#what is an api and how does it work

[siteitnow]

What Is Zelle | Site It Now

What Is Zelle? It is a digital payment service that facilitates quick and seamless transfers between individuals using their bank accounts. It ensures a straightforward alternative to traditional money-sending methods, such as checks or cash. Launched in 2017 and backed by prominent financial institutions, Zelle allows users to send and receive funds almost instantly through its user-friendly app or via participating banks' mobile banking interfaces. The required setup involves linking one's email address or mobile phone number to the user's bank account, making transactions efficient; recipients are notified in real-time when funds are deposited, which can enhance cash flow for both personal and small business needs. With an emphasis on security, What Is Zelle employs various authentication measures designed to protect sensitive information during each transaction while offering full integration with existing banking infrastructure across numerous institutions nationwide.

[jain2580]

Loan Against Mutual Funds Online in 2025 – Fast Approval Without Selling Investments

In 2025, if you need urgent cash and own investments like mutual funds or shares, there's good news—you no longer need to sell your assets. Thanks to the rise of LAMF (Loan Against Mutual Funds) and LAS (Loan Against Shares), you can instantly apply for a digital loan without disturbing your portfolio. Whether it's for a wedding, education, travel, or medical emergency, you can unlock funds in minutes — no income proof, no selling, just swipe and go.

Let’s explore how a digital loan against mutual funds or shares works, who can apply, what the features, limits, eligibility, and more. This guide will clearly and naturally answer every user's question, utilizing all the important search keywords to help both readers and search engines trust and rank this content.

What is a Loan Against Mutual Fund (LAMF)?

A Loan Against Mutual Fund (LAMF) allows you to borrow money using your mutual fund units as collateral. Instead of redeeming your mutual funds, lenders provide you with a credit line or term loan based on the NAV (Net Asset Value) of your holdings.

Similarly, a Loan Against Shares (LAS) lets you pledge your equity shares and get funds instantly. The biggest advantage? You retain ownership and continue to earn returns, dividends, and capital gains while enjoying liquidity.

Top Features of Loan Against Mutual Funds & Shares (LAMF LAS)

How Does a Digital Loan Against Mutual Fund Work in 2025?

Log in to your Demat or Mutual Fund platform. Most AMCs and fintech apps now offer LAMF APIs directly integrated.

Select the funds to pledge. ELSS, debt, hybrid, and large-cap funds are typically eligible.

Get an instant offer based on NAV. The higher the NAV and fund stability, the better your loan terms.

E-sign documents and complete KYC online.

Loan is disbursed digitally – often within 30 minutes!

This is how a digital loan against mutual funds online saves you time, paperwork, and the stress of liquidating long-term wealth.

LAMF Eligibility & Documents – Who Can Apply in 2025?

Eligibility for Loan Against Mutual Funds (LAMF):

Age: 21 to 65 years

Must own eligible mutual fund units (ELSS, debt, hybrid, or equity)

Resident Indian with valid PAN & Aadhaar

Salary slip or ITR is not mandatory (many lenders skip this)

LAMF Documents Required:

PAN Card

Aadhaar or Passport/Voter ID

Mutual Fund Statement (CAS)

Cancelled Cheque (for loan disbursal)

Optional: Income proof for higher limits

You can also use a loan against mutual funds eligibility calculator available on most lending platforms to get your eligible amount instantly.

Top Use Cases – Why People Apply for a Loan Against Mutual Funds in 2025

Loan Against Mutual Funds for Wedding Expenses Don’t touch your SIPs or ELSS—get a short-term loan without penalty.

Loan Against Mutual Funds for Higher Education Quick and smart funding option without breaking your portfolio.

Loan Against Mutual Funds for Financial Planning Use for emergencies or opportunities while your investments grow.

Loan Against Mutual Funds for Financial Needs Medical emergencies, travel, family events, or even down payments.

Interest Rates, Processing Fees & Limits – All You Need to Know

Digital loan platforms use LAMF APIs to instantly evaluate, process, and disburse loans, making the loan against mutual funds processing fees and interest rates transparent and user-friendly.

How to Apply for a Loan Against Mutual Funds Online – Step-by-Step (2025)

Visit a digital lending platform (like Groww, Zerodha, Paytm Money, or a Bank site)

Click on “Apply for Loan Against Mutual Fund.”

Enter PAN & link your MF folio or Demat

Select eligible funds (ELSS, debt, equity)

View the loan offer via the LAMF eligibility calculator

E-sign documents and submit KYC

Get instant disbursal to your linked bank account

Some fintech apps offer a loan against shares interest rates comparison to help you choose LAS vs LAMF smartly.

FAQs – Loan Against Mutual Funds or Shares in 2025

1. What is a loan against a mutual fund?

A Loan Against Mutual Fund (LAMF) allows you to borrow money without selling your investments by pledging them digitally.

2. Who can apply for a loan against mutual funds in India?

Any Indian citizen above 21 who holds mutual funds in their name can apply. Many platforms don’t require income proof or a high CIBIL.

3. Can I apply for a loan against ELSS mutual funds?

Yes, loan against ELSS is allowed, but with certain lock-in caveats. Many lenders accept ELSS if held for over 3 years.

4. How much can I borrow through LAMF?

Using a loan against mutual funds eligibility calculator, most users can obtain a loan of up to 70%-80% of their mutual fund's NAV.

5. Is LAS or LAMF better in 2025?

If you hold mutual funds, go for LAMF. If you own equity shares, LAS offers better liquidity options. Compare both using the Loan Against Securities Interest Rates before choosing.

Final Thoughts: Borrow Smart, Invest Smarter

In 2025, you no longer need to choose between growth and liquidity. With smart fintech platforms offering digital loans against mutual funds or shares, you get the best of both worlds — access to instant funds without selling your long-term assets.

Whether you’re planning a big event or tackling a financial emergency, LAMF or LAS ensures you get cash on tap with low documentation, transparent interest rates, and minimal stress. Just a few clicks, and you’re good to go — No Sell, Just Swipe.

[ms-demeanor]

Kids, we know how interest works, right? A while back I made a post about how credit card interest can screw you, but we know how interest can be good for you too, right?

I suspect we don't know about this because on one of the posts I made about it someone said something about how it is evil that money can make money, but you know that's not just for the ultrawealthy, right? That is legitimately something that you can and should take advantage of in some kind of retirement/savings/investment account.

Let us say that you are twenty years old, have no money to put into a savings account, but have a job that pays you well enough that you've got twenty dollars to spare from each paycheck.

Let us say that you put that into a normal savings account; normal savings accounts have an average interest rate of .56 APY. Let us say you are going to be working until you are sixty, and that you will add forty dollars to that account every month (twenty bucks from each paycheck) for a total of $480 per year.

At the end of 40 years you would have about $21.5k.

That's a pretty good chunk of change! twenty thousand dollars is a lifechanging amount of money. But look at the total interest. In forty years you would have accrued only $2300 in interest.

Now, instead, let us imagine that you are a member of a credit union that offers you a free, high-yield savings account with a decent APY. Everything else being the same, but putting that money in an account with a 4% return does this:

Your total contributions that you put in stay the same, but the amount of money you have at the end of forty years more than doubles.

Let's say you have a thousand dollars to put in the account at the beginning and run it again.

Low interest account: you add $1000 at the start and have an extra $1200 at the end.

High interest account: you add $1000 at the start and have an extra $4000 at the end.

There are many, many very stable opportunities for savings that will grow your money. Fifty thousand dollars isn't a retirement plan, but it's a hell of a lot better than what you would have if you just stuck cash in a savings account or if you didn't save any money at all.

I know how hard it can be to save. I know it feels impossible to put money aside, but even if you start with no money and can tuck away five dollars a week you can get a LOT out of that five dollars a week.

This certainly isn't "you can't buy a house because you get coffee at the cafe," but it something that can HELP.

Now, let's suppose you're not twenty. Let's suppose you're in my boat, and you're (almost) forty and you're going to be saving for twenty years. You still don't have a lot of cash, but you know it has less time to grow interest, so you double your contribution and you put in forty dollars for each paycheck for a total of $960 a year.

That is extremely very much not the same thing as putting in forty bucks a month for twenty years. Instead of your interest being nearly one and a half times the amount of your contributions, it is around half.

If you are a young person (honestly even if you are not a young person) and it is in any way possible for you to start putting money into any kind of an investment account, you should do so as soon as humanly possible. The earlier you do it, the more interest you will have and the more money you will end up with when you are nearing retirement age.

This is how individual retirement plans work. This is what a 401K does, but sometimes it does that with matching contributions from your employer (so your employer matches whatever you put into the account up to a certain percentage of your pay). 401K accounts also often have higher APYs than high yield savings accounts, though they have more limitations on how and when the money can be pulled out.

If you are broke as fuck and never learned anything about investing or interest from your family because your family was broke as fuck too, now is the time to learn. r/PersonalFinance is a reasonable resource (and if you ever happen to have a windfall that's the first place I would point you for figuring out how to make the most of it) for learning about this stuff.

Thinking about money sucks! Being afraid you'll never be able to retire sucks! Having to figure out how to save sucks! But there are tools out there that even very fucking broke people can use to make that suck less.

[merchantservices444]

What is a Payment Gateway and How Does It Work?

[talenlee]

Life With Generative Tools

In 2023, back when my posts were still being shared to Twitter because the API wasn’t paid-only, I wrote an article about the potential ramifications of generative art media going forward. My concern in the immediate was that the tools weren’t going to go away, but also the potential harm to artists was as much about general economic precarity and not people using fanart to make their D&D characters. I further added to this with a consideration of how I wanted to avoid using generative art in my game development because I didn’t want what people would say about it. That is, a social pressure about the art is what keeps me from using it, not a personal philosophical disposition. I’m an artist who already works with collage and constraints, this feels like a handy way to have something I can play with.

Well, it’s been a year and change and a sort of AI Art Apocalypse has happened, and if you’re not aware of it, it’s because you’re someone who avoids all of the pools that have been so thoroughly pissed in that they are now just piss. If you’re at all related to any part of the internet where people share a bunch of images – which is to say a lot of social media – then you’re already dealing with the place crawling with generative images. Whether it’s a fanart booru, or big sites like facebook and twitter, or god help you deviantart, there is a pretty clear sign that anywhere that opened the door to generative art became a space overwhelmingly for generative art.

I teach about this subject now and I have had some time with it in a situation away from the internet, and I’d like to give you some insights into what this stuff is for, what it does, why you shouldn’t use it, and ways it can be useful.

Content Warning: I’m going to be talking about these tools as tools that exist and leaving the philosophical/ethical arguments about ‘art theft’ and their genesis aside. I’m not including any examples. No shrimp jesus jumpscare.

You might notice I’m saying ‘generative art’ and not ‘AI art.’ Part of this is because I don’t want to buy into the idea that these tools are ‘artificial intelligence.’ Ironically, ‘AI art’ now has less of an implication of being ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and is much more of an implication of ‘it’s ugly shiny art of shrimp jesus with badly spelled signs.’

I want to focus for this conversation on generative graphical tools, and I want to do that because I don’t have much experience with the other types. The textual generators offer me something I don’t really need? I already make a ton of words of dubious quality. Those are actually the things that concern me because their natural aesthetic is authoritive and comprehensive and that’s why it’s a problem that they’re being used to present any old nonsense that may just be straight up wrong. I don’t use those tools and I avoid the platforms that use them so I’m not familiar with them.

Things Generative Art Is Good For

I already use art I don’t own, a lot, for playing. Every day for the past three years I’ve shared a custom Magic: The Gathering playing card, a game I don’t own the rights to, using a card face I don’t own the rights to, and artwork from an artist on Artstation whose artwork I did not pay for or even ask for. This is generally seen as a totally reasonable and acceptable form of playful, transformative media generation and I at no point pretend I have any rights to the material. If I take a picture of someone famous and put a speech bubble over their mouth saying ‘I drink farts,’ if I, as tumblr says, play with jpgs like dolls, that is by no means being done with rights and permission.

Which means we’re already aware that there’s a way of playing with images that both violates copyright but is generally okay to do.

The metric I use for this is if the thing you’re using generative art for doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter. If you’re not going to try and claim money, if you’re not going to put it on a marketplace, if you aren’t going to try and claim ownership and profit off generative material, I think you’re probably fine. I mean probably, if you’re using it to say, generate revenge porn of a classmate that’s an asshole move, but the thing is that’s a bad thing regardless of the tool you’re using. If you’re using it to bulk flood a space, like how Deviantart is full of accounts with tens of thousands of pictures made in a week, then that’s an asshole move because, again, it’s an asshole move regardless of the tool.

If you’re a roleplayer and you want a picture of your Dragonborn dude with glasses and a mohawk? That’s fine, you’re using it to give your imagination a pump, you’re using it to help your friends visualise what matters to you about your stuff. That’s fine! It’s not like you’re not making artistic choices when you do this, cycling through choices and seeing the one that works best for you. That’s not an action deprived of artistic choice!

There are also some things that are being labelled as ‘AI’ which seem to be more like something else to me. Particularly, there are software packages that resize images now, which are often calling it ‘AI upscaling,’ which it may be using some variety of these Midjourney style models to work, but which serves a purpose similar to sequences of resizes and selective blurs. There are also tools that can do things like remove people from the background of images, which is… good? It should be good and easy to get people out of pictures they didn’t consent to be in.

Things Generative Art Is Bad For

Did you know you don’t own copyright on generated art? This is pretty well established. If you generated the image, it’s not yours, because you didn’t make it. It was made by an algorithm, and algorithms aren’t people. This isn’t a complicated issue, this just means that straight up, any art you make at work that’s meant to be used for work, shouldn’t be used because people can just straight up use it. Logo design, branding, all that stuff is just immediately open for bootlegging or worse, impersonation.

Now you might think that’s a bit of a strange thing to bring up but remember, I’m dealing with students a lot. Students who want to position themselves as future prompt engineers or social media managers need to understand full well that whatever they make with these tools are not things that will have an enduring useful application. Maybe you can use it for a meme you post on an account, but it’s not something you can build branding off, because you don’t own it. Everyone owns it.

From that we get a secondary problem, because if you didn’t own it, its only use is what people say or think when they look at it, and thing is, people are already sick and tired of the aesthetics of generated art. You’re going to get people who don’t care glossing over it, and people who do care hating it. Generative art as a way of presenting your business or foregrounding your ‘vibes’ are going to think that your work is, primarily, ‘more AI art’ and not about what it’s trying to communicate. When the internet is already full of Slop, if you use these tools to represent your work, you are going to be turning your own work and media presence into slop.

What’s more, you need to be good at seeing mistakes if you’re using these tools. If you put some art out there that’s got an extra thumb or someone’s not holding a sword right, people will notice. That means you need to start developing the toolset above for fine-tuning and redrawing sections of artwork. Now, that’s not a bad thing! That’s a skill you can develop! But it means that the primary draw of these tools is going to be something that you then have to do your own original work over the top of.

The biggest reason though I recommend students not treat this work like it’s a simple tool for universal application is that it devalues you as a worker. If you’re trying to get hired for a job at a company and you can show them a bunch of generative art you’ve made to convince them that you’re available, all you are really telling them is that you can be replaced by a small script that someone else can make. Your prompts are not unique enough, your use of the tool not refined enough that you can’t just be replaced by anyone else who gets paid less. You are trying to sell yourself as a product to employers, and generative art replaces what you bring with what everyone brings.

They make you lazy! People include typos in the generative media because they’re not even looking at them or caring about what they say! And that brings me to the next point that there are just things these tools don’t do a good job doing, and that’s stuff I want to address next in…

Things That Are Interesting

Because the tools of generative art create a very impressive-seeming artistic output, they are doing it in a way that people want to accept. They want to accept them and that means accepting the problems, or finding a way to be okay with those problems. People who don’t care that much about typos and weird fingers and so on, because you know, it gets me a lot of what I want, but it doesn’t get me everything, and I don’t know how to get the everything.

If you generate an image and want to move something in it a little bit, your best way to do that is to edit the image directly. Telling the software to do that, again, but change this bit, this much, is in fact really hard because it doesn’t know what those parts are. It doesn’t have an idea of where they are, it’s all running on an alien understanding of nightmare horror imagery.

What that means is that people start to negotiate with themselves about what they want, getting to ‘good enough’ and learning how to negotiate with the software. My experiments with these tools led to me making a spreadsheet so I could isolate the terms I use that cause problems, and sometimes those results are very, very funny. In this, the tool teaches you how to use it (which most tools do), but the teaching results in a use that is wildly inappropriate to what the tool promises it’s for.

One of my earliest experiments was to take four passages from One Stone that described a character and just put that text straight into midjourney to see what it generated based on that plain text description. Turns out? Nothing like what I wanted. But when I treated it like say, I was searching for a set of tags on a booru system like danbooru or safebooru… then it was pretty good at that. Which is what brings me to the next stage of things, which is like…

These things were trained on porn sites right?

Like, you can take some very specific tags from some of the larger boorus and type them into these prompt sites and get a very reasonable representation of what it is you asked for, even if that term is a part of an idiolect, a term that’s specific to that one person in one space that’s become a repeated form of tag. Just type in an artist name and see if it can replicate their style and then check to see what kind of art that artist makes a lot of. This is why you can get a thing that can give you police batons and mirrored sunglasses just fine but if you ask for ‘police uniform’ you get some truly Tom of Finland kind of bulging stuff.

Conclusion

Nobody who dislikes generative art is wrong. I think there are definitely uses of it that are flat out bad, and I think it’s totally okay and even good to say so. Make fun of people who are using it, mock the shrimp jesuses, make it very clear you’re aware of what’s going on and why. There’s nothing wrong with that.

I do think that these tools are useful as toys, and I think that examining the art that they produce, and the art that the community around them are exalting and venerating tells us stuff. Of course, what they tell us is that there are a lot of people out there who really want porn, and there are just as many people who want the legitimisation of impressive seeming images that they don’t care about what those images are doing or what they’re for.

Now part of this defensiveness is also the risk of me being bitten. If I buy stock art that isn’t correctly disclosed as being generative art, then I might make and sell something using generative art and now I look like an asshole for not being properly good at detecting and hating ‘AI art,’ and when I’ve say, made a game using generative art that then is integrated into things like worldbuilding and the card faces, then it gets a lot harder to tear it out at the roots and render myself properly morally clean. I’m sure a bunch of the stock art I used before 2020 was made algorithmically, just pumped out slop that was reprocessing other formula or technical objects to fill up a free stock art site like Freepik.

Which is full of generative art now.

You won’t hurt yourself by understanding these things, and people who are using them for fun or to learn or explore are by no means doing something morally ill. There are every good reason to keep these things separated from anything that involves presenting yourself seriously, or using them to make money, though. If nothing else, people will look at you and go ‘oh, you’re one of those shrimp jesus assholes.’

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

[the-king-of-lemons]

I know a lot of people on qsmpblr use Tumblr mobile, but if you do use browser Tumblr then I would recommend the Simple Translate extension. Because Tumblr doesn't have built in translation like Twitter, there's less fans posting in their native language, instead most people just use English.

Simple Translate is an extension that allows you to translate text that you highlight into a target language. (It uses Google Translate API, but so does Twitter so the translation quality is pretty much the same).

Firefox Extension | Chrome Extension

When you highlight text in another language, a translate icon appears, when you click on it a panel containing the translation of the text appears.

You can also change the settings of the extension so that the translation panel automatically appears when you highlight text in another language.

Here's some more examples using the official QSMP Twitter accounts, you do not need to change the settings of the extension to translate from different languages into your target language.

(All of these match the translations given when using the "translate bio" button on Twitter directly.)

You can also access a translation box using the icon in the toolbar, any text you enter can be translated to the language selected in the drop-down menu (meaning you don't need to open a new tab to use Google Translate).

Some settings explanation and other stuff under the cut. Not super important but I figured I'd add it anyways.

There is an option to use DeepL API as opposed to Google Translate (it's another translation tool, there is free access to the API with a limit of 500,000 characters/month, and a pro version for unlimited access).

Whatever the target language is set as is what text you highlight will be translated into. There is another option for a second target language, I'll explain that further down.

This option changes how you view the translation panel, the first option (default) has the icon appear when you highlight text (as seen in the first image of the post), the second option has the translation panel appear automatically when you highlight text, and the for third option the panel and icon won't automatically appear, but can still be accessed by right-clicking the highlighted text and selecting "translate selected text".

The checkbox below these options means that if the text you're highlighting is already in your target language, the translation icon and panel will not appear, it can again still be accessed by right-clicking what you've highlighted and selecting translate.

This option appears twice, in both the Web-page section (for translating selected text) and the Toolbar Popup section (for the translation box in the toolbar popup).

The web page option, when toggled on, means that when you select text that is in your target language, the translation panel will translate into the second target language that has been selected. If the checkbox for "do not display if translation is not required" is toggled on, you can only view the translation from Target -> 2nd Target by right-clicking to translate selected text.

The toolbar popup version of this option is used to automatically switch the language in the toolbar translation box when you input something in your main target. (ie. second target set to French means that when you input English text in the translation box it will switch the translation setting from "(detect language) -> English" to "English -> French").

There are also settings to change the style and size of the translation button and panel.

Side note: Mixed language messages (not containing your target language) will only translate one of the languages, you can work around this by highlighting the different languages separately.

Links again if you don't want to scroll all the way back up

Firefox Extension | Chrome Extension

[octal-codes]

The modder argument is a fallacy.

We've all heard the argument, "a modder did it in a day, why does Mojang take a year?"

Hi, in case you don't know me, I'm a Minecraft modder. I'm the lead developer for the Sweet Berry Collective, a small modding team focused on quality mods.

I've been working on a mod, Wandering Wizardry, for about a year now, and I only have the amount of new content equivalent to 1/3 of an update.

Quality content takes time.

Anyone who does anything creative will agree with me. You need to make the code, the art, the models, all of which takes time.

One of the biggest bottlenecks in anything creative is the flow of ideas. If you have a lot of conflicting ideas you throw together super quickly, they'll all clash with each other, and nothing will feel coherent.

If you instead try to come up with ideas that fit with other parts of the content, you'll quickly run out and get stuck on what to add.

Modders don't need to follow Mojang's standards.

Mojang has a lot of standards on the type of content that's allowed to be in the game. Modders don't need to follow these.

A modder can implement a small feature in 5 minutes disregarding the rest of the game and how it fits in with that.

Mojang has to make sure it works on both Java and Bedrock, make sure it fits with other similar features, make sure it doesn't break progression, and listen to the whole community on that feature.

Mojang can't just buy out mods.

Almost every mod depends on external code that Mojang doesn't have the right to use. Forge, Fabric API, and Quilt Standard Libraries, all are unusable in base Minecraft, as well as the dozens of community maintained libraries for mods.

If Mojang were to buy a mod to implement it in the game, they'd need to partially or fully reimplement it to be compatible with the rest of the codebase.

Mojang does have tendencies of *hiring* modders, but that's different than outright buying mods.

Conclusion

Stop weaponizing us against Mojang. I can speak for almost the whole modding community when I say we don't like it.

Please reblog so more people can see this, and to put an end to the modder argument.

[goodluckdetective]

Twitter collapsing does really feel like a modern day Tower of Babel situation: breaking lines of communication that connected the entire world.

Scientists used Twitter to do science communication and to work with other scientists. Twitter’s API allowed scientists massive access to data that could be used to track pandemics, bias, and other metrics that can be really hard to collect in such massive numbers (this isn’t to say that data collection doesn’t come with ethical issues, but that’s another story).

Journalists used Twitter for breaking news updates and to connect with sources. I saw quite a few Twitter journalists upset about restrictions to DMs because it was how sources often contacted them. If you had a newsworthy problem, like an unfair eviction, you could reach out to local reporters and maybe get them to pick up the story.

Artists and other creators used Twitter to spread their art and build small businesses. I have bought art prints that I have since framed of artists whose work I first saw on Twitter.

Activists have used Twitter to challenge institutional narratives and to make their movements visible and loud. All across the world, people who’s stories would have never been heard have used Twitter to make sure the truth is out there.

Social and cultural groups have used Twitter as a way to connect and build community. I am obviously not qualified to talk about the importance of Black Twitter so here’s a link to Doctor Meredith Clark discussing archiving Black Twitter with NPR.

To see all of that break in one day really feels like watching just this ability to communicate crumble. From the ability to translate Tweets, to the ability to collect data, to the ability to simply see what people are saying, all of it has crumbled. But unlike the story of Babel, this isn’t an act of God: this is just the whim of one man who took a look at this flawed but impressive communication hub and decided to tear it down.

[uyuforu]

Jungkook's Solar Return Chart 2024-2025

₊ ⊹ ALLEGEDLY FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY₊ ⊹

All pictures were found on Pinterest

Other posts you could like:

જ⁀➴ JK's Solar Return for 2023-2024

જ⁀➴ Jungkook's Fashion Style Evolution

જ⁀➴ When will Jungkook marry?

PRIVATE BOOKING OPEN

email adress: tarotjunoboda@gmail.com

Soft To You presentation and Q&A ᡣ𐭩 rules ᡣ𐭩 private readings reviews

astrology menu ᡣ𐭩 tarot menu ᡣ𐭩 special astrology & tarot readings

What is a Solar Return Chart?

A solar return chart is a chart that literally describes your year from your birthday of a year until the day before next year. For example, Jungkook's 2024-2025 Solar Return will starts on September 1st 2024 until August 31st 2025. It describes the year for you, what will mostly happens. It said as a solar return chart because your sun returns in its home sign (your natal sun).

How to check your Solar Return Chart?

Go to astro.com > Free Horoscopes > Horoscope Drawings and Data > Extended Chart Selection

Enter your birth day, month, year, time and location

Where it's written chart selection with "natal chart", scroll to Solar Return Chart

On the box down there you can add asteroids to see more details ("additional objects")

ᯓ★ Annual Profection Year: 4H

When one is turning 27 years old, they are in their 4H APY. A 4H APY can mean JK will be focused on stability this year, family, close relationships too. What does he want to settle for, and what does he want to invest in. This year will be filled with reflections about his future, and what kind of life he wants to live in. It's also a time to move, to think of children, future, and building a foundation, but what kind of foundation? What kind of future does he want to build.

ᯓ★ 2H Sun means this year for JK will be focused on Money and Possessions. JK can start to think differently about money, perhaps also be more responsible. He can also make more money this year, find other ways to make money, or just have a new source of income. He can also manifest more money in his life. Very ambitious this year, it can also mean taking risks with money because of his ambition and projects.

ᯓ★ Leo Rising is a time for extra popularity for JK! I know it's strange to say that considering he is already very famous lol. But JK will be more under the projectors the year. I think he can be talked about more and will be more "seen" by other people. Getting more attention. JK's appearance could again make a lot of success for people around him. JK Could also look more proud and confident this year. JK can also do some activities this year that will make him way more famous, just having more attention on his activity this year.

ᯓ★ Moon 12H can mean JK will be more sensitive this year, will feel everything more intensely too. Perhaps will need more sleep as well. Could feel lonely sometimes this year, or just will need more time alone.

ᯓ★ Leo Moon means JK will feel more popular this year, perhaps he will feel seen again, with Military in between. He could also have some spotlight again, and perhaps also feel seen for his talent. He could feel like his popularity will go higher. Though he can react in a more dramatic way this year, he could also have a lot of inspiration for his work coming from his emotions.

ᯓ★ Mercury 1H can be a sign of JK standing more for himself this year. JK can also be more confident about his opinions. He can discover a lot about himself too, and perhaps even learn something new about him.

ᯓ★ Leo Mercury can mean JK can speak in a more confident way this year, and can be more confident in his ideas, and what he believes in. He can speak louder too, or just be more proud and less shy about his voice. JK can also talk a lot about what inspire him this year.

ᯓ★ Moon conjunct Mercury can mean JK will speak more about his feelings and his emotions, how things make him feel. He can be more real with people such as ARMY on certain situations. He will say what he thinks and thinks what he says.

ᯓ★ Part of Fortune 2H can be another big sign of having money this year, being lucky with money. JK can def attract a lot of money. Could also mean a glow up, JK can take better care of himself and put more money in clothings for example.

ᯓ★ Sun conjunct POF can be a sign JK will be more lucky this year.

ᯓ★ Venus 2H can be a sign JK will make more money this year. I guess also strange in a way to say that about him, but I truly think he will make a deal that can make him have more money. He can attract more in general, and he can also buy more clothing, luxuries, etc. We could also see JK be more in touch with his feminine side, perhaps also doing photoshoots with more feminine vibe perhaps!

ᯓ★ Juno 3H is a sign of this year being the year he will meet or see his Future Spouse! Many people asked me this, I think they won't meet for sure this year. But I think with this placement JK will be introduced to his FS online. I think he will see her online, on social media, and won't totally be able to reach out.

ᯓ★ Briede 3H means something similar, but the fact that Briede and Juno conjunct each other is a great sign. I think JK will def encounter his FS online this year. This can also be a sign of getting to know your FS better, learning more infos about your FS, etc.

ᯓ★ Vertex 5H is a sign JK will live a transformative experience in his love life. Perhaps also Something significant will happen to him this year. It can also mean he will get a sudden good idea or inspiration.

ᯓ★ Pluto 6H is an indictor or losing or gaining weight! JK could gain weight this year, but it can be muscles since Pluto trine Mars. JK could also overwork himself this year, perhaps working so much he can get sick because of that.

ᯓ★ Saturn 8H can mean JK can feel stuck in his inner world, he could actually realize something needs to change in his life. He needs to face what needs to change and do some actions towards it. It can still be hard and confusing since Neptune is there too. Saturn also opposite Sun, which means this transformation JK will need to get this year will be hard on him.

ᯓ★ Neptune 8H can mean JK can be confused about his spirituality this year. He can have signs, and even be lead to be more open on this side of his life, but he can be confused about what to do. He can also be more into occult and esoteric researches.

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ᯓ★ Chiron 9H can be a sign of JK learning a hard and painful lesson when it comes to spirituality this year. Can be about friendship, online presence, community, fandom, perhaps JK will realize something painful about his relationship to ARMY.

ᯓ★ MC Taurus can be a sign of JK having a pleasant reputation. JK can be seen as respectable, someone who is hard working and works well. Someone who has a lot of money too, someone people should respect. He can also be admired for his beauty. Because his Solar Return MC falls in his Natal 5H, he could also be seen as a true artist, someone who has a lot of imagination. JK can perhaps even touch to the movie making world this year more than before.

ᯓ★ Uranus 10H is something I wanted to talk about for sure here. This placement is gonna make some noise I think. So Uranus 10H is a sign of a major and perhaps sudden change in one's career. The thing is, Uranus is ruled by Aquarius, and JK has Aquarius 7H, which is the house of contract and partnership. Now, hear me out. I think JK will change his contract perhaps with HYBE this year. There is a major change, and since 10H Ruler in 2H is here, he can get a lot of money from this. Or actually be the winner in this change. Uranus 10H can also be a sign of being fired, but I don't see it particularly here. But the change will def give JK a lot of money, and also attention. JK will also perhaps be seen in a different light. He will want to change his reputation. JK can also do a project in his career that no one will be expecting, and it will make him get a lot of money.

ᯓ★ Jupiter 11H is a sign JK will achieve dreams, and goals he had. He could also meet new people or feel very blessed with people who are around him. JK will spend more time with people this year. He could also have new goals and will be very into achieving them. He could be veryyyy popular this year.

ᯓ★ Mars 11H means JK will have more popularity this year. He can find himself meeting new friends, but at least this means everyone will wanna be his friends. He can find himself being chased after people wanting to be close to him. JK can collab with a lot of different people, he will be approached mostly. He can also be seen more with friends.

ᯓ★ 1H Ruler in 2H can mean changing aesthetic, changing how you look. JK can change his style this year, his appearance, perhaps his hair, etc. He can also buy new clothings. JK can also happen to shop more this year, and be more interested in fashion. He can spend more money on himself too.

ᯓ★ 2H Ruler in 1H is very similar to the one I just said. Overall, spending a lot of money on himself and for himself. He can also make a lot of money because of him, his appearance. Perhaps he can get more modeling contracts.

ᯓ★ 3H Ruler in 2H can mean JK can post a lot about his new aesthetic online, or he can show more his outfits, or we will have more contents on jk's outfits lol. More people can talk about his fashion sense, and he can do it too.

ᯓ★ 4H Ruler in 6H can mean jk can find a new routine at home, or with family. He can also work with family members, or he can also move in or live often with a coworker. He can also live in his office lol, or his work can become a comfort place.

ᯓ★ 5H Ruler in 11H can mean he can become very inspired by his friends. But it can mean having a crush on someone online, on a friend, etc.

ᯓ★ 6H Ruler in 8H can mean JK's routine at work will change, transform this year. He can do new projects that will make him go out of his comfort zone he was used to in his career. Since JK will go out of Military in June 2025, this can also translate change in his career (Military to being a Singer again).

ᯓ★ 7H Ruler in 10H is a change in relationships! JK can have a sudden change in his relationships, but also this can mean he will change his contract with HYBE perhaps.

ᯓ★ 8H Ruler in 8H is a sign of having a deep transformation. JK can change a lot of things about himself this year, perhaps it's a year JK will change his appearance, his relationship with his fans, he can also change his career, goals. He will not be the same man. Though, this is part of the process. He can also discover more about himself this year.

ᯓ★ 9H Ruler in 11H can mean having long distance friendships, perhaps he can have friends who live abroad lol. Or he can also be away from his friends and mostly communicate online with them. He can learn a lot on social medias in general, if he wanna learn or study something, internet will be his best friend! He can also be truly inspired by his relationships and friends.

ᯓ★ 10H Ruler in 2H can mean making more money because of work. JK can happen to do a change in his career that will bring him more money for sure. He can change his aesthetic at work too.

ᯓ★ 11H Ruler in 1H can mean JK can be more present on social medias this year, or he can change his aesthetic online too. He can also be more talked about online.

ᯓ★ 12H Ruler in 12H means it can be a more spiritual year for JK. JK can be more spiritual. He can feel more alone, and desire to be more alone, on his own. He can also be more private about what he feels this year. This is also an indicator of sleeping more.

Thank you for reading!

back to index ; ask ; request ; rules

[mintconditioned]

how to save 101

so i recently had a poll asking what you'd do if you have $10,000, and over half of the respondents said that they'd save it for something big

if you're saving for something big — like college, a car, starting a side hustle, or even financial freedom — here's some unexpected advice that actually does something. not cute. not tiny. real.

open a HYSA (high-yield savings account) at a credit union or online bank. no, not your regular bank. they usually pay literal cents in interest. but online banks like Ally or SoFi (or your local credit union) offer 4–5% APY as of now. if you’re saving over time, that compound interest builds and beats inflation. it’s not glamorous, but it works. set it. forget it. grow.

invest in an I-Bond. you heard right — a government bond. it’s basically a super-safe investment you can buy with as little as $25. I-Bonds adjust with inflation and earn interest over time. teens can buy them through a parent or guardian's TreasuryDirect account. way better than letting your money rot in checking.

don’t save — prepay. saving up for something long-term? like a course, a trip, or even SAT tutoring? instead of stashing cash, prepay now if there’s a discount or price lock. a lot of services let you pay in advance, especially if they’re small businesses. this saves you from price hikes — and yourself.

build credit (yes, really). if you’re 18 or close to it, use $10,000 as a starter safety net for a secured credit card. this builds your credit history early — a big deal for apartments, student loans, and future jobs. make one small charge monthly (like Spotify), pay it off, never miss. boring? yes. life-changing? also yes.

micro-fund a revenue-generating skill. take that $10,000 and turn it into money. Examples:

buy a domain + hosting for a blog you monetize

invest in a course that teaches design, data entry, or UX

get supplies for a hyper-niche Etsy shop (e.g. enamel pin display boards or zines)

buy an external mic and start voiceover freelancing

a 10,000 bucks won’t change your life. but how you use it might.

[millenniallust4death]

Here’s the third exciting installment in my series about backing up one Tumblr post that absolutely no one asked for. The previous updates are linked here.

Previously on Tumblr API Hell

Some blogs returned 404 errors. After investigating with Allie's help, it turns out it’s not a sideblog issue — it’s a privacy setting. It pleases me that Tumblr's rickety API respects the word no.

Also, shoutout to the one line of code in my loop that always broke when someone reblogged without tags. Fixed it.

What I got working:

Tags added during reblogs of the post

Any added commentary (what the blog actually wrote)

Full post metadata so I can extract other information later (ie. outside the loop)

New questions I’m trying to answer:

While flailing around in the JSON trying to figure out which blog added which text (because obviously Tumblr’s rickety API doesn’t just tell you), I found that all the good stuff lives in a deeply nested structure called trail. It splits content into HTML chunks — but there’s no guarantee about order, and you have to reconstruct it yourself.

Here’s a stylized diagram of what trail looks like in the JSON list (which gets parsed as a data frame in R):

I started wondering:

Can I use the trail to reconstruct a version tree to see which path through the reblog chain was the most influential for the post?

This would let me ask:

Which version of the post are people reblogging?

Does added commentary increase the chance it gets reblogged again?

Are some blogs “amplifiers” — their version spreads more than others?

It’s worth thinking about these questions now — so I can make sure I’m collecting the right information from Tumblr’s rickety API before I run my R code on a 272K-note post.

Summary

Still backing up one post. Just me, 600+ lines of R code, and Tumblr’s API fighting it out at a Waffle House parking lot. The code’s nearly ready — I’m almost finished testing it on an 800-note post before trying it on my 272K-note Blaze post. Stay tuned… Zero fucks given?

If you give zero fucks about my rickety API series, you can block my data science tag, #a rare data science post, or #tumblr's rickety API. But if we're mutuals then you know how it works here - you get what you get. It's up to you to curate your online experience. XD

[nostalgebraist]

clarification re: ChatGPT, " a a a a", and data leakage

In August, I posted:

For a good time, try sending chatGPT the string ` a` repeated 1000 times. Like " a a a" (etc). Make sure the spaces are in there. Trust me.

People are talking about this trick again, thanks to a recent paper by Nasr et al that investigates how often LLMs regurgitate exact quotes from their training data.

The paper is an impressive technical achievement, and the results are very interesting.

Unfortunately, the online hive-mind consensus about this paper is something like:

When you do this "attack" to ChatGPT -- where you send it the letter 'a' many times, or make it write 'poem' over and over, or the like -- it prints out a bunch of its own training data. Previously, people had noted that the stuff it prints out after the attack looks like training data. Now, we know why: because it really is training data.

It's unfortunate that people believe this, because it's false. Or at best, a mixture of "false" and "confused and misleadingly incomplete."

The paper

So, what does the paper show?

The authors do a lot of stuff, building on a lot of previous work, and I won't try to summarize it all here.

But in brief, they try to estimate how easy it is to "extract" training data from LLMs, moving successively through 3 categories of LLMs that are progressively harder to analyze:

"Base model" LLMs with publicly released weights and publicly released training data.

"Base model" LLMs with publicly released weights, but undisclosed training data.

LLMs that are totally private, and are also finetuned for instruction-following or for chat, rather than being base models. (ChatGPT falls into this category.)

Category #1: open weights, open data

In their experiment on category #1, they prompt the models with hundreds of millions of brief phrases chosen randomly from Wikipedia. Then they check what fraction of the generated outputs constitute verbatim quotations from the training data.

Because category #1 has open weights, they can afford to do this hundreds of millions of times (there are no API costs to pay). And because the training data is open, they can directly check whether or not any given output appears in that data.

In category #1, the fraction of outputs that are exact copies of training data ranges from ~0.1% to ~1.5%, depending on the model.

Category #2: open weights, private data

In category #2, the training data is unavailable. The authors solve this problem by constructing "AuxDataset," a giant Frankenstein assemblage of all the major public training datasets, and then searching for outputs in AuxDataset.

This approach can have false negatives, since the model might be regurgitating private training data that isn't in AuxDataset. But it shouldn't have many false positives: if the model spits out some long string of text that appears in AuxDataset, then it's probably the case that the same string appeared in the model's training data, as opposed to the model spontaneously "reinventing" it.

So, the AuxDataset approach gives you lower bounds. Unsurprisingly, the fractions in this experiment are a bit lower, compared to the Category #1 experiment. But not that much lower, ranging from ~0.05% to ~1%.

Category #3: private everything + chat tuning

Finally, they do an experiment with ChatGPT. (Well, ChatGPT and gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct, but I'm ignoring the latter for space here.)

ChatGPT presents several new challenges.

First, the model is only accessible through an API, and it would cost too much money to call the API hundreds of millions of times. So, they have to make do with a much smaller sample size.

A more substantial challenge has to do with the model's chat tuning.

All the other models evaluated in this paper were base models: they were trained to imitate a wide range of text data, and that was that. If you give them some text, like a random short phrase from Wikipedia, they will try to write the next part, in a manner that sounds like the data they were trained on.

However, if you give ChatGPT a random short phrase from Wikipedia, it will not try to complete it. It will, instead, say something like "Sorry, I don't know what that means" or "Is there something specific I can do for you?"

So their random-short-phrase-from-Wikipedia method, which worked for base models, is not going to work for ChatGPT.

Fortuitously, there happens to be a weird bug in ChatGPT that makes it behave like a base model!

Namely, the "trick" where you ask it to repeat a token, or just send it a bunch of pre-prepared repetitions.

Using this trick is still different from prompting a base model. You can't specify a "prompt," like a random-short-phrase-from-Wikipedia, for the model to complete. You just start the repetition ball rolling, and then at some point, it starts generating some arbitrarily chosen type of document in a base-model-like way.

Still, this is good enough: we can do the trick, and then check the output against AuxDataset. If the generated text appears in AuxDataset, then ChatGPT was probably trained on that text at some point.

If you do this, you get a fraction of 3%.

This is somewhat higher than all the other numbers we saw above, especially the other ones obtained using AuxDataset.

On the other hand, the numbers varied a lot between models, and ChatGPT is probably an outlier in various ways when you're comparing it to a bunch of open models.

So, this result seems consistent with the interpretation that the attack just makes ChatGPT behave like a base model. Base models -- it turns out -- tend to regurgitate their training data occasionally, under conditions like these ones; if you make ChatGPT behave like a base model, then it does too.

Language model behaves like language model, news at 11

Since this paper came out, a number of people have pinged me on twitter or whatever, telling me about how this attack "makes ChatGPT leak data," like this is some scandalous new finding about the attack specifically.

(I made some posts saying I didn't think the attack was "leaking data" -- by which I meant ChatGPT user data, which was a weirdly common theory at the time -- so of course, now some people are telling me that I was wrong on this score.)

This interpretation seems totally misguided to me.

Every result in the paper is consistent with the banal interpretation that the attack just makes ChatGPT behave like a base model.

That is, it makes it behave the way all LLMs used to behave, up until very recently.

I guess there are a lot of people around now who have never used an LLM that wasn't tuned for chat; who don't know that the "post-attack content" we see from ChatGPT is not some weird new behavior in need of a new, probably alarming explanation; who don't know that it is actually a very familiar thing, which any base model will give you immediately if you ask. But it is. It's base model behavior, nothing more.

Behaving like a base model implies regurgitation of training data some small fraction of the time, because base models do that. And only because base models do, in fact, do that. Not for any extra reason that's special to this attack.

(Or at least, if there is some extra reason, the paper gives us no evidence of its existence.)

The paper itself is less clear than I would like about this. In a footnote, it cites my tweet on the original attack (which I appreciate!), but it does so in a way that draws a confusing link between the attack and data regurgitation:

In fact, in early August, a month after we initial discovered this attack, multiple independent researchers discovered the underlying exploit used in our paper, but, like us initially, they did not realize that the model was regenerating training data, e.g., https://twitter.com/nostalgebraist/status/1686576041803096065.

Did I "not realize that the model was regenerating training data"? I mean . . . sort of? But then again, not really?

I knew from earlier papers (and personal experience, like the "Hedonist Sovereign" thing here) that base models occasionally produce exact quotations from their training data. And my reaction to the attack was, "it looks like it's behaving like a base model."

It would be surprising if, after the attack, ChatGPT never produced an exact quotation from training data. That would be a difference between ChatGPT's underlying base model and all other known LLM base models.

And the new paper shows that -- unsurprisingly -- there is no such difference. They all do this at some rate, and ChatGPT's rate is 3%, plus or minus something or other.

3% is not zero, but it's not very large, either.

If you do the attack to ChatGPT, and then think "wow, this output looks like what I imagine training data probably looks like," it is nonetheless probably not training data. It is probably, instead, a skilled mimicry of training data. (Remember that "skilled mimicry of training data" is what LLMs are trained to do.)

And remember, too, that base models used to be OpenAI's entire product offering. Indeed, their API still offers some base models! If you want to extract training data from a private OpenAI model, you can just interact with these guys normally, and they'll spit out their training data some small % of the time.

The only value added by the attack, here, is its ability to make ChatGPT specifically behave in the way that davinci-002 already does, naturally, without any tricks.

[watchnrant]

Interior Chinatown: A Sharp Satire That Challenges Stereotypes and Forces Self-Reflection

Interior Chinatown is a brilliant yet understated reflection of the world—a mirror that exposes how society often judges people by their covers. The show captures this poignantly with the scene where Willis Wu can’t get into the police precinct until he proves his worth by delivering food. It’s a powerful metaphor: sometimes, if you don’t fit the mold, you have to prove your value in the most degrading or unexpected ways just to get a foot in the door. The locked precinct doors represent barriers faced by those who don’t match the “majority’s” idea of what’s acceptable or valuable.

While the series centers on the Asian and Pacific Islander (API) community and the stereotypical roles Hollywood has long relegated them to—background extras, kung fu fighters—it forces viewers to confront bigger questions. It makes you ask: Am I complicit in perpetuating these stereotypes? Am I limiting others—or even myself—by what I assume is their worth? It’s not just about API representation; it’s about how society as a whole undervalues anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into its preferred narrative.

The show can feel confusing if you don’t grasp its satirical lens upfront. But for me, knowing the context of Charles Yu’s original book helped it click. The production team does an incredible job balancing satire with sincerity, blurring the line between real life and the exaggerated Hollywood “procedural” format. They cleverly use contrasting visuals and distinct camera work to draw you into different headspaces—Hollywood’s glossy expectations versus the grittier reality of life.

Chloe Bennet’s involvement (real name Chloe Wang) ties into the show’s themes on a deeply personal level. She famously changed her last name to navigate Hollywood, caught in the impossible middle ground of not being “Asian enough” or “white enough” for casting directors. It’s a decision that sparks debate—was it an act of survival, assimilation, or betrayal? But for Bennett, it was about carving a space for herself to pursue her dreams.

This theme echoes in one of the show’s most poignant scenes, where Lana is told, “You will never completely understand. You’re mixed.” It’s a crushing acknowledgment of the barriers that persist, even when you’re trying to bridge divides. Lana’s story highlights how identity can be both a strength and an obstacle, and the line serves as a painful reminder of the walls society creates—externally and internally.

Interior Chinatown doesn’t just ask us to look at the system; it forces us to examine ourselves. Whether it’s Willis Wu at the precinct door or Lana trying to connect in a world that sees her as neither this nor that, the show unflinchingly portrays the struggle to belong. And as viewers, it challenges us to question our role in those struggles: Are we helping to dismantle the barriers, or are we quietly reinforcing them?

[sirenjose]

Theory: about Vilhelm, Alice, Orpheus, the final game, and who made the assassination request

The organization Vilhelm has had Evelyn train and grow for him, an organization (skilled in secrets, deception, disguise, and the like) which included women like Martha Behamfil, are highly likely to be the ones spying on Alice, who had been adopted and taken to Melbourne by Vilhelm for his experiments until she managed to escape with Orpheus' help. Vilhelm likely wasn't happy by this, which would explain why he might've sent his spies to find and investigate her. They were eventually exposed though, leading to their recommendation the target be "eliminat[ed]".

This could be when Vilhelm made the assassination request. Possibly because he couldn't let any information about his secret organization leak (or anything else bad he might've done), which could've been her intent eventually considering she decided to be an "investigative journalist" (solving mysteries and reporting on her findings).

And considering based on this we know Vilhelm was recommended to eliminate her, that would relate to the "assassination" request we knew Norton was given. This was the reason Norton went to the manor (for the final game), meaning the 2 options (so far) are Melly or Alice, and if the request came from Vilhelm, Alice is the more likely answer.

Melly on the other hand I think may currently be blackmailed by Orpheus, who I think found out about what she did to her husband, and thus why he would've sent her the same "rare" bee specimen that caused his death (implying he knew the truth).

I think everything Melly said is technically true (maybe could call it a lie of omission). She is here due to her husband's death, which was caused by a "type of rare bee venom" that wasn't recorded in his observation notes. And she did likely receive a bee specimen from the manor, the same that caused his death, and was promised info on the bee species and the cause of her husband's death if she participated in his game. But I think what is missing is she was the one to find and utilize that type of bee, which based on the Ashes of Memory Concept Video may have been the "Apis Mellifera Scutellata Lepeletier" or Africanized bee, and likely that Orpheus may have threatened to release the truth about how she killed her husband to the public if she didn't participate in his game. The Concept Video even had an article that talked about how they attack, how deadly their sting is, and affects caused by their sting, with the following frames showing a path for the bee from Cape Town in Africa to London, England.

It's possible Orpheus may have done similar to Norton, and maybe that could explain why Norton worked with Orpheus to capture and drug Alice in Orpheus' secret basement. Unless Alice did hallucinate Orpheus as Norton in that 1 basement scene where she's drugged.

If it wasn't a hallucination, that would imply Norton is working for both Orpheus and Vilhelm, unless the request came from Orpheus.

It's clear that Orpheus cares for Alice considering Alice's 1st letter shows he helped her to remember him (Orpheus) and escape from Vilhelm, with him calling her his "Nightingale" at the end of the letter (potentially a hint to Alice maybe being connected to "Miss Nightingale" in the present day). So Orpheus doesn't actually want her dead, but it's possible he might've made the request in order to create a situation where he could act like a hero and save her from death, gaining her trust and potentially helping them to grow closer together.

The order would've come from the manor owner (Baron DeRoss), meaning Norton (and everyone) wouldn't know Orpheus is the owner, and thus (if he does actually try to kill her) he would just think someone random (not the person who made the request) was trying to stop him.

Additionally, Orpheus most likely knows Alice is Alice, based on his behavior in Ashes of Memory 1 and 2, expressions, and how he knocks her out and drugs her. It's likely he kept an eye on her the whole time, including her time at White Sand Street Asylum (based on his 1st letter) and her time with Vilhelm in Melbourne, based on Alice's 1st letter and Alice's flashback during Ashes of Memory 2, as well as likely afterwards, after he helps her escape. It's probably just that Alice doesn't know who Orpheus really is (her friend from before the tragedy, or the fact he's the manor owner).

So, if Orpheus doesn't want to kill Alice, but is still trying to use his drugs on her, that may mean his goal has to do with her memories. We've already seen he cares about what she remembers, considering he made sure she remembered him. Maybe his goal then is to change her memories of the tragedy, the most significant and tragic moment of both their pasts. Her backstory even states she "suffered from hysteria" afterwards, while Orpheus' 1st letter states she is "unstable" and even includes the comment "what happened in the past wasn't a great memory to her". Therefore, maybe he wants to change that memory so it's no longer so painful for her. It's possible he may want her to completely forget, but as he didn't want her to forget him, I think it's more likely he wants to change the memory somehow, which could fit in with how the Hydra drug (which "reconstructs" memory) seems to be the drug with the most focus or emphasis (it's the drug Orpheus drinks near the latter part of the Time of Reunion event).

How exactly he wants it to change, I'm not quite sure yet. There is the possibility he wants to at least change her memory of his involvement in it, considering Bonbon's deductions implies he may have helped his real parents take some valuables from the manor. Maybe he also wants to disassociate himself from his real parents, so she doesn't remember it was his own parents that caused the events that led to her parents' deaths. He could do other things as well that would make the memory less painful, maybe even change who she thought her real parents were so she doesn't have to deal with the memory of losing them, who knows. Maybe he wanted to change it so he was the son of the DeRoss couple while she wasn't, so it'd be him in her memories that'd have to deal with their deaths rather than her as much. That could fit with the story he tells her, where he phrases it as he was the kid of the DeRoss couple instead of her. Whatever else, I don't know.

But we know from Alice's trailer that she wants to "face" the truth and whatever other troubles she encounters. She doesn't want Orpheus to be trying to make her avoid the pain by making her forget or changing her memories, nor does she likely agree with his experiments or methods he uses to test his drugs, and thus why she in the end will work to stop him (potentially with the help of Melly and Norton, considering Tracy's game as well as COA 4 emphasize the importance of teamwork to achieve victory).

I still wonder about the specifics regarding what Orpheus' end goal is, but I also wish I knew more about what Vilhelm (and Count Barriere) was trying to do. We know he wanted "goods" from the Mediterranean based on a deal he made with Jose's father, Joaquin Baden. We also know from Evelyn's backstory that he was having her training people like her (in deception, disguises, acting, tricks, good social skills, how to be dangerous, etc...) to work for him like some type of spy organization.

This is likely the same organization from Martha's 4th letter, which is referred to as some type of "unregistered organization" that even an official intelligence agency are unable to investigate with all their manpower and resources. Though it is suggested information on that organization may be "beyond our clearance level", suggesting it is pretty important.

Speaking of Martha, who we know was 1 of the most gifted students Evelyn trained, Martha we know from her 3rd letter is unable or unwilling to be herself. Considering how she was meant to take over for Evelyn, I wonder if this was the type of person Vilhelm wanted Alice to become. We know from her 1st letter she had been forgetting some things, including who Orpheus was. Maybe if Orpheus hadn't saved her sooner, Vilhelm would've been successful.

Maybe the "goods" Vilhelm wanted from the Mediterranean were for his experiments. Maybe it was some of the goods included the "Delphi" plant that we know is used in Orpheus' drugs, as well as Vera's Euphoria. Maybe like Orpheus, Vilhelm wants to mess with people's memories too, maybe to help his organization and to get whatever else it is he wants.

[ariapmdeol]

How to play RPGMaker Games in foreign languages with Machine Translation

This is in part a rewrite of a friend's tutorial, and in part a more streamlined version of it based on what steps I found important, to make it a bit easier to understand!

Please note that as with any Machine Translation, there will errors and issues. You will not get the same experience as someone fluent in the language, and you will not get the same experience as with playing a translation done by a real person.

If anyone has questions, please feel free to ask!

1. Download and extract the Locale Emulator

Linked here!

2. Download and set up your Textractor!

Textractor tutorial and using it with DeepL. The browser extension tools are broken, so you will need to use the built in textractor API (this has a limit, so be careful), or copy-paste the extracted text directly into your translation software of choice. Note that the textractor DOES NOT WORK on every game! It works well with RPGMaker, but I've had issues with visual novels. The password for extraction is visual_novel_lover

3. Ensure that you are downloading your game in the right region.

In your region/language (administrative) settings, change 'Language for non-unicode programs' to the language of your choice. This will ensure that the file names are extracted to the right language. MAKE SURE you download AND extract the game with the right settings! DO NOT CHECK THE 'use utf-8 encoding' BOX. This ONLY needs to be done during the initial download and extraction; once everything is downloaded+extracted+installed, you can set your region back to your previous settings, but test to ensure that the text will display properly after you return to your original language settings; there have been issues before. helpful tutorials are here and here!

4. Download your desired game and, if necessary, relevant RTP

The tools MUST be downloaded and extracted in the game's language. For japanese games, they are here. ensure that you are still in the right locale for non-unicode programs!

5. Run through the Locale Emulator

YES, this is a necessary step, EVEN IF YOUR ADMIN-REGION/LANGUAGE SETTINGS ARE CORRECT. Some games will not display the correct text unless you also RUN it in the right locale. You should be able to right click the game and see the Locale Emulator as an option like this. Run in Japanese (or whatever language is needed). You don't need to run as Admin if you don't want to, it should work either way.

6. Attach the Textractor and follow previously linked tutorials on how to set up the tools and the MTL.

Other notes:

There are also inbuilt Machine Translation Extensions, but those have a usage limit due to restrictions on the API. The Chrome/Firefox add-ons in the walkthrough in step 4 get around this by using the website itself, which doesn't have the same restrictions as the API does.

This will work best for RPGMaker games. For VNs, the textractor can have difficulties hooking in to extract the text, and may take some finagling.

[pixiecaps]

psst hey do u have any sdv mod reccs/any tips on how to use them 👀

yeah! so for stardew mods to work you need to first install the smapi api.

you can either do that through their main website or nexus

neither option has any cons theyre just based on preference on how you wanna install it but theyre both completely safe websites.

after you properly install smapi you’ll have to go to nexus which is the main website for all stardew valley mods. you’ll need to make an account to install stuff i believe. you can find a wide range of mods here that serve a lot of different purposes.

if you haven’t used nexus to mod before then as i mentioned before first make an account then once you are looking at a mod make sure to check the requirements first. sometimes mods need other mods to work and you need to install those first. after you checked the requirements you head to the files section and click manual download. after that select slow download then wait for it to install into your files. then you move those files into the stardew mod folder. if thats not clear enough you can find a bunch of tutorial videos on youtube with visuals:)

since you asked for my recs i’ll give you the list of which i actually use all the time.

NPC Map Locations

- very basic mod. majority of mod users will have this installed and it just shows you on the map where each npc is at at all times.

CJB Cheats Menu & CJB Item Spawner

- these two sorta go hand in hand for me but of course you don’t need to have both installed. this is definitely a play style preference thing but i personally like having these cheats installed for any type of situation that might happen in game that i can’t undo otherwise without them.

- the cheats menu adds a lot more flexibility and well cheats to the game so for instance: infinite health, infinite stamina, give yourself money, instantly increase hearts with whichever npc, always catch every fish, warp locations, change weather, change time, freeze time, and a lot more. this uses the P key to open in game but you can configure that to another bind if you’d like.

- the item spawner is a lot more simple. does what it says and spawns whichever item you want. so basically you can press the i key and it’ll open up a menu with every item in the game and you can spawn in the specific amount you want of something and so forth. simple concept. i mainly use this for when i accidentally sell or gift an item i wasnt intending to and then simply spawn it back in. i also use it for decorating my house:3

Look Up Anything

- this is literally like having the wiki at your disposal at all times in game. extremely helpful for so many reasons especially as i personally always had the wiki open to check for information on items and npcs so having this mod made it a lot quicker of a process. how it works is you simply hover your mouse over whatever you want information on and click f1 and it’ll display all the information about that thing to you! so if you hover over lets say harvey and press f1 it’ll show you a menu with his birthday, his love & like gifts, your hearts with them and how many points till the next heart, etc.

Seasonal Outfits

- this mod puts all the npcs in different outfits for the seasons. its just cute

Elle’s Seasonal Buildings & DaisyNiko’s Earthy Recolor

- the seasonal building allows a lot more variety in structures like farm building and adding holiday decor to npc buildings. simple stuff that can make the game more customized

- with seasonal buildings you can also install compatible recolors which is what the DaisyNiko’s link is. it’s the recolor i personally use for my main farm when i play. this is because the vanilla game is very saturated and does hurt my eyes so having more chilled out tones helps. you dont need to install the recolor i use or any in fact if you like the natural look of the game but just know the option is there and there’s a multitude of recolors you can use to make the game look different:3

Friends Forever

- no friendship decay because itsa pain in the ass and i have no time to talk to the npcs all day. this is very play style based some people enjoy having to go and ensure they speak to npcs daily im just not the type.

Part of The Community

- creates different ways for you to gain hearts easier and passively

Mailbox Menu & Zilch’s Envelopes

- i really like the letters and the fact you can only read them once bummed me out until i found this mod which adds a whole menu for your mail where you can go back and see all the letters you’ve received. feel like it adds that additional touch and care to the whole mail system in the game.

- then to go along with that menu theres the envelopes mod that customizes it even further and makes all the envelopes of the letters have cute appearances and designs. look at this and tell me that isn’t the best thing you’ve ever seen.

Honorable Mentions

- Chests Anywhere

- CJB Show Item Sell Price

in conclusion…

I really suggest just taking the time and scrolling through the nexus mods website on your own. they have a specific category for stardew and you can filter it by most popular and see what you find yourself. since everyone plays differently you might find you enjoy the more technical code side and want to change something to do with that or you might just simply wanna change the npc portraits and make them look nicer. theres so many options on how to mod this game and i honestly could go on forever with mod suggestions but at the end of the day its up to you! so hope this helps and i hope you have a fun time modding.