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wirewitchviolet · 2 years ago

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How a Computer Works - Part 1 (Components)

I am about to teach you on a real fundamental, connecting up electronic components level, how a computer actually works. Before I get into the meat of this though (you can just skip down below the fold if you don't care), here's the reasons I'm sitting doing so in this format:

Like a decade or two ago, companies Facebook pushed this whole "pivot to video" idea on the whole internet with some completely faked data, convincing everyone that everything had to be a video, and we need to start pushing back against that. Especially for stuff like complex explanations of things or instructions, it's much more efficient to just explain things clearly in text, maybe with some visual aids, so people can easily search, scan, and skip around between sections. It's also a hell of a lot easier to host things long term, and you can even print out a text based explainer and not need a computer to read it, keep it on a desk, highlight it, etc.

People are so clueless about how computers actually work that they start really thinking like it's all magical. Even programmers. Aside from how proper knowledge lets you get more out of them, this leads to people spouting off total nonsense about "teaching sand to think" or "everything is just 1s and 0s" or "this 'AI' a con artist who was trying to sell me NFTs a month ago probably really is an amazing creative thinking machine that can do everything he says!"

We used to have this cultural value going where it was expected that if you owned something and used it day to day, you'd have enough basic knowledge of how it worked that if it stopped working you could open it up, see what was wrong, and maybe fix it on your own, or maybe even put one together again from scratch, and that's obviously worth bringing back.

I'm personally working on a totally bonkers DIY project and I'd like to hype up like-minded people for when it gets farther along.

So all that said, have a standard reminder that I am completely reliant on Patreon donations to survive, keep updating this blog, and ideally start getting some PCBs and chips and a nice oscilloscope to get that mystery project off the ground.

Electricity probably doesn't work like how you were taught (and my explanation shouldn't be trusted too far either).

I remember, growing up, hearing all sorts of things about electricity having this sort of magical ability to always find the shortest possible path to where it needs to get, flowing like water, and a bunch of other things that are kind of useful for explaining how a Faraday cage or a lightning rod works, and not conflicting with how simple electronics will have a battery and then a single line of wire going through like a switch and a light bulb or whatever back to the other end of the battery.

If you had this idea drilled into your head hard enough, you might end up thinking that if we have a wire hooked to the negative end of a battery stretching off to the east, and another wire stretching off to the east from the positive end, and we bridge between the two in several places with an LED or something soldered to both ends, only the westernmost one is going to light up, because hey, the shortest path is the one that turns off as quickly as possible to connect to the other side, right? Well turns out no, all three are going to light up, because that "shortest path" thing is a total misunderstanding.

Here's how it actually works, roughly. If you took basic high school chemistry, you learned about how the periodic table is set up, right? A given atom, normally, has whatever number of protons in the core, and the same number of electrons, whipping all over around it, being attracted to those protons but repelled by each other, and there's particular counts of electrons which are super chill with that arrangement so we put those elements in the same column as each other, and then as you count up from those, you get the elements between those either have some electrons that don't fit all tight packed in the tight orbit and just kinda hang out all wide and lonely and "want to" buddy up with another atom that has more room, up to the half full column that can kinda go either way, then as we approach the next happy number they "want to" have a little more company to get right to that cozy tight packed number, and when you have "extra" electrons and "missing" electrons other atoms kinda cozy up and share so they hit those good noble gas counts.

I'm sure real experts want to scream at me for both that and this, but this is basically how electricity works. You have a big pile of something at the "positive" end that's "missing electrons" (for the above reason or maybe actually ionized so they really aren't there), and a "negative" end that's got spares. Then you make wires out of stuff from those middle of the road elements that have awkward electron counts and don't mind buddying up (and also high melting points and some other handy qualities) and you hook those in there. And the electron clouds on all the atoms in the wire get kinda pulled towards the positive side because there's more room over there, but if they full on leave their nucleus needs more electron pals, so yeah neighbors get pulled over, and the whole wire connected to the positive bit ends up with a positive charge to it, and the whole wire on the negative bit is negatively charged, and so yeah, anywhere you bridge the gap between the two, the electrons are pretty stoked about balancing out these two big awkward compromises and they'll start conga lining over to balance things out, and while they're at it they'll light up lights or shake speakers or spin motors or activate electromagnets or whatever other rad things you've worked out how to make happen with a live electric current.

Insulators, Resistors, Waves, and Capacitors

Oh and we typically surround these wires made of things that are super happy about sharing electrons around with materials that are very much "I'm good, thanks," but this isn't an all or nothing system and there's stuff you can connect between the positive and negative ends of things that still pass the current along, but only so much so fast. We use those to make resistors, and those are handy because sometimes you don't want to put all the juice you have through something because it would damage it, and having a resistor anywhere along a path you're putting current through puts a cap on that flow, and also sometimes you might want a wire connected to positive or negative with a really strong resistor so it'll have SOME sort of default charge, but if we get a free(r) flowing connection attached to that wire somewhere else that opens sometimes, screw that little trickle going one way, we're leaning everyone the other way for now.

The other thing with electricity is is that the flow here isn't a basic yes/no thing. How enthusiastically those electrons are getting pulled depends on the difference in charge at the positive and negative ends, and also if you're running super long wires then even if they conduct real good, having all that space to spread along is going to kinda slow things to a trickle, AND the whole thing is kinda going to have some inherent bounciness to it both because we're dealing with electrons whipping and spinning all over and because, since it's a property that's actually useful for a lot of things we do with electricity, the power coming out of the wall has this intentional wobbly nature because we've actually got this ridiculous spinny thing going on that's constantly flip flopping which prong of the socket is positive and which is negative and point is we get these sine waves of strength by default, and they kinda flop over if we're going really far.

Of course there's also a lot of times when you really want to not have your current flow flickering on and off all the time, but hey fortunately one of the first neat little electronic components we ever worked out are capacitors... and look, I'm going to be straight with you. I don't really get capacitors, but the basic idea is you've got two wires that go to big wide plates, and between those you have something that doesn't conduct the electricity normally, but they're so close the electromagnetic fields are like vibing, and then if you disconnect them from the flow they were almost conducting and/or they get charged to their limit, they just can't deal with being so charged up and they'll bridge their own gap and let it out. So basically you give them electricity to hold onto for a bit then pass along, and various sizes of them are super handy if you want to have a delay between throwing a switch and having things start doing their thing, or keeping stuff going after you break a connection, or you make a little branching path where one branch connects all regular and the other goes through a capacitor, and the electricity which is coming in in little pulses effectively comes out as a relatively steady stream because every time it'd cut out the capacity lets its charge go.

We don't just have switches, we have potentiometers.

OK, so... all of the above is just sort of about having a current and maybe worrying about how strong it is, but other than explaining how you can just kinda have main power rails running all over, and just hook stuff across them all willy-nilly rather than being forced to put everything in one big line, but still, all you can do with that is turn the whole thing on and off by breaking the circuit. Incidentally, switches, buttons, keys, and anything else you use to control the behavior of any electronic device really are just physically touching loose wires together or pulling them apart... well wait no, not all, this is a good bit to know.

None of this is actually pass/fail, really, there's wave amplitudes and how big a difference we have between the all. So when you have like, a volume knob, that's a potentiometer, which is a simple little thing where you've got your wire, it's going through a resistor, and then we have another wire we're scraping back and forth along the resistor, using a knob, usually, and the idea is the current only has to go through X percent of the resistor to get to the wire you're moving, which proportionately reduces the resistance. So you have like a 20 volt current, you've got a resistor that'll drop that down to 5 or so, but then you move this other wire down along and you've got this whole dynamic range and you can fine tune it to 15 or 10 or whatever coming down that wire. And what's nice about this again, what's actually coming down the wire is this wobbily wave of current, it's not really just "on" or "off, and as you add resistance, the wobble stays the same, it's just the peaks and valleys get closer to being just flat. Which is great if you're making, say, a knob to control volume, or brightness, or anything you want variable intensity in really.

Hey hey, it's a relay!

Again, a lot of the earliest stuff people did with electronics was really dependent on that analog wobbly waveform angle. Particularly for reproducing sound, and particularly the signals of a telegraph. Those had to travel down wires for absurd distances, and as previously stated, when you do that the signal is going to eventually decay to nothing. But then someone came up with this really basic idea where every so often along those super long wires, you set something up that takes the old signal and uses it to start a new one. They called them relays, because you know, it's like a relay race.

If you know how an electromagnet works (something about the field generated when you coil a bunch of copper wire around an iron core and run an electric current through it), a relay is super simple. You've got an electromagnet in the first circuit you're running, presumably right by where it's going to hit the big charged endpoint, and that magnetically pulls a tab of metal that's acting as a switch on a new circuit. As long as you've got enough juice left to activate the magnet, you slam that switch and voom you've got all the voltage you can generate on the new line.

Relays don't get used too much in other stuff, being unpopular at the time for not being all analog and wobbily (slamming that switch back and forth IS going to be a very binary on or off sorta thing), and they make this loud clacking noise that's actually just super cool to hear in devices that do use them (pinball machines are one of the main surviving use cases I believe) but could be annoying in some cases. What's also neat is that they're a logical AND gate. That is, if you have current flowing into the magnet, AND you have current flowing into the new wire up to the switch, you have it flowing out through the far side of the switch, but if either of those isn't true, nothing happens. Logic gates, to get ahead of myself a bit, are kinda the whole thing with computers, but we still need the rest of them. So for these purposes, relays re only neat if it's the most power and space efficient AND gate you have access to.

Oh and come to think of it, there's no reason we need to have that magnet closing the circuit when it's doing its thing. We could have it closed by default and yank it open by the magnet. Hey, now we're inverting whatever we're getting on the first wire! Neat!

Relay computers clack too loud! Gimme vacuum tubes!

So... let's take a look at the other main thing people used electricity for before coming up with the whole computer thing, our old friend the light bulb! Now I already touched a bit on the whole wacky alternating current thing, and I think this is actually one of the cases that eventually lead to it being adopted so widely, but the earliest light bulbs tended to just use normal direct current, where again, you've got the positive end and the negative end, and we just take a little filament of whatever we have handy that glows when you run enough of a current through it, and we put that in a big glass bulb and pump out all the air we can, because if we don't, the oxygen in there is probably going to change that from glowing a bit to straight up catching on fire and burning immediately.

But, we have a new weird little problem, because of the physics behind that glowing. Making something hot, on a molecular level, is just kinda adding energy to the system so everything jitters around more violently, and if you get something hot enough that it glows, you're getting it all twitchy enough for tinier particles to just fly the hell off it. Specifically photons, that's the light bit, but also hey, remember, electrons are just kinda free moving and whipping all over looking for their naked proton pals... and hey, inside this big glass bulb, we've got that other end of the wire with the more positive charge to it. Why bother wandering up this whole coily filament when we're in a vacuum and there's nothing to get in the way if we just leap straight over that gap? So... they do that, and they're coming in fast and on elliptical approaches and all, so a bunch of electrons overshoot and smack into the glass on the far side, and now one side of every light bulb is getting all gross and burnt from that and turning all brown and we can't have that.

So again, part of the fix is we switched to alternating current so it's at least splitting those wild jumps up to either side, but before that, someone tried to solve this by just... kinda putting a backboard in there. Stick a big metal plate on the end of another wire in the bulb connected to a positive charge, and now OK, all those maverick electrons smack into here and aren't messing up the glass, but also hey, this is a neat little thing. Those electrons are making that hop because they're all hot and bothered. If we're not heating up the plate they're jumping to, and there's no real reason we'd want to, then if we had a negative signal over on that side... nothing would happen. Electrons aren't getting all antsy and jumping back.

So now we have a diode! The name comes because we have two (di-) electrodes (-ode) we care about in the bulb (we're just kind of ignoring the negative one), and it's a one way street for our circuit. That's useful for a lot of stuff, like not having electricity flow backwards through complex systems and mess things up, converting AC to DC (when it flips, current won't flow through the diode so we lop off the bottom of the wave, and hey, we can do that thing with capacitors to release their current during those cutoffs, and if we're clever we can get a pretty steady high).

More electrodes! More electrodes!

So a bit after someone worked out this whole vacuum tube diode thing, someone went hey, what if it was a triode? So, let's stick another electrode in there, and this one just kinda curves around in the middle, just kinda making a grate or a mesh grid, between our hot always flowing filament and that catch plate we're keeping positively charged when it's doing stuff. Well this works in a neat way. If there's a negative charge on it, it's going to be pushing back on those electrons jumping over, and if there's a positive charge on it, it's going to help pull those electrons over (it's all thin, so they're going to shoot right past it, especially if there's way more of a positive charge over on the plate... and here's the super cool part- This is an analog thing. If we have a relatively big negative charge, it's going to repel everything, if it's a relatively big positive, it's going to pull a ton across, if it's right in the middle, it's like it wasn't even in there, and you can have tiny charges for all the gradients in between.

We don't need a huge charge for any of this though, because we're just helping or hindering the big jump from the high voltage stuff, and huh, weren't we doing this whole weak current controlling a strong current thing before with the relay? We were! And this is doing the same thing! Except now we're doing it all analog style, not slapping switch with a magnet, and we can make those wavy currents peak higher or lower and cool, now we can have phone lines boost over long distances too, and make volume knobs, and all that good stuff.

The relay version of this had that cool trick though where you could flip the output. Can we still flip the output? We sure can, we just need some other toys in the mix. See we keep talking about positive charges and negative charges at the ends of our circuits, but these are relative things. I mentioned way back when how you can use resistors to throttle how much of a current we've got, so you can run two wires to that grid in the triode. One connects to a negative charge and the other positive, with resistors on both those lines, and a switch that can break the connection on the positive end. If the positive is disconnected, we've got a negative charge on the grid, since it's all we've got, but if we connect it, and the resistor to the negative end really limits flow, we're positive in the section the grid's in. And over on the side with the collecting plate, we branch off with another resistor setup so the negative charge on that side is normally the only viable connection for a positive, but when we flip the grid to positive, we're jumping across the gap in the vacuum tube, and that's a big open flow so we'll just take those electrons instead of the ones that have to squeeze through a tight resistor to get there.

That explanation is probably a bit hard to follow because I'm over here trying to explain it based on how the electrons are actually getting pulled around. In the world of electronics everyone decided to just pretend the flow is going the other way because it makes stuff easier to follow. So pretend we have magical positrons that go the other way and if they have nothing better to do they go down the path where we have all the fun stuff further down the circuit lighting lights and all that even though it's a tight squeeze through a resistor, because there's a yucky double negative in the triode and that's worse, but we have the switch rigged up to make that a nice positive go signal to the resistance free promised land with a bonus booster to cut across, so we're just gonna go that way when the grid signal's connected.

Oh and you can make other sorts of logic circuits or double up on them in a single tube if you add more grids and such, which we did for a while, but not really relevant these days.

Cool history lesson but I know there's no relays or vacuum tubes in my computer.

Right, so the above things are how we used to make computers, but they were super bulky, and you'd have to deal with how relays are super loud and kinda slow, and vacuum tubes need a big power draw and get hot. What we use instead of either of those these days are transistors. See after spending a good number of years working out all this circuit flow stuff with vacuum tubes we eventually focused on how the real important thing in all of this is how with the right materials you can make a little juncture where current flows between a positive and negative charge if a third wire going in there is also positively charged, but if it's negatively charged we're pulling over. And turns out there is a WAY more efficient way of doing that if you take a chunk of good ol' middle of the electron road silicon, and just kinda lightly paint the side of it with just the tiniest amount of positive leaning and negative leaning elements on the sides.

Really transistors don't require understanding anything new past the large number of topics already covered here, they're just more compact about it. Positive leaning bit, negative leaning bit, wildcard in the middle, like a vacuum tube. Based on the concepts of pulling electrons around from chemistry, like a circuit in general. The control wire in the middle kinda works in just a pass-fail sort of way, like a relay. They're just really nice compared to the older alternatives because they don't make noise or have moving parts to wear down, you don't have to run enough current through them for metal to start glowing and the whole room to heat up, and you can make them small. Absurdly small. Like... need an electron microscope to see them small.

And of course you can also make an inverter super tiny like that, and a diode (while you're at it you can use special materials or phosphors to make them light emitting, go LEDs!) and resistors can get pretty damn small if you just use less of a more resistant material, capacitors I think have a limit to how tiny you can get, practically, but yeah, you now know enough of the basic fundamentals of how computers work to throw some logic gates together. We've covered how a relay, triode, or transistor function as an AND gate. An OR gate is super easy, you just stick diodes on two wires so you don't have messy backflow then connect them together and lead off there. If you can get your head around wiring up an inverter (AKA NOT), hey, stick one after an AND to get a NAND, or an OR to get a NOR. You can work out XOR and XNOR from there right? Just build 4 NANDs, pass input A into gates 1 and 2, B into 2 and 3, 2's output into 1 and 3, 1 and 3's output into 4 for a XOR, use NORs instead for a XNOR. That's all of them right? So now just build a ton of those and arrange them into a computer. It's all logic and math from there.

Oh right. It's... an absurd amount of logic and math, and I can only fit so many words in a blog post. So we'll have to go all...

CONTINUED IN PART 2!

Meanwhile, again, if you can spare some cash I'd really appreciate it.

#computers #computer science #history #electronics #education #relays #transistors #vacuum tubes

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germanpostwarmodern · 7 months ago

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I recently reorganized my library and in the process stumbled across the present tome which celebrates its 20th birthday in 2024: Philip Jodidio’s „Tadao Ando - Complete Works“, published by Taschen in 2004. It was the first edition of a book that to this day remains a staple in the publisher’s program. In oversized coffee table format that monograph features about forty of Ando’s most significant projects, among them early row and single-family houses, the Rokko Housing projects, the famous Church of Light and Water Temple or large-scale and unrealized projects like the Chikatsu-Atsuka and Calder Museums. Each project is accompanied by a concise text as well as large-format photographs, drawings and plans. The former convey the exceptional spatial qualities of Ando’s buildings but also demonstrate his sophisticated handling of concrete, a feature that obviously isn’t an end in itself but the sensible enclosing of space.

The book reminded me of my early admiration of Tadao Ando but also of the fact that many of the projects that came to life after the book’s initial release didn’t excite my on the same level as those contained in it.

#tadao ando #monograph #architecture #japan #architecture book #book

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talenlee · 5 months ago

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Dev Pile 2025-06 — Starter Kit

Making dev piles is a new experience for the blog in that they are explicitly deliberately timely. Where most of the work on this blog is thrown weeks, sometimes months in advance if it doesn’t fit neatly in a single spot, I am trying to make sure I write any given Dev Pile article covering the ‘week before’ the article goes up. This is a new kind of work for me, and it’s necessitated working ahead.

The week this article is being ‘written in’ is the week after Cancon. I had a plan for this week: I was going to spend the week writing an article developing the game dev I did, at cancon, in the dull periods at the table between the sales. Thing is, this year, that did not happen – Cancon was pretty much completely constant, so much so that the first day I didn’t even notice I never pulled out my notebook and what notes did get taken during the whole event were surface, or sketching out some minor ideas.

Therefore instead of a single intense focus here, this is going to be something of a hello and hey, here’s how to get started article about game making, tools, and prototyping.

Who Can Make Games?

You can make games. I can make games. Anyone who wants to can make games. The access you have to industrial scale production equipment to make the game you’re designing into something that looks like conventional product is a little more attainable than you may think, thanks to modern tools.

The core of you making games is this: Can you explain a set of rules to another player that let them understand how to play the game?

Great, then you’ve made a game. The next step is working out how to make that game the kind of game you want it to be. And to paraphrase what Adam Savage once said, the difference between doing game development and screwing around is just writing things down.

Tools

First things first, if you have a tool you like for any of the stated purposes, then you should use the tool you like. The tools I describe here should all be free, but that can make them less convenient in ways you may not like.

To write rulebooks, I use LibreOffice. This is a text editor in the same vein as Pages and Word, and much like Google Docs. We’ve pretty much solved ‘writing in a document for a computer user to read’ as a format, and that format has been kinda the same for thirty years. Notably, a formal editor like this lets you do tables and give texts formatting entries like heading styles, which means you don’t have to work to translate that stuff to a website like a wordpress content management system. Under the hood, these two things know how to talk to one another.

Notepad is a valuable tool as well for when you need ‘scrap’ text – no formatting, just some numbers or the like, but literally anything will do here.

Almost inevitably any given game design I have will need a spreadsheet. Sometimes a spreadsheet lets me present a skeleton of a game, with say, a sheet of 52 entries that just indicate the information on a card’s face. That means I use LibreCalc, but I only started using that seven months ago, when I learned about the IFS function. The version of Excel I was using from 2007 didn’t have this ‘new’ functionality, and I found that very useful. You may ask: How often do you need ‘IFS’ in game development and the answer is never. There are definitely thihngs I can use spreadsheets for, but these functions are not super necessary.

To do visual editing I use GIMP, pronounced ‘noo-imp,’ because gimp is a silly word to use in everyday conversation and it has worn its welcome out in my tongue. GIMP is a program that takes some getting used to, but the heart of what it is is a powerful photoshop-level program that puts almost everything it has directly under your control, including warp tools, healing tools, stamp tools and other simple filters. I will usually use GIMP to generate a template file or example for how a card should look, and then, when I want to put those cards into a file to make a pdf for printing, I turn to…

Scribus! Scribus is my layout and DTP program that I avoid using in every situation I can. I dislike Scribus interface a lot, and as a result, I route around it – I try to make sure that if I’m doing something in a design that Scribus ‘could’ do, I will ensure that Scribus is the only thing that can do it, and if something else can do it, I’ll do it that way. This is a combination of familiarity and convenience: Scribus is by no means a bad program, I’m sure, but I don’t like using it and it feels very easy to break things, which means when I do use it, I’m probably using it ‘wrong,’ and a Scribus expert would want to correct my technique.

For making simple slideshow videos, where I just show a thing, talk about it, and move on, I use the program OBS, which you can use for rules tutorials or explainers. OBS has its own ability to do slides – which you can make in a slideshow program like Google Slides or powerpoint or Prezi if you like – and then you talk over it, advancing the slides in OBS. It’s a very powerful, very flexible tool, but I can understand if it’s a bit overwhelming to start with.

If you want to record audio for your game, which is a cool thing to do, I use Audacity. It’s a simple audio program if you’re just using it for its basic functions, but it can be great if (for example) you want to record audio diaries of your creation process.

Also, mixed in with this is, cardboard, paper, scissors and glue. Playing cards need a standardised form so you can make a ‘blank’ deck of cards by taking an ordinary deck of cards and putting large, white, laundry stickers on each face, ‘wiping’ it so you can write what you want on the face.

Art Though?

I use free art where I can. There’s a lot of art assets, paid and free over on itch.io, which you can definitely use to make your game work look more interesting than base. And of course…

Bandaid tearing off time,

There are free image generators that you can use if you are comfortable with that. My advice is that you should only ever use generators for ‘zero value’ forms of media; that is, nothing you intend to sell and nothing you intend to use as identifying for yourself; don’t use a generator for a logo for your identity or brand, for example, because that’s uncopyrightable and then someone can just copy it. Even if they don’t, the fact they can undermines the copyright value of designing your own logo and title.

But yeah, image generators are available online. When I need an image for an example, the one I recommend using is dezgo, because it doesn’t require a login, doesn’t require you to pay money, and all it asks of you is time to let it finish working. You’re not going to get timely bulk media out of it, but that means, in my mind, that any artwork it generates is going to be worth scrutinising and editing to make it more appropriate to your needs. This is part of a greater conversation, but for now, the important thing is that if you’re going to use generative tools you need to make sure you recognise what they’re bad at and what they’re bad for.

Getting Started?

Alright, you have some tools to make what you have in mind more possible. What I recommend you do, and I will delve more into this later in the week, is make a prototype, and then, once you have the prototype, look at it seriously.

You’re going to have to get your head around the question what do I like without asking the followup question why at first. What is it about your prototype that satisfies you? What would you change if you could? Why isn’t it satisfying to you, what about it makes you concerned. Are there things you haven’t thought about because of biases you have? Is it a game you can’t play with one hand?

The point is the prototype marks the point you start finding out. You don’t need a perfect game to prototype – indeed, I have a lot of very ugly games as prototypes and I think those ugly prototypes work really well as a place to start working out what to do next.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Dev Pile #Games #Making

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glamsmine · 18 days ago

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VERY short excerpt from a fic idea I've been working on:

You are the big secret that Rex has been keeping from his girlfriend of two years.

I'm still working out the kinks.

Thoughts?

"What was that Rex?" She said in that soft voice of hers with a small smile, the kind that looked endearing paired with her knitted brows that were coiled up in anticipation.

"My dad's dead." He said plainly. Her hand dropped the spoon in her hand, spilling what little cereal it had as it met the table in a hard clink.

"Oh Rex, I'm sorry-" She started with condolences ready on her tongue.

"Its fine. You don't have to feel sorry, that wasn't what I meant so say. I have a sister actually. Probably should’ve led with that instead of with the dead father line." He nervously chuckled, saying everything in one breath as if it didn't affect him. Rae was still trying to process the sudden reveal of his father's supposed passing.

And that's it lmao.

I have more written but I wonder if anyone would even be interested in reading something like this? I've been brewing a LOT of sister!reader fics for the invicible fandom this past month but they're still works in progress and this is the only one im rly interested in getting some feedback on as a concept.😅

Ik my writing isn't all that good, it's decent but not at the level I want it to be at yet.

Planning on maybe just making headcanon posts to warm up to writing more frequently. But who knows.

Also I have no idea how to format fics on here. Everyone just seems to do their own thing but there's this general look fics on here have that I wanna try out making so that it's obvious it's writing drabbles and stuff instead of just going all in with blocks of text like I previously have. Yikes past me😬😔😭

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pomegranates-and-poppies · 21 days ago

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preliminary thoughts on siddur shoshanat yadi (shavuot thoughts pt 1)

I'll say up front, I did not enjoy davening with this siddur. To be transparent, I have a siddur I really like and I bought a copy of Shoshanat Yadi as an experiment (just decided to get the proof on a whim, I felt more comfortable being within my budget for it). I also liked that it was comprehensive of all services and not massive--the siddur I usually use doesn't have a version like that. I also want to disclaim that I have not gone through the siddur in-depth; these are my thoughts after using it once, for festival services.

Problem 1: Quality-of-life features. My preferred siddur, Eit Ratzon, has a LOT of QoL features--a longer table of contents for example. I want to say right here that I understand that anything that makes the book longer is also a tradeoff with the fact that it works for all services and is a small format. I found Shoshanat Yadi a little annoying to navigate: mostly because of the format of translation and transliteration, which I'll talk about in a sec--it was just hard to quickly figure out which blessing I was looking at by reading the text. The table of contents was a little too short, but honestly it was serviceable. What was really annoying was that I *could not find Yigdal anywhere!!* However, I'm going to give the siddur a pass on this stuff because a) I think this would be mostly fine for someone who's more adept at navigating siddurim than I am, b) I can also chalk this up to unfamiliarity with the siddur and service, I think it would be better with more frequent use and in a more familiar context, and c) it's a proof copy, so these things might change. Also, I really liked the little symbols for directions like stand and bow! I think they're a lot more elegant than what Eit Ratzon does.

Problem 2: The translation-transliteration format. Here's a screenshot from the full text PDF which is also linked on the antizionistsiddur instagram (side note: I had to download the file because it was so large and that seemed to break the comments but I would love to be able to get a look at the comments in context).

I don't like this. I really like reading the English meanings of prayers and doing this makes it really hard to get a continuous meaning--you essentially end up reading the prayer in fragments rather than in complete sentences. The introduction says this is to help readers make connections between the English and the Hebrew line-by-line, and while it might do that for someone who's better at Hebrew than I am, I find that it really misses the forest from the trees in that I struggle to look at a page and get a good idea of what a prayer is about. This and the following thing are the main issues I have.

Problem 3: The Aleinu in the room. My preferred siddur, Eit Ratzon, has four versions of the Aleinu (including the traditional) that attempt to grapple with the message of the choseness of the Jewish people, because a message of Jewish supremacy doesn't sit right with a lot of us. Shoshanat Yadi has only the traditional. And while I understand trying to keep the siddur short, it feels like an antizionist siddur should definitely attempt to grapple with the prayer that is pretty explicit about Jewish supremacy. Similarly, I could see an explanation of this as trying to keep the prayer traditional, but if you're going to add v'al kol palestinah and v'al kol yoshvei teivel and chaverim I don't think it's too much of a stretch to at least give people the option to deviate. I think this highlights a weird tension that often exists between traditional Judaism and progressive values and there's often no good way to resolve that, but I think Shoshanat Yadi should at least try. Tatir Tz'rurah talks about it a bit in the introduction but it feels pretty surface-level, and I think Shoshanat Yadi should stand on its own and make its own explanation as well.

With those large pieces of criticism, here are the things I did like about the siddur:

aforementioned includes all the services + is small

aforementioned the little symbols for directions

While I personally don't feel the need, I like the option of chaverim with yisrael

I liked the introduction! I liked what it had to say and how it said it.

I like the inclusion of Hagar in the matriarchs or at least found it interesting, (i'm curious how the tune would go with her added) though I would have loved some info about it in the introduction

I like that it has the bedtime shma! feels kinda sweet idk

I don't think I'm going to use the proof copy much, but I might take it as a travel siddur because of its size and comprehensiveness, and I might try to use it at my own services once or twice (but I'm away + won't be going to services for the summer so that won't be for awhile). I don't think I'll buy a full copy, and I probably won't buy any further antizionist siddurim like this unless they're big copies with lots of commentary (the main reason I like Eit Ratzon). I wasn't necessarily expecting to replace my current siddur, but I hoped that Shoshanat Yadi would be something I wanted to daven from sometimes, maybe when the mood struck me. I think Tatir Tz'rurah would have been more like that just because of the formatting of the translation and transliteration, but alas I could not get my hands on one. anyway those are my thoughts. curious to hear others, especially from people who have Tatir Tz'rurah!

#siddur shoshanat yadi #shoshanat yadi #jewish joy #judaism #jumblr #jewish antizionism #antizionist siddur #pomegranates.txt

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wildbolt · 4 months ago

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˖ ⚡️ ＃ 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐭 is a highly selective & private writing blog feat. 𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐬𝐡𝐢 𝐚𝐬𝐡 𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐮𝐦 of the ( 1997 - 2023 ) pokeani series. inspiration taken from the indigo league, gotta catch 'em live, many to all films, & personal headcanons. playlist.

a majestic tale within THE WONDERFUL WORLD of pokemon. one young boy dreams to be the VERY BEST &. to become pokemon master. through hard trials of fate &. brave determination, crowns him as a TRUE hero &. BORN champion.

★☆ searching far & wide with: spookymulti ☆ mfingoak ☆ hightouch ☆ hiswrlds ☆ talkaboutpathetic ☆ royalgardensnake

☆★ team: pikachu ★ victini ★ rowlet ★ oshawott ★ lucario ★ charizard

001. hello fellow trainer! welcome to my blog where i write my beloved little ashy boy. i have enjoyed pokemon since the tender age of five & to this very day, yellow & gale of darkness being my personal favorite games! i have been rping for 15+ years and have yet to get out of this chair. my blog is strictly selective & private, so i will only interact with my mutuals. i will not be responding back to the following messages: want to rp? can we be mutuals? etc. i'm sure you are an amazing writer with wonderful muse(s) but this is my decision to follow, please do not take it personally if i don't follow back, as this is due to comfort & to keep a tidy dashboard. i will end up soft blocking when i deem it necessary: if i find your muse makes me feel uncomfortable all of a sudden, i never found our muses could connect, or if the dash is clogged as i do ghost a lot. i don't have high standards, but there are somethings i do take on direct level when it comes to rping. i won't be following hub blogs as well. if you have sides, i will look through them but they must be pinned in order for me to browse them.

002. i am crossover & original character friendly. however i must have some info of your oc & any verses they have before we can write together. i also need to know what series your muse(s) originate from for better understanding & writing perspective, as this makes my life a whole lot easier to know what we can do during interactions. i would love to partake in any kind of plotting, though i am a very lax role player & it isn't necessary. this goes without saying, but godmodding, metagaming & powerplay is forbidden. there can be some exceptions, but this does not allow you to have full control while we write.

003. please do not pressure me for replies, i work a 40+ hour job in a stressful environment. i also have add/adhd, so i get distracted very easily. i also forget a lot & feel swamped most times. i only write when i am motivated & have enough energy. with all that being said, my inbox & dms are always open for any new interactions. just be patient when & if i am sporadic with them.

004. i won't be writing any nsfw as my muse is plot locked at the age of 10 in canon. there may be dark scenes that may contain death however, as my muse does indeed die a few times during the series. this will be on the most rarest occasions, or may not be present at all. i don't tag triggers, but if need be i can & will. just give me a holler if anything needs to be tagged correctly.

005. length varies to what i can come up with & what my writing partners bring to the table. this doesn't mean you ever have to match up with mine. i enjoy making stories at times & this all ties down to reply speed. format is small text with html color coding. you can format our threads however you like, so long as it is readable. also, please trim your posts for my poor ocd brain.

006. this blog contains multishipping in different timelines and verses. good chemistry & enough interactions are required for any dynamic questions, but never be afraid to ask if you want something planned as i am open for romantic/familial/platonic ships. i don't practice exclusives but i do with mains.

007. no drama. no hate. no name drops. if i see anything of sort in the inbox or dms, it will be deleted upon arrival. role play is a hobby & for fun, let's keep it that way. so please, do not harass any of my writing partners. if you are wary of someone i interact with however, you may politely inform me. but i absolutely will not tolerate for personal disliking towards another. anonymous asks are forever closed simply for me to focus on threads & in my opinion, i had never found anons enjoyable to answer.

008. my open starters & prompts are available always! you may also continue an answered ask without question. if sending an inbox message for one of his partners, please please specify who you want or i will pick at random. this goes for my starter calls as well. i will be sticking to english dub pokemon names, as this is easiest for me. if you want to know/read about ash, his pokemon and verses you must click on the floating links on my theme. do note: i did not play scarlet & violet very much (the game was just too unplayable for me my b) so like ash, i am unknowing of the paldea region. in a way, that's a win-win tbh. i am not at all associated with the pokemon rpc nor will i write battles. i'm just here to chill & vibe with my favorite son shine. best wishes!

#𝘗𝘜𝘒𝘈. / 𝘏𝘌+𝘏𝘐𝘔. / 𝟣𝟪+. / 𝘊𝘚𝘛. Ϟ૮(๑⚈ ․̫ ⚈๑)ა

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thecloudstan · 5 months ago

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I want to draw a short comic about a birthday party for Rufus this year but we have no information about his date of birth :(((((

So if it's OK, I would like to read a short story about our dear president's birthday with the Turks, Darkstar and Cloud too ofc 🥰

And if you don't mind, may I draw a short comic based on that story?

I don't mind at all!! Because Advent Children era is when my brain works most flexibly with them, this little moment slots into the NTYC timeline rather nicely. So it could be anytime between chapter 6ish and chapter 15ish. Due to this, I couldn't work in Darkstar, though. But please feel free to add the lil beastie into whatever art you decide to do (if you indeed decide to do it). She can be lying protectively at Rufus' feet in spirit for the story but for real in the comic (you could even just take this scenario and make it OG/Remake timeline if you want, 100% up to you and I will be happy with anything)! 😂 Because formatting is being hateful, I'm putting the blurb below a Read More.

Enjoy!

Cloud slips his cell into his pocket after trudging up the steps at Healen and shooting a quick, curt text to Reno to let him know he's waiting outside. The invitation had been out of the blue and uncharacteristically vague. The boss wants you here, he'd said. Tseng??? Cloud fired back. No, not MY boss, THE boss. Don't play dumb today, pretty boy, just make the appointment, yeah? Cloud still isn't sure why he agreed, but as Reno opens the door and chaperones him to Rufus' very familiar quarters—babbling incessantly all the while—his nerves start to subside. He can hear voices beyond the door before Reno even cracks it open. Upon entering, the room is aglow with warm light and voices full of tempered excitement. All the Turks are here and accounted for; Elena and Tseng nurse drinks while chatting back and forth off to the left of the little center table, Rude arranges small, festive bags and packages atop the counter beside the mini fridge.

And there, sat at the table alone with a smile on his face and some tiny confection before him, is Rufus Shinra. He fixes Cloud in place with eyes partially squinted by the force of his grin, offering a little nod and wave of hello. "Anyway, go say hi to the birthday boy," Reno says, snapping Cloud out of his moment of wonderment at the scene in front of him. "Birthday?" Cloud grouses, looking at Reno with a little knit in his brow only after Rufus has broken their gaze to ask Rude for something. "You could've at least told me. I got nothin'." Cloud throws both arms out wide in a gesture that reveals just how empty handed he is. As usual, Reno shrugs off any accusations as he backs away from Cloud and toward his partner. "Don't worry, blondie, your presence is present enough, trust me!" With an undeserved snicker Reno turns to meet Rude at Rufus' side. Cloud watches them in the doorway for an awkward moment before summoning the wherewithal to move his feet. As he approaches the former President, the other two slink away to find themselves a drink. Upon closer inspection, Cloud can see that the confection is some kind of cake from an upscale bakery, all perfectly round and encased in what looks like a hard, white and brown candy coating. Probably white and dark chocolate, but he can't be certain.

"A nice surprise," that velvet voice pours out syrupy sweet, sweeter than any birthday cake could ever hope to be.

Cloud levels him with a heavy but almost apologetic gaze.

"Hm? Wish I knew ahead of time so I could've brought you something but I think some details got lost in the invitation..."

Rufus only smiles, stifles a laugh. It's hard to tell whether he knew Reno tracked him down, or if it was his idea to begin with. That's not surprising, though. "Would you like a taste?" he suddenly asks out of nowhere, gesturing to the cake on the table. Cloud ignores the baser meaning behind the question and leans over the table to get a good look at the cake, making a bit of a show of it. He's not a die hard lover of sweets, but it looks good enough. He does notice there isn't a single candle is in sight, though. Feigning contemplation, he folds his arms over his chest, rests his chin on a fist. "Before the birthday boy? Nah. Besides...your friends here seem to have forgotten the candles," he teases, only now realizing how much of their relationship has progressed without him even knowing Rufus' birthday. "How old are you turning, anyway?" Rufus again only reacts with the slightest curl to the corners of his lips before reaching a graceful hand forward. He lifts a heavy cake knife from beside the platter on which the fancy little dish sits. With deft and nimble fingers he cuts through, but pauses before completing the slice. "Wouldn't you like to know..."

#ff7 #advent children #cloud strife #rufus shinra #the turks #strifra #rucloud #rukura #rufus x cloud #ask fics #stanswers #mynameiskan #fic: ntyc #ntyc #fic: next time you call

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greentrickster · 9 months ago

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WIP game

Rules: You will be given a word. Share one sentence/excerpt from your wip(s) that start with each letter of that word.

@shadow-pixelle tagged me with ECHO, so congrats - have some 'Got a Light?' (my RWBY fic) snippets! And, to have some extra fun, since they're all from the same fic, I'll get one snippet from each of the first two books I've written this fic in and two from the current book (because it's the biggest), and you'll get the sentences in the order I wrote them... but not necessarily in the order they'll come in the fic, because I'm writing non-chronologically. ;D Enjoy!

"Easy for you to say," Jaune gives up on meditating (because he's weak) to glare at Roman, "You're probably just saying that because you had a stupid one, like- like bad luck or making your pockets bigger or something!"

...Branwen had flinched at the first suggestion. Interesting. Neo'll have to look into that. More importantly, however, Roman has frozen in place, dust crystal fallen to the ground beside him. He stares straight up into the sky unmoving for a good twenty seconds before he lets his arm fall across his eyes with a distraught groan.

"Dangit, that second one actually sounds like an amazing- that would have been so useful for shoplifting or, hells, just storing extra ammo without ruining the lines of my suit- dammit, now I'm sad, thanks a lot."

"Consider: would any of you say you are quite the same people now that you were at the beginning of the school year? How about ten years ago?" he smiles at the range of reactions this elicits. "To me, it is much the same, albeit on a far larger scale. It seems as though we each carry a certain amount of... ourselves, for lack of a better word, with us to each new life.

"For example, it may surprise you to know that, in regards to myself, while I have heard many times that I seem to have gained a certain level of maturity overnight when my memories and powers are unlocked, oddly little in my personality or mindset of my new life seem to change beyond that. I will confess, it inspires a certain amount of curiosity these days, whenever the end of a current life draws near, as to what new myself I will have become the next time my memories return."

"Hey, what about all the nice things you were gonna say to Pyrrha?!"

"They will be formatted as an extremely flattering eulogy!!!"

Qrow is drawn away from this amusing interaction by Neo, who has removed a glove and stolen a fistful of bacon with her bare hand, wiggling it enticingly at Qrow with a big smile.

"I feel like I'm being mocked," he states, examining it with each eye suspiciously.

"You're not," Torchwick says, finally calm again and theatrically wiping his eye, "She just likes watching birds eat. Used to sneak into kitchens at restaurants so she could get table scraps for it."

...eh, fair enough. Qrow obliges and daintily tugs a strip of bacon free with his beak, holding it with one claw to peck at. Neo beams.

"Oh, um- yes! He says... 'Thinking of mew.'"

Ruby glances up from skimming her texts to see Weiss staring blankly ahead.

"...he's a dork," she says, voice dazed, "He's an enormous dork."

"Weiss-" Uncle Qrow groans, only for Jaune to hold his hand up.

"Don't bother, Mr. Branwen, I've got this."

"Kid, it's Qrow."

Jaune ignores him, going to put a steadying hand on Weiss's shoulder. "Look, I'm sorry you have to find out this way, but the thing about guys is... we're all dorks. And Neptune is our king."

"...I see." Weiss nods, and Ruby goes back to her own texts, "Is it a bad sign that I still like him, even though he's flawed?"

"I mean, he didn't realize you wanted to keep seeing him after the dance until you cried at him for flirting with other girls," Nora comments, "You kinda already knew that he wasn't perfect."

"I suppose that's true... In that case, I'm going to respond in kind! Nora, I require your assistance!"

---

(Told you guys it's not as dire as my research subject list makes it sound!)

I'll be tagging @fullbattleregalia and @elektricangel, along with anyone else who wants to play - your word is LIFE (because my fic's about Roman coming back as a ghost and I'm funny).

#my writing #Got a Light?#rwby #roman torchwick #jaune arc #weiss schnee #qrow branwen #ruby rose #professor ozpin #nora valkyrie #shadow pixelle #tag game #neopolitian (rwby)#caps tw #also can you tell I'm going to be ignoring a lot of canon in this?#like just... so much canon #if ignoring canon were an olympic sport I could ignore for Canada #it's a cloqwork orange fic btw #(aka ozqrowick)

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the-tmnt-ficfinder · 9 months ago

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Ficfinder finds: The Lemonade Leak

Chapter 22: The Stranger

Chapter 22 Summary: No Summary

The Stranger: Appraisal and Ratings

(Don't know what fanfic "Appraisal and Ratings" means? Check out my explanation on my Main Masterpost! Looking for a different fanfic to read? Head on over to my Fanfic List Masterpost!)

Disclaimer: This fanfic is only available to those who have an Ao3 profile. This fanfic is written by @turtleinsoup, so go show them some love and support!!

The fanfic ratings are not based on quality, favoritism, or how good I think it is, but rather, how intense a subject may be. Like a movie review, or the tags on Ao3, letting the readers know what to expect.

Plot: 💛💛💛💛💛

"Plot is five out of five!! Things are really intense and in the thick of it now!! This chapter, once again, has some majorly important lore drops, and it quite intense!!"

Suspense/Mystery: 💛💛💛💛🖤

"Suspense/Mystery is four out of five!! The fact that this chapter is from Donnie's POV, only makes the suspense and mystery even better!! While Donnie knows who he is, he can understand what's going on, we have NO clue what Leo is thinking!! It's very clever, that when we most wanted to know what was going on with Donnie, the fic was from Leo's POV, and now that the tables have turned, its more from Donnie's POV."

Angst/Hurt: 💛💛💛💛💛

"Angst/Hurt is five out of five!! Oof this chapter has a lot of emotional angst. Like, the kind brought on by betrayal. Seriously, this chapter, while its amazing, is also very intense."

Fluff/Comfort: 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤

"Fluff/Comfort is zero out of five! This chapter has no fluff, and no comfort! Everything is going to hurt!!!"

Emotions Conveyed: 💛💛💛🖤🖤

"Emotions Conveyed is three out of five!! Oh man, the despair, the utterly crushing sense of betrayal, and the heartbreak from Donnie are immaculate!!"

Drama/Tension Level: 💛💛💛💛💛

"Drama/Tension Level is five out of five!! This entire chapter is filled with nonstop tension, and sibling drama!! Because, of course the Disaster Twins would be the most dramatic together."

Triggers: 💛💛💛🖤🖤

"Triggers for this chapter are three out of five. This chapter has a lot of medical drama in it, along with triggering medical content. In the authors note, it warns for "Bad Humor, Sibling Abuse, Unresolved Emotional Tension." Remember to always read the tags, and stay safe!"

Legibility (Reading): 💛💛💛💛💛

"Legibility (Reading) is five out of five!! I really loved how in depth the explanations went during this chapter!! Highly impressive!! This chapter, as it is from Donnie's POV, is very enjoyable to read, as its full of equations, and unique texts."

Legibility (Audio): 💛💛🖤🖤🖤

"Legibility (Audio) is two out of five!! Due to this chapter being from Donnie's POV, a lot of the text doesn't translate well into audio book format. Its incredibly hard to understand, and takes away from the unique quality of the special text."

Length: 💛💛💛💛🖤

"Length is four out of five!! Chapter 22 of The Lemonade Leak takes about 41-42 minutes to listen to!!"

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Next Chapter ->

<- Previous

The Lemonade Leak: Story Ratings and Chapter List

Personal thoughts on chapter below cut (Contains Spoilers)

I'd first like to point out the chapter name of "The Stranger". Is Leo the Stranger? Is Donnie? To each other, they both appear as strangers.

He woke up, feeling like someone was trying to resculpt his skull with a sledgehammer. The ache was so bad he needed a moment to string a coherent thought together. The first one was, Wonderful. Brace yourself, Brain, we must’ve been hit by a train again.

I feel like this implies that he has indeed been hit by a train more than once (besides when he was attacked by Leo in the train) lol. Perhaps it was the Krang train?

Donnie ran his tongue along the inside of his teeth, gathering the vocals needed. “To put it in words, I synthesized a composite matrix using transgalactic astronucleides – subatomic components originating from an extradimensional - but also pretty much not - construct. These astronucleides due to their inherent non-Euclidean properties, lead to a range of attributes that diverge significantly from conventional matter-energy interaction paradigms. Interlaced within the compounds, they engage in highly resonant interplay. The localized resonance catalyzes a cascade of spatial reactions in the cellular milieu of the afflicted entity – in our case, Raph – orchestrating a corrective intervention against an aberrant ‘infectious’ process, which ostensibly defies terrestrial pathological norms.”

The amount of effort put into this paragraph right here is tremendous!! Beautiful, and poetic!! I love how much terminology is used. Rather than hedged sentences, it’s a full on explanation!!

It sat heavy in his mouth but was just smooth enough to swallow. Donnie counted the milliliters running down his throat, pausing at about 150. Then he pinned Leo with his stare. “Where are we?”

Donnie can count exact milliliters… just… wow!!!

Donnie tore off the plastic lid. He expanded the pharynx inside his throat and downed the entire drink including the garnishing in half a second. Then he gave Leo a glare, licking the corner of his lip clean. “Do they know, or do they not know that I am here, Nardo?"

Soft shell turtles swallow their meals whole. I always enjoy when this fact is incorporated into Donnie’s biology.

This chapter had such a unique intense flow to it!! The story pacing for this fic is just absolutely incredibly!! It went from feelin isolated, and small, to massive, and incredibly huge!! Plot level jumped from a 10 to a 100!!

#tmntficfinder #ficfinder #rottmnt fanfiction #rottmnt #tmnt fanfiction #rottmnt fanfic #rottmnt post invasion #disaster twins #ficfinder finds the lemonade leak #the lemonade leak

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inventors-fair · 8 months ago

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Signpost Winners: Going for Gold Again

Our winners this week are @bergdg, @sparkyyoungupstart, and @tanknspank!

@bergdg — Izka, Slizt Clan Shanktail

Bloodthirst Aggo was certainly a powerhouse in its time. I imagine. It was long before my time, I'll tell you that, and it was also a time before the proliferation of uncommon legendary creatures. As it stands, this is one of them with quite an interesting and hard-to-deal-with board presence, but as far as creatures go, I think it's just plain strong. You do have to have quite a bit of bloodthirst to get it going, but what I like is that it strongly would've rewarded the color combo because, well, it was a set with Orzhov and Izzet as its other main colors; this slots you firmly into strictly bloodthirst or at least strongly rewards that.

In this day and age the ability to put a lot of counters on a lot of creatures makes the pinging pretty lethal once you get there. An environment strictly based around hurting this kind of effect wouldn't be too hard to deal with, though, because it's designed to be balanced around bloodthirst being in the set at all. The lethality on a first-striker can be a pain, yeah, but there's no nail-biting contention, and I'd say that it also raises players' awareness of precombat effect necessity. A modern take on old-school clashing!

@sparkyyoungupstart — Blackmail Courier

This card is here because I really, really hope that it works. I mean, it groks, but good lord was Cipher a mechanic that had a lot of baggage to go with it. Groking how to encode cards was fairly easy, or at least it was in my opinion. Conceptually it was awesome. There was always so much reminder text that it made things hard to work with for sure... But hell, the creatures needed to be good, and they needed to have some way to outpace the Boros nonsense that was happening around that time in limited. Deathtouch is a great way to make sure that the massive jerks on the other side of the table had to think twice.

What I really like is how deathtouch discourages blocking but at the same time the encoding makes it necessary. You're not going to get too many encoded creatures unless you're getting a huge amount of cipher-to-other-spell ratio, and depending on what those encoded cards are, this turns a matter of "can I trade up" into "you will deal with me." The choice of damnations is excellently done, and I also love the name that you came up with for this creature. It takes a second for the tongue-in-cheek to fully hit.

@tanknspank — Stromkirk Sommelier

Look, I'm going to level with y'all—I actually liked a lot of the signposts that some folks chose to replace, and more than that, I really did like Bloodtithe Harvester (and so did a lot of standard players at the time, though not for Vampires). I think this card is still really good, though, and I want to start with the fact that mechanically, it's just plain fine. This was a weird format that did tend to make a lot of Blood tokens fairly easily, but having the ability to draw blood from Vampire tokens as well��I'll give you that that's fairly novel. It's actually really funny that Edgar and Sorin were the only cards to actually make Vampire tokens on their own, but regardless, Blood was valuable enough that I'll give this card a pass.

The flavor is where this one really shines through for me. What I like about the connection is that this sommelier is the one who's more interested in blood than the characters around them, and a) that means that they're going to produce more blood to one-up the other blood glasses brought to them, and b) whenever a new unnamed vampire comes around, boom, here they are with a bottle to show off. I think that that aspect is pretty funny to think about, and the flavor text there is just the right kind of dry horror to send a shiver down the spine while bringing a smirk to the fangs—er, face. I like my cards how I like my blood: dark, and also my own, and also usually red unless I'm feeling fancy.

Runners? Oh yeah, coming up <3

@abelzumi

#mtg #magic the gathering #custom magic card #inventor's fair #commentary #winners #signpost redesign contest

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zebratoys · 17 hours ago

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When it comes to placing Merkabah-inspired sacred geometry art, the goal is to amplify its energetic and symbolic resonance while harmonizing the space.

This item was exclusively designed for: ► Yoga studio sacred art ► Healing & Energy Therapy room décor ► Altar or Sacred Space artwork ► Meditation room wall décor ► Studio workspaces spiritual art ► Study or Journaling Area ► Therapy and Counseling Office ► Living rooms décor ► Office consciousness art ► Entryway or Threshold

Here’s a guide for ideal placements based on intention and environment:

Yoga Studio or Group Gathering Space:

Purpose: Radiates collective energetic elevation, unity, and transformation. Creates a unified energy field for group sessions. It symbolizes the union of body, mind, and spirit—mirroring the essentials of yoga itself to elevate practices of chakra alignment and energy flow

Ideal Placement Tip: Large format at the center stage on the main front and back walls or ceiling, for a 360-degree energy flow.

Healing room décor / Energy Therapy Rooms:

Purpose: Strengthens energy channeling and energetic protection and amplifies healing intentions, vibrational alignment and light body healing for frequency synergy and elevation.

Ideal Placement Tip: Behind the healer or above the main healing treatment table or directly above it to activate alignment for the client and practitioner. Multiple smaller pieces create a powerful energy grid.

Altar or Sacred Space Artwork:

Purpose: Acts as a symbolic anchor and a sacred symbol of divine protection for ascension, balance, and divine light connection in spiritual rituals and sacred practices. Enhances prayer and manifestation practices.

Ideal Placement Tip: Leaned against or hung directly above your altar table, surrounded by crystals, candles, or Sacred texts.

Meditation room / Zen Corner Space:

Purpose: Enhances focus and spiritual ascension, connection, raises vibration, aids visualization. Guides you into deep states of peace, balance and alignment. Represents the integration of spirit and matter. Creates powerful energy vortex for ritual work.

Ideal Placement Tip: Hang it at eye level behind or in front of the meditation cushion or seat.

Study or Journaling Area:

Purpose: Inspires deep reflection, clarity, and elevated consciousness for creators, lightworkers, and mystics. Evokes deep soul work and intuitive flow.

Ideal Placement Tip: Hang it near your desk or writing nook.

Therapy and Counseling Office:

Purpose: In therapeutic spaces, the energy must support calm, trust, and deep inner work. Sacred art symbolizes protection, balance, and spiritual transformation—making it a powerful visual ally in counseling or therapy sessions. It gently reinforces a sense of sacred containment, helping sensitive clients feel supported while encouraging subtle emotional safety, energetic shifts and breakthroughs.

Ideal Placement Tip: Place the artwork behind the practitioner (to energetically anchor the room) or on a side wall visible to the client for mindfulness, reflection, spiritual growth, energy balance, calming and inspiration.

Office consciousness art:

Purpose: When placed in the workspace, the Merkabah acts as a symbol of clarity, focus, and elevated thinking. It supports consciousness-expanding, conscious decision-making, creativity, and alignment with a higher purpose during your daily tasks in a mindful office environment.

Ideal Placement Tip: Above your work table or near a light-filled window, in your line of sight or on the wall behind your chair to subtly reinforce energetic boundaries and awareness.

Studio spiritual art:

Purpose: Creative energy thrives when the space is infused with higher frequency that ignites inspiration, intuitive flow, and spiritual ascension grounding. Sacred art helps channel higher consciousness into creative expression, making it ideal for artists, designers, writers, and visionaries. Promotes astral travel and lucid dreaming.

Ideal Placement Tip: Above your desk, journaling nook, or on a shelf beside your writing tools. Facing your creative workstation or on a central wall that anchors the space with intention and energy and awakens flow and divine guidance in creative workspaces.

Living rooms décor:

Purpose: In the heart of the home, sacred art radiates harmony, balance, and high-vibration living spaces that benefits everyone who enters. It becomes a focal point of peace, unity, and spiritual presence.

Ideal Placement Tip: Conversation area, centered above a sofa, fireplace, or main gathering area — or integrated into a gallery wall of meaningful art to create harmonious family dynamics.

Entryway or Threshold:

Purpose: Blesses all who enter. First impression sets the energetic tone. Serves as a guardian symbol for high-vibe home entry, and spiritual filter, welcoming positive vibrations and spiritual protection from lower vibrations at the doorway.

Ideal Placement Tip: Above, in front or beside the doorframe.

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fandom-rpfinder · 30 days ago

Note

Hi so I'm back again-- shocker!

I'm Mercury, She/He/Fae/It, 24, queer and autistic; I'm looking for someone to roleplay characters from Detroit: Become Human (preferably Hank, Gavin, or Markus) against my Connor, specifically RK800. I can take any dynamic whether it be platonic, familial, romantic, etc. but have a strong preference for romantic. I am open to OCs, maybe even OC x Canon, but I am trying to find my footing writing Connor so I'd prefer canon interactions, thank you. This doesn't mean we can't add OCs later, it just means I'm looking for canon right now specifically!

I am slowly developing basic ideas of and for Connor's character, but I imagine him either being gay, or bisexual with a male preference; it can be ironed out over the course of the RP, if we pursue romantic or sexual endeavors. I'm happy to write him from a viewpoint of following his programming before the revolution or as a deviated android after the fact-- both together would be fun too, especially with a Markus muse!

I'm hoping that the RP will be set in a private Discord server, as I am very text heavy and love to format things pretty, use proxy-ing bots (such as Tupperbox) for character creation, etc. I typically write up to 3-5k words, taking up about 2-3 Discord messages worth of text. I'm very slow with responses depending on my level of energy, interest, whether I'll be busy on certain days-- etc. I do not like being rushed or pressured, it completely kills my muse, so I'm kindly asking you as a potential RP partner have patience with me. Friendly reminders are okay though!

I'm comfortable with dark content, but I have HARD limits about certain things. Thus, I will not be writing: noncon, pedophilia, zoophilia, or necrophilia. Racism and ableism are also off the table in terms of actively being used in a harmful way, or slinging slurs in or out of character.

As per the new rules, all characters listed in this ad are 18+!

PLEASE like this post or reach out if you are interested. Thank you! :) <3

👾

#detroit become human roleplay #detroit become human rp #dbh roleplay #dbh rp

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ihazyourkitty · 1 year ago

Text

Why John Hargrove is full of it p.1

Multiple people have expressed interest in the detailed Blackfish rebuttal I am working on. The plan is to put it in video essay format on Youtube. This not only has the potential to reach a larger audience, but it also gives me more creative/expressive flexibility that would otherwise be difficult to get across in just written text.

This project will not be completed for quite some time, as there are a lot of things to cover. However, I did want to provide a short glimpse into some things I've uncovered thus far.

You see, I plan on not only refuting the movie itself, but also covering the consequences of Blackfish, and major figures like Naomi Rose, Ingrid Visser, etc. So as part of this project, I am listening to the eBook version of John Hargrove's Beneath the Surface for the second time. It's..... so.... much..... fun.....

*sigh* Warning, there's a long rant ahead. TL;DR John Hargrove comes off as very full of himself in this book, and it's annoying.

______

Now, on a purely emotional, literary level I guess, the book is certainly very gripping. It's difficult to put down, even when you know that much of what is alleged therein is utter bullcrap. However, I don't think this is just because the whole "little-guy turns against evil corporation" trope makes for good storytelling across the board. I think it's also because, unlike Mark Simmons' Killing Keiko, or Hazel McBride's I Still Believe, John Hargrove's Beneath the Surface has the luxury of both professional editing, and a co-author (Howard Chia-Eoan).

To be clear, I'm not saying this as dig against Hazel McBride or Mark Simmons. I bring this up merely to illustrate the stark contrast here. As far as I know, their works were self published, or at least lacking the same polish and publicity from big name publishers, or sensationalist documentaries.

However, this contrast wouldn't be so noteworthy to me were it not for these two things I'm increasingly noticing in this reread of Beneath the Surface:

It is never clearly stated which parts were written by Hargrove, and which were ghost written by Chia-Eoan... but the amount of contradictions and shoehorned information in here gives me some serious suspicions.

John Hargrove... seems incredibly full of himself!

I don't have the time to elaborate on #1 right now, so we'll just talk about #2 today. John Hargrove is almost never in the wrong. He is always painted as the hero, the true advocate for these animals. You don't hear much about the other trainers he worked with or learned from. Mostly, it's just about him. He bemoans the allegedly poor conditions SeaWorld's animals are kept in, while simultaneously boasting about all his accomplishments with them. He speaks of differing perspectives between him and some of the other trainers, but seldom elaborates on what exactly those differences were. Instead, he usually just frames it in a sanctimonious "me vs. them" way.

The closest he gets to admitting any mistakes he had to learn from is when he recounted an aggressive incident with Freya at Marineland Antibes, and even then.... the whole reason why that incident (allegedly) happened was because Hargrove overestimated his training/waterworks abilities with a whale he didn't have a relationship with. His admission of that mistake is then overshadowed by the rather self-righteous tone he frames the resolution with. All the success was about him. You don't hear anything about how he worked with the other trainers there, what they brought to the table, and certainly not the stronger, lasting relationships they had with Freya. It's not that he had to mention them by name, but he didn't even mention them at all!

To be fair, this interpretation is partly subjective on my part. Still, as someone who is personally working in animal husbandry right now (albeit not with marine mammals), the gaping holes in this narrative raises some red flags.

Here's some free advice to anyone interested in working in the zoo/aquarium industry: I have been told by multiple hiring managers that they don't want someone who "just wants to work with the animals, and not deal with people." That's not how this works. You still have to work with people in some form or another.

It doesn't matter which animals you are working with. When you're on an animal husbandry/training team, you gotta ask for/provide help, seek/give feedback, communicate with other departments, etc. Complaints, conflict and disagreements will inevitably happen, but you gotta be mature about it.

And yes, in that process... you are going to make mistakes, and you're going to have to own up to them! It's part of how you learn. You're also going to inevitably work with people who don't see things the same way.

The people who can't do this tend to not only get stuck in their own way, but are more likely to start resenting coworkers and/or management whenever disagreements happen. They'll constantly complain about how other people do things, but then can't/won't take constructive feedback themselves. It's worse when it's someone with more experience under their belt because of the massive ego. Let me be clear: this kind of mindset does not help your animals! It only creates a toxic work environment that's resistant to change!

DO. NOT. BE. THIS. PERSON!!!!

No, this does not mean you can't vent frustrations. No this does not mean that you can't take pride in your work. It means that you gotta be able to swallow your pride, and not alienate other people.

So, what does all that have to do with the contrast mentioned earlier?

Like Hargrove, McBride details her career journey, but doesn't just paint it all in glamour. She talks about her setbacks, how she grew, things she learned from other people, the internships she did, the grunt work she was willing to do, etc.

Killing Keiko has less to do with the details of Mark Simmons' career path, but he does give credit to other people where it is due, even at times towards those he fundamentally disagreed with. I can remember one part where he explicitly admitted that he made a mistake too, and tellingly, it was in an instance where he played the "I've been doing this for years" card. In the very next sentence he admitted it was the wrong thing to say in that situation, and highlighted the perspective he was missing in that moment.

These things are conspicuously absent in Beneath the Surface. I don't remember anything of the sort that stood out when I first read the book, and thus far it's certainly not there in my second time around. The first third of the book is dedicated to how he dreamed of becoming a trainer as a kid, and the path he took to get there. Most of this path, though, is painted in glamor, when the reality is.... the path to getting into animal husbandry isn't particularly glamorous. Not only do you have go to college, but you also have to settle for various unpaid internships or volunteer gigs, and then apply for multiple jobs only to get several no's before it works out (to say nothing of how underpaid zookeepers/aquarists/trainers are).

Hargrove, on the other hand, kept pestering lead marine mammal trainers at SeaWorld since he was a kid, practiced his swimming/diving abilities, and started his degree in psychology. Then, as luck would have it, an apprentice trainer position opened up at SW San Antonio, and when he got the job, he jubilantly quit college. Not much is said about what kind of volunteer work he did before that. I think he did some stuff with marine mammal rescue in Texas, but I'll have to go back and reread to be sure... in any event, I wish I'd heard more about the experience he got besides swimming and pestering the SW animal training department.

And like.... great, he got the job, but it seemed more by luck than by the sweat of his brow. Then he balked that he was put in the SeaLion Stadium, and/or that he had to spend a lot of time washing dishes and spotting before even being allowed to work directly with a whale, which like..... yeah? I don't know what you were expecting dude.

(Btw, this part isn't just me being nit-picky, Duncan Versteegh from ML Antibes corroborates Hargrove's resistance to doing grunt work like cleaning)

Whenever mentioning people at SW who didn't want to work at Shamu Stadium, Hargrove couldn't understand how anyone wouldn't want that.... because heaven forbid other people have different preferences? To be fair, from what I've heard of SW work culture in general, Shamu Stadium is kind of painted as the glamorous A-team, but DANG does Hargrove really lean into that attitude!

Later on, he detailed some of the conflicts he had with SW's entertainment department. At one point his manager explicitly told him he needed learn to get along better with other departments. And like... yeah... yeah you do!

Look, I'm not interested in doing blanket apologia for SeaWorld. I'm sure Hargrove was in the right more than once when he'd argue with people, but I'm also not convinced that the whole of the entertainment department, management, et al., were just a bunch of unfeeling jerks who didn't care about the animals.

This part actually ground my gears quite a bit. Before I became an aquarist, I was an educator, and sometimes I would overhear certain husbandry staff gossip about us in a really patronizing way whenever there were miscommunications. Not that they never had valid reasons to complain, they did, but to be treated like you're just a dumb educator/guest services person is not pleasant, and certainly not professional. I don't know how common this is at other places, but I bring this up to illustrate the importance of being able to work with other departments, especially in the face of disagreements or miscommunication.

That Beneath the Surface paints Hargrove's inability to do this as a virtue rather than as the character flaw that it is... well.... it's um... it's a choice. And it's telling.

Again, some of this interpretation is subjective on my part. Ultimately, none of us can know for sure what is in someone else's heart. Hargrove does seem to sincerely care about the animals, despite the narcissism. However, the vast majority of people who are going to be reading his book are not people who have spent much if any time working in the zoo industry, and thus may not pick up on some of these things. I'm not the only one to point these things out either.

So even if one is against keeping orcas in captivity, I think being aware of the egos behind figures like Hargrove is important. When you get to the end of his book, you would think that all his former colleagues are, at best, just timid little clogs in a corporate machine, brainwashed to do as SW says. This is just not true. These people are dedicated to their animals, and have worked very hard to get where they are at. Some have gone on to get their masters, or PhD's, provide expertise to other facilities, or take part in rescues, etc., and they did it without chasing clout.

SW Corporate should absolutely treat their employees better, but their treatment of them pales in comparison to how people like Hargrove basically erase their accomplishments altogether. In this way, he tries to have it both ways... his time at SW proves how much of an expert he is, you know, because he was a senior trainer with two decades of experience after all! Oh, but when someone else from the field speaks up to refute what he says, nope.... their accomplishments don't matter, they're just brainwashed. If that doesn't scream "massive ego", then I don't know what does.

I'm only halfway through the book on this second round, so there is a chance I'll come back to correct some things here. I do encourage people to try to read this book themselves and come to their own conclusions. You don't have to buy it either, check your local library (it's how I got a hold of this eBook).

#thank you for coming to my TEDtalk #John Hargrove #Blackfish BS #He only turned against SW after being demoted from Shamu Stadium #For a safety violation #this is also in the book

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canmom · 2 years ago

Text

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

being a pirate is all right to be...

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

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

Usenet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In practice?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IPFS

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

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

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

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

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

Goddamn that's a lot to try to summarise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freenet Hyphanet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BTDigg

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

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

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

Say something about TOR?

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

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

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

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

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

What's the future of piracy?

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

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

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

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

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

#piracy

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