while he's deep in his work, spectacles on the tip of his nose as he reads, he allows you to lay wrapped in his tail by the fireplace behind him. Sometimes, if you fell asleep, he would carry you to bed when he was finished.

Morgott wasn't sure how the topic had been brought up, but the moment he heard the mention of children he immediately became apprehensive. Although, deep down, he would love to have little children of his own, he was absolutely terrified that they would bear his curse and that you would struggle to love them even if you loved him.

~Pregnancy+Children Headcanons~

After A LOT of discussion, you and Morgott had decided that children would not be in either of your best interests for the time being (mostly to make sure Morgott was comfortable with his choice) so when you came hurrying into his study, disrupting his work late at night nearly 3 months later and told him you were pregnant, it was like being smacked in the face. He was excited as much as he was terrified.

Morgott absolutely DOTED on you the whole pregnancy. He would neglect his work as long as possible if it meant taking care of you. Even despite his fears, you were always quick to tell him that you would love their child unconditionally, omen or not. this always eased his tension and sent him out of his spiraling

When the time finally came, Morgott was probably more of a mess than you were. He silently cursed himself and blamed himself every time he heard you in pain and for 13 hours it ate him up.

Morgott's fears were immediately washed away the moment he laid eyes upon the beautiful child you had gifted him. He could swear he cried just a little bit when he found out it was a girl. Despite her being an omen, she was so perfect in both of your eyes. Morgott thanked the erdtree that she would never experience her childhood in the shunning grounds like he and his brother had.

As years pass by, Morgott would dote on both of his girls, his daughter being a daddy's girl especially. He would do anything for her. During each stage of her life. Whether it be scaring away the monster in her wardrobe, reading stories to lull her to sleep, bandaging her wounds when she fell, and eventually comforting her after her first heartbreak, he would ALWAYS be there for his little girl

[doubledyke]

edd cutting ed's food for him any time they have lunch together as little kids

[aseplant]

He turned out v pretty I am actually so proud of this

[vinelark]

rereading ch2 of bbts in honor of tim’s birthday <3 here’s to another year of not aging little guy

happy belated birthday timmy!

[kate-bot]

i LOVE when you draw peppino or fake pep with wiggly smiles it’s sooo cute!! charlie brown vibes

HEHE THANK U SM!!! I absolutely love giving them the wiggliest smiles it’s free therapy . .. I am glad you enjoy them also :3

I do traditional doodles so often i just never post them cuz they’re not the best so here’s one of the cleaner ones….. with a big wiggly smile :)))

[spidercannibal]

as much as i love braime with all my heart i wish ppl would talk ab brienne more individually and her character because i truly am obsessed with her!!! i think she’s one of the most revolutionary female characters ever tbh (i think a lot of the asoiaf girls are kinda revolutionary but that’s because they’re much more well written than a lot of characters) like when do creators ever let they’re supposedly “masculine” female characters be soft and genuinely empathetic as well as heroic?? when do creators ever let a woman be ugly! like the complexity of her never being able to fit in anywhere, she’s not allowed to be woman because she’s ugly and the society she’s born in can’t even stomach her and when she tries to defy the gender roles that said society won’t even let her fit into by picking up sword she’s mocked and ridiculed and her womahood is stripped of her even more and tells her to be more like a woman !!! JUST RAHHHHH i love her sm i’m sorry ab this rant i’m tired and have been thinking ab her. BEFORE I END FHIS RANT i fuckjng HATE HATE HATE d&ds depiction of brienne they could not understand even what her arc was ab!!! they stripped her of everything she is!!! her loyalty, her naivety, her empathy, her heroism ITS ALL JUST GONE!!! instead they decide to make her the stereotypical badass androgynous warrior woman and like there’s nothing wrong with that trope hell i like it but all the nuance surrounding her arc and her gender are just gone. i would’ve loved to see gwen play a book accurate brienne because i loveee gwen and she is what saved show brienne for me

[bogdreamz]

SOOO WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT SEASON 4???

(love your art btw!!!)

smeltbracket found dead in this kitchen

[mamawasatesttube]

kon is actually a metaphor for adhd gifted kid burnout and im dying on this hill

[intertexts]

Oh wait

You like fucked up towns?

Do you perhaps have any thoughts on towns and how to make them more fucked up? :]

(^^ words of something trying to make a small town map that’s fucked up)

OH. HUH. FUN QUESTION. i feel like. i am a terrible person to ask for thoughts on things like this because the extent of my writing is like, gay ass character studies & shit. but. i do have a ton of thoughts on fucked up towns.

the most important thing, i personally think, is having your town be grounded in a real regional place and it has to be a place you love. it's so difficult to make that shit up from scratch and still carry a real weight. and the horror or strangeness or sadness of the town should come from the reality of it.

picking a few of the easiest examples: welcome to night vale, night in the woods, h.p. lovecraft's miskatonic county. the fucked-up-ness of all of them springs from the nature of the place itself. they're not interchangeable, and they all have different emotions linked with them.

night vale is, very loosely, a satire of unbothered american suburbia in the face of-- well. all the horrific shit that post-9/11 unbothered americana ignores! and the strangeness and beauty of the setting comes from the easy and pleasant and mundane way that its citizens interact with the horror. it's day-to-day, it's chill, it's normal. yeah the faceless old lady who lives in your home is running for mayor. yeah the angels who work the community garden and live with josie finally won the case for their existence we can acknowledge them now cool. (& also of course night vale is a southwestern desert town & it doesn't let u forget that!! it's hot and sunny in the day and cold at night and there's sand dunes out by the edge of town and beaches with no lakes and it is very grounded in its setting!!)

possum falls from nitw, on the other hand, is a love letter to to those old, death spiraling pennsylvania rust belt mining towns. it isn't as heavily supernatural of a setting (outside of the old god in the mines the elders are sacrificing the most vulnerable members of the community to for nothing but the continued hollow, wheezing survival of something that should be allowed to die) but it's very grounded in the reality of those places-- the omnipresent forest, the dinky grocery store, your old high school classmate sitting out on her apartment steps at sunset, the feeling of being out in the autumn cold at dusk and the empty subway station and the weathered, half-hearted historical remnants of local pride and the ghost of the closed mine over it all. the type of dead-end, black hole, potholed main street town that you know you're gonna live and die in because it's what your parents did and what their parents did and god knows how you'd even make it out.

lovecraft-- i mean, mandatory disclaimer on his insane racism of course. up to u if u wanna read of his work, a lot of his short stories r very short etc. but crucially, for what we're talking about here, lovecraft was fucking in love with new england in the way that people who r born and raised in new england r insane about it. his lovecraft country/miskatonic county/arkham county is set in massachusetts, and he's very clear about why everything's set in mass: bleak, lonely, ancient, haunted by the sea and the lingering ghosts of twisted puritan ideology. his fucked up towns are the dark hidden backwoods, the port towns, the wretched things brought by settlers who have been a parasite upon the woods and the rocks and the fields for hundreds of years, etc, the feeling that something has gone wrong and perverted here and it's far too late to fix it.

so like, tl;dr-- don't try and make somewherw generically weird. figure out what place makes YOU go crazy go stupid. pinpoint Why it specifically makes u go crazy go stupid, as opposed to everywhere else. crank that shit up to 100!!!!

[good--merits-accumulated]

i fear i am endlessly predictable (writing new dps au which is once again fantasy with Arthurian elements)

[yusuke-of-valla]

Of course the fucking throughline of this game is that everything is caused by weird parental issues

[riddlerosehearts]

Okay now I've come to ask you about Elenion! I want to know everything!!! What about them has grown and changed? Are they still a bard with a bit of stage fright? Did their origin story change at all? How's Gale? Are you hoping for anything specific from Act 3? (You don't have to answer all those questions, just giving some prompts 😊) I'm pumped that you're loving the game!!!

ooh okay, well first of all i hope the way that i always switch between using he/him and they/them pronouns for elenion isn't confusing. i actually use the mirror to swap them in-game sometimes too and i really love that that's a thing they let you do. oh and speaking of using the mirror, back when i first started playing i shared with you some screenshots of what he looked like but since then i ended up changing to a slightly different face preset from a mod i had installed--he basically just has freckles and shorter/smaller ears now, but that fits much better than what i started with.

also, while i was waiting to be able to replace my hard drive i actually filled out a whole character sheet i found on here just for the fun of it and was planning to post it later! maybe i'll also write out a character description along with it, so i can reference that if i need to.

anyway, gonna put the rest of this under a cut just in case it gets lengthy! (assuming the cut shows up in the correct place, anyway. i had this reply saved as a draft and tumblr keeps glitching and messing things up whenever i save the draft.)

so back when i first started playing, i had come up with a basic idea for what kind of character i wanted to make but a lot of it was sort of vague. and then as i played through act 1 i ended up coming up with different ideas that i preferred and decided to stick with. i didn't really change too much about elenion's personality! i think i told you before that they've always wanted to live up to the legacy of their father who was himself a renowned bard but they're very anxious and insecure, and that they're very reserved but also friendly and good at putting on a confident facade. that's all still true. however, i think i also told you that they were pretty normal and didn't have a traumatic backstory and that their father died after they moved away from home… well, i did change that a bit! i decided that their father actually died like 15 years ago when they were still a teenager, in an accident that they have always believed was their fault, and there was no way for them to save him or bring him back--so that's why they've continued to act the way they do for so long, and also why they very infrequently visit baldur's gate and are anxious about returning. they gradually distanced themself from their home and from their mother out of guilt and haven't visited in years at this point, always using their work and their travels as an excuse, so now having to be back in the city means having to face that.

something else that's important is that before getting abducted by mindflayers elenion would basically do a lot of historical and anthropological research in whatever places he visited as a way to gain inspiration for his writing, and he actually really prefers just doing research and putting on smaller performances over trying to be the glamorous bard that his father was, but before ending up on this crazy journey and becoming more comfortable with opening up to gale and the other companions he would've never admitted that to anyone including himself. right now he still plans to just keep doing what he's been doing after all this is over, but maybe he'll end up accepting that it is not working, isn't making him happy, and probably isn't how his father would've wanted him to spend his life. all of this is still a fairly simple story, but hey, sometimes simplicity works best!

gale is literally so sweet and is such a gentleman and i can't believe there are people who hate him. something i did in the game not too long ago was find tara on a rooftop eating pigeons and after she left gale was like "oh by the way, i was thinking about introducing you two over a homecooked meal in my super cool tower that has a really nice kitchen and a wine cellar, if you would like that!" …uh, hello, who WOULDN'T afkjghdsfs. i actually had him in my party during the big battle at the mind flayer colony and he very nearly tried to blow himself up, but elenion talked him out of it and now he seems like he really does want to live, so obviously i'm glad about that… only now he constantly talks about wanting to find this book about the netherese crown and try to use its power, which is concerning and i really hope i don't somehow accidentally convince him to become a god omg. i honestly can't really think of anything specific that i'm wanting to see in act 3, i'm just excited to see what happens and how everybody's stories end! though i know gale has at least one more really sweet romance scene coming up in act 3 because i've seen gifs of it, so i guess i can say i'm looking forward to getting to see it for myself. i also really want to know what's going to happen with lae'zel and the githyanki egg we found since in my game she's been carrying it around and seems pretty attached to it, like are we actually going to come across a more accepting creche to drop it off at, or is she just going to end up becoming a mother, or…?? but as for the main plot i pretty much have no idea what to expect!!