#this whole thing was spurred on by the poll yes how could you tell?

[slightlytoastedbagel]

I still don't fucking understand ruikasa

[icypantherwrites]

Changes Coming to Patreon; Back to AO3 Icy Goes

An abbreviated and slightly different version of a post I made on my Patreon this evening:

Several months ago I made the announcement that I was switching my main platform from AO3 to exclusively post my works on Patreon. I had hoped it would help with some of my mental health issues with the reasoning that Patreon was a platform with a smaller, dedicated audience and would be better than posting into the great unknown and feeling let down by the sheer number of hits but no sightings of the people behind them.

Unfortunately, this decision has not panned out the way I had hoped. To be completely honest, I feel even worse than I ever have before. I truly thought this switch would encourage more engagement from those that were on my Patreon given that everyone now had that exclusive access and knowing that they'd want to be involved and that I'd be okay with knowing only a literal handful of people might be reading. That has not been the case. And to be clear, that's on me for having those hopes and expectations because certainly no one at my Patreon is required to engage with my works; you pay a subscription fee each month, you get content, and more always comes. And I will certainly continue to post those works that Patreon supporters paid for and expect to see under the original outline of my Patreon, but at this time...

At this time I've made the decision to return to posting on AO3 and no longer make that content exclusive to Patreon.

Any of the exclusive one-shots that did post here will remain, but I'll be adding them to my AO3 archive as well and the chaptered fics will only be posting for early release tiers on Patreon going forward, not posting later for all tiers. They will all instead be made available on my AO3 and just like before you are welcome to read them there. To be clear: none of your access to content is changing. You will still be able to read all of my stories, but they will no longer exclusively be on Patreon.

It is really hard for me to post works (and yes, I know they are all finished, it's still hard). It is hard to post in the author's notes and ask for comments and engagement because it is not fun to post and feel like hardly anyone is reading, and harder still when very few do because it just tells me that the majority of people either don't read those requests or they ignore them. Both don't feel good. And doubly so when you consider the majority of my content is about support. Ironic, right? ;p

Just like when I made this original decision, I didn't come to this one lightly. After all, there was a reason I decided to step away from AO3. But trying to bribe y'all with extra content via engagement hasn't worked. I've actually had 7 people in the two months that I made this switch join the page and quit within a couple days (sometimes a couple hours), accessing all content (and no doubt spurred on by the sheer amount behind a paywall) and that's a slap in the face to me and makes me feel even worse. And I certainly don't want to turn my works into a pay-per-view where I open a shop and sell PDF copies of individual works because the money has never, ever, been what the Patreon has been about. The finances help me to justify spending the time writing the works to keep this page active and going, but the whole reason I created a Patreon was to have an engaged, local community where I could be myself a little bit more, be a little more honest than I normally allow myself to be, and to share exclusive works with all those who made that decision to come here and financially support me with the hope that would extend to mental and emotional support via engagement on the site ♥

There are over 100 people on my Patreon and on average not even 10% make an appearance. It feels like I am posting and posting and hardly anyone is reading and the whole point of posting works is to share them because fandom is something that is meant to be shared. It's an experience for us all, whether we're creators or consumers, and we cannot exist without the other. It's a circle of fanfiction.

AO3 wasn't the best for me mentally. But the alternative I decided to pursue has unfortunately been even worse. And yet I still can't help but want to share my creations, want to make those connections, want people to laugh and cry and find comfort and support and experience emotions or feelings they may never had had, to learn and grow, to just enjoy the whump and angst and find a little escape sometimes from reality. Writing has been so important to me, it's what has kept me going through some very low times although it's catch-22 as the posting part of that process can make me feel lower than when I started. But I push through and hope that things get better, always.

Planning out this Patreon has meant so much to me. Writing stories for it, setting up polls, getting to create cover banners, write commissions, and, most importantly, interact with all of you... it has kept me going. And in order for me to not hate this page, to not delete it, to not call it quits, I need to make this switch back to AO3 and the chance for a larger audience. And I truly hope you can understand why I am doing this. I truly hope that even though the vast amount of my works will now be technically "free" that you still remain a member of my Patreon as those "free" works are only possible due to this site. 

And to anyone reading this now on my Tumblr, please read the above. I only continue to post because of the financial support on my Patreon. There is now going to be a burst of content posting on my AO3 and lots more to come, but please don’t ever think that this is “free” because it was not free. 

And this isn’t to tell you to go join my Patreon (although if you’d like to, please feel free) but to remind you that it costs nothing to leave a comment on a story that you read and that doing so means everything to the creator. Please don’t see this change as just an endless buffet of fanfiction to consume. Please see it as what it is: a chance to engage, to be a part of a fandom, and to support a creator whether that’s financially emotionally or both. 

A gentle reminder that Patreon on the whole was never meant to be just a "how much can you get" type of site, but a way to show your support to creators you enjoy with little bonuses as incentives to check out higher pledged tiers and to stick around so the creator keeps wanting to make more content to share. This page will still have all the bonuses it has always had: the FMs, the previews and bonus snippets, the ability to commission, and, in the event they happen, all of the events and contests :) 

I'm sad that this change didn't work out the way I had hoped, but there's no such things as failures; it has been a learning experience. Thank you all for your patience with me as I muddle through this and try to make the best choices for my own mental health ♥ Thank you to all for your financial support of this Patreon that allows me to keep writing and thank you so much to all those who comment and engage and inspire me to keep writing ♥

Much love,

Icy

[bcvcsc]

The price of Bitcoin surged more than 17% in the last 24 hours and now sits at $2744, not too far from its June all-time-high of about $3,000.

Here’s what’s happening: Bitcoin is being updated. The update has the chance of causing a serious rift that threatens some of the best things about Bitcoin, including how easy it is to use. It’s a complicated process, but things are looking good right now for that rift not actually happening. But we’re not out of the woods yet.

The story of how all this is unfolding is a complex one, and if you tried to read any of the explainers about what's happening —and there's a couple of great ones —you probably still didn't understand a thing. The terminology is obscure, the dates constantly shift, and there's a a lot of uncertainty about the entire process.

Here's a short overview of what's happening and what's likely to happen with Bitcoin in the near future, using terms you can understand.

Upgrading Bitcoin, democratically

Bitcoin needs an upgrade. The software, which was originally released in 2009, has mostly worked quite well, but lately it's become painfully obvious that some aspects of it can't cope with the increased demands of its growing community.

How do you upgrade a software that's decentralized? Bitcoin is maintained by developers (the most important of which are known as the Bitcoin Core team), but changes to it must be deployed in a democratic way.

This is where miners enter the picture. They are people and organizations who employ a tremendous number of powerful computers to power Bitcoin's network, for which they are rewarded with Bitcoin. They have a very big interest in making sure Bitcoin doesn't change in a way that reduces their income.

If the miners don't adopt an upgrade to Bitcoin, it won't happen. Worse, if the miners do not agree on an important decision, something called a hard fork can happen, meaning Bitcoin would be split into two separate cryptocurrencies, which is generally a bad thing.

Even the miners are not all-powerful. If they adopt a change that's not supported by the majority of actual users and exchanges, they could become stranded and ultimately unable to sell the bitcoins they created.

Making Bitcoin faster

Changing Bitcoin is not an easy feat, but we've reached a point when an upgrade is necessary. The largest issue is the block size in Bitcoin's blockchain, which has spurred a long and painful debate among Bitcoin developers.

Think of a blockchain as a big notebook. A block is one page in the notebook. Right now, you can only write a very low number of transactions on one page. But there’s a lot of folks who want to do a transaction, so there’s not enough room on the page. Miners take a look at the page and choose the transactions which pay the best fee; the rest have to wait. This is why Bitcoin transactions are currently slow and expensive.

An obvious solution is to increase the block size, and there's a proposal to do so called SegWit, but there's a number of reasons why it's not trivial to adopt. Suffice to say that some Bitcoin developers, proponents and miners hate the idea for a variety of technical and political reasons. Some think it should not be done at all, some think it should be done in a different way. And Bitcoin's core community is very, very conservative when it comes to change.

The bridge towards a new Bitcoin is built

To make this upgrade a little easier to adopt, developers have come up with a couple of ideas that make the switch more gradual. They are essentially ways to make the miners say "yes, I agree to the upgrade" before the upgrade is actually deployed. If a majority of miners say yes, then there's a bigger chance that the upgrade will go through.

Right now, the majority of miners are signaling they will adopt something called BIP 91, which is a very important step towards an actual update of the Bitcoin software. It means that in two or three days, miners will likely start using the first part of the upgrade. Then, in two weeks, they will adopt SegWit, which is what all this mess is about.

What's all this talk about August 1?

If you read about Bitcoin lately, you probably noticed August 1 as an important date. According to one proposal, this was the date when SegWit was to be adopted. But the miners decided to activate one of those mini upgrades earlier, so the actual upgrade will likely happen a few days earlier.

When, exactly? There's no straight answer. This is a complex upgrade with some things happening at a designated date and time, others happening when a certain block is mined and still others when a certain milestone is reached on the Bitcoin network. This means that often there's no strict date when something must happen, only estimates. Following all of this can be a chore; check this visual outline or this guide if you want to know more.

If everything goes according to plan, sometime in mid-November, Bitcoin will finally become a new version of Bitcoin, but the change should be painless. A new Bitcoin should arise, one that can process a lot more transactions per block than the current version. Even more importantly, a successful upgrade will pave the way for future upgrades of the software.

What exactly is the problem here?

Everything lined up above sounds as if things are working as intended. So why such a big hubbub over the whole upgrade?

Remember how Trump was losing at the polls but won come election time? A similar thing could happen to Bitcoin. There's a chance that some of the miners will change their mind at the very last second, with the whole upgrade falling through. Bitcoin is a very big machine and its cogs are numerous; there are even conspiracy theories that say some miners will reject the proposal at the last second precisely to cause a rift and create chaos.

And there could be an unforeseen technical glitch in the new code. When that happens in a piece of software maintained by a centralized authority, like Apple's iOS, a fix is fairly simple: Apple releases a fixed version, and users simply install it over the old one. With Bitcoin, things could get messy. It took years to talk the community into upgrading to SegWit; now imagine having to explain to that same community they need to switch to another upgrade in a matter of hours.

Glitches can and do happen. In 2010, a bug in Bitcoin code was discovered, enabling users to create an infinite number of bitcoins. But the Bitcoin community was orders of magnitude smaller and things were easier to fix back then, so the patch was successfully deployed in a matter of hours after it was discovered. No major bugs in Bitcoin have been discovered since, but then again, changes of this magnitude were not deployed often.

Not exactly smooth sailing yet

Bitcoin is not only new software; it's a new type of software. All this uncertainty can be ascribed, as many experts do, to growing pains, and it's likely that in the future Bitcoin will be a far more robust system. And right now, it looks as if the SegWit upgrade will go through.

But if you think investing into Bitcoin now is easy money, tread carefully. No one can tell you for sure how everything will pan out. This is why Bitcoin's price has been so volatile lately, and it will likely continue to be so, at least until the dust on the entire SegWit thing has settled.

[bountyofbeads]

One day, the Trump superpower of his shameless self-regard may fail him

By Megan McArdle | Published October 04, 2019 5:40 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 7, 2019 10:25 AM ET

Take a break for just a moment. Step back from the dizzying rotation of the impeachment-grade news cycle and the frantic hurly-burly of partisan disputation. Enjoy a deep cleansing breath, and cast yourself back to a more innocent time, like the spring of 2015. Then just sit with it for a moment, pondering how absolutely astonishing our current predicament really is.

President Trump is on the fast track to impeachment — all right, yes, it’s not really all that surprising. But when you think back over the past four years, don’t you feel your breath catching in your throat, your eyes widening, your mouth falling ajar as you contemplate the amazing fact that Donald Trump ever became president of the United States, and thus, liable to impeachment?

I’ve literally lost count of all the moments at which I thought well, he’s done it now, no campaign could possibly survive that unforced error. Starting in July 2015, when he said of John McCain, “He’s not a war hero … I like people who weren’t captured.” This from a man who’s certainly no war hero, in part because a friendly podiatrist secured him a draft deferment for (apparently evanescent) bone spurs.

Americans don’t like anyone who impugns the honor of the nation’s warriors, especially not anyone who avoided service and is insulting a warrior who spent more than five years being tortured by the enemy in a notorious communist prison camp. Obviously, the Trump campaign was over … er, I meant to say, just begun.

There was still plenty of time for Trump to attack the parents of a dead soldier, to claim that judges of Mexican ancestry shouldn’t be allowed to oversee the trial involving a class-action lawsuit over his now-defunct Trump University and, in a hot-mic recording, to be revealed bragging about groping women. There was still time for reports about Trump routinely stiffing small vendors, for the clip of him discussing his own daughter in a salacious radio interview. And, gosh, that’s only the very craziest, most indisputably unacceptable stuff that happened before commander bone spurs became commander in chief.

How could any candidate have survived just one of these thermonuclear scandals, much less all of them? Trump must have had some previously undetected superpower — and in reality, he does, a quite obvious one: a perfect lack of concern about anyone except himself.

A normal person, possessed of a modicum of empathy and a healthy capacity for shame, wouldn’t have done such things. But if a normal politician had somehow done them, and gotten caught, he likely would have slunk away, withdrawing partly to avoid further public shaming but also to shield innocent bystanders — his family, his party — who would otherwise suffer for his sins. Not Trump, who seems largely indifferent to any suffering except his own and entirely immune to remorse, or its wistful cousin, regret.

Which is why his supporters like him. They were tired of having concerns about immigration dismissed as racist, beyond the pale — and they tired, too, of having their opinions about crime, terrorism or trade met with the same unanswerable accusation. Trump ignored the whole pious apparatus of unspoken rules that axiomatically excluded their arguments from the public square. The fact that he was shameless, brazen and unconcerned by procedural nicety, in his campaign and in his presidency, was one of his main attractions.

These traits have delivered enough victories — the 2016 election, the confirmation of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court — that his supporters are loath to question them now. Possibly his supporters are right; maybe Trump’s devil-may-care indifference is pure genius and will bring still more victories for those who followed him down the road less traveled.

Yet it seems at least worth asking why so few politicians chart the course of nakedly shameless self-regard. Was Trump simply the first explorer daring enough to discover a novel route to power? Or is this an extremely risky passage, safe to travel only under unusual circumstances, and otherwise a dead end?

I’d argue the latter, though of course I — effete #NeverTrumper — can be expected to say nothing else. But even his most ardent supporters ought to recognize that superpowers can make one a villain as often as a hero, and that this particular superpower is at the very least risky for them.

Because if the waters turn stormy and the public rebels — if polls suggest we’re looking at a Democratic president and a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate — then the day will come when even many of Trump’s supporters want him to stage a strategic withdrawal. And on that day, they’ll discover that he pays exactly as little heed to his followers as he does to anyone else who is not named “Trump.”

It’s not news that Trump is corrupt. What’s new is how he is succeeding in corrupting our government.

By Fred Hiatt | Published October 06, 2019 5:44 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 7, 2019 10:25 AM ET |

It is no longer surprising to see President Trump wielding the government as an instrument purely for his personal benefit or vengeance.

What is both alarming and new is how government, increasingly, is giving way and giving in.

Three years into Trump’s term, we are witnessing the accelerating erosion of a bedrock American principle: that the awesome power of government will be wielded fairly, based on facts and evidence, and without regard to political fear or favor.

A normal government that cared about corruption in Ukraine, as officials in this administration sometimes pretend they do, would seek improvements in its judicial system. But Trump has no such concern, as you can tell from his July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president. He never mentions corruption, but presses only for two specific investigations he hopes will benefit his domestic political fortunes.

A government committed to rescuing Americans from unfair detention abroad — as Trump likes to boast he is — would be committed to rescuing all Americans from unfair detention abroad.

But this administration picks and chooses, based on Trump’s whims and grudges. For a Christian cleric held in Turkey, Trump goes all out. For a New York Times reporter endangered in Egypt, the administration does not bestir itself, as Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger recently recounted.

Some officials have indulged these impulses almost from the start. That Times reporter barely escaped arrest two years ago. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s dishonest maneuverings to get a question about citizenship added to the 2020 Census took place in the spring of 2017. Last year, officials devised their policy to separate children from parents at the border, and then repeatedly lied about it.

But as time goes on, the government more and more is endorsing and amplifying policies that serve Trump’s political interest. Just recently:

●As soon as Trump decided to make political hay out of California’s homeless population, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler accused the (Democratic) state of allowing human feces to pollute its waterways and demanded action. Around the country, 3,508 community water systems are out of compliance with standards; only California attracted the EPA’s attention.

●When the House Ways and Means Committee requested Trump’s tax returns, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig flatly refused — though the law says the returns “shall” be turned over if requested.

●When another House committee wanted former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to testify about Trump’s efforts to fire special investigator Robert S. Mueller III, White House counsel Pat Cipollone — who is supposed to represent the law, not the president’s personal well-being — happily asserted executive privilege on behalf of this tale of obstruction, though Lewandowski never actually worked in the White House.

●Indulging another Trump obsession, the State Department has intensified an investigation of Obama-era officials who sent emails to Hillary Clinton — including by retroactively classifying some of their messages, as The Post reported a few days ago.

●When the intelligence community’s inspector general ruled that the whistleblower complaint about Trump and Ukraine should be sent to Congress, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel conveniently offered a contrary opinion. No, the OLC said, “the appropriate action is to refer the matter to the Department of Justice.”

●Which was doubly convenient, in fact, because Justice, with great efficiency, determined that — although soliciting assistance from a foreign power on behalf of a political campaign is against the law — Trump had nothing to worry about, on the pretext that prosecutors were unable to assign a dollar value to the help he had solicited. Case closed. Case never even opened, in fact.

What’s going on? Senior officials who had the fortitude to defend the rule of law have gradually been replaced by those who put ambition over principle. A few who still try to do the right thing are kept in vulnerable “acting” positions and hemmed in by toadies and hacks in subordinate positions.

Meanwhile, honest civil servants leave or become demoralized. They watch first-class research agencies be deliberately disrupted and degraded. They see Trump firing (Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch) and threatening (the still anonymous whistleblower) honest professionals. Resistance to abuse of power naturally dwindles.

Yes, take this as a warning of what a second term would mean. Norms get eroded, a nonpartisan bureaucracy can be corrupted.

But remember also that the whistleblower and intelligence inspector general refused to bend. Thousands of public servants like them are continuing to fulfill their missions as best they can. We need to keep faith with them as they work, often under pressures we can’t imagine, to keep government fair and honest.

The new GOP strategy: Don’t believe the president

By James Downie | Published October 06, 2019 7:00 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 7, 2019 10:25 AM ET

You knew there was never going to be just one whistleblower. A president who stands on the White House lawn and asks foreign countries to investigate his political opponents was never going to otherwise keep such schemes to a small circle of loyalists. And so it has come to pass. ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos revealed Sunday morning, “ABC News has learned that the legal team representing the first whistleblower is now representing a second whistleblower. Attorney Mark Zaid told me that this second whistleblower is a member of the intelligence community with firsthand information on some of the allegations at issue.”

Confronted with that new information on the various Sunday morning talk shows, Republican congressmen and senators largely opted for the same mix of misinformation and non-answers that they’ve been stuck with even as poll after poll shows support for an impeachment inquiry rising. In one area, though, a new talking point has emerged: Don’t believe the president.

This goes back to the president’s appearance on the South Lawn on Oct. 3, when Trump asked China to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter. There’s no way to defend a president publicly asking a geopolitical rival to investigate domestic political rivals, so Republicans have decided to pretend he didn’t do that. The first up was Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): “I don’t think it’s a real request,” he told reporters Friday morning, “I think he did it to provoke you to ask me and others and get outraged by it.” Republicans on the Sunday shows followed suit. “I doubt if the China comment was serious, to tell you the truth,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) on CBS’s “Face the Nation." On ABC, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) feigned incredulity: “George, you really think he was serious about thinking that China’s going to investigate the Biden family?”

It isn’t the first time that Republicans, confronted with a controversial Trump quote, have said the president wasn’t being serious. Trump even told special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that his infamous request to Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails was a joke. That Capitol Hill Republicans would go back to this well is no surprise; it’s an easy dodge when, according to The Post’s Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, GOP lawmakers and aides say privately that their “collective strategy is simply to survive and not make any sudden moves.”

The difference this time is that the president himself isn’t claiming that he was joking, not in any of his numerous Twitter missives since that South Lawn appearance. Instead, he laid into criticism from Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) about his request to China. And Sunday afternoon he said on Twitter that he would “would LOVE running" against Biden.

Not only wasn’t Trump joking about asking China to investigate Biden, he isn’t pretending that he was. In other words, Republican politicians don’t want you to believe the president.

One reason Trump fit in so well with the GOP and especially its Fox News propaganda arm is that he and those around him have made livings telling people not to believe their own eyes. Years of “Trump’s a brilliant businessman, not a bumbling heir with multiple bankruptcies” easily transitioned to “Mexico will pay for the wall, not taxpayers.” But the narrative of “right good, left bad” was always bigger than one person, even one as influential as the president. Now, that narrative demands a new reality: “Don’t believe Trump even when he’s telling you to believe him.” The myth has swallowed Trump himself.

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