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lizacstuff · 3 years

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Sen Çal Kapımı / Edser Asks

After the fragman, I got a few anons this afternoon, my answer are under the cut.

(Also my initial reactions are in this post.)

Anonymous said: In the spirit of optimism- when Eda broke up with Serkan in 25, everyone freaked out but by the end of the next episode, she proposed LOL. Maybe just maybe they won’t do the “everyone pretends Selin and Serkan are a thing for medical reasons for multiple episodes” route and someone gets her kicked to the curb in 29. I wonder how much of the 2.5 hrs will be before he comes back and how much is after.

LOL, I certainly would like Selin to be back for only one episode. I hope my speculation is right (this post,)and her narrative purpose is to make Serkan distrust Eda from the start and once she’s done that she can exit stage right.

As for the theory you mention, which I have seen on twitter, I don’t see people pretending they’re together for medical reasons. That makes zero sense to me (not that medical diagnosis on a silly romantic dramedy dizi would be accurate, lol) why would that be necessary? Why would anyone go along with that? Especially when all he would need to do is google himself to find out about his relationship with Eda. They were all over the tabloids and on the cover of a magazine. Plus it seems like he knows about Eda, Selin tells him "she turned you into someone you’re not and dragged you into a different world.” He has to know they were in a relationship.

There is a lot of knee-jerk hysteria over there right now which is leading to completely neurosis-induced, nonsensical, worst-case scenario speculation. I recommend avoiding for awhile if anyone is easily upset by that type of thing.

As for the timeline of the ep, great question. I am hoping that the walk into ArtLife is not the end of the episode. We’re going to need to see Serkan and Eda meeting face to face before this episode is up in order to survive! We know almost the full cast (including Hande and Kerem) were shooting at a cafe yesterday, and the cast looked dressed up. Most thought it was for 1x28, so that seems like there are scenes with Serkan and the full cast in this ep.

Though, the show has a lot of questions to answer. How in God’s name did he end up in that cabin? Did he get on the plane or not? Was he held captive and got dropped in the woods with only Selin’s phone number? Has he been in a coma? Was there foul play involved? Was there a brain injury or did Babaanne arrange his kidnapping and give him some experimental drug to wipe out his memories of Eda?

Not sure if this Deniz is a law enforcement official or some sort of private detective, but there would have been some sort of official inquiry and search when he went missing. So he can’t just be lazing around for 2 months, easily findable. And Selin can’t have been with him for anything length of time without the others knowing he’s alive, because that would pretty much be kidnapping. So what HAPPENED?

Anonymous said: I hope we get good Eda and Aydan moments. She didn’t get married but she is still Aydan’s daughter now. He’s going to come back and find that this woman has his mother, his company, his dog, his car, his friends.....there’s no way that he doesn’t just know that Selin has been a snake.

Yes, please! I’m sure we will get Eda and Aydan moments, it looks from the first trailer that they will lean on each other while he’s missing. Which they should, they’ll be the two that will hold out hope and give one another comfort.

I am LOVING that Eda is driving his car and taking care of his dog. As she should, they were hours away from being married! And yes, you’re correct, he’s going to find Eda so deeply embedded in everything he remembers (except Selin) that it’s going to drive him crazy. Who is this woman and how did she ensorcell him so thoroughly? Can’t wait for him to find out.

You know what I’m most looking forward to in regards to Aydan? Serkan’s shock that his mother has conquered her agoraphobia. Can’t wait for him to find out that Eda was instrumental in helping her do that.

She is going to hit him like an emotional freight train. A second time.

Anonymous said: i know most of the fandom has already accepted it as fact bc they can't wait for the actual ep to make conclusions, but i'm less inclined to believe he's been in that cabin w/ selin for 2 months.. idk HOW he gets there, or how selin ends up there.. but for some reason i think they find him first, and he takes off by himself for a bit as he's overwhelmed with the whole situation.. and then selin enters. idk, we'll have to see it, but i think, like all trailers, it's confusing on purpose.

This theory is definitely possible. That he’s found and freaks out and goes to the cabin. Perhaps the last he remembers he was still with Selin so he reaches out to her for answer about what’s going on. That would make sense why he accepts her comfort, and she gives it, but can’t help herself from trying to do everything in her power to make him distrust Eda. Even if she doesn’t have hope of reconciliation, just to cause chaos because she doesn’t want them to find happiness together. She’s said it more than once, she didn’t want him happy, while she was not.

Anonymous said: I am not emotionally prepared to watch the look on Eda’s face when Serkan walks in holding hands with Selin after being missing for the last two months....😭😭😭. Also even if Serkan & Selin are purely platonic watching their scenes together are going to be brutal. I am prepared to cry ( both tears of joy & sadness) & be very mad at various points in this episode. It will be an rollercoaster of emotions for sure.

Yep, pretty much all of this! I don’t think I’m going to enjoy watching this episode at all. However, my hope is that I will really enjoy watching the storyline that it sets up where we get to watch Serkan fall in love with Eda all over again. Think of all the delicious, UST-y, sexy, funny, fiery, passionate scenes that are in store for us!

Off the top of my head, things I want:

Serkan opening Madonna in a Fur Coat and finding their photo

Serkan’s deep-seated memory kicking in and mindlessly tearing the crusts off bread for her without realizing it or knowing why

Finding out his computer password and what it means

Seeing photos of them from their matchmaking party. Looking so in love and surrounded by friends and family and everyone looks so happy

One of the friends, Engin or Piril snapping and telling him the big change Eda brought about in him was just that he was happy

Serkan seeing media clippings of them and their relationship

Eda handcuffing him so they have to spend time together while trying to jog his memory

After being suspicious and trying to keep her at arms length, Serkan finally breaking down and asking her questions about their relationship

Serkan being mistrustful of her, but still unable to say no to her

Anonymous said: So I get that SCK is going through a reset and now we will get to watch Eda & Serkan fall in love again but seriously they brought Selin back like that...WTF? Now she is even worse than Balca. Plus the entire world thinks Serkan is dead but somehow Selin found him and never bothered to tell anyone else...that should send up some red flags for sure. Regardless of the explanation, this situation is going to crush Eda. And it seems like a lot to go through to have him immediately get his memories back so we could be stuck with this storyline for a while.

Yes, poor Eda is going to be crushed no matter what. However, I know that people have been theorizing that the memory loss would be short, but I never thought it would be. What’s the point of this reset unless they’re going to follow through with it and milk it for as many episode as possible. They’re trying to find ways to keep this show going and this is their big swing.

The entire point is to recreate the magic of Eda and Serkan falling in love, and, honestly, I'm not sure why anyone would want that to be over in 2 episodes. I don’t see it as being stuck with the amnesia story, I’m excited for all the parallels, watching Serkan get struck by lightning a second time when he first sees her. Watching him be suspicious of her, of her motives of her abilities, but then finding out all the same things that he found out the first time, that she’s fierce, kind-hearted, loyal and talented. And just a bright shining light for him.

My heart melts just thinking about it. We just have to get rid of that opportunistic, malevolent, bitter hag.

Anonymous said: one complaint that i've seen in regards to sck is that characters aren't sent off properly.. but outside of maybe fifi (which we don't know how they'll explain her leaving) am i the only one that doesn't... really care? everyone that's left has been unsubstantial or in a villain role, and personally whatever way they leave i'm fine with lol.. i know when selin left ppl were mad bc they wanted a redemption story arc for her.. but not every character NEEDS that by default, if that makes sense.

For context, this ask was sent before the fragman. I agree with you, no side character needs redemption by default. I’ve said it many times, but on this specific show, really only two characters matter: Eda and Serkan. This is their story. Their love story. Everyone else is supporting in the truest sense of the word. They all exist to prop up the A story. So for most of them their journey doesn’t matter unless it directly affects Eda or Serkan. (Aydan’s growth and redemption has directly impacted Eda and Serkan and that’s why time has been spent on it). Selin is a tool. She’s behaved erratically at time because she only exists for the writers to use her to antagonize the protagonists. Her story in and of itself does not matter.

I laughed hysterically when some on twitter were thinking Serkan might really be dead and Kerem was leaving the show.

Seriously? You think they would try to keep this show going without Edser? That anyone would pay money for it, without them? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! If one of them were to leave, the show would be over. Dead. Cancelled. There is NO reason for this show to keep going other than for more Edser. Everything else is an after thought, filler, or characters that prop up Eda and Serkan either literally or symbolically or thematically. Nothing else stands on it’s own.

They devised this storyline in order to go back to the magic of these two people falling in love. Full stop. That’s why we’re seeing this reset. Because no other characters or their storylines are compelling enough to carry the show. I applaud the writers for creating a situation where we could watch Serkan fall in love with Eda one more time. (just get rid of Selin, please, so I can enjoy it... and do it quickly.)

#Sen Çal Kapımı #Sen Cal Kapimi #edser #sck speculation #sck spoilers #sckask #sck 1x29 #asklizac #anonymous

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bramblepeltao3 · 3 years

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HBD Ardyn

A tiny ficlet that came to me this morning for the trash man’s birthday

Del smirked, very much pleased with her hiding place. She wondered quietly what she would do the day she was no longer small enough to fit anywhere and everywhere. Perhaps by then she could simply make people do whatever she wanted, no sneaking required. Wouldn’t that be cool?

She worked on controlling her breathing to make sure she was as quiet as possible. There weren’t as many workstations in this office, just the one, so not enough fans were buzzing to mask the inconvenient sounds her body made to exist.

Man, having no body at all would be the most cool.

Finally she could hear the door open and two sets of footsteps walking towards her. ‘Yes,’ she thought to herself, ‘he brought the student in this time.’ That was perfect, it meant the lead scientist would be saying all the important stuff out loud to them. The pair of nice, polished shoes sat in the desk chair while the clean but cheap shoes stood next to it.

“There are a number of clearance steps you have to pass to get into this information,” the lead scientist man began, “first is a username that’s different from your standard one. It’s your first initial, last name, and year of birth.”

Del grinned. She could easily figure out that information for the majority of the employees here.

“And the default password is capital M Magitek1234. Make sure you change it when you get started.”

Jackpot! There was no way every single employee took the time to change their password. She was as good as in now.

“Next you need to enter the security clearance code. Write this down but eventually you should probably memorize it…”

Del closed her eyes and listened intently, knowing the pen and paper that was her own memory would capture it with ease.

“And finally you have to click the dialogue box asking if you accept responsibility for what you do on the terminal.”

Oh, yes she would happily accept responsibility on someone else’s behalf.

“And you’re in. Now,”

The six year old listened to the tutorial on how to use the charting system. She would probably be able to figure it out herself, given enough time, but she wanted to spend as much of it as possible reading everything she could.

Halfway through the navigation button explanation, the lead scientist adjusted his legs and kicked the bottom of the desk she was hiding under. She flinched instinctively, but successfully stayed quiet.

Until some dust broke loose into the air and made its way to her. She tried to hold back, even keeping her hands held over her nose and mouth. But the reflexes of the human body could not be stopped, and in spite of herself she sneezed. It was small, barely a squeak, but as soon as she made it the man in charge stopped talking. He pushed his chair back from the desk and whispered something she couldn’t make out.

He knew.

The student bent over, eyes going wide when he saw her.

“Uh, yes Doctor, there is a-”

“I know, her name is Delphia and she’s a rotten little brat. Her room is in the north hallway, number 375. Take her back there and lock the door.”

Del had a single moment to make a decision: she could easily escape from this situation if she so chose to. She could squirm back up the way she came between the wall and the back of the desk (the gap existed so the computer could be plugged into the wall outlet, she only needed to push it a tiny bit to get through). From there she could jump back to the ventilation opening and escape. But then everyone would know her secret passageways and there would certainly be repercussions. So the other option was to simply make this idiot teenager think she was an innocent little girl and ditch his grasp the moment the door opened.

Del put on her best innocent little kid face and crawled out from under the desk. Luckily the dust was already making her eyes water, and she used that to make herself look even more pathetic.

“I’m sorry doctor! I was scared and needed to hide!” She said, laying it on even thicker when she looked towards the younger man.

“You’re a liar and a waste of everyone’s time. This isn’t a daycare, go back to your room!” The old man who had no power over her commanded.

Del temporarily stifled her pride and sniffled. “Yes Sir.” She took the boy’s hand and let him walk her to the door. She had everything she needed now anyway.

“So, Delphia right? How old are you?” The boy asked as they walked through the doorway.

“I’m six years old…” she answered quietly.

“You’re kind of young to be in a place like this. What were you hiding from?”

Del forced her lip to tremble. “The monsters,” she whispered, “they’re all over and they said they’re gonna get me.”

“Awe, I’m sure nothing here would want to hurt a cute little kid like you!”

She tired of this exchange. Pretending to be a big baby made her skin crawl but it certainly had its benefits.

“You can just leave me here, I can get back by myself,” she said while rubbing her eyes with her free hand.

“Oh it’s no trouble Delly.”

WHAT did this guy just call her?

“I’m sorry for being a bother, I know all of you guys are super busy.” She could feel herself willing him to let go of her hand.

The boy looked at her, then back towards the office, and spent a long amount of time trying to think. Del swore she could see smoke coming out of his ears.

“I’d better do what he said. It’s okay though, do you want to sing a song while we walk to make it less scary?”

Fuck. Time for Operation Shock Value.

“No, I don’t want to fucking sing, are you stupid?” Del asked in her normal voice.

The words had their intended effect as the boy let go of her hand and stepped back in disbelief at what he heard.

Del took a moment to stick her tongue out, expose her middle finger, and took off running.

“W-wait, hey, Delphia!” His loud footsteps were quick behind her. The older scientists were much easier to run from.

She turned a corner slightly too fast and slid, barely recovering before falling and continuing on. It gave him enough time to close the gap she’d pushed so hard to create. Just as she thought her fun today was over with, she turned another corner and-

“Uncle Ardyn!” She squealed, slowing to a stop and reaching her arms up to the only adult in the whole star who was worth a damn.

“Well well, what sort of trouble have you gotten yourself into today, Delphia?” The Chancellor asked as the boy’s footsteps stopped behind her.

“Ch-chancellor Izunia?” He asked.

“One and the same,” Ardyn answered with a grin, scooping Del up into his arms. She turned and spit out her tongue once again in a show of victory. “Has my little niece been giving you trouble?”

“N-nie-? Uh, Chancellor, Sir, I was asked to-”

“He was chasing me! I was just trying to play a game and he was so mean.” Del turned to give her puppy dog eyes to Uncle Ardyn. It was simply for the fun of it, as she knew the man could always see right through her.

“Tsk tsk,” Ardyn wagged his finger at her before poking her on the nose, “now what have we said about lying, little finch?”

“That it’s a normal coping mechanism for children from abusive households,” she repeated from memory.

“Indeed it is. And?”

Del huffed. “And it’s still a bad behavior and I should do better to stop relying on it…”

“Very good. You can return to your business now, young man,” Ardyn said politely. He turned around and began to walk down the long hallway, still carrying Del gently.

“Uncle Ardyn I didn’t know you’d be here today!” Del chirped.

He chuckled. “Your father asked me to come by for a special presentation. And one you shouldn’t even think about listening in on.”

“Aaawe,” Del whined. He was the one person she didn’t want to disappoint. So if he said she shouldn’t do something, she would usually behave.

Usually.

“Now now, you wouldn’t mope about on your Uncle Ardyn’s birthday would you?”

“Birthday?” Del asked. She knew in theory that birthdays were an important thing. Her birthdays until now were an excuse for her mother to throw another big party to show her off like a prop. Her sixth birthday came and went with nothing but a simple gift from Uncle Ardyn: a small orange cake. It was the best thing she’d ever eaten in her whole life.

She began to feel a distressing disappointment. “I...I didn’t get you anything!”

Uncle Ardyn laughed before kneeling and putting her down in front of her personal computer terminal. “I have no need of material possessions, but if you would like to do something nice for me on this day, perhaps you could mind your manners at tonight’s dinner?”

She rolled her eyes and stifled a whine. If that’s what he wanted then that was what she would do.

“Okay…” She forgot tonight was her weekly Dinner with Dad night. She much preferred eating in the cafeteria with the interns who found her wit and sass charming. Also they had better food in the cafeteria. “What should I study today?” She asked before climbing into her chair and turning on her terminal.

“Hmm, why don’t you learn how an engine works? And give me a full report at the end of the day.”

She nodded enthusiastically. She loved updating the Chancellor with everything she learned between his visits.

“Yes! I can do that!”

“Very good, now that’s why you’re my favorite niece.” He gave her another gentle tap on the nose, eliciting a snorting giggle.

“Do you have any other nieces?” She asked.

“Oh, now and then.” He gave her a quick pat on the head, and made his way to her father’s workroom.

Uncle Ardyn was so weird. That’s why she loved him.

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comicgeekscomicgeek · 3 years

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Their Hero Academia – Chapter 71: Past Endeavors

Presenting the next installment of my on-going, nextgen, MHA fic! Earlier chapters can be found here

“So this is public transportation,” Izumi said. “Interesting.” She had been on the U.A. buses before, but this was quite different. Certainly, there was a more interesting variety of people riding the subway, including one homeless man who seemed deep in conversation with what appeared to be thin air.

“It’s just a subway train,” Chihiro told her. Her Cords were retracted in the confined space of the car, but animated. She’d warned early on that a crowded car at this time of day could come with its share of “perverts.”

“Not a very good one,” Mineta said, pouting a bit. “No one’s tried to grope me or take an upskirt photo! Aren’t I good enough for these sleezebags? It’s enough to give a girl a complex!”

Chihiro buried her face in her hands. “Why are you like this?”

“There’s several theories.”

Izumi was grateful for the company. Though she was determined to see this through, she had worried she would back out if she did it on her own. And she was well aware that she was what Chihiro called a “sheltered rich girl,” making the journey more complicated. This was her first time riding the subway, after all. Chihiro had insisted on accompanying her and Mineta had insisted on coming along as well.

Perhaps she should have asked Katsumi. But her dear friend was also quite volatile. The likelihood of violence breaking out when she met her grandfather was not insignificant.

She did feel a bit guilty though. Izumi had asked their driver to take her into the city, with instructions that she would call for pick-up in a few hours, under the pretense of meeting her friends. None of which was a lie. She had met up with Chihiro and Mineta. What she had been untruthful about was that they had then taken the subway, which was not a question that had been asked, so it was not a lie. Their destination was not far, only a pair of stops past the station they had boarded at, but she desperately needed to keep her actions hidden from her parents.

She was also slightly in disguise, wearing clothes that Chihiro had brought her. They were casual things, jeans and a t-shirt with the name of some band on it. Her hair was mostly stuffed up under a lime-green hat with cat ears. As the daughter of two prominent Heroes and part of two extremely well-known families, she has spent a considerable portion of her life in the limelight, even if only at the edges of it. The story of her illness had leaked as a child and made numerous headlines as well, even if the details were sparse. To say nothing of how much of Japan had seen her during the Sports Festival. Despite coming in second, Mineta was drawing less attention, perhaps because she seemed to desperate for it; offense as a defense, as it were.

Izumi was going to see her grandfather, Enji Todoroki, also known as Endeavor, and he had been the Number One Hero once upon a time. Even as the Heroes of her parents’ generation had been ascending, he had continued to hold a place in the Top Ten. But mysteriously, about eleven years ago, shortly after she had recovered from her illness, he had publicly confessed to the numerous mistakes he had made and the abusive behavior he had engaged in with his children, then retired from his Hero career and from public life. She could not remember the last time she had seen him.

But with a little bit of ethically dubious help from Mineta (She had been able to guess her father’s password for Hero-Net resources, which had gotten them a location), she now knew where he was. And she had so many questions for him. Questions she could not ask her parents, for she did not believe she could trust them to be honest about this. She loved them dearly and knew that they loved her, but if what she suspected was true, then they were absolutely keeping secrets from her. It cast the specter of doubt over anything she might learn.

Because her grandfather’s retirement coincided with the capture of a Villain called Plague, a Villain with the ability to unleash devastating diseases. A Villain who had escaped from custody not that long ago. Plague, who had, by all accounts, previously turned himself in voluntarily…

There were too many coincidences and things happening at the same time. She was certain she had been one of Plague’s victims, though whether that had been intentional or not, she could not say. But her illness tracked to the exact time of his rampage across Japan and matched the symptoms exactly. Her grandfather was the best chance she had for getting real answers.

Of course, the real question was… answers to what? Was it enough to know whether she was a deliberate victim or simply an unfortunate bystander? Did she want to know what part her grandfather had played in it all? Did she want to know if the escaped Plague was still a threat to her and her family?

She wasn’t sure. Izumi only knew that there was too much about the circumstances of her own life that she did not know. The events of her past still cast a shadow over her future. Her illness had exasperated her already somewhat frail constitution, making it the reason she still struggled with stamina and endurance. She was proud of her accomplishments and all she had overcome. But if she did not have those limitations…

Chihiro gave her a slight nudge. “Hey, we’re here. It’s our stop.”

***

The house before them was a simple, small, one story affair, in a nice neighborhood. It and its lawn and garden were well kept. It was a far cry from the spacious and sprawling house her father, uncles, and aunt had grown up in. Aunt Fuyumi and Uncle Tensei lived there now, the house having been left to her when her grandfather had retired from public life and Hero work. And it was smaller by far than the estate her immediate family lived in, a truly large mansion with expansive grounds and even guest houses. When she was younger, some of her friends had joked that it must have had its own postal code. Or, as Chihiro had said, “its own phone number.”

To think that her grandfather had been so close all this time and she had never known it, only a few subway stops away from U.A.

“Well,” Chihiro said, “here we are.”

“Right where anybody could walk up,” Mika said. “Kind of expected a big fence or something, based on all the stories.”

Izumi’s heart thudded in her chest. “This may have been a bad idea,” she said. “Perhaps I should have called first. Maybe we should come back another time. We do not even know if he is home.” She took a slight step backwards.

“Hey.” Chihiro put a hand on her shoulder. “Look at me.” Izumi turned her head to look at her friend. “You want to go, we’ll go. Strategic retreat, no shame. But you already came all this way. Might as well give it a shot.”

The path to the door was made of carefully carved stones. As with everything about the house and garden, it suggested the occupant had taken great care to make everything just so. That matched with what little she knew of her grandfather, a demanding man who sought perfection in all things.

As they stood in front of the door, Izumi looked to her left and right. Both of her friends gave her a small nod. Carefully, she raised a hand and knocked on the door, once, twice, three times. It was a solid, heavy door, and the knock sounded out loud and clear.

“He must not be home,” she said after a moment. “We should go.”

“Hold your horses,” Chihiro said.

“Hey! Buy me dinner first!”

“Not what I meant, Mika.”

Suddenly, Izumi could hear the sound of heavy footsteps near the door. After a moment longer, the door opened and her grandfather stepped into view. Enji Todoroki was a large man, taller and broader than her father. His former red hair had gone grey with age. He still had a deep scar over his left eye and she could see burn scars on his face, hands, and peeking out from the collar of his shirt and going up his neck.

“What do you want?” he began, his eyes narrow and harsh. She suspected he received very few visitors.

“I,” she began, then faltered. She had been so determined when she had made these plans, but now she found all her confidence failing her. Where was her determination to prove herself? Where was the strength she had found to challenge Katsumi and her classmates at the Sports Festival? Why could she not form the words?

“Out with it!” he growled, so harshly that this time, all three of them took a step back.

“Hey!” Mineta snapped. “You can’t talk to us like that!”

“I’ll do what I like with unwelcome and uninvited girls on my own property,” her grandfather growled.

“Please,” Izumi said softly. She reached up and pulled off the hat, letting her dual colored hair cascade behind her. “Grandfather. I just wish to talk. There are things I must know.”

His eyes widened as recognition dawned. “Izumi…!”

***

It had taken considerable convincing to get Chihiro and Mineta to leave. Both girls had insisted on staying with her, but while her grandfather was willing to speak to her, he had been unwilling to entertain her friends. This was understandable. There had been a weight in her request to talk, one that betrayed the important and deeply personal nature of the conversation. But ultimately, she had convinced them to return to the small shopping district they had passed on their way to her grandfather’s house. She would let them know when she was ready to rejoin them.

The interior of Grandfather’s house reminded her very much of the traditional Todoroki home, Japanese-styled with tatami mats. There was more furniture than she would have expected of a man who lived alone, but she also recalled that Aunt Fuyumi had a closer relationship with him than her own family did. It was something both she and her father made a concentrated effort not to speak of, lest their own relationship become damaged. She realized somewhat belatedly that she could have gotten her grandfather’s whereabouts directly from her aunt, but that would have been uncomfortable and awkward for all involved… and might not have yielded the results she wanted. Aunt Fuyumi might well have respected her father’s wishes that she not see her grandfather.

She sat on the small couch, sipping tea that Grandfather had provided. He sat opposite her with tea of his own, in an armchair. “Thank you,” she began, “for visiting me in the hospital. And for the rabbit.”

His eyes softened slightly as he set his teacup on a side table. “You’re welcome,” he said. “I knew you were out there when those Nomu attacked. I was worried that…” He trailed off, not finishing that thought.

“I pushed myself, but I endured,” Izumi said, with some degree of pride. “Chargebolt and Grape Juice did the fighting. I merely acted as containment.” Her thoughts raced back to that morning. She had been so certain that all she’d done was seal Uncle Denki and Mister Mineta into an icy tomb. But they had held the line until Uncle Izuku had arrived to the rescue.

“You should be proud,” Grandfather said. “I watched your performance at the Sports Festival. You’re stronger than I ever could have dreamed you would be. Especially after…”

He seemed to realize how his words sounded, as though he disbelieved how someone with her weaknesses could succeed. “I’m sorry,” he went on. “That sounded harsher than I meant it. I’m truly, truly proud and pleased by your successes.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But it is the “after” and what caused it that brought me here today.” Izumi sat down her teacup and folded her hands in front of her, drawing herself up to her full seated height.

“I need to know about Plague. About what he did, what he did to me. About what caused you to retire and bear your sins publicly. And why these rifts between you and Father now exist.”

Grandfather frowned. “I suppose I should have expected this sooner or later.” He looked down, as though deciding whether or not to tell her anything or perhaps whether or not to simply throw her out. “But you deserve the truth, to know the whole truth of yourself. It is a long tale and not a particularly pleasant one.”

She simply nodded. “I’m listening.”

***

“You’ve heard of the Hatamoto Program?” Grandfather asked.

“The program by which the government recruited talented and powerfully children with useful or powerful Quirks,” Izumi said, “training them outside the traditional Hero Schools so that they could then exercise more direct control over them than the average Hero.”

They had learned about it in their Hero History class. Hawks, now the Deputy Commissioner of the Hero Public Safety Committee, was the most well-known graduate of the program, though there were others. The majority of them were retired, with only the most recent graduates still active. The original League of Villains had leaked the details of the program to the public during her parents third year of U.A., in an attempt to discredit the country’s Heroes. How much that had succeeded was a matter of debate, but it had succeeded in getting the program shut down.

Grandfather nodded. “There were other programs as well. One of these was run by an organization known as the Iga Group. They were not strictly a governmental organization, in order to provide a layer of plausible deniability should it or its agents be exposed, but for all intents and purposes, they were just another arm of enforcement. Their mission was to capture and contain anyone whose Quirk was deemed too dangerous to the general population to be allowed to remain free.”

It should not have surprised Izumi as much as it did. Quirks which were dangerous to others were something society struggled with to this day. She knew there were many people who received special support equipment or other accommodations from the government because of their Quirks and the problems they created. There had been a boy in her elementary school who had to go for weekly appointments where he was able to safely discharge the radioactivity he could generate.

And the limited information she had been able to look up about Plague had included accusations of the same thing. It had never been proven one way or the other, but after Uncle Izuki had talked the man into turning himself in, a great number of people thought missing had suddenly re-entered society. It seemed there was more truth to it than she expected. It was a sobering thought. Even if it wasn’t done anymore, to think that people could have been stripped of their freedoms just because of their Quirks…!

“Though they had their own agents,” Grandfather continued, “they also employed some Heroes, to help with what they deemed particularly dangerous acquisitions. Myself included.”

At that, she let out a soft gasp. “How?” she demanded, the forcefulness she’d been lacking before returning suddenly. “How could you?”

There was a small flicker of flame across his face as her grandfather’s eyes narrowed and his jaw set itself hard, his fists clenching. He took in a breath and the flames died down, the rest of his posture relaxing. “I thought it was the right thing to do,” he said finally. “You must understand, this was a different time. I was barely twenty when they first asked for my help, newly minted as the Number Two Hero. Even with All Might having… made considerable in-roads in bringing justice, there was still a lot of danger and lawlessness. I thought that if someone could not control their Quirk, if it made them a danger, then they had to be stopped. As simple as that. I was good at bringing people in. They were usually committing acts of accidental Villainy anyway. It looked good on my record. It fueled both my goals and theirs.”

He shook his head. “As has often been the case in my life, I let my ambitions get the better of me. I thought I was doing necessary work that All Might, with his smug, smiling face and “pure heart” wouldn’t dare touch. I thought, “at least in this, I am better than he’ll ever be.’”

Her grandfather’s rivalry with All Might was well known. It was the very reason for the existence of her father, her Aunt Fuyumi, and Uncle Natsuo, which meant, in some way, she owed her own life to it. The two had allegedly been on better terms once, though she did not know if that persisted.

“And Plague was one of those people you captured for them?” she asked.

Her grandfather nodded. “He was. At the time, he was not yet a true Villain. He wasn’t calling himself Plague yet. He was a child, about the same age as Shoto, with dreams of becoming a doctor or a scientist. His Quirk was registered as “Disease Generation.” It caused him to store viruses in his body that he could release or alter. Until then, he hadn’t been any trouble. But he lost control one day and unleashed something that wiped out his entire village before help could arrive. At the time, the choice to take him in seemed obvious. In hindsight… perhaps he deserved compassion. But I had been working with the Iga for a long time by then and did not question their judgement. So we captured him. In his panic, he fought back and infected several Iga agents, but my flames ultimately brought him down. And he was taken to the Iga’s offshore prison.”

He looked down again. “Not long after that, All Might was forced to retire after battling All for One and I became the new Number One Hero. With it came a certain degree of additional scrutiny that the program could not afford and they cut ties with me. I put them from my mind and focused instead on the challenges ahead of me.”

Izumi nodded, unsure of how else to respond. How many innocents had her grandfather burned and subdued, whose only crimes were having a Quirk someone at the Iga had deemed dangerous? How could he so casually have put it behind him? Even in Plague’s case, it sounded as though it had been an accident… Where did the scales of justice fall for such a thing?

“Time passed,” Grandfather continued. “And I began to realize the harm I had done my family. Becoming the Number One caused me to reflect upon what I had done to them. Little by little, I did begin to reconnect with your father and Fuyumi. Natsuo never forgave me. And, of course, Toya had been hiding in plain sight the whole time, eventually turning on his League of Villain allies in order to protect his unborn child with that psychopath.”

A cousin she had never met, just as she had never met her Uncle Toya. She had herd her father speak of her occasionally. All she knew was that her cousin was a criminal, the daughter of her Uncle Toya and the former League member known as Himiko Toga.

“Things were strained, I admit,” Grandfather said. “But they were… slowly getting better. I was allowed to attend your father’s wedding. I was even allowed to spend time with you as a child, though I am sure you were too young to remember.”

She shook her head. “I don’t. I’m sorry. Just flashes and fragments.”

He looked defeated at that, but nodded and moved on. “To be expected. By the time you were four, I was already being surpassed in the rankings by Deku, Lemillion, Ground Zero, and even Shoto. And rather than being offended by it… I was proud. And then, Plague escaped from Iga custody, in the company of two others that had been captured, a man called Manticore whose Quirk made him into a monstrous and uncontrollable beast and another called Bloodstorm with a blood-bending Quirk called Hemokinesis. It’s still never quite been determined how they did it.”

He leaned forward in his chair, his tone becoming somehow even more serious. “But they held Japan in a state of terror for months. Many people were laid low and sickened by bio-terrorism, with Bloodstorm and Plague working in concert while Manticore provided the muscle. With it being well known that Shoto was my son and that he had a family, it was not hard for him to find the perfect way to strike at us, at me. He infected you.”

That was it then. No more questions about it. She had been a target, not merely an unfortunate victim. And only then, a target to cause her grandfather pain and distract the Heroes like her father. The weakness that she still carried with her, all the times her body had failed her, it was all his fault. She could already feel her cheeks flushing with anger.

“It was your fault,” she said flatly. The words simply spat out of her, a powerful accusation.

Her grandfather’s eyes widened and he looked down, shame written all over his face. She could no more have hurt him than if she’d struck him with her Quirk. “It is,” he said. “I’ve carried that with me every day since then.”

She should have left then and there. But there was regret in her grandfather’s voice. How dare he treat it as something he could simply feel sorry for? He carried it with him? What about what she carried with her? Izumi was angry. Angrier than she could ever recall being in her entire life. She stood.

“Do you know,” Izumi demanded, “how I have suffered because of you?” She could feel the room growing colder around her and the heat inside her own body starting to rise. “How often I am left with barely the strength to even stand? How difficult it is to regulate the two aspects of my Quirk? How hard I have to fight for my place among my friends? How my parents treat me as some fragile China doll, confident in me one moment, afraid I might break upon the slightest breeze the next? Do you know?!”

Frost had collected around her feet, spreading out across the tatami mats, stopping less than a centimeter from her grandfather’s chair, traveling around it and completely encircling him. She could feel the heat inside her, a glowing red center. She could hold it for now, but her anger seemed to stoke it, demanding its release. She had such a perfect target right in front of her.

He looked smaller now, so very defeated, his arms hanging limply at his sides. He did not look her in the eye. “You have every right to hate me,” he said. “It was my fault. He targeted you because of me.”

She was breathing hard now, her muscles clenched tightly. She wanted to scream, to lash out, to draw every last iota of heat from his body, to do something. If only he would yell back, show some anger of his own, react as anything other than a punching bag. She wanted Katsumi here. Her friend was so such less inhibited than she. Katsumi would have already torn the old man apart.

But Izumi… Izumi was not that person. She would fight with all her might, for her friends, for justice, for what was right. But she would not strike a man who would not fight back, no matter the wrong he had caused her.

All the same, she should have left. She had confirmed her suspicions. But there was so much more she needed to know. “I am not certain I hate you,” she said after a long moment, sitting back down. A little bit of vapor came with her words and she had to focus a moment to cease leeching heat from the environment. “But I do not particularly like you in this moment. But I need to know the whole story. What happened next? How was I cured? Why did this cause you to retire?”

Her grandfather nodded. “You deserve all the answers,” he said. “I’ll do my best to tell you them.

“After you became ill, it already began to strain things between Shoto and myself. I had told him what I knew about Plague and the others and the part I had played with the Iga. He assumed, correctly, that you had been targeted because of me. Shoto and his friends doubled-down on their investigations, even as the cases grew and you grew sicker and sicker. Plague grew bolder, breaking into television broadcasts. His virus had not killed anyone yet, but he claimed he would escalate it if those responsible for stealing his life did not confess their crimes. Eventually, Lemillion was able to put together enough clues to find where the three of them were hiding out.” He closed his eyes for a moment, at those reliving those memories. How much guilt did he feel? It couldn’t possibly have been enough.

“Plague was ahead of us. He sent Bloodstorm and Manticore into the heart of Tokoyo. Shoto, Ground Zero, Lemillion, and Ingenium took them on. It left Deku and myself to battle Plague. Just as well. I suspect Shoto would not have trusted himself to fight alongside me. I suspect more of their friends would have joined in, but they feared what might happen elsewhere with that many Heroes mobilizing. The second League of Villains was already beginning to make noise, splitting their attention.

“Plague was hiding in his old village. It had been abandoned since then… but he had remade it, built himself a lab where he could unleash his virus on the winds of a coming storm. When Deku and I arrived, threw everything he had at us. A viral load that dropped me to my knees in a moment, puking my guts out. But Deku… that boy just put everything he had into resisting, sparking like a damn emerald firecracker. I tried to burn it out of my body, raising my temperature, but it was all I could do to keep conscious. He hit Deku with so much they say the soil where he stood is still loaded with viruses.

“All the while, Plague was screaming accusations. About how he’d been kidnapped by the Iga and myself, when he’d just been a kid. About how the Iga Group had experimented on him and tortured not just him, but everyone that had captured. I didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t want to believe I’d been a party to such horrors. Any illusions I’d had that I was doing the right thing… shattered.”

There was sadness in his voice, even some measure of sympathy. Perhaps he really had thought he was doing the right thing. Her grandfather had once tried to undo the harm he’d done to his family. He was capable of guilt and remorse. Izumi was not always the best judge of people’s emotions and behaviors, but she believed him here. For now, at least.

He shook his head. “And Deku… Deku told Plague he believed him. He even promised that he would look into it, that if it was true, he would smash the place open with his own hands. But only if Plague offered a cure for his virus that was ravaging the country. His sincerity must have reached him, because Plague agreed… on the condition that I confessed to my complicity as well. In that moment, I would have agreed to anything. Deku countered that by that point, it might be too late. But he promised again to investigate Plague’s claims and personally assured his safety.”

Grandfather sighed. “Plague was reluctant, untrusting even still. At that point, broken, the fragile relationship I’d built with Shoto shattered, I had nothing to lose, not even my pride. I begged him to at least save you, even offered up my own life. Deku talked him down to putting a stop to it all. Plague agreed and administered an antidote to me and gave Deku a formula.”

Izumi had a faint memory of what had happened after that: Uncle Izuku rushing into her hospital room, giving her mother a formula of some kind. Her mother must have manufactured it, personally. After that, she’d begun to recover. But she had already been somewhat fragile, something she had inherited from her grandmother, Rei. Others who had been cured, she had discovered, had recovered fully, with few lasting effects. But she still walked in the shadow of that illness.

Her grandfather continued. “In the aftermath, we turned Manticore and Bloodstorm over to the authorities. As best as I recall, they got Anima in to talk to Manticore, to see if there was anything human left under that Quirk. Bloodstorm though, was nothing but a psychopath who went straight to Tartarus. Deku claimed custody over Plague, said he was needed to save lives. He was the Number One Hero by that point; they trusted him.”

It must have been serious then, for Uncle Izuku to have believed him. But it was also no surprise that Uncle Izuku had been able to talk Plague down either. As the Symbol of Hope, he’d made it a point to do things different, to fight when he had to, but to use other methods whenever he could. It was one of many things that made him incredibly popular and incredibly valuable.

“We regrouped to take the fight to them. Lemillion and Ingenium had been injured, leaving only four of us. Iga’s prison was located on an island off the east coast of Japan. And its head was a powerful man named Jinpachi Kitagawa, who had a geokinetic Quirk that let him control magma. He was a military man, who fit in well with the early days of Quirk laws. But the times were already starting to change, and his obsession with protection was turning more to madness in the face of it. When Deku, Shoto, Ground Zero, Plague, and I arrived… he must have known his time was over. He set his forces on us immediately and even joined in the battle himself.”

Her grandfather touched the scars on his hands. “His lava was hotter and more powerful than my flames. I could not stand against him. But Shoto could. His ice, his mother’s Quirk… It proved to be exactly what was needed that day. He saved my life, though I could tell he was tempted to simply let me die. Maybe he should have. But we won.”

He shook his head again. “The inside of the prison was more horrible than I could have possibly imagined. People half-starved, attached to more wires and machines than I could have believed. This was nothing else than outright torture and experimentation. Kitagawa was… a very sick man, with some very horrifying ideas about how society should function and who should be at the top, making the decisions. But he had whispered enough in the ears of the right people and operated for long enough that I doubt the government was fully aware of the extent of what he was doing. They didn’t want to know. They only wanted the problem Quirk users removed. Plausible deniability.”

“That does not explain your retirement,” Izumi reminded him. She was horrified by what she was hearing, but was failing to see the connections.

“I’m getting to that,” he said. If her interruption bothered him, he didn’t show it. “Things after were… not good. The government was able to keep the affair on the island hidden. Kitagawa was going to be thrown in the darkest depths of Tartarus. But Deku wanted everyone they had released, as quickly as possible. The government tried to argue, but he threatened to go public. They threatened to ruin him. He didn’t care.”

Her grandfather gave a small laugh. “Too much of All Might in that boy, related by blood or not. They caved. The government, including the HPSC, got everyone involved to keep it under wraps in exchange for acting expeditiously, while they quietly set about cataloging and releasing the people who had been kept there, along with disbanding the Iga and evaluating what to do with its employees. Some of them were loyal to Kitagawa personally, and would be imprisoned. Others… thought they were just doing a necessary job. And many of the most fanatical and loyal scattered before they could be caught, including several of their science staff. Deku wanted to go public, of course, but was ultimately convinced that such a revelation would shatter the fragile peace of society.”

He let out a low growl. “But Kitagawa did not plan on going quietly. He would break whatever he could, tear down those who had stopped him. The only thing that could head it off was another scandal. I was injured, feeling my age. If anything had taught me that this was now a young man’s game, it was this. And so I manufactured the scandal that would occupy the public and the media’s attention. Confessed publically to the wrongs I had done my family and declared my retirement from Heroics and public life. Perhaps not quite what Plague wanted from me… but I suffered the scorn and fall from grace all the same. Plague surrendered himself to custody voluntarily, recognizing that he had crossed the same lines that had been crossed in his original capture. I understand that these days, universities and labs occasionally contacted him for his expertise.”

Grandfather let out a long sigh. “It was just as well. After finding out exactly what I had been a part of and how it had nearly led to your death, your father wanted nothing more to do with me and wanted me to have nothing more to do with you. The least I could do was make sure you grew up in a world that did not give itself over the chaos of the bad old days. Like a good compromise, it left no one truly happy. It was one of the last times your father and I spoke.”

He certainly made it sound like an act of self-sacrifice… but Izumi was not so sure she could forgive so easily. Not with everything it had cost her. Not with everything he had done, all the people he had hurt, by his actions and by his ignorance.

“He has escaped,” she told him flatly. “I overheard it while doing my Internship.”

That got a reaction out of him, his eyes going wide and his flames flaring for the briefest second again. They were weak and flickering. “Impossible,” he said. “He would not…”

“I only know what I have heard,” she said. “It seems only fair that you know. Information for information.”

That was probably harsher than she should have been. But the emotions roiling inside her demanded an outlet. The blame for so much could be laid at his feet. She needed time to process it all. She needed to decide if she would confront her parents about this and the fact that they had kept it all a secret. She needed… she needed, very much not to be here.

Izumi stood again. “Thank you for your honesty, Grandfather.” She turned towards the door.

“Wait…” he began, rising slowly out of his chair. “Izumi…”

“Yes?”

“Could I… would you… ever consider… visiting again?” Despite being a big man, he looked small, pitiful, and broken. He was reaching out to her, desperate for some kind of connection.

“I shall consider it,” she said, truly not knowing the answer. She opened the door in time to see Mineta, head down, horns pointed, about to charge it.

“Mika!” Chihiro called out. “Stop!”

Mineta skidded to a stop, hooves clattering on the stones. “What? Aw, I wanted to break down the door!”

Izumi stepped outside, pointedly closing the door behind her. “Why were you going to break it down?”

“We’ve been texting for the last half hour!” Chihiro said. “You didn’t answer!”

Izumi shook her head. “I turned my phone off. I wished to be uninterrupted.”

Chihiro’s Cords pointed accusingly. “Don’t do that, okay?! We were worried!”

She nodded. “I shall try not to worry you in the future, thank you.”

“Did you get any answers?” Mineta asked. “Do we need to administer an ass-kicking to a senior citizen?”

“I do not think that will be necessary, but thank you,” Izumi told her. “But to answer your question… yes. And also no. But I know now what made me. I just have to figure out if it changes who I will become.”

“Can we figure it out on the way back?” Mineta asked. “Because there was a really nice ice cream shop on the way with a couple really cute guys behind the counter…”

#my hero academia #their hero academia #izumi todoroki #enji todoroki #mha endeavor #fan fiction #fan fic #my writing

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hannahmcne · 5 years

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Her Royal Highness - Chapter 4

Mal's door remained unlocked, but she didn't go anywhere except down the hall. Mainly because she couldn't remember where she'd come from and a piercing headache had started in the front of her brain, right behind her eyes. So, she hung out in her room. Not long after Ben left, Sophia came around and brought paper, writing utensils, books, and a little list filled with lots of numbers.

"What's this?" Mal asked, as she rubbed her head and squinted at the writing. She recognized the names written on the sides of the numbers, but her head still didn't feel like it was working correctly.

"A list of important phone numbers for the palace," Sophia answered. She had a tea set on the dresser and was preparing a cup for Mal. "My number is on there too." She said as she added a small pill to her cup, which fizzled into the drink and disappeared.

"What do I do with them?" Mal asked. She sounded flat-out exhausted as she tried to focus on the paper.

Sophia chuckled and took the list out of her hand, replacing it with the tea, which Mal stared blearily at in confusion. "For your headache," Sophia told her. "Drink up. Where is your phone?"

It was lying on the bed, locked. Sophia handed it to Mal, who quickly entered her password and then gave it back because the light hurt her head even more. She took a sip of the hot drink Sophia had given her and her eyes rolled into the back of her head. "Oh gosh." She moaned as her head cleared. "This heals everything."

Sophia opened the text app with a chuckle. While Mal finished her tea, Sophia entered her phone number and set the message 'Mal Bertha'.

"Look, Mal. Now you can contact me." Sophia explained to Mal, showing Mal her own phone screen, which had lit up with a green notification with her name in it.

Mal looked at the screen and watched as Sophia showed her how to label the number with a contact so that she'd know it was Sophia.

"Why are there two keyboards?" Mal asked, noticing a different panel at the bottom of the screen. She pointed to it so that Sophia could see what she was talking about.

"One is a picture keyboard." Sophia simplified. "There's a bunch of faces and animals and stuff. Want to see?"

Mal shook her head. Eventually, she'd be left alone, so she could explore the picture-keyboard then. She observed in bleary exhaustion as Sophia entered in a new number and sent her name through. This time, a little grey text box appeared with three dots in it.

"They're messaging back," Sophia explained to Mal, gesturing to the box.

'Ben Florian' was the name that came back. Mal frowned. "Is that Prince Ben, Ben?" She asked.

"Yes." Sophia nodded and watched Mal to see what her reaction would be.

"Oh," Mal replied lamely. The phone buzzed in Sophia's hand. A moving picture had appeared from Ben. It featured a middle-aged man with a friendly smile, who was waving with the caption: 'Hi'.

Sophia continued adding Belle, Adam, Lumiere, and a few other people. One of these was named Doug. When Doug first received the message with Mal's name from Sophia, he immediately texted back a paragraph. There wasn't much meat to it. It was basically "If you need me, come ask" "Sorry if I take a while to answer texts."

Sophia was very kind to keep Mal's saucer topped with headache remedy, but eventually, she had to slip away to refill the pot. Mal, who felt much better, took the books Sophia had brought and began to fill her little bookcase up. She discovered a surprise: a thick, white comforter hidden underneath the pillows on her bed. She traded her shock blanket for it and took the paper and pencils Sophia had brought her. Then, she hid out in the closet, which she liked because it wasn't as bright, and it was a smaller space. She did keep the door cracked open a stitch, so Sophia wouldn't wonder where she'd gone if she came back.

Mal liked to doodle. She'd done more than her fair share of graffiti on the Isle, decorated their hideaway behind the rock-pulley system, and spent a fair majority of her time in class drawing on scraps of grey paper. It was nice to work with all the new utensils instead of the emptyish ones she got on the Isle. As she was finishing putting the finishing touches on a rendering of her new home, the castle, she heard a knock at the door. She pushed the closet door open a little with her toes and called: "Come in!"

The door opened and revealed a woman who Mal had seen many times on TV. She cautiously climbed to her feet.

The Fairy Godmother flashed a beautiful smile. "Hello, Mal." She greeted, then curtseyed. "I'm the Fairy Godmother. I've been told you aren't what we were expecting."

The Fairy Godmother wore a blue dress with a retro collar and a pink bow fastened beneath her collarbone. Underneath her skirts, Mal could see the edges of a black and white polka-dotted fabric attached to the bottom of the knee-length dress. She wore blue plastic flats and wore her hair curly with a pretty silver clip in it.

Mal swallowed and managed a small bow, of some sorts. "It sounds like you were expecting Hades himself." She said softly.

"Not Hades, but a mini-Maleficent, perhaps." The Fairy Godmother's smile faded a little as her eyes began to travel. Mal shifted her weight and began twirling a lock of hair around her finger as the older woman studied her.

"White isn't really your color, is it, dear?" Fairy Godmother asked with a smile.

Mal smirked. "Just don't put me in yellow and we'll be fine."

Fairy Godmother laughed. "How old are you, dear?" She asked.

"Sixteen," Mal answered, leaning against the closet frame and kicking her leg up to rest against the doorframe. At her answer, the Fairy Godmother looked sad.

"My, you're much younger than I was expecting." The Fairy Godmother whispered. "You're about the same age as my daughter Jane."

"What are you here for, again?" Mal asked. This conversation was going way off track, in her opinion.

"To talk, mostly. I was curious, have you experimented with your mother's magic yet?" Fairy Godmother sat down on the bed and examined Mal even further.

The question startled Mal. Of course, she knew her mother had possessed some of the strongest magics in the land before her imprisonment. The fact she had created and executed this elaborate mess was a testament to that. But the idea that she would have similar powers hadn't occurred to her. The only thing she'd ever been able to do was make her eyes light up.

Fairy Godmother chuckled. "I suppose not, then? Can you try now? Do you know any spells?" Mal shook her head. Everything her mom had once crammed down her throat and into her head felt like years ago now. "Make something up." Fairy Godmother encouraged her. She bit her cheek as she crossed her ankles daintily and waited.

Mal raked her newly not-aching brain and quickly made a flimsy rhyme. "Snap my fingers like a thread, hurry to fix the hair on my head."

Upon her words, her fingers took a life of their own. A sharp green light appeared at the end of her fingernails. She flicked her hand left, then right, and then made a little circle around her face, all against her will. Her vision went green and foggy for a few seconds, and then she felt the strands on her head rearranging and straightening themselves into something that hopefully didn't look like she'd had a mental breakdown earlier and lost her cool at the future king of Auradon. Mal slumped back in exhaustion as soon as she had control of her hand back.

The Fairy Godmother applauded lightly. Mal stared in surprise at her fingers, and then quickly turned her attention back to the Fairy Godmother. Conversation now, panic over new revelation later.

"Well, Auradon discourages magic, I'm sure you know. You might be able to find books in the library to teach you about theory and things like that, but active practice is a punishable offense, usually with heavy fines and sometimes community service. And of course, spells work better if the lines match syllables, and if they're in multiples of three, seven, or with the same number of beats as your age." Laugh lines appeared in the older woman's face as she smiled proudly at Mal. "But, laws aside, you could very powerful one day, even without practicing magic. I hope you'll recognize that and use that power for good."

Mal had no clue what she was going to do at that point. She was still blown away that her first feeble attempt at a spell had worked.

The Fairy Godmother cleared her throat. "If I may, can I sample your magic? If there's any correlation to Maleficent's, it might help with decoding her curse. We have already sampled former cursed items, but it appears in different… context on Ben." She gestured to Mal's hands.

Mal swallowed and nodded. "Yeah. Anything to get me out of this mess." She outstretched her fingers and walked towards the Fairy Godmother.

At her words, the Fairy Godmother looked incredibly sorry. She took Mal's hand and spread her fingers out. She began to mumble, and the tips of Mal's fingers relit. A warmth spread through her palm. But the Fairy Godmother quickly let go. She shook her head. "Your magic is the same type hers is, but it's far too weak at the moment to be able to unravel her curse. It's also slightly warped."

"Warped?" Mal asked, alarmed. How could it be warped? She'd cast one spell her entire life and now she was damaged forever. Just her luck.

"It happens naturally." The Fairy Godmother assured her. "Everything in the world has a little magic, and your magic grows depending on where you live and how you use your powers. I bet the barrier over the Isle is what warped it the most." Fairy Godmother shrugged. "Anyways, we can't have you help us break it yet until you're a little stronger."

"How long will that take?" Mal asked.

"Well, you should have been growing your magic at a steady rate for several years now." Fairy Godmother explained. "For you to recover and exercise your magic enough to gain enough power would take two or three years of intense magical growth, which you won't be able to get in rhabdophobic Auradon."

Mal slumped her shoulders in disappointment. "Alright." She mumbled. Fairy Godmother patted her cheek.

"Cheer up dear. We'll figure this out. For now, are you alright? I heard you had a panic attack today. Has that happened before?" She folded her hands in her lap and tilted her head.

"Yeah, I did," Mal admitted. "And no. I've never had anything like that happen. I just, the walls felt like they were going to fall in so I went into the closet to hide."

"And couldn't stand up?" Fairy Godmother prompted, looking worried.

"Or hear or move or anything." Mal agreed. "It was like my brain was shaking and my body went stiff." The Fairy Godmother examined Mal as she moved her hands in explanation. Mal carefully sat down next to the wingless-fairy.

"Before then, had you eaten or drank anything?" The Fairy Godmother asked.

Mal shook her head. "No. Well, I had some candies on the way to the palace this morning, but nothing else since lunch yesterday. I missed dinner because my mom decided to inform me that I was leaving."

"That would play into it. You probably didn't sleep all that well either, huh?" Fairy Godmother nodded as if this all made sense to her.

"No," Mal admitted sheepishly.

"We have panic attacks like that at the school every year when finals roll around." The Fairy Godmother informed her. "People forget to take care of themselves. We get panic attacks and people passing out when they're exercising, among other things."

"Oh. So, I just need to keep on top of that?" Mal asked.

"That should do it. Of course, if it persists, see a doctor." Fairy Godmother smiled.

Mal made a face, and the Fairy Godmother laughed. A silence formed for a few seconds. The Fairy Godmother looked around the room. "Did you really not know you were coming here?" She asked quietly.

Mal withdrew into her frame and clammed up. "She sat us down in front of the TV and wouldn't say a word on why she was so excited. When they finally brought Ben out of his meeting with you and King Adam gave his statement to Auradon, she told us in celebration while she was dancing around the room. None of my friends or the other villains had any idea what to think. No one talked to me all day."

"So, it wasn't exactly a surprise when they showed up?"

"Well…" Mal trailed off. "I don't know. It all went so quickly." The Fairy Godmother crossed her legs and leaned forward to Mal. She waited until the purple-haired girl began to speak again. "I was angry at first, but then I managed to convince myself she'd been lying. I mean, Mom's had tons of elaborate plans to leave before. But when I came back they'd already packed up my things for me and the guards showed up about five minutes later to drag me away."

"On behalf of Auradon, I apologize." The Fairy Godmother whispered softly. Mal snapped into an upright and hostile position and furrowed her eyebrows at the Fairy Godmother.

"You'll apologize for this and not for the Isle of the Lost?" She accused. The Fairy Godmother looked taken aback.

"Why should we apologize for the Isle of the Lost? We had to protect ourselves from the villains." She explained with confusion evident in her tone.

"I find it funny," Mal said bitterly. "How you fought an entire war where both sides lost thousands of people and still refused to use the death row to eradicate the problem. It's your fault I'm here in the first place. If you had killed Maleficent, I wouldn't have to deal with this – this burden! Or if you had come up with a different solution to the Isle of the Lost: banished them outside the kingdom, removed their powers, again: killed them, then Mom never would have thought to create this spell in the first place. Who's to say it's her fault and not Auradon's?"

"We don't believe in killing or hurting people like that." Fairy Godmother explained to try and placate Mal. This only riled the teen up even more.

"And that's another thing!" Mal retorted angrily. "Auradon's famous honor code; despite the fact you imprisoned hundreds of your worst villains, murderers, and schemers on the Isle and refuse to provide them the basic essentials to life outside of the weekly trash delivery, you don't believe in removing a person's magic and allowing them to walk free for their lives? Haven't you heard what happened to Ursula's eye? Or my Mother's wings?"

The Fairy Godmother was silent. Then, she pointed at Mal's head. "Your horns, dear." She whispered.

Mal blinked in surprise. She cautiously reached up to feel the top of her head and fell two curved protrusions descending back into her skull. They felt like warm stone or ivory. But they were only there for a second, and then they were gone. She stared in shock at her fingertips, as if she were doubting what they'd felt.

Across the room, the door creaked, and someone knocked. Mal turned her sharp gaze to the entrance. After a few seconds delay, it opened a little more and Prince Ben appeared, looking sheepish. He cleared his throat and began to speak in a high, awkward tone:

"Erm, sorry, we're waiting for you in the library, and-"

"How long have you been standing there?" Mal interrupted his introduction. Ben wilted. Mal scoffed. "Long enough, then." She stood up and, after a moments' hesitation, took her new phone with her. Ben's face was red as she marched past him at a brisk pace. She stopped outside the door and pretended to wait for him and the Fairy Godmother, but truthfully, she didn't know where the library was.

Ben held the door for the older woman as she walked past, then took up the lead. Mal walked beside him. If she couldn't lead, she sure as heck wouldn't fall behind him. Ben curled and uncurled his hands like he wasn't sure what to do with them while they swung at his side.

Ben stopped outside of a pair of doors that were three times his height. Why anyone would need doors this tall, Mal didn't know, but she hoped some giant found them useful one day. Ben opened the door to allow the Fairy Godmother, who had remained silent during the walk down, and Mal, to walk through.

Mal sucked in a breath at the tall beams of the library. The ceiling was patterned opposite the floor, with the ceiling being the lighter inverse of the pattern on the floor. The room was a very large rectangular prism, with the wall ahead made of glass and looking out over the kingdom. The wall they'd just entered with their backs to had a beautiful mural of the castle, featuring a beautiful girl in yellow and a rose, among other things. It must have been the story of Belle and her Beast, Mal noted as she took in a ferocious, growling monster in a corner of the wall. The last two walls were made of books. Several other enormously tall bookshelves filled the magnificent room, but directly in front of her was a collection of rose-embroidered couches and chairs surrounded by a rosewood coffee table with dozens of papers and folders spread out on it. Belle and Adam were sitting in two armchairs and holding each other's hands. They looked up without a smile as the group entered the room.

"Come and take a seat." Adam invited in a weary tone. He raised a hand and beckoned the three towards him.

They did, and Ben and Mal ended up sitting next to each other on the two-seater so that everyone could examine them. Ben still hadn't said anything to Mal since telling her they were waiting for him. He twiddled his thumbs and did his very best to politely ignore her.

"We have about three months until Ben is due to become King." Adam began in a grave tone. "Mal has agreed to marry him, but only as a last resort. One of the new goals of this meeting is to ensure she is no more trapped than we are."

Everyone flinched at the King's harsh, straight-to-the-point words. Mal bit her tongue and examined the mural on the wall.

"The spell… it is too complicated to break at this moment." The Fairy Godmother admitted. "We don't know where to start." She picked up a manila file on the coffee table and opened it up. On the top was a black and white photo of what looked like a mess of spiderwebs.

"This is one micro-cubic traunct of the spell." The Fairy Godmother explained. She laughed at Ben's confused expression. "A traunct is the smallest portion of any spell. It's much like an atom in how magic is made up. Unfortunately, this one is, by far, the most complicated of any spell I've ever seen. In most cases, a simple undoing spell could sever small trauncts. However, Maleficent has done something rather unique in that these trauncts are backing each other up, and nothing we've tried thus far has severed their hold. We're going to have to unravel it or submit to it."

"Unravel it?" Belle asked.

"In order for us to unravel it, we have to find a hink, or a hole in the trauncts so we can loosen their hold and put them apart little by little. The spell won't be broken, per se, but we can pull conditions off the spell until eventually, it will be as though it has no power on you."

"Sounds like a lengthy process," Mal commented.

"It is." The Fairy Godmother admitted sheepishly. "I've never seen anything so complicated. We're looking at a year, maybe two years' worth of work."

King Adam made a sound in the back of his throat that sounded like the beginning of a groan, or like he'd been kicked or something; a defeated sound.

"There's no hope it'll be gone before Ben's coronation?" Mal begged.

"Unless there's a major breakthrough within the next ten minutes." The Fairy Godmother said. Mal turned her head away from the group and schooled her features to indifference. Ben leaned forward and started running his hands through his hair. The only sound was that of Mal tapping her hands on her knees.

"I think it's time to start talking about the kingdom's infrastructure when Mal becomes Queen." The Fairy Godmother said quietly. No one missed the use of the word 'when'.

"Right," Adam muttered. "What are the details of Maleficent's curse?"

"Mal must become Queen before Ben is twenty-five, otherwise the both of them will begin to experience excruciating pain. If Mal is murdered, then Ben will go with her. If she's maimed in any way that she's rendered unable to take the Queen's throne, the results will carry over onto Ben. She needs to have the ability to pass binding laws in Auradon and has authority over troops in Auradon's standing army." The Fairy Godmother rubbed the bridge of her nose as if to stem a headache off. "As far as Auradon's requirements go, Mal still has to pass the same tests Ben did. I can deliver them here if you would like?"

"Tests?" Mal asked.

"There's three of them," Ben explained. "I failed the last one due to this curse, but since it's consciously manageable, I'm still able to rule the Kingdom. Basically, the tests were made to answer three questions: Will you be able to rule the kingdom? Will you do it right? And is anyone controlling you?"

"Oh," Mal said because there wasn't much else to be said.

"Would you like to zoom through it?" The Fairy Godmother asked gently. "It probably wouldn't be worth discussing much more if you can't become queen anyways."

Mal shrugged. "Sure. Whatever." She turned her phone over, palm over palm, as the Fairy Godmother reached for a different, light blue folder.

"If you fail the first two, you will not be able to rule." The Fairy Godmother cautioned. Mal didn't seem concerned.

The Fairy Godmother withdrew a similarly blue-tinted paper to the one Ben had written on. Ben was especially anxious to see the results. He scooted forward on his seat to peer over her shoulder. As Mal scrawled her name on the first two lines, the entire room held its breath. Then it faded to blue, and the three royals and one fairy breathed a sigh of relief. Mal rolled her eyes.

Ben curled his nails into his palms as the Fairy Godmother asked Mal the second question. This, of course, was the goodness check. Belle and Adam both leaned forward in their chairs as the Fairy Godmother asked Mal to sign on the third line. Mal's hand hesitated on its way to the paper as she raised an eyebrow at the nervous royals. Then she scrawled her name and the date, and the black color changed to the same royal blue as the first question.

Ben sat back in cold shock.

This was Maleficent's kid, right? The mistress of all evil? The one who cursed Queen Leah's entire kingdom? Ben was dumbfounded. He glanced sideways at Mal and watched her tuck a lock of purple hair behind her ear as she chewed on her cheek and stared at the paper. Something softened in his heart and he had to look back at the paper to stop the awed smile from moving onto his face.

While he sat in his stupor, the Fairy Godmother removed all spells and enchantments from Mal, and then Mal signed her name. It came back red, just as Ben's had. The Fairy Godmother produced a gem, identical to the one in her office, and instructed Mal on how to hold it. She read the spell's aura quickly and determined it was the identical other half to Ben's spell.

And that was when Ben had another revelation.

Maleficent had raised a lady fit to be queen. He wasn't even sure Audrey would have been able to pass the test, cruel as she was. And extended from that, Maleficent had raised this girl while keeping in mind she would one day be his wife.

It couldn't have been Maleficent's intention to raise such a morally strong woman. Mal must have found the path of good herself while on an Isle where evil ran rampant. Ben was beyond impressed.

"We've talked." Belle began with a quick gesture to her husband and herself. "And we've decided to announce that Mal will be queen alongside Ben."

Fairy Godmother drummed her fingers together. "I think that's the right thing to do." She said finally. "Unless we wish to marry Mal and Ben and allow them to go their own separate ways?" She gestured to the two teens.

No one in the room had considered this alternative. It made the royals stop in their tracks.

The Fairy Godmother continued: "Of course, neither would be able to get married to other people until the curse is broken, if ever. So long as Maleficent's conditions are covered, they technically have their freedom."

Mal dug her fingers into her knees. Living alone in Auradon? That was a prospect she wasn't prepared to cover. She looked toward Ben to try and decipher his feelings. His eyes were wide; he looked like a deer caught in headlights.

"We need time," Belle said quickly. "We don't need to make decisions like that so quickly. We'll let Ben and Mal be the ruler of that decision."

"But-" Adam continued. "We need to know by a month before the coronation. That's when we were planning on announcing Mal since we wanted to keep the press away from you while you adjust to Auradon and get to know Ben."

Belle nodded in agreement. Mal crossed her arms and leaned back into the upholstery. The king and queen were actually, by her book, being pretty fair. A warm feeling was rising up inside her chest. And before she could stop them, two words spilled out of her mouth.

"Thank you." Mal blurted out. "For being so fair." She pulled her arms tighter around herself and turned back toward the mural on the wall. The air in the room suddenly felt very thick with... what?

"You're welcome, dear," Belle replied as if it were no big deal.

The sun dipped lower and lower in the sky outside. At first, Mal had tried to follow the conversation, but then she'd gotten lost among all the legal terms and political abbreviations. She only looked back at the group whenever her name was mentioned and did her best to look as if none of their words were affecting her. She was aware her edginess was tuned down by the fact she was wearing white instead of black.

As the day drew to a close, Belle and Adam got up to show the Fairy Godmother out. Mal, too, stood up to examine the large mural on the side of the wall. Ben remained sitting for a few seconds, and then stood up and walked up behind her. He was watching her with a curious expression as he stood behind her and watched her cross her arms and take in the large, beautiful painting.

"You good?" Ben asked in a whisper that tickled his lips as he spoke.

Mal exhaled through her nose. "Yeah," She agreed in a high, strong voice. then, softer and more guarded: "It's whatever."

"So... no?" Ben asked, watching her eyes flicker back and forth.

Mal didn't answer. The muscles in her arm tensed, and she acted as if he were not there. Then, she raised her hand to the wall and gestured to it. "This is a lovely mural. I used to paint things like this on the Isle."

"Oh, yeah." Ben nodded. "For Mom and Dad's first anniversary, Dad wanted to have the library redone, but the plans took too long to be drawn up. So, two years later, for their third, they began work. Mom was pregnant with me that year and the paint fumes were too much for her most days, so she never saw the progress until after I was born." Ben explained. He let his eyes flicker over the frame of Mal's shoulders as she listened to him and took a small breath.

Mal chewed her cheek in thought. "That's cool. And there's so much detail..." She smiled a little, and then returned to a neutral expression. Her eyes fixed on the floor. "So, this is really happening, huh? I was still kind of hoping I'd wake up and it'd be over."

"Yeah." Ben sighed. "But hey, you're going to be a queen."

"Ugh." Mal groaned. Ben laughed at her dismay and, while she was distracted, slipped an arm around her shoulders. Mal tensed up and shrank away from his grasp, but Ben didn't seem to notice.

"You'll be a great queen, and by the way, you did really good today. I know a couple of Auradon kids who wouldn't have passed the goodness portion of that test." Ben told her.

Mal's eyebrows furrowed. Why would that matter? Was that supposed to make her feel good about herself? 'Some Auradon kids can't do this, so it's amazing a daughter of Maleficent could.' "So... are you comparing the Islanders to Auradonia? That's it's amazing an Islander managed to best any Auradonian?" Mal frowned and turned to look at him.

Ben shook his head. "No." He disagreed. "It's just that you're a good person who comes from an entire island of bad. It's admirable." He reached down for her hand, but Mal jumped away and out from his grasp.

"What are you doing?" She hissed, guarding her hands against him and bracing herself as if she expected him to throw a punch. "And you said no before you basically regurgitated what I'd said." She narrowed her eyes and took a few careful, suspicious steps back.

"Calm down." Ben patted the air with his hands. "I just-"

"And for the record," Mal snapped, interrupting him. "Your parents created the Isle. It's their fault that I'm even here, that I was even born. Auradon is finally getting what's been coming for a long, long time."

"That's not true!" Ben disagreed. "Mal, I was just trying to-"

"I wish I could throw you onto that Isle." Mal hissed. Her eyes were alight with green magic. Ben searched through them and found nothing but weakness. Nothing but guarded faults. A vein began to pulsate in his neck and he balled his fists up. Mal dug in her feet, marched right up to him, and stuck a finger in front of his nose. "Don't you even understand?" She hissed. "You and everything you've grown up with?" She gestured around to everything around them, the furniture, the library, the beautiful mural. "It's abhorrible." She snapped. "You gave the children of your enemies nothing despite their innocence. Generations would have withered away in misery if your parents and their band of petty royals had had their way. I thought you believed everyone could forge their own paths and be anything they wanted in Auradon, despite where they came from."

"We do believe that!" Ben protested. He reached for the hand the hung at her side but she jumped back like he was a hot stone.

"Don't touch me!" She shrieked. "You're liars, all of you!" She began to back up to the door. Ben followed her in small steps. "You already think I'm like my mother, like Cruella, like the Evil Queen! It's your own fault and your own proposed goodness that made you foolish enough to allow my mother to spell your stupid crowns. It's Auradon's fault my mom has cursed me and you. So don't go feeling sorry for yourselves now that your 'happily-ever-after' has a kink. You deserve torment for all the evil you've caused."

Mal turned and fled out of the library. Ben dug his nails into the palms of his hands, turned, and ripped a pile of books off of a shelf to throw to the ground. They clattered to his feet and hid his shoes from view. He kicked them away and dropped down to the carpet, where he buried his face in his hands. She was so arrogant, and self-righteous and... right. Ben pulled his legs up to his chest. She was right.

#descendants #ben and mal #fanfic

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datesfox777 · 3 years

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Ssh Agent For Mac Os X

I'm running Mac OS X, and it appears that after SSHing to several machines, using identity files, my 'ssh-agent' builds up a lot of identity / keys and then sometimes offers too many to a remote machine, causing them to kick me off before connecting:

Ssh-agent Mac Os X Keychain

Mac Restart Ssh Agent

Ssh Agent Mac Os X

Ssh Agent For Mac Os X 10.10

Received disconnect from 10.12.10.16: 2: Too many authentication failures for cwd

It's pretty obvious what's happening, and this page talks about it in more detail:

SSH servers only allow you to attempt to authenticate a certain number of times. Each failed password attempt, each failed pubkey/identity that is offered, etc, take up one of these attempts. If you have a lot of SSH keys in your agent, you may find that an SSH server may kick you out before allowing you to attempt password authentication at all. If this is the case, there are a few different workarounds.

Mac OS X includes a command-line SSH client as part of the operating system. To use it, goto Finder, and selext Go - Utilities from the top menu. Then look for Terminal. Terminal can be used to get a local terminal window, and also supports SSH connections to remote servers. Given all of the above, especially if SIP prevents you from disabling this directly, I would probably attack it a different way. The first idea that comes to mind would be to write my own launchd plist and have it run on load to have it run the commands to automatically stop ssh-agent, and then see if you can then get oh-my-zsh to restart / control it. It's an old question but I recently ran into the same issue on my Mac running 10.12.6. The DISPLAY variable is not set in the terminal and ssh -X doesn't work. This is what I did that solved the problem: Reinstall XQuartz using Homebrew: brew cask install xquartz (the option -forced may be necessary) Add the XQuartz launcher to the system default (following the solution in this Reddit post.

Rebooting clears the agent and then everything works OK again. I can also add this line to my .ssh/config file to force it to use password authentication:

Anyhow, I saw the note on the page I referenced talking about deleting keys from the agent, but I'm not sure if that applies on a Mac since they appear to be cleared after reboot anyhow.

Is there a simple way to clear out all keys in the 'ssh-agent' (the same thing that happens at reboot)?

If you haven’t set up your YubiKey yet, this is a good place to start.

Evil Martians are growing. With more employees and more clients, there is a demand for stronger security. Our clients trust us with their source code and, even more importantly, with access to their production servers, and this trust cannot be broken. In a hostile environment of the modern web, though, it is easier said than done. A good old password, even coupled with a password manager, does not cut it anymore. The most obvious way to increase security is to opt for two-factor authentication (2FA) that is widely supported. Even without hardware keys, it makes an attacker’s job much harder than it used to be.

A sticky situation

We have enforced 2FA across all our staff for all the tools that we use daily: email, GitHub, task trackers, and others. By default, it involves requesting one-time access codes either by SMS/phone call or through a dedicated smartphone app. Cellular networks, however, are not the safest place: messages and calls can be intercepted. Opting for an app like Google Authenticator is more secure, but can also be compromised, at least in theory, if a smartphone that runs it is precisely targeted by an attacker.

So, can we do better? There exists an open authentication standard that aims to both strengthen and simplify 2FA.

Known as Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) and originally developed by Yubico and Google, it relies on physical devices (usually USB or NFC) that implement cryptographic algorithms on a chip, similar to smart cards that have been around for ages. You probably have at least few of those in your pockets: phone SIM, bank cards, various IDs and the like.

Now, instead of confirming your access with some code, you need to insert a USB stick into your computer, press the physical button on it, and the device will take care of the rest. Authenticating with U2F is already supported by major browsers (the only notable exception, sadly, is Safari) and you can use it with many online services that software professionals use daily: Google and Gmail, Dropbox, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Nextcloud, Facebook, and the list goes on.

The advantages of a hardware solution are obvious: a possibility of a remote attacker gaining access to one of your tools is pretty much eliminated. The attacker needs to physically get a hold of your USB key, which is still a security risk, but in an entirely different domain.

There is a number of vendors that sell USB keys, and we chose Yubico and their YubiKey 4 series. They are versatile, compact and can either be carried around on a keychain or, for smaller models, stay in the USB slot of your laptop all the time. There are also USB-C models for newer Macs, so you don’t need dongles. Besides implementing U2F, YubiKey 4 series supports various security standards:

Smart card PIV

Authenticating online with U2F works out of the box on Linux, macOS, and Windows and in all major browsers. However, if you want to use your YubiKey for SSH connections, things quickly get less straightforward.

Sticks and Macs

We do have our fair share of Linux users, but the instructions we offer further are for macOS only, as replacing default ssh-agent with a gpg-agent on a system level is a Mac-specific problem.

A Mac is a computer of choice for most of us at Evil Martians. We also use SSH all the time: while pushing code to GitHub or accessing remote servers. As all our employees work remotely from their private machines, contents of their ~/.ssh folders should never be allowed to leak. Common security measures, like the hard drive encryption, are always in order, but with YubiKeys already being used for U2F, would not it be better to store RSA keys for SSH on them too, and off the computer?

Ssh-agent Mac Os X Keychain

As YubiKey already supports OpenPGP, we can use it as the OpenPGP card with all the benefits:

Download Intensify for macOS 10.9 or later and enjoy it on your Mac. ‎Intensify turns your everyday photos into stunning, dramatic masterpieces. Use simple controls to bring up the details, reveal the hidden beauty and enhance every pixel. 'Best of App Store' + over 20 other software awards. Intensify for apple mac. Intensify Pro is for Mac photo enthusiasts who want their photos to stand out. Intensify Pro gives you powerful new ways to create dramatic results. Professionally created presets make it 'one.

Once RSA keys are put on a card, they cannot be retrieved programmatically in any way.

Keys written to a card can only be used in combination with a PIN code, so even if a YubiKey is stolen, a thief would not be able to authenticate directly.

To set up YubiKey as a smart-card holding your PGP keys, you need first to replace your ssh-agent that comes pre-installed with macOS with a GnuPG solution. The easiest way to do it is directly from Terminal with Homebrew:

If you want to install a full GPG Suite that includes GUI applications, you can run another command (requires Homebrew Cask), or download it from the website:

At the time of this writing, the most recent version of gpg is 2.2.X. Let’s double-check, just to be sure:

Many guides out there tell you how to install YubiKey with gpg 2.0.X, and there has been a lot of significant changes since then. We recommend updating, and that should also be done with caution: backup your ~/.gnupg directory before making any changes!

Important!Now you need to either generate your PGP keys directly on the YubiKey or create them locally and copy over. There is an official guide for that, as well as a more evolved instruction on GitHub from the user drduh.

After all that is done, you need to enable your SSH client (the built-in Terminal app, for instance) to read PGP keys directly from YubiKey. It is time to say goodbye to a built-in ssh-agent that have served you well before.

Insert a YubiKey holding a PGP key in your computer and run the following commands; they will launch a gpg-agent and instruct your applications to use a new SSH authentication socket:

If everything went well, you should see that your private RSA key is now in fact located on a YubiKey (it has a unique cardno), the output of an ssh-add -l should resemble this:

Congratulations, you are done! This changes will not persist, however.

As soon as you reload your system, or even switch to a new console window, this setup will go away.

Let’s see how we can make it permanent.

Making things stick

The first thing that comes to mind when changing any shell-related setup is to change the local profile, be it ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zsh_profile (if you don’t know what type of shell you have, most likely you have bash, it comes by default with macOS). Open that file in an editor and add:

Now every time you launch a console, it will know how to SSH properly. If you live in a shell, use Vim or Emacs to write your code and were never tempted with GitHub’s visual features, you are all set.

However, if you use an IDE or one of those modern text editors with integrated GitHub functionality, such as Atom or Visual Studio Code? Those applications are not concerned with your shell setup and will still use system defaults for SSH, which is not what we want since we store all our keys securely on a YubiKey.

“But before we dealt with gpg, we did not need to set up anything, and everything worked!” you might say, and you would be right: macOS takes care of all that with a built-in service-management framework called launchd. You can read more about it by running man launchd, but you don’t have to.

You only need to know that launchd deals with so-called “property lists”. These are XML files with a .plist extension that define services to be launched and their launch options. They are located in the following directories:

~/Library/LaunchAgents for per-user agents provided by the user.

/Library/LaunchAgents for per-user agents provided by the administrator.

/Library/LaunchDaemons for system-wide daemons provided by the administrator.

/System/Library/LaunchAgents for per-user agents provided by macOS.

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons for system-wide daemons provided by macOS.

Let’s do some digging and look for anything SSH-related. Here it is, right in a /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.openssh.ssh-agent.plist:

Without diving into much detail, we see that this is how macOS makes ssh-agent a default utility for SSH authentication.

Unfortunately, we cannot edit this file directly, as anything located in a /System folder is protected from tampering by a macOS feature called System Integrity Protection. There is a way to disable it, but you don’t want to do that. Apple folk came up with it for a reason.

A stickler for detail

Nothing prevents us from writing our own .plist though! All these XMLs will be treated as instructions for launchd, so this is our chance to circumvent ssh-agent once and for all!

First of all, let’s read man gpg-agent and learn what GnuPG agent for Mac is capable of:

Mac Restart Ssh Agent

It can become a daemon and live in the background with the --daemon option.

There is a --supervised option designed for systemd which makes the gpg-agent wait for a certain set of sockets and then access them through file descriptors.

A --server option allows our agent to hook onto the TTY and listen for text input, without opening any sockets.

Unfortunately, launchd only tracks processes that run in the foreground, and neither --supervised, nor --server will do us any good. So, the best way to launch an agent is by using the same command that we used before: gpgconf --launch gpg-agent. Let’s express it in launchd-compatible XML:

Now save it as homebrew.gpg.gpg-agent.plist and put it into ~/Library/LaunchAgents folder. To test that it all works (you won’t have to do it after restart), tell launchd to load a new plist:

Now let’s make sure that the agent is loaded:

A digit in the launchctl list output shows the exit status of a launched program, and 0 is what we want to see. pgrep confirms that we are in fact up and running.

Ssh Agent Mac Os X

However, we are not done yet. We still need to point SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable to $HOME/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent.ssh. The problem is that the variable is already set (user-wide) by the launchd default setting for ssh-agent.

At this moment, I have nothing better in mind than the following “hack”: forcibly symlink gpg-agent’s socket to the default one, stored in an SSH_AUTH_SOCK variable. The power of Unix allows us to do that, but that effectively messes up the default SSH configuration. However, as we are now using GnuPG for everything SSH-related, that should not be a problem. If you have better ideas, please contact me on Twitter.

We can create another plist that will do all necessary symlinking on login.

The only trick here is to call the shell directly, with /bin/sh (so we can reference shell variables), and pass a command to it. Now, save the file as ~/Library/LaunchAgents/link-ssh-auth-sock.plist and load it with launchd.

Let’s test the result:

Bingo! Our macOS is now effectively tricked into thinking that it deals with ssh-agent, even though it’s the gpg-agent doing authenticating and reading PGP keys directly from your YubiKey.

All you need to do know to authenticate over SSH in a true hardware fashion is to turn on your laptop, put a stick in the USB and push a button on it. Your Mac is now completely secure!

Still stuck?

There is another problem you may encounter when you start using YubiKey as an OpenGPG card. Our gpg-agent sometimes get stuck, and it looks like a YubiKey is not connected at all, replugging it also does nothing. It is a known problem, discussed here. My observations show that it appears after I put my laptop to sleep. Let’s deal with that too.

First, we need a tool that keeps track when our laptop wakes up: sleepwatcher is made just for that. Install it with Homebrew:

By default, it expects two scripts: ~/.sleep to run before the computer goes to sleep, and ~/.wakeup to run after it wakes up. Let’s create them.

The minimal ~/.sleep script can look like this (we only need to be sure it passes as a shell script)

In ~/.wakeup we will forcibly restart our gpg-agent:

Now we need to add execution flags and enable sleepwatcher’s service:

Ssh Agent For Mac Os X 10.10

Thank you for reading! Download find my mac for mac. In this article, we showed how to set up your SSH authentication flow with YubiKey as an OpenPGP card and how to make your gpg-agent play nicely with macOS. Now all you need to do to access a server or push code to a remote repository is to insert a stick into your USB and enter a PIN code when requested. Passphrases no longer required!

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aquarianlights · 6 years

Text

It's okay to be.

Although the death of loved ones will shake the very foundational base of any soul home.

It is because the crave for physical hugs and reassuring words of comfort.

When they leave this world through physical form they are not entirely gone. They are here with us always with the ability to visit freely as we would them at their homes.

It’s okay to cry, to vent, to relive memories of your special moments. But do not live in the past and the ghost of someone who wouldn’t want you to torture yourself. Although your grieving process is your own. Surround yourself with loved ones and friends who understand and have loved n lived through it.

It’s easy to tell another what to do and not. But the purest truth is to follow your heart and be kind to yourself as your password love one would want you to be.

I hope this helps you. As they helped you throughout life.

Response from Killian: Thank you so much for this. I really appreciate this. You don’t have to read all of this. But this is for you and for everyone and then for you again, if you do. I really, REALLY needed to vent and really, really needed a distraction and, well, everyone knows what helps me the most, yeah? Whining, bitching, and ranting/tangents. It’s the one and only thing that keeps me from acting on my life threatening impulses. So. . .here is the product of the venting that just saved me from myself. Enjoi or don’t. Thank you so much for the note. I appreciate it, fam. This response is mostly for everyone on my followers list, btw. I, personally, believe in reincarnation based on our karma. My entire spirituality revolves around the afterlife and the theory of reincarnation and different planes of existence and nonlinear time and linear time coexisting. But at the same time, I also believe in spirits, ghosts, entities, and all things falling within the paranormal realm as I have had numerous experiences with them. But I do believe that the entities that still haunt this linear existence on our planet are trapped here because their karma was either at 0 when they died and not at a positive or negative number, which means that the fate aliens didn’t know whether to demote or promote them and are evaluating their linear timeline. OR. . .there is no room in the place that they have to demote or promote them to and no parallel timelines are appropriate for them. So they are playing a waiting game. And on a rare occasion, the demonic spirits that are here that have enough energy force to actually move things and hurt animals and people. . .those are people who have done such horrific things that their karma was so far in the negatives that they could not be forgiven and were not allowed another chance and are now rooted here on this hell planet for all of eternity with all of the positive energy and positive karma they accumulated from birth to death sucked out completely so that they are truly left to suffer---all alone with their own malice, unable to actually converse with or be touched by anyone ever again. I cannot think of another instance in which it would be appropriate for someone to be locked into this existence or in the purgatory stage where they have to wait and wait and wait as this noncorporeal spirit coexisting with corporeal beings until they can progress to a higher level of existence either on their current planet or a different planet or be demoted to a lower species on their current planet or on a different planet. It’s always rare to be born as the same species on the same planet. That would be very strange and make no sense with the laws of karma unless you had a pure 0 karma that you had somehow managed to balance out in the fate aliens eyes right before you died. No negative numbers or positive numbers in existence for you anymore. Everything cancelled out by doing good deeds for all the bad you’ve done thus far and making sure not to do TOO many good deeds and to balance out the good with the bad and so on and so forth. Which is close to impossible while living your life. Which is why I truly think the fate aliens would keep these people with leveled out to 0 karma in a purgatory stagnant state as a spirit for a while until they figured out whether to do the taboo thing and reincarnate them as the same species on the same planet and everything be the same. . .or to do something normal and push them up to a higher plane but only like. . .one level higher and barely higher. Maybe even keep them as the same species on the same planet, but make them have a much brighter future and a much nicer life, which is always a possibility with karma. When you progress to a new species with a new planet, you’ll always have a better life. And when you get demoted, you’ll always have a worse life. It just works that way. It always has. And it keeps going and going until YOU become the omnipotent, noncorporeal alien that controls all of non-linear time and controls all of the fate aliens that control all of the linear time and you are literally the highest level of existence possible and there is nothing higher and you just exist outside of time and there is no concept of time and you exist forever and always and never and everywhere and no where all simultaneously.

Those are just the basics of my beliefs.

And they have a scientific basis to them in many instances, but I won’t go into that. I wanted to explain that BECAUSE. . .

You said they aren’t really gone when they are physically gone, right? And that they have the ability to visit us as freely as we used to be able to visit them in their home, right?

I am under the impression that you meant through spirits, like. . .say, through feeling their presence even when they are not there. Through talking aloud to them and something happening and just somehow knowing it was them responding in some way because it is something they would do (ie; knocking over a certain picture of someone when you’re talking to them about them to remind you how much they don’t like them).

Stuff like that is what I mean by feeling their presence. You know what I mean, right? I don’t have to elaborate, yeah?

You aren’t talking about, say, through prayer or, uh. . .guardian angel or any of that religious bullshit, right? Because, uh, you must not have known me or looked through my blog for even 2 seconds if you’re suggesting anything christian/baptist/catholic/etc based. And I’m gonna be highly offended if you or anyone else suggests I pray to them when they’re gone or that they’re watching over me from heaven or that they’re better now with “god” or that they’re my “guardian angels” now and they are always watching over me. Like, oh hell no, don’t anyone fucking say that while this shit is going on because I will get set the fuck off and I will attack anyone who says that shit. I won’t get offended in the least if anyone says they are praying for me or they’re sending me prayers and that they’re including my grandparents in their weekly service or something. Anything of that nature is actually highly comforting to me and makes me feel very at ease and happy and respected and loved. But the SECOND someone tries to force their beliefs on me and just assume like all christians/baptists/catholics/etc do that everyone will love to hear that shit and be comforted by the “they’re in heaven now/god has them/they’re your guardian angels” bullshit. . .I will fucking snap and attack them. Those three things (and I’m sure other things that I haven’t thought of, too, along with the “you should pray to them” thing) are the LEAST comforting things I could possibly be told during all of this.

1. I absolutely do NOT want my grandparents to be in heaven, if there were such a place. I do not believe there is, but if there were, then there would be every form of every beliefs afterlife available and up for the choosing when you died. You’d just go to some sort of grim reaper who is a sorter and tell them which afterlife you believe in and you’d be put into that version of the afterlife, the good or bad or neutral depending on what your ending karma is, unless you believe we disintegrate into nothingness, then, of course, there is only one ending. But if my grandparents were to go to heaven, that would fucking be it. They would never get another linear existence. They would never get another chance to find happiness. Do you know the chances of people like my grandparents who were high school sweethearts, laid eyes on each other and had love at first sight, have been married for over 70 years, will die happily married to each other and never once have been unhappy together and it wasn’t fake at all. . .do you know the chances of people like that becoming partners again in their second life if they get sorted onto the same planet and are similar enough species (both humanoid or both animal or something like that)??? It’s high. EXTREMELY high. I want them to have the chance to fall in love all over again and live a brand new life on a brand new world and see brand new things. My grandma was raised by an alcoholic and was beat all the time growing up. My grandfather is as bigoted as they come and is insanely ignorant and never went to college. My grandmother never even got her drivers license and that is something she has always regretted. I want them to get the chance to live better lives. I want my grandmother to have parents or parental figure(s) she deserves as the kind, loving, amazing woman she was before Alzheimer’s. I want her to be able to go far in life and get achievements that she couldn’t make in this life because she got pregnant with my mother so early in life and they couldn’t afford to send my grandma to school because they were growing up during the great depression. My grandparents got married right after high school and had 8 kids. My grandma was a GREAT mother and did everything possible for them and sent them all to school and those who wanted to go to college or trade schools, she sent them. She helped them every way she could. My grandfather worked very hard and built houses everywhere and he loved it and was very good at it, but growing up in such a rough, terrible, long ago time and being as white as they come and being raised by people who grew up in an even MORE white era, he has always been your typical ignorant, says and does whatever he wants, bigoted, hateful towards everyone that isn’t white as well as women, white man. I do not want him to go to heaven because I want him to learn his fucking lesson and get his ass kicked by being knocked down a peg. I want him to have his karma so low that he gets demoted. He wouldn’t move out of their house so late because of the fact that “I’m the man!! I need to take care of my wife!! It’s MY house!!! I don’t care that I have dementia and can’t take care of her properly! Hurr durr I am a manly man and these are my manly man responsibilities!!!” and since he only had dementia and not Alzheimer’s, he was their power of attorney and wouldn’t give everything up. It wasn’t until he drove his car into a gas station pump while trying to go somewhere in Massachusetts for the millionth time (he lives in Florida, but my whole family is from MA and I’m the only “southerner” who polluted the blood line by being born and raised in Florida and only coming up to our home state of MA in the summers) that they finally saw something and he got his license taken away. But then it wasn’t until my grandma FELL after not being able to get out of the chair for days because she wasn’t talking, wasn’t eating, wasn’t able to go to the bathroom except on herself, couldn’t get changed, couldn’t hold herself up and was sliding out of the chair, etc etc etc coz we thought the Alzheimer’s had progressed so badly. All of their workers had quit because my grandpa was a terror at trying to take care of her “right”. And then it wasn’t until she ACTUALLY FELL that he called 911 and they took them both to the hospital and they found out he had advanced lung cancer and they both had a UTI, but hers was severe enough to cause her to almost die and they rechecked my grandma’s breast cancer and it had progressed. SO. . .they were FINALLY taken to a home by adult protective services. And he was fucking mad about that! And I need him to just be knocked the fuck down a peg in his next life because I am so goddamn sick of his bitching and whining about black people and looking down on women who have jobs and looking down on my generation because we can actually think for ourselves and him always watching the fucking news like my father and getting all of his political information from the corrupt sources there and spreading fake news and actually corrupting the polls and making the rest of us suffer by going to vote and also his inherent HATRED for the LGBT community. . . And I am going to have to DIE without either of them knowing I am transgender. Because I was too scared to come out to either of them before my grandma got dementia. My grandpa probably wouldn’t know what it was. And my grandma wouldn’t either. But I would want them to listen and understand and know that I’m going to be getting gender correction hormones that will change everything about me to correct who I am. And I wanted them to BE HERE to see the end result. . . . but I guess this shows me that I DO want to go through with HRT before my parents die. I thought about holding off until my parents die to do HRT, but this confirms that I need to do it before they die so that they can meet their son and know who he really is before they die. I don’t want them to die without actually knowing me. If my grandparents went to this fake fucking paradise called heaven, there would be nothing forever and, frankly, the stagnancy of forever in heaven with nothing to strive for sounds like my worst nightmare. To have everything that I could ever want is my worst fucking nightmare and my own personal hell and I wouldn’t wish that pain on my worst enemy. Sure, it’s great for a little while. . .but for an infinite amount of time that drags on and NEVER ends. . .??? That would be the worst and I would end up hurting myself just to FEEL something other than that euphoria that they describe. Just like in the movies where there are drugs and stuff that are manufactured at birth to be ingrained in humans that force them to experience nothing except happiness their entire life and have nothing except happy memories and have a filter in their mind that filter out any bad memories they may accidentally acquire and erase them. . . . there ends up being a HUGE black market that EVERYONE partakes in (even law enforcement) for bad memories and drugs that will make you feel angry and sad and depressed and suicidal and upset and confused and stressed and all sorts of things OTHER than euphoric. That is what heaven is. . .the worst place imaginable. I would not wish that on my worst fucking enemy, nevertheless on people I LOVE. The ONLY person I would EVER wish that on would be Trump. That is how much I hate that orange blob. And I would want it to be televised for all of eternity for everyone to see the constant breakdowns and struggles and eventual going insane. I would only wish that kind of inane punishment on the most evil person on the planet: Trump.

2. To say “god has them” scares me. It downright scares me because I see the catholic/baptist/christian god as this scary, horrifying omnipotent presence who is cruel af to everyone and will punish everyone without mercy and without discerning who is deserving of punishment and who isn’t (noah’s ark, anyone? before you [note: these are all general yous, not personal yous] jump on me, if you all don’t know me... which, ...if you’re reading this and you ARE going to jump on me... you probably SHOULD know me first...lmao... you don’t wanna jump on a stranger and look stupid by being horribly wrong about this. . .but before you jump on me, I grew up and was raised roman catholic. i went to a private catholic school for almost all of my adolescent life right into my teenage years. I have not only read the entire bible, I have been forced to pick that horrible fictitious book apart piece by piece in religion classes over the years as I grew up. So don’t go telling me I need to read the fuckin’ bible just because you’re gonna be big mad about me having opinions that are harshly different than yours lol). This guy is someone who will usually not answer prayers and who will rape people, impregnate them, leave them with the child to tend for it themselves and not pitch in AT ALL. . . (not even gonna pay child support, my home boy? damn cmon fam). . .and will gladly allow everyone to be mass manipulated and will not stop them from using his/her name for horrible, horrible things when he clearly should have the power to do so. And what about his other son who he fucking betrayed and banished? Yeah, fuck this guy (or girl). And he apparently traps all these people up in this horrible place for eternity and gives them no options except to be happy and have all the things so that they have nothing to strive for and nothing to want for. . .nothing to keep them going, nothing to ever feel, no reason for existing, no reason for waking up, no reason to be happy except for the fact that you do feel happy and it’s all wrong for so many reasons that I don’t even want to elaborate any further because I’m going to get a fucking panic attack thinking about it because if I start to convince myself of the possibility that all afterlives are real---which means heaven is real and that is the ONLY way heaven can be real is if they are ALL real from EVERY belief---then this fucking awful place exists and tons and tons of people have fallen for the trap and are literally trapped there forever and ever and ever. . .and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. And because my mom’s side of the family is all catholic. . .they will all choose that afterlife, too, when presented with the choice of what afterlife to choose. . .oh god oh god oh god. . .my mom. . .my mom would choose heaven. . .oh god oh god oh god. . .I don’t want to think of them all suffering like that. That is the ultimate version of suffering. I can’t even imagine. . .oh my god. I need to stop. Immediately. Moving on......

3. To say my grandparents are my guardian angels is just...... wrong. I would not want a guardian angel. Ever. I used to find this creepy even when I was a sheltered, ignorant, brainwashed little catholic schoolboy. I felt it was so goddamn creepy when my parents and the priests and nuns at school (our classes were taught by nuns and our dean was a priest) would all say that “[x] guardian angel is watching over you so you need to make them proud by being on your best behaviour. But when you get into trouble, don’t hesitate to say a prayer to them. They will save you.” That was like. . .big brother stuff to me before I had even read 1984 or ANYTHING Orwellian in general yet. It was big brother before I knew what big brother actually was. It was scary and intimidating. It was like I was being watched all the time and I couldn’t have a moments peace and I couldn’t be alone ever. I always felt eyes on me and I could never move around or talk to the voices in my head or the hallucinations I saw like I needed to (which were always both thought to be imaginary friends by everyone, including counselors and my parents, until I got older and they never went away and more appeared and everything became much more vivid and frequent). It was torture. Christmas has always been my all-time favourite time of year because it was the one and only time my parents wouldn’t do anything bad to me ever and were over-the-top kind to me and loving and it was like they were totally different people in front of our entire family and friends. It was so much fun being with everyone, seeing all the sparkly lights, playing with friends, fireplace, the cold weather finally getting there, decorating the tree, decorating cookies, presents, stockings, festivities. . .so many things!! But you know what was always awful about Christmas when I was little and still believed? Santa Clause. It felt like he was some guardian angel watching over me for that entire month. On the 1st of December every year, I would become hyper-paranoid and hyper-aware of every movement I made, everything I said, everything I did, and every interaction I had. It was awful. It was torture. That’s what it feels like to have a guardian angel. Pressure. Constant pressure. And then I’m always thinking about them, too. Like. . .don’t they have better things to do than just constantly watch me? What, are they just sitting there all day and all night with binoculars way up there looking down at me unblinkingly? Are they right by my side as a noncorporeal orb of energy waiting to defend me at any turn? Whatever it may be, I feel like I am being watched 24/7. And it feels like I’m not the only one because they have to be watching over other people they were close to, too, right? So, how do they do it? I overthink it and get panicky and end up talking to them no matter where I am and I end up having breakdowns and/or panic attacks. And with no valium left to calm me down. . .I have nothing!! For fucks sake. Hearing my grandparents may be magically turned into slaves. . .that’s not something I look forward to. What, so. . .they get two options. They either get to be eternally happy and do nothing for eternity. . .or they get to be eternally happy and be a slave to the system of heaven as a guardian angel for eternity. Hmmmmm. Choose your poison, I guess! Fuck heaven and the concept of heaven. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.

SO. . .as you all can see. . .those three things are EXTREMELY unsettling to me and TRUST ME when I say that, YES, I see the alternatives and the way that you people who worship/believe look at it. I know. I’ve been there. I was that brainwashed little roman catholic boy for the longest time. I was roman catholic for more of my life thus far than I have been my current spirituality which is my own that I do not have a name for since it is no particular religion or belief system and involves a LOT of different beliefs from belief systems around the world, as well as stuff I’ve discovered from my own experiences, as well as stuff from science. The stuff I’ve put down here are only regarding the afterlife and are only the bare skeleton basics of what I believe. But, TRUST ME, I know the opposing side. I don’t need any of it explained to me and IF IT IS EXPLAINED TO ME, whoever does it will be promptly ignored and blocked (and, yes, I can block anonymous people) unless you are just being SO ridiculous and SO stupid and SO ludicrous that I have to post it so that my 4k+ followers can all get a laugh out of it like I did. I’ll be sure to get a laugh out of all the religious nuts in my inbox after all of this is said and done, but I’m sure I will ignore most of them. But if one strikes me as PARTICULARLY hilariously ludicrous, I will be sure to post it for everyone so that you can all laugh with me. I promise. I won’t let you guys down. Haha. But I do not need it explained because, frankly, I could probably explain it a LOT better than any of you. But I would explain it in some words that are, er. . .not very pretty. :) So you all do not want me to explain it. Trust me. Trust me. TRUST ME.

*****And trust me when I say...... EVEN IF YOU EXPLAIN IT TO DEATH TO ME, IT WILL DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING EXCEPT MAKE ME HATE YOU AND HATE WHICHEVER RELIGION [read: cult] YOU ARE A PART OF AS WELL AS MY FORMER RELIGION [that cult being catholicism] EVEN MORE THAN I ALREADY DO. It will do nothing more than make me have an even deeper hatred for religions everywhere and it will certainly reinforce the idea that people who believe in these things are generally horrible people who want to force their beliefs on me. You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t force it to fucking drink, bitches.*****

Back to the topic on hand.....................

I SAY ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL OF THAT.............................

Because

I do not think my grandparents would still be present. And I say all of THAT and explain all of that in detail [the 1, 2, 3 thing] because I wanted to make it VERY clear to EVERYONE here because the vast majority of my followers are not people who speak to me on the daily like people on FB do, so you all do not know my trigger point with religion and how bad flashbacks happen the second anyone forces their beliefs on me in general or the second anyone forces their beliefs on me during a tragedy/painful time. I will lash out and instantly attack ANYONE who does anything like that and I wanted to make it HYPER-CLEAR for everyone and ANYONE that that is a thing with me and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to get that off my chest. . . . . .Venting is the only way I survive through things. I always need to vent in order to not harm myself and to not off myself. Writing ALL of this out allows me to write the pain off and to keep my impulses at bay and really think about things before acting on these horrific self destructive impulses.

So I really do need to write all of this AND post it. Otherwise it’s not fulfilling if I just erase it. Then the pain comes back. If no one reads it, then the pain comes back.

ANYWAYS. . .

I don’t think my grandparents would still be present for even a little while because I think they’re going to be promoted to the next planet and I know my grandma is going to be a humanoid species and is going to have a better life than she did here. . .but idk about my grandpa. I hope to fuck they find each other again. I really, really do. Their love is strong enough to transcend the boundaries of reincarnation. Or maybe my grandpa will be reincarnated on that planet as a domestic animal of some sort and my grandma will adopt him (or her if he gets reincarnated as a girl) and she (or he if she gets reincarnated as a boy . . .or maybe they have third or fourth sexes on this planet? or maybe only one sex? hmmm) will live happily by herself with her animal that is my grandpa and they will just have this special bond that you hear of in journal articles and they will live together until the animal dies or something and then maybe my grandpa will have good enough karma that he can come back as a humanoid and then they can be together in some capacity if it is not too late. Maybe he can be her adopted child. I doubt they could be lovers because of the age thing, but it’s possible after he gets old enough in their world to comprehend and understand what love between people with that kind of age gap means and be able to consent properly. . . Hmmmmm. You never know.

I just don’t think they will still be here. And if they are?

Well. . .if they are. . .that’s kind of unsettling for me with my belief system. I would rather not feel their presence ever again so that I know they passed on to their next life. If I feel their presence, then I know something is wrong. And if something is wrong, it will take my focus off of school at a very inconvenient time in my pre-med program when I need to be kicking it into high gear more than EVER. And it will kill me because I will just be having breakdowns and panic attacks and losing sleep ALL THE TIME over the fact that they’re not okay and that something is wrong due to the fate aliens not allowing them to pass on for SOME reason. And then I would be spending time researching ways to help loved ones pass on to the afterlife or to gain good karma in the spirit world in order to move on. . .instead of using the time to do research for surgical things for school. It would terrify me if I felt their presence in that way. :(

I know that is supposed to be a comfort, though, so I very much appreciate that mention and I very much appreciate that though. All of that excessive explanation and elaboration is moreso geared at my pack of followers who need to be informed during this time of grieving that that is the wrong way to go about helping me if they want to help. . .which I really hope they do. Not many people have come forward to help. . .and that kinda kill me. . .so I’m just hoping more people come forward with support and help like this because this was extremely kind and extremely helpful and I cannot thank you enough. Seriously.

That is VERY good advice to not live in the past regardless of actively thinking about the memories. . .I actually did not think about or prepare for that. I noticed I have been, uh. . .recalling a lot of memories with them or at their house lately. I’ve been telling stories left and right irl and through texts. I have never really done that before. Not about my grandparents. . .Hell, I JUST did it with this post, didn’t I??? Wow. I feel like I’m one of those people that are going to get stuck in a loop of thoughts if I’m not careful. . .I have borderline personality disorder AND schizo-affective disorder which both lead to insanely bad paranoid thoughts and catastrophic thinking issues. I had both under control until my pain medication for my fibro and ehlers danlos got stripped from my for 2 weeks and until it became an issue to get it. . .and I had it under control until my grandparents decided to uh. . .y’know. . .get lung cancer and breast cancer and get life threatening UTI’s and drive into a gas station and basically start dying way sooner than expected and to screw up the plan that my mother and the rest of the kids had. (They didn’t choose it; I’m just joking. I deal with things with sarcasm and humour. Which I believe is going to be frowned upon during their death. . .)

It was expected that my grandma would pass first and it would be swift and painless due to the Alzheimer’s. My grandpa wouldn’t last long after that because he would basically die of a broken heart. I’m not exaggerating or joking. Some old people legitimately do die of a broken heart when their loved one passes on. My grandpa would be one of those people. But my mom planned on taking him in and having him live with them and things would work out because my grandpa can mostly take care of himself. My grandma cannot. . .and if grandpa goes before her. . .my god, she’s going to be so panicky and so lost and so confused. Whenever he leaves the room, she gets extremely panicked and starts screaming his name and begging people to go check on him to make sure he’s not dead from this or that. He’s the only thing that keeps her grounded in reality with her Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t know what day it is, she doesn’t know who she is or what her birthday is, she doesn’t know who her my mom is, she doesn’t know who I am and I am her favourite niece/nephew in the family. . .but she knows exactly what her husband is doing at all times and she knows where he is and she knows if he has eaten and if he has taken his medications and she reminds him when to take his meds and all of these things. She could be lost somewhere, but if he’s there, it would be okay. Honestly, it never seems to matter where they are to her, as long as she’s with him nowadays. To him, it matters a fuckton. Everything matters. But with him going first. . . if my grandma doesn’t have that grounding thing in her daily life. . . . . .I have no idea what would happen. Because she won’t remember he has died no matter how many times they repeat it to her. She’ll be asking every hour or so, I’m sure. Probably more often than that and the workers at the home will have to keep repeating it to her over and over and over that he is dead and she will keep having to experience that trauma over and over and over. That’s............ that’s torture. I can’t imagine that. . .Whereas, if grandma went first. . .it would be peaceful. . .grandpa would grieve and eventually die of a broken heart and we would have the funeral in Massachusetts where they would be buried right next to each other. My grandpa wants to be buried under my mom’s “Nana” (idk how they’re related but my mom has always called her Nana and never by her real name. So idk.) so that he “can look up her skirt”. That was always his wish. So he gets the plot below hers. And my grandma gets the plot next to him. I cannot imagine being buried alone like that. . . .not even when I’m dead. I would have to be buried WITH my partner, not NEXT to them. Fuck no. One of my biggest fears is being buried alive. The fuck NO. Even after death, that’s not happening. But I’m not getting cremated either. I’ve already signed up with two organizations to have my body donated to medical students for study and to have my brain donated to a prestigious brain mapping organization which they will take ANY brain. Infected ones, ones with mental disorders, ones with issues like Alzheimer’s or Down Syndrome, from high IQ’s to low IQ’s, from people who have Ph.D’s to people who dropped out of high school, anything. They’ll take anything because there is absolutely nothing we cannot learn from examining the human brain piece by piece. And the fact it has to basically be fresh is a HUGE problem for brain mappers because the demand HIGHLY outranks the supply. And eeeeeveryone just LOVES to be an organ donor so everyone just immediately puts down organ donor on their card and never even THINKS to sign up for brain mapping or to have their cadaver sent to scientists for medical advancement or medical students for teaching purposes. Why the fuck save only a few fucking people who are going to die soon probably anyways when your organs may reject in them anyways. . .when you could literally use your own corpse to teach people who are alive invaluable things that can help them learn to help and to cure more and more things and more and more people. Why save only a few lives who will die shortly after you save them and may even reject your organs immediately and render them useless. . .when you could save thousands. . .millions. . .billions. . .maybe even be the basis for saving the entire human race? I have always said no to being an organ donor. I know vulcans and every other race in Star Trek has a problem with this phrase and even Spock himself has had a problem with this phrase in the series and has had discussions about it with Kirk, but I still believe wholeheartedly in it: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” And I know people are groaning and saying “Well, Killian, what about when you are one of the few?” Glad you asked. I am not going to say that I will selflessly suffer and die as a self sacrifice because that is not what my human body will allow me to do and that has been proven via multiple suicide attempts and by chronic pain. I know exactly how my near death experiences have all gone. I know exactly how being extremely uncomfortable goes to me. I know exactly how my body and mind deals with physical pain. I know exactly how my body and mind deals with the prospect of my own death. My flight or fight response kicks in almost immediately when my body starts to feel the effects. The problem being. . .I cannot remember a single time that my mind/body has ever chosen the “flight” response for ANY instance. My body/mind has ALWAYS chosen the “fight” response so whenever I start to feel it and it sinks in that I’m going to die or COULD die, I will fight for survival with every breath I take. I will do everything in my power to stay alive, even if it means taking people down with me. Even if it means compromising my principals. Will I use organ donors to save my life and still have the “fuck being an organ donor” principle ingrained in me? Yeah, most likely. Albeit I cannot predict that, I can certainly predict that based off of the fact that that is an instance that I generally act hypocritically. I am a HUGE hypocrite in those regards and I am well aware of it and I am quite okay with it. I don’t mind being a contradiction at all. I’m not harming anyone; I’m actually helping people. In every instance in which I am extremely hypocritical, I am never harming anyone. So it is perfectly okay for me to be contradictory like I am.

Anyways.... I went off on a tangent like that because I started to get bad feels and started to feel down so I thought I would distract myself with writing about something different for a second. . .And it worked. I feel back to normal. Ahh, the powers of venting and bitching and whining. The powers of a good tangent. Beautiful.

And yes I do believe it is INCREDIBLY important to surround myself with loved ones. . .but I’m not sure I know many people who have gone through the death of someone close. I know one person---who I happen to be in love with---who has lost so many people near and dear to her. I feel I can go to her. . .but I don’t really have anyone irl. I mean, I live with someone who has lost someone close to him. But I don’t want to burden him by coming to him and venting to him over the loss of my grandparents when it is probably insignificant to his loss and his problems. I need to learn how to deal with things better, but I guess the steps to dealing with things better is to experience things in the first place. This is something I have never experienced. Not close people. To experience death of people you’re not close with and strangers is one thing. . .but to experience the death of people you’re close with. . . .that’s something I have never gone through.

I wish my person could be there for me more than she is. I know she said she was going to try to walk away from me more because she can’t be where I need her to be in regards to being okay and her mood and her tone of voice and being snappy with me. . .but I really needed her to . . .moreso to. . .put all of that aside for me for however long this lasts (probably a few months) and just not get a tone with me anymore and try to keep her mood matching mine or keep her mood UP like I normally do even if it’s fake and to never snap at me and to just, above all, be there for me at all times. Just. . .selflessly be there to listen, as a shoulder to cry on, someone to snuggle. . .basically just. . .a friend who is going to put aside all their agony and pain for me for a few months and go to other people other than me when they need to get a tone, get angry, get snappy, cry, vent about their issues, and have massive mood swings. It’s asking a lot, I know. It wouldn’t be asking a lot if it were just for, say, a week or something. But the fact that it will probably be at least 2 months. . .and right now has no set end date. . .that’s asking a LOT of her. . .and I know that. I do. I was just sort of hoping. . . .I was hoping that, since she is my person. . .that she would do it. I don’t know why I got my hopes up and allowed them to be crushed like that. That was stupid of me. And it’s not her fault at all! The fact that she’s going to walk away from me from now on whenever she gets a tone/needs to get a tone/starts to get a tone/wants to get a tone, whenever she wants to argue or engage me for any reasons, whenever she wants to take her anger out on others, whenever she wants to vent her frustrations, whenever she wants to snap at me/anyone/everyone, whenever she wants to bring other people’s moods down to her level, . . .she’s going to walk away for all of that. . .But since an assortment of that usually happens on a daily basis, that’s going to hurt. A lot. To have my person have to disengage from me and walk away every day probably in the middle of a conversation. . .That is going to be truly painful for the first few weeks of it. But it is most definitely better than it continuing the way it was because I got SO close to actually attempting suicide the other night simply due to her. Nothing else. I mean, everything else was there. . .but it was just sort of. . .there. . .it wasn’t new, it wasn’t bothersome. . .it wasn’t a big deal. . .it was all just there as per usual and were all just big reasons to die that outweighed any reason to stay alive. But I was solely focused on the reasons she was constantly giving me on the daily, whether they were directed at me or not. It was awful. Being someone with borderline personality disorder and not being able to control my life-destructive-level impulses is horrifying for me and everyone around me and everyone who knows me. So for her to support me in this way---the only way she can right now---is exactly what I need. I’m hoping that maybe when my grandparents do actually pass and we all see how I actually react finally and I will actually need her there more than anything (I think. I just don’t know. I may want to be alone and may shut everyone out or may even run away from home and sleep in my car or on the streets for all I know.]. . .maybe she will start responding how I need her to the day after as well? I fully, 200% expect her to respond with total and complete support that day/night. I expect her to watch me for suicidal behaviour, watch me for cutting, stay with me if I need someone to hold me, stay with me if I need someone to talk to me, stay with me if I need someone to just.... watch Friends with me all day or something equally lighthearted, check in on me emotionally (or literally if I’m okay enough to be left alone) every hour or less, to give me lots of hugs, to be EXTREMELY sensitive to everything going on regarding me, to not get any sort of mood or react badly to anything and I 200% expect her to show support and love and radiance and kindness and not any of the normal snippiness and darkness and sarcasm and hatred. I will be absolutely shattered if she tries to bring me down to depressed or suicidal like she normally does. Absolutely shattered and at that point, I’m sure that will be it for me. I 200% expect her to try to keep the mood jovial as much as possible even if she is not feeling okay. I expect her to do everything she can for me. I expect her to get things for me and basically, uh. . .be my maid for the day? HAHA. Okay, no, I don’t expect THAT last part. Just kidding! I do expect her to fetch me water and shove it in my face to remind me to hydrate, though, because I will be dehydrating easily that day and I do not want to end up in the hospital that day because I would surely get admitted to a ward if I were there ad talked. So having bottles of water shoved in my face every once and a while would be extremely helpful so I kinda expect that of her, too. But. . .also, not, because that’s not totally common sense? Whereas the rest of this is? Idk. I just need her to be..... an amazing friend and I need her to cry with me, laugh with me, hug me, hold me, pet me, be there for me, listen to me vent, listen to me ramble about pointless things, not interrupt me, just. . .listen to me go on and on, even if she doesn’t understand me while I’m crying, listen to me tell stories even if I tell them twice because I probably will because I will WANT to tell them twice to make it seem more real that they happened at all,. . .I really need a listener that day, all day. Someone to snuggle and listen to me. I may even need someone to sleep in my bed with me that night. I may even expect her to sleep in my bed with me that night, permitting her boyfriend allows it. Not like we haven’t slept in beds together since they got together. It’s not a big deal. He doesn’t mind at all, despite the fact we are ex’s. He’s a very good boyfriend and knows her well and knows me well and knows our past and trusts us both. I’m his little brother in a sense of a platonic relationship where I am not blood related to him and the girl is my ex girlfriend, but moreso. . .my person, my platonic soul mate, my best friend. We are all friends and I consider them family. I’m 100% sure he would allow her to sleep next to me that night and I’m partially sure he would let her hold me till I fell asleep that night, given the circumstances and the fact that I do not have a partner to do that nor do I have my therapy dog here to do that for me. . .which kills me. I’m missing having both at this hard time in my life. I will be getting Echo soon, but I probably won’t be getting a girlfriend or two any time soon. Especially not before my grandparents pass on...........sigh. So I need SOMEONE to hold me while I fall asleep that night. . .and I hope that my person will do it.

At least. . .this is all in theory how I am going to react. I don’t actually know. It could go the opposite and I could end up being completely silent, getting angry at her and everyone else, and shutting out the world in my room in the front room and just asking everyone to leave me alone for the day and to not get offended when I ignore each and every one of them. Or maybe it’ll be a mixture of both. One first, the other late. Or back and forth, back and forth, mood swings. . .? I just don’t know. I have NO CLUE.

But you’re definitely right. Surrounding myself with loved ones is the most important thing. I want my mom to be apart of this and I want to be able to support her but I probably won’t even get to see her until the funeral. . .if I can even make it.

Okay. . .well. . .now that I’ve exhausted topics to go on LONG tangents about. . .. . I’m gonna stop ranting now. . .I really do think I’ve exhausted my distraction topics. . .

Thank you SO SO SO much for sending this to me. You have no idea how much it meant to me to get this yesterday. Seriously. You are a godsend. I do not know how to thank you. <3

#submission #death

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clonerightsagenda · 7 years

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I did approximately 45 seconds of research for this and most of it was looking at pictures of space

tuesjade prompt: space

"Kanaya, are you busy?"

You consider this. You are, at this very moment, considering your artificially miniature tree (bonsai, Dirk called it) trying to decide if it's growing too fast. There is no topiary for you to style with a chainsaw here, so you've channeled your gardening precision in smaller pursuits. Aradia introduced you to the technique, which she says is an East Alternian tradition. She thought you might like it, and the process looks soothing from a distance. Up close, it involves a lot of neuroticism about angles. Or maybe that’s just how you do it.

Although you've been deep in contemplation of which branches might need pruning, to external observers you've been staring at a tree for fifteen minutes. The contemplation might have veered off course a while ago. Your mind is foggy a lot these days.

Speaking of which, Jade is waiting for a response. "Not exactly," you hazard.

The two of you cross paths often in her greenhouse. You and Calliope are its most frequent visitors. Sticking your hands into soil is a good way to ground yourself in a life where you’re still putting down roots. When she’s busy with a project, Jade will only nod as you walk by, but if she’s passing through she likes to chat. You’d only spoken for a few hours while cooperating on creating the genesis frog, but then you’d gotten along. You’d bonded laughing about the Knights assisting you and reminiscing about childhoods spent gazing at the clouds and longing for company. She could be prickly too – demanding passwords or doubting your intentions. A troll on Pesterchum, even a polite one, wasn’t important enough for her to hide those parts of herself from. It’s a quirk of her character that strangers are the ones who knew her best.

Now, she leans in to admire your work. Her hair is growing out, but it doesn't cover the curve of her neck as she reaches out to tap the pot. "It's so cute!"

You readjust the pot's position. "Could you move your carotid artery out of my line of sight? It's distracting."

She hops back and sits on a greenhouse table reserved for equipment. A watering can topples over with a thunk. "Is the vampire thing still a problem?"

"It's a work in progress." What it is is maddening. Your life has been set to half speed - where once you were the fastest of your group on foot (discounting flash stepping), now you lag behind. Your thoughts lag too, making your conversational pauses even more ponderous while you trudge through mental muck. Rose and Roxy have had it as bad with different symptoms. You and Rose spent the morning slumped over the kitchen table pulling grotesque faces at each other. She'd squeezed your hand and said, "I feel terrible" with exhausted pride. At least you're not going through this alone.

"I'm not going to abandon all restraint and attack you,” you reassure Jade, “but it's like dangling a raw haunch in front of a cholerbear."

“Sorry I’m so delicious!” she says with a laugh, and hunches her shoulders up around her neck. "I'll try not to be too tempting. But I do have something else that might distract you. Do you want to come to outer space?"

You look back at some sprigs of new growth questing too far above the tree's canopy and itch for pruning shears. "I know we share an Aspect, but my interests have always been more terrestrial."

"You won't be disappointed, I promise."

There's a temporary transportalizer plugged into an outlet in Jade's room. They're simple to drop down and activate, thanks to alchemizing them with fenestrated portal technology. Maybe they're too easy to use - Jake left one in the bathroom once, and when Terezi went to take a shower she ended up in an ocean several thousand light years away. She hid a fish in his bed when she got back.

"This seems out of character," you say. Jade usually teleports rather than taking the stairs.

"My range isn't as far these days, and we're going way out."

“Should we tell anyone we’re leaving?”

She shakes her head and steps onto the telepad. Over her shoulder, in the instant before she vanishes, she calls, "It'll only take a few minutes. You'll want to see this. Trust me."

When you rematerialize, your first breath doesn't come. Jade sees your eyes widen, and she catches your arm before you can step back onto the exit telepad. "There's not much of an atmosphere here. Your game powers will kick in in a moment, don't worry." Sure enough, your next breath comes easier. You focus on respiration until you're reassured that you won’t lose consciousness, and then you look around.

The landscape is nothing but dust and rock. It could be the surface of the Veil laboratory meteor that served as your temporary home, except no structures jut out from the surface. The sky isn't the flat black of the furthest ring, but it isn't the starry expanse of normal space either. Instead, a bright haze of gasses swirls and churns.

"A star formed in the middle of this nebula," Jade tells you. "The rest of the disc around it is still taking shape into planets. Either this chunk wandered in from outside and gotten pulled into the star’s orbit, or otherwise its accretion happened way faster than anything else’s. I haven’t looked closely enough at it yet to tell." She scans the sky. "It looks like we're rotated away from what I brought you here to show you. I can handle a local jump on my own. Are you ready?"

You nod, and your atoms fizzle into green fire. Normally after a First Guardian teleport you blink the flashes out of your eyes, but they remain dazzled. There's a rift in the middle of the haze, where a larger object has pulled surrounding dust and gasses into its mass. It's a shifting, molten sphere that you can only look at from the corners of your vision. "What is it?"

The light reflects off Jade's glasses, making them flash bright yellow when she turns to smile at you. "It's a planet being born."

After a few more seconds, you drop your gaze to the rock at your feet, blinking away afterimages. Your eyes burn. "Do you recognize it?" she asks.

"Yes, I'd be able to pick this particular glowing orb out of a lineup."

"Pff, don't be sarcastic. Use your spacey powers!"

You close your eyes with relief and try to reach out with a sense that isn't any of the five. Space usually feels uncomfortably vast, a place that could swallow you up and leave nothing behind. There is infinite creative potential in Space, yes, but what it is most of all is empty. Void. Right now, though, it feels vibrant. Alternia was old, lit by a dying star growing too large for the species dependent on its rays. Everything in this place feels fresh with the birth of stars and planets. They have red hot cores and fission reactions that are only beginning to burn. Recognize it? "I'm not as expert at using them as you are."

She purses her lips. "If it helps, this hunk of rock we're on right now is going to be pulled into orbit and become that planet's moon. In a few billion years some of the gasses floating around will form an atmosphere and rain down to the planet’s surface to create oceans. Eventually it'll be able to support life." She raises her eyebrows like this should mean something to you. When you don’t speak, she says, "It's the planet where we'll raise the mothergrub."

You look back at the white-hot giant in the sky. Postponing the revival of your species is the right decision, you’re sure of that. Attempting to properly raise a mothergrub and then batches of wigglers while not even eight sweeps old and lightheaded from rainbow drinker withdrawal would only end in disaster. Few of you were raised well. None of you want to pass that along. Still, after seeing the matriorb shatter and finally getting it back, it’s hard to know your greatest responsibility is so far out of your sight, even if the screens have already shown you it will be fine. "It's not there now?"

"No, of course not. It won't be for another few billion years."

You hadn't checked all the readouts on the lab equipment. All the numbers for date ranges had been too large to grasp. Universes are vast in many dimensions, time and space. It’s something you’re only just coming to appreciate. "That's a long time to wait."

"John can take you there whenever you'd like. We don't have to move in chronological order. It's kind of like how you're not expected to read through an entire encyclopedia set front to back." She sticks out her tongue. "Although you can."

You’re not sure what an encyclopedia is, but this sounds like a sore subject. "Did you?"

"My grandpa only left me with so much to read, and I wanted to know what was going on with the rest of the world! They were very outdated though. I thought the Cold War was still happening. When a plane came by to do a package drop after I finished the C volume, I hid in case it was a bomber."

"Cold War? Was that a war you only fought in cold climates?"

"Noooo, not exactly. I'll explain it some other time, it was kind of messy." She scuffs her foot through the dust, kicking up a cloud that settles quickly in the thin atmosphere. "We can go back now. I just thought you might like to see it all get started out here. And now you know we can flip to the page where the mothergrub is any time you like."

You turn back to glimpse the planet one more time. Someday, civilization will spring up there. You’ve seen it happen. In theory, you’ll be there to help. That’s the responsibility you were given, and it’s one you’re determined to execute – just not today.

Today, you’re watching a world get born. The energy of creation hums around you and thrums deep in your veins. Who needs someone else’s blood when you can have this?

A few nights after the game, you and Rose had climbed up onto the roof to watch the sun set. It was the first time either of you had seen one in sweeps. You half-expected Rose to say something scathing about how cliched it was as a romantic venue, but she stayed quiet until the last traces of light slipped under the horizon. “I know when I was drunk I said everything was beautiful like some roadside hippie peddling dreamcatchers,” she said. “Enough that it must have lost its meaning. But the world is beautiful sometimes.”

“You’ll make that concession?” you’d teased.

“I’m still at war with the fundamental injustices of reality. But…” She leaned against your shoulder. “We can stop and enjoy the highlights.”

“It’s beautiful,” you say now.

“There are a lot of really cool sights to see out here,” Jade says. “A whole universe full of them! But I know you had a tree to chop up. Are you ready to go home?”

“I think I can just about handle one planet at a time.” You wave farewell to the burning sphere in the sky. “I’ll be back.”

“Before you know it,” Jade agrees, and she takes your hand, and you’re gone.

#tuesjade #and kanaya is officially checked off the list #it's choppy but i have a long list of stuff to do today #and thus must check posting this off to clear room to go Die #kat writes fic #tlcverse #shoutout to ppl who actually read this bullshit despite it obvs not being canon compliant #and in fact being compliant with an au like 3 ppl know about

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anthonybialy · 7 years

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In Charge and Inattentive

The best football fans could make throws some lame NFL quarterback couldn't. It's very easy to spot who's open from the couch. Being president is the same except for lower stakes. The Super Bowl is more essential than tracking whichever countries are blowing up each other. It's no different as president, at least at present. Fox & Friends sets the agenda in these rational times. I always thought Brian Kilmeade deserved more say in how the world goes.

But even those whose entire outlook consists of telling others how they stupidly do everything wrong are shocked by the job's secrets. Forget what’s really in Area 51, as I presume it's nothing but bourbon cases along with a Mad Magazine collection shared by Joe Biden and Dan Quayle in the spirit of bipartisanship. If anything's left hidden in the world, the president knows. Please change his Twitter password.

Some secrets are so big that even Donald Trump won't blurt them out. As with a football coach, his job is to know more than those watching. He can remember what it was like to own a USFL franchise before he ruined the league.

You can tell when our classy president leaves a meeting with an empty gaze that he just learned something unpleasant about our world. Spacing out is a possible cause, but it's not certain. Seeing the grave reports will change anyone's mind. It's especially so for those who can no longer rely on Bill O'Reilly's talking points for information. A guy that charming shouldn't need to harass ladies to score.

There's a reason that nobody sane wants to be Earth's most powerful person despite the perks. The novelty of taking a helicopter to lunch wears off after awhile. Learning just how grave the stakes are is the punishment for the biggest egomaniacs among us. Trust that they know more while not letting them off the hook when they do something patently absurd.

Presidents should occasionally let us know if they're acting ridiculously based on a secret they learned from a general or dork hacker. A wink while looking into the camera would be of great help. It would at least be nice to use as an excuse.

Decent work upsets the right people. Every worthwhile decision is going to tick off a percentage of ingrates. The man actually making them knows poverty or bloodshed could result. You don't have to feel bad for him. But even the right move will make some act like their families have been slaughtered.

I'm going to be the fun boss that lets employees play pinball. Who wants to be mean and yell? Making preposterous promises is easy for those who don't have to achieve them. Find yourself in charge and suddenly have to figure out how to make this profitable. The shock makes coolness evaporate. Guess who's scolding now? Give the biggest office to the guy involved with multiple bankruptcies to see the principle in action. He never seemed that neat from the start.

Filling out complaint cards is campaign behavior. Some of them contain useful criticism, even if it tends to be from people cranky enough to moan that their marinara portion was too small. But that doesn't mean the person who left the two-star Yelp review knows how to ensure the mozzarella sticks are crispy enough. Doing the job is infinitely tougher than pointing out how to do it better, unless movie critics are more interesting than directors.

Consecutive presidents treating bitching as a strategy haven't reaffirmed our faith in sweet government. Their penchant for treating it like the universal solution creates irony which helps us smirk through agony. Those unsuited for the top job nonetheless getting it make the case for properly limiting power. It's not about to happen, but at least conservative theories survive through those who oppose them in practice fumbling so badly.

An utter lack executive experience was the last guy's biggest asset. Barack Obama bluffed his way into ensuring enough gazing suckers refused to call his claptrap. Moaning from a street corner, the Senate, and the campaign trail substituted for feasible planning. By comparison, acting is the one thing Donald Trump shares in common with Ronald Reagan. He's lived the role of a rich guy, as seen by all the glitz and pink marble around him. Letting him be in charge of a hollow golden-painted egg with his name stenciled was as far as he should've gotten.

But he's in the real boss's chair now. Trump has to act like a grownup. Being 70 is nothing more than a shallow indicator. Actual maturity is not guaranteed by a certain number of trips around the Sun. Despite what Alex Jones may claim, that's how our planet actually moves.

Regardless, it was way more fun for the president to note what the last guy with the job did wrong. That was before the confidential briefing phase. Sometimes, a flip-flop results from realizing just how grave the situation is. Knowing is half the battle, which makes it easy to dodge a shallow criticism lobbed from the crowd. Feel free to still mock the president even if he backed down for our own good.

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bants-in-beijing · 7 years

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到啦！

yaaas finally made it to the hostel and set up uni internet account on both phone and laptop 👊achievement unlocked👊

So lots has happened in the past few days :O first moved into 中关新园 and caught up with a friend + her family in Beijing :D They helped me buy tons of stuff at local stores and organise registration at the uni etc. (literally could not have done it alone omg like the bureaucracy involved with the process on its own is already a huge struggle but that alongside trying to sort everything out in a foreign language is just next to impossible). so massive thanks to them for being so patient and helping out 🙏 🙏~

top tip: if u have to buy a clothes rack, make sure you have someone with you at the time so you don’t end up lugging it across campus, nearly leaving it behind in a corner store, and hauling it over a walkway bridge up to the 9th floor of ur hostel all alone :) Pros tho, your arms will get super ripped (unsteady shaking wrists for the next hour may or may not be a minor side effect tho...)

I’m in a double room on the 9th floor of the hostel, so the view is pretty decent. On the other hand tho no idea where my roommate is???? the 服务员 said she went back home to Korea for new year but that she should b back for the start of their classes on Monday .... but like she isn’t here yet?? what’s even weirder tho is that stuff on her side of the room has been moved since i got here 0_0 my friends back in NZ and i have this inside joke that she’s probably a ghost or invisible, which given the situation seemed like a pretty plausible explanation at the time ahaha 😂 but then another friend said that the room mate might’ve arrived back already, grabbed some stuff from our room, and then gone away again to stay at a friend’s place for a few days or something instead, which does make slightly more sense than the invisible theory i s’pose lol. From the books and notes on her side of the room it looks like she’s korean but proficient in English and chinese. So yay that’s a plus! at least communication shouldn’t be too difficult when we finally do meet ahahah.

Yesterday morning all the pre-uni students had a test to see which chinese classes we should be placed into 😱 NOTE: bring a 2B pencil to the placement test or face getting growled at by the supervisor. Mechanical pencils not okay either for some reason... 😒

NGL Personally i thought the test was pretty hard. the actual comprehension of the listening part wasn’t too bad, it was just really confusing because they had heaps of answers that were almost the same save for a few details, or multiple answers that COULD have been correct and it was just a matter of really getting the specific details to figure out which one fit best, which was something completely different to anything i’d ever done in NCEA before so yea saying it was a bit of a challenge would be an understatement lol. To put it in perspective i straight up guessed all the answer for the last few questions in the reading section and wrote an essay with every second character in pinyin for the writing part lmao 😓😬 somehow though despite all that still managed to make it into class 3! But don’t actually know how the classes are ranked in terms of numbering so could still be in the cabbage class after all lmao. Class lists came out in the afternoon on that same day, so it must have been a very quick marking process. Luckily a couple of friends i made are in the same class!!! :D One of those friends is the same age as me, arrived on the same day and likes the same song by this one chinese artist! plus a few other things the same as well~ it was just really nice to find someone with so many things in common this early on, especially after three days of practical isolation in the hostel lol.

Got a chinese sim and data plan, set up a chinese bank account, had the medical exam, and bought text books for class. Still needa set up online + mobile banking though, purchase insurance and get a permanent residence permit. I was actually living off of 4g data on its own since friday because there was no way to connect to the internet without going to the computer department (which was shut over the weekend, of course... ). Also had to sort out a ton of stuff with my passport at the new sun centre and computer centre. Because during the actual application procedure months ago i used my old passport, so some stuff like my internet password and admission notice were using the old passport number while other things in the uni system were already using my new passport number. It got a bit messy to say the least... that’s just one thing to be aware of. You can get unlimited internet for 10 yuan a month which is very, very reasonable! originally it used to be 100yuan a month but apparently so many students complained about how expensive it was that they lowered the price. You need to pay for internet by going to this machine in the 计算中心， inserting your campus card and putting in the last six digits of your passport number (hence where many complications arise.. luckily there was another international student there at the time who helped me out and had the same old/new passport problem when she first came last semester. and as it turns out my new friend has that exact same problem too😂)

ALSO make sure to put money on your campus card if you want to eat at the school canteens. They don’t take cash. But most stores on campus only take cash, not your campus card, so really you just need to have both handy. You can put money on your card at the 中关新园接待中心 or machines on campus (but i haven’t quite figured out how or where to do that yet lol). if there’s no money on your campus card tho it’s not that big of a deal caus you can always just buy dinner from a convenience store on campus or go to the restaurants at 中关新园 and pay using your hostel card (but that seems to be more expensive than campus canteens so probs wouldn’t recommend it...although i haven’t actually eaten there before sooo). A normal amount to put on campus cards is around 100yuan. Any more than that and you’ll probably get laughed at by the receptionist. Plus it just makes sense not to put too much on at any one time in case it gets stolen or lost. Photos to come!!

sorry for the long post lmao too much to catch up on.

#中关新园 #北大 #北京大学 #travel #peking university #global villlage hostel

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timeofthecentury · 3 years

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Internet safety tips - important for everyone

I’m writing this after a friend of mine got bullied and harrassed in real life thanks to a Tumblr post one lunatic didn’t agree with. Don’t want that to be you? Read on...

We are in an age where it’s easier than ever to access information. There’s some simple ways you can help prevent your information from being easy to access too. Just because you haven’t personally encountered the darker sides of the internet, such as harassers, doxxers, fraudsters and groomers, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Trust me that everyone, especially minors, should avoid publicly releasing personal information when possible.

1) Keep your name safe

Why? Because it makes it easy for anyone to find out more info on you. This includes future employers, groomers, someone who wants to steal identities and commit fraud, and horrible people on the internet that want to continue online harassing offline.

- Use a pseudonym instead of your real name. It can literally be anything (though maybe try to avoid using names from languages you don’t understand, or you’ll get in some very awkward situations)

- Don’t use the same email address for everything so your real name and online identity accounts can’t be linked

- Keep separate accounts for your personal life and for interacting with strangers.

2) Keep your age safe

Why? Because there are creepy people out there who want to target minors, and even if you’re not a minor, giving away that additional information can make it easier for fraudsters to use your data. Any additional information can help turn a suspicion about your identity into a known fact.

- Avoid giving your real exact age ESPECIALLY if you’re under 18

- Do not tell anyone your birthday, if you used your real birthday to sign up for a website, hide it from your profile

- If you’ve told someone your birth date, don’t tell them the year too, and vice versa

- If you must give an age, try to refer to it in terms of the range of your age rather than being specific (e.g. I am / am not a minor, I’m in my 30s, etc)

- Making up a fake age may be useful, but be wary:

- if you’re a minor and you pretend to be over 18, you could end up being exposed to adult content. Even if you think you’re very mature, some people are very sneaky in the way they talk and you could wind up in a situation you shouldn’t be in.

- In the opposite situation, if you’re an adult, don’t pretend to be a minor. That just looks like you’re trying to blend in with kids and is seen as very creepy, plus if any actual minors find out, they’re going to feel very uncomfortable. If you’re in a situation where you feel you can’t be in that community unless you’re a minor, then you shouldn’t be there.

- DO NOT fall for “birthday game” posts which get you to “pick a character” or the like based on your birth month, date and year. You’ll just give away your real birthday like that. You can play along in your head or with real life friends, and just not publicly post the result!

3) Keep your address safe

Why? You don’t want randoms turning up at your house, do you? Also, bullies and online trolls could send you in person hate mail, or make fake calls regarding your address to the police. There have been many cases of such doxxing cases leading to horribly adverse effects on not only the day to day lives of the targets, but also their mental health.

- Don’t be more specific than country (or state for US people) when telling internet strangers where you live

- Do those internet strangers REALLY need to know which school / university / dance class / sports team / art lessons / etc you went to? (spoilers: no)

- For the love of everything holy do not tell anyone your actual address

- If you buy from onilne shops under your real name, make sure there’s no way that the shop owner can connect that to your online identity (e.g. using a different email)

4) Keep your password safe

Why? To avoid people logging into your account, and stealing not only the account (and any others that use the same email and password...), but all the data that comes with it. Plus, someone could take over your account and use it to trick your friends and family, or use it in a way that implicates you in crimes.

- DO NOT DO NOT PLEASE DO NOT use the same password for everything

- Use 2 factor authentication when you can

- Don’t store your password in plain text on a file on your computer. If you’ve gotta write it down, do it in real life and NOT on something that can be easily taken by someone else, like a post it

- Have trustworthy antivirus software on your computer and keep it, and your browser, updated, to avoid hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in your system and getting access to your accounts

5) Be careful with your exact nationality / racial heritage

Why? Another piece of identifying information, which can possibly help lead people towards your real life address or identity. You might get creepy questions from those who fetishise race. Plus, there’s been quite a lot of incidents of race based crime, so you’re not going to want to put yourself out as a target. (of course, you can proudly be Black or Asian or European or the like, but you should be aware of the risks if you publicise this information)

- Regardless of what people may tell you, it doesn’t make you a bad person if you “refuse to admit” that you’re white, or Black, or Asian, or so on, so don’t feel pressured into revealing this information.

- What IS wrong, is pretending to be a race that you’re not. So don’t make up a fake racial identity to cover your real one.

6) Be careful with your sexuality and gender when in the LGBTQ+ community

Why? Not every space on the internet is as accepting towards the LGBTQ+ community as you may be used to. Plus, there have been “raids” organised by more extremist sites, where they specifically sign up and “attack” users of websites that have large populations of members that don’t share their views. Homophobic and transphobic attacks have occured as the result of this. So keep this in mind if you choose to share your sexuality, trans/cis status, neopronouns, exact gender and so on.

- As with the last point, though, DON’T make up a fake sexuality and gender to cover your real one, that’s disrespectful to people who actually have those identities and experiences.

7) Be careful with other specifics

- Posting triggers: trolls might intentionally try to trigger you. There’s easy ways to filter out content based on tags on many popular social media sites, so you can do so without actually revealing said tags.

- Posting photos and videos of yourself: trolls might try and bully you based on appearance, including saying things that just aren’t true just to get at you. Also, that’s the number one way to identify you for sure. What would your future boss think about that TikTok challenge? Doing some of the more life-endangering ones is stupid in itself, but also definitely will make employers think less highly of you in future.

- Posting a drawing of yourself: You can still be identified with that, though it’s a bit more difficult if it’s more stylised. Paired with other data such as location and age, however, this suddenly becomes a much more important piece of the puzzle and can be the difference between someone finding your real identity and not. The great thing about drawings, though, is that you can change up your clothing, hairstyles and the like so that it still represents who you are, but not exactly how you appear in real life.

- Saying anything controversial: unfortunately we live in an age where you can get in trouble for something you said in a time when you were more ignorant when you’ve since changed your opinion. So if you’re about to say anything that’s at risk of being controversial, think first and make sure to be properly educated on the topic you’re speaking on. Be sure to avoid falling into echo chambers where everyone agrees with each other - just because people agree doesn’t make them right! Follow the facts, or in cases where there are no set facts, consult all opinions and make your own judgement.

- Just don’t post anything that would give someone incentive / reason to want to hack your account / harass you / doxx you. Unfortunately, even something that seems innocent can set someone off, such as posting a theory about a TV show. However, being careful with what you post can still reduce the chances of being targetted.

In summary:

The internet is more dangerous than you think, so it’s vital that you stay safe. Be careful with any and all personal information. If in doubt, just don’t post it! We can’t undo the trauma my friend has gone through, but we can try to help prevent the same thing from happening to other people. Please spread this information far and wide!

#text #psa #important #technology #fandom #tiktok #please share #textpost #text post #internet #tumblr #please reblog #2021

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ecotone99 · 4 years

Text

[RF] Living in my Universe

Living in My Universe

Religion.

A very controversial part of me.

Religion and Belief. What’s the difference?

Influence of family greatly bares down on your religion and beliefs. Which adds another factor.

Religion, Belief, and People.

My parents constantly argued over the relation between the first and last of the items listed above.

My mother’s family’s influence on her religion was the fact that they were Jewish. Jewish in both religion and people, they said. My mother left them for her father. An atheist. They did not approve. She shed the skin that her family had forced on her. She was not of the Jewish religion. Yet, somehow, she was still Jewish.

“Judaism is not just a religion, but a people.” Was her argument.

My father, an ever so stubborn atheist, disagreed. “You must practice a religion to be considered a people of that religion.” Was his counterargument. Honestly, I always felt as if he was not looking at the whole picture when he made that counterargument. He was an atheist that celebrated Christmas. Just for the presents. Still, though, did that not count as practicing Christianity? Not to him.

So obviously there was flaws in his argument. I sided with my mother until she brought up, slightly overenthusiastically, that “Judaism is inherited through the mother”.

Great job forcing that identity on your child, mother. Just let me add it to the list of the other identities that you have shoved on me like a hat.

Kiwi. I do not care if you and father were born and raised in New Zealand, or that me myself was born there. I was raised in America. I have a bland American accent. Deal with it.

Straight. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, but if you are so presumptuous that you prance around the house talking about how anyone with sexual or romantic orientations that are not the same as yours are just acting out for attention, then you need to stop assuming things about me.

Prodigy. If I do not ace every test and get every extra credit points, am I a disappointment to you and your standards?

I did not know. Maybe I was part of the Jewish people, but I did not need another confusing religion/belief/people on my plate or I would topple.

Religion. Atheist? No. I thought that there was something there. Not nothing, but not God either. I did have a few theories though.

What if life was just a dream. When I die, I would wake up in another universe with completely different physical rules… as a baby. Earth physics just simply would not apply. Baby babble would be English, but of course they do not speak English there. I had had dreams that seemed to last lifetimes, so why not just one lifetime. Would that be impossible?

Or perhaps, imagine a universe where everything anyone believed was true? I was sure that no one had the same exact beliefs as anyone else. One person denied a few choice lines of the Bible, and another had a few extra theories under their belt, but they both were pronounced as Christians. So, everyone lived in their own parallel universe. Each person had everything that they believed in from the depths of their heart in that universe. Everything you knew to be true was true, and you could rest assured that no matter what others said about it, you could stand by your beliefs one hundred percent confident.

I talked a lot about Belief in the second theory. That is because I believed that Religion is simply a type of Belief. All Religions are Beliefs but not all Beliefs are Religions. Or maybe they were. I did not claim to know all the rules of language and things beyond language. Again, this is simply my Belief. The bigger question is, can Beliefs be Theories?

Well, can they?

“Genevieve? You coming down?”

Ah, the mother, the forcer of identities, calling to yank me out of my theories for some dinner.

Thank God.

Or whatever exists up there. Possibly down there. Or everywhere. Nowhere.

What existed to me right now is dinner. I was parched. And starved. But mostly parched.

I was free of contemplation until nightfall, where I would lay in bed for at least half an hour scanning over my theories and creating… no… discovering new ones until fatigue took over.

I could not wait.

Then again, when I went to sleep I would have to go to bed, then stand up out of bed, walk over to my chest of toys, stand on it, and kiss the two photos of my dogs hanging above it. Then I would have to crawl back into bed, let my muscles relax and have my head touch my pillow, before turning on my reading light, crawling back out of bed, and crouching down to check under my bed for who knows what. Then I could go to sleep.

If I did not repeat that routine I would never forgive myself.

***

Rolling over when I awoke, morning sunlight was peeking through my window. Slapping my hand around on the desktop next to me, my hand found my phone. My uncoordinated fingers took five tries to type my password in.

Five. A good number.

I disabled my alarm before it could go off in another few minutes and scare the hell out of me. When I exited to the home screen, I could not help but notice that there was a little red circle signifying that I had mail over my mail application. In bold letters, at the top of my inbox, was the words:

Avrie had edited the document: Presouls

Well, nothing could wake me up by answering Avrie’s questions about my theories about pre-earth life of souls. Typing out a scant: tell u later, did not seem near sufficient enough, but I needed to gorge myself on breakfast carbohydrates before catching the bus. As I rushed to get ready, a response that I should give to Avrie when I had time rushed through my head over and over, revising and perfecting itself.

Presouls are souls that will one day belong to an organism living in this universe, or possibly just on Earth. Extra Terrestrials might exist…

Stop. No distractions.

There are many different universes that a soul goes through before coming to ours… each time it goes through another universe it loses its memory of the previous one…

Ugh. Now if I did not finish this thought I would never forgive myself.

This is why we cannot learn. We can learn, we just have… life-term memory loss, as you could put it. We do not learn from the mistakes we made in previous lifetimes because we cannot remember them--

I ended my train of thought with an embarrassing belch.

Luckily perfectionist mother was not around to hear it.

“Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.” I repeated under my breath, somewhat annoyed. Every hiccup or belch or voice crack I repeated this routine, or else I would never forgive myself.

I barely tolerated myself.

***

On the bus I nervously glanced up from my phone’s cracked surface every now and then to look out the window and make sure that we were still on track for the school building. I needed to make sure that no one had hijacked the bus. When that possibility had entered my mind a few weeks ago, I had introduced this new routine to my schedule.

If I did not do this I would never forgive myself.

Although, I already hate myself for creating these routines in the first place, so there is not much to forgive.

Arriving at the Olmo Schoolhouse for Middle Grade Youth, the school bus jerked to a stop. The school was compact. Standing at the parking lot and gazing out at the schoolhouse, I could cover both halves of the building by putting my little pinky fingers next to each other in front of my face and shutting one eye.

I was doing this action now when Avrie grabbed my elbow with her calloused hands and hoisted my into a standing position. “The bus driver said to get off. Did you not hear him?” It was staged more as an observation than a question. Of course I did not hear him. She knew that. Did I ever pay attention to what the bus driver had to say?

I responded with a shake of my head.

“You think too much.” Avrie had my elbow locked in a tight grasp in her fist as she dragged me off the bus.

True. I tended to live in my thoughts and not pay too much attention to the environment around me. I could not tell you the colors of the walls of my classroom. My excuse to myself about this fact is that I was now in middle grade now and therefore have six different classrooms.

Six. A bad number.

The cafeteria makes seven.

Seven was a good number.

Avrie was now pulling my non responding body through the doorframe of the schoolhouse. The wood of the door frame was painted scarlett, while the door itself was painted a deep shade of carmine. Interesting. I had never noticed the color difference before. Now that I did though, I would see the ugly mistake every time I pass by it.

I did think too much, as Avrie constantly pointed out.

But maybe that was to my own benefit, as shown in this situation.

“Come on, Gen! Are you a corpse or a person?” Avrie puffed.

“Corpses cannot think. And apparently I think too much.”

“You do. You came up with that counterargument, out of all the ones in the world.”

“What about other worlds?” I asked.

“You are just proving my point, you realize.”

“I know.” But if I did not say that I would never forgive myself.

Moments passed between us, as if Avrie expected me to say more. I used this time allotted to me to think some more.

Avrie was my friend.

She was one of my many friends. When you only have fifty or so students in a grade you tend to be stuck in the same classes with mostly everyone. You get to know people. But Avrie was the only person who had ever called me her friend to my face.

I stress about things until I get confirmation.

“You’re thinking again!” Avrie wiggled her pointer finger in what she called the no-no wave. “Genie is a bad girl!” She said in a sing-songy voice. She suddenly gasped dramatically, pointing a shaking finger at me. “Genie…” She drew out. She then took out a cylindrical pencil case out of her book bag and mimicked rubbing it with the palm of her hand. “Genie…” She repeated. Her eyes lit up. “You should be a genie for Halloween!”

And you should be a parrot, cause you have repeated that joke about a billion times. That's hyperbole, of course. I groaned. Now I needed to say that aloud. I do not know why I need to voice some thoughts and not others, but I’m not the one who chooses.

Who does, then…

Ugh. Not more religion talk.

“And you should be a parrot, cause you have repeated that joke about a billion times.” And I just repeated that line twice as well. Once in my head, and once aloud. I am such a hypocrite.

I winced. “That's hyperbole, of course.” I muttered softly under my breath, not meant for anyone else’s ears. I felt compelled to add that last part. If I did not, I would never forgive myself.

Then I dived back into my thoughts. I was done with conversation for the time being.

***

As I walk into my first period classroom and see the people standing about it, all I could think of was feelings.

I hated feelings.

I did not have strong feelings for anyone in this room, but just people in general left me considering my sexual and romantic orientation.

I shoved the thoughts into the back of my mind. They were not something I needed to sort out and rethink again right now.

“Diversity.” The teacher started.

Judaism.

Atheist.

Religion.

Beliefs.

Nope. Nope. Nope. I decided to delve into fantasy world from one of my favorite book series’ and fanfic myself into it. It was one of my favorite escape techniques.

“Genna? Would you like to answer the question?” The teacher intrudes into my fantasy world.

Genevieve. Gen. Genie. Genna. Pick one. Please. I beg you.

“Genna? Do you understand what is going on?”

Just call me Genny. Humor me. I dare you.

“Genna? Were you listening to anything we were just talking about.

I giggled. “Uhhh…” A few girls in the back smirked. I smirked back. They were friendly smirks. I thought they were, at least.

“You think too much.” Avrie was constantly saying.

I try. I respond to her in my head.

Say it… My mind whispered.

Beat it. I said to my mind.

If you do not say it you will never forgive yourself! My mind sounded just like Avrie’s sing-songy teasing voice. My mind was teasing me. I was crazy.

“You are really making me mad with you inattention, Genna.” The teacher sounded angry.

Say it! My voice mimicked the teacher’s sharp tone.

“I try!” I blurt out, pressured by both conversations, one external and one internal.

The girls behind me burst into a fit of laughter.

I am tempted to join them. Maybe it will burn away a bit of my embarrassment. I decided not to. It definitely would not make the expression the teacher was flashing at me any less frightening.

“Are you trying to get into trouble?” The teacher growled.

It was not like I could dig myself any deeper into the hole. “If I want to get into trouble, then you should…” not get me in trouble. I wave my hands as emphasis. Even I cringe at my words. Was reverse psychology really the best card that I could play?

“Get you into more trouble?” The teacher finished my sentence for me.

“That was not what I was implying.”

I left that class with a slip to give to my parents and a big teacher smackdown. Tears from the embarrassing class were still hot on my face.

Such fatal mistakes I can make in the heat of a debate.

Someone beside me yawned. The chain reaction caused me to yawn.

“Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.” I mumbled miserably.

If I did not say that I would never forgive myself.

***

One. Two. Three. I was counting my steps as I was reaching my final classroom of the day. I had started, so now I could not stop or I would never forgive myself. Four. Five. Six. One, three, and five are good numbers. Four and six are not.

List of good numbers: zero, one, three, five, seven, ten, twelve, thirteen, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, fifty, seventy-three, seventy-five, eighty-five, one hundred. And those are just the ones under one hundred. And counting one hundred, of course. Those are just the ones one hundred and under.

List of bad numbers: Anything in between the good ones. The numbers under the good ones… well, if they are the opposite of a good one then they are good and if they are an opposite of a bad one then they are bad.

I have reached my classroom.

And I had not continued to count my steps, but had instead got absorbed into good and bad numbers.

So I need to go back and start over. Walking back to the spot where I had started counting, I did not count my steps. On the way back I did. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. In the end it takes a total of sixteen steps. Sixteen is not a good number. I take two steps in place to make eighteen. Sixteen plus two is eighteen. Funny, the classroom that I had so much trouble getting into was actually the math classroom.

A giggle escaped my lips. Math. I did math outside the math classroom. Hilarious.

I attracted a few odd looks. I gave them odd looks back. It was not that hard because I am odd. Weird. Strange. There were a lot of words for ‘odd’. It was probably odd that I was thinking about this, anyway. I was odd.

Five more words for odd: Genevieve. Gen. Genie. Genna. Genny.

Five is a good number.

***

“Genevieve? You coming down?”

Ah, yes. Dinner.

My mother says that same thing every night. I guess I am not the only one who has habits. Are hers on purpose, forced, or just instinctual?

What are mine? They seem forced, but maybe that is just a part of me. Maybe they are just part of my instinct. Or maybe, deep down, I need them to stay alive and well.

If that were so, would it be considered instinct or purposeful?

Another question to add to the queue. Sorry, new question but you have to go to spot seventy-three. There are so many questions ahead of you that came first that I still need to answer.

Seventy-three. A good number.

“Genevieve?” My mother shouted, sounded a bit pissed off. “You coming down?”

“I’m coming!” I yelled back, infuriated. I was just getting ready to come up. By getting ready I meant finishing a very important thought. All of my thoughts were important, though. Did that mean that none of them were, and that I should not dwell too much on any of them?

Question queue. Number seventy-four.

Seventy-four is a bad number.

A took away one from the beginning, claiming it as resolved. It was not like I remember most of my questions. Good. Back to seventy-three. I have been stuck on seventy-three for ages, even though the next good number is just two questions away.

But I am impatient.

“Genevieve? Dinner!” My mother breaks from her line, and improvises with underlying anger. Well, the anger was not really underlying. At least it was not like school were there was no one to laugh at me. I was an only child. Sometimes it is good and sometimes it is bad.

Good and bad. My two favorite words. Black and white. Simple categories. No extra thinking required.

Unlike most everything else.

“Genevieve? Get your *ss up here, now!”

Uh-oh. Cussing. That was not good.

I decide to get my *ss up there. Sometimes listening to your common sense is better than thinking.

***

I was lying in bed for around thirty minutes when I remember to kiss the photographs of my euthanized dogs, and to check under my bed.

If I did not do that, I would never forgive myself.

When I dragged myself back into bed, for once was not fanficing myself into a story until I fell asleep. I was not even fathoming about unfathomable things. My mind was blank. Until I realized that my mind was blank, and then all I could think about was: My mind is blank. My mind is blank. My mind is blank. My mind is blank.

Four. A bad number

I needed to repeat this one hundred times.

If I did not, I would never forgive myself.

***

This was my punishment for blowing up at the teacher yesterday.

A counselor appointment.

I feel like a prisoner at a Home School being forced to go to counseling sessions to “make up” for my bad behavior. Yet, what I had done would never really be forgiven. So, it was all useless. Yes, that was how I felt now. I felt like I was sitting on a hard stool and locked in a room with a glass wall between me and the person that I was talking to. I felt like this because even though the chair I was sitting on was coushy, my butt sank down so low into it that it touched the metal bars that acted as support for the chair. Though the counselor was supposed to make you feel like you could open up to them in whatever way you wanted, this steel-faced woman sitting across from me had a face more guarded than my father when my mother asked him how work was going.

“So.” The counselor started, words clipped, like she wanted to get her appointment with a delinquent over with so she could move on to helping little kids with their friendship conflicts. “It says here,” She said, consulting a folder on her desk. “that you were not listening in class, and talked back to your teacher in a very snarky way when she reprimanded you.”

“My teacher used the word ‘snarky’? Wow. That’s weird.” Weird. Odd. Like me.

“That seems like the exact type of behavior that you were sent here for. So that we could correct that type of behavior.”

“Speaking what’s on my mind could get me imprisoned?” That would be a big problem for me. Sh*t, now I felt compelled to say that. Like always. At the worst possible time. Like always. My brain is my enemy. Like always. It nagged me like a toddler. Like always.

“That would be a big problem for me.” I gave in. Like always. If I did not, I would never forgive myself. I decided to follow up on the thought. The thought that was now voiced. “Whatever happened to not lying? What about to free speech in America?” Who am I kidding. When could I expect fairness out of this world?”

“This is concerning your academics, not your rights--”

“My what? Oh right, my rights. My human rights, that can apparently be taken away like a child’s television privileges.” I snapped.

“That temper is the exact reason you are in this situation in the first place.”

“That kind, empathizing personality is why you got this counseling position in the first place. Oh, wait, you don’t have a kind, empathizing personality. My mistake.”

A dangerous fire lit itself in the steel-faced woman’s eyes. I glared right back at her.

She relented first and slammed the folder on her desk shut. “You may go now, Miss Genevieve.”

“Call me Genny. I dare you.”

I felt satisfied at the confused look on her face as I pushed open the door with all my might, and left it swinging so it hit the wall. I hoped that it left a dent.

I grinned as I thought, If it doesn’t, then I will never forgive myself.

\***

I was hiding out in my room from my mother, who was probably combing the house for me this very moment, content on cornering me and giving me a stern talking-to about my behavior. So I had barricaded myself behind a wall of pillows stuffed between the floor and my bed. Yes, I was under the bed.

Because guilt was worming around in my stomach (I am a very weak person), I made the choice to retain whatever was left of my prized qualities and did my homework.

Typing out an essay on my computer, I picked the font size that would make my essay seem longer than it really was, but would not make my text so big that the teacher would get suspicious of it. The choices I had were mixes of good and bad numbers. 8. Bad; Nine. Bad; Ten. Good; Twelve. Good; Fourteen. Bad; Eighteen. Good; Twenty-four. Good; Thirty. Good; Thirty-six. Bad; Forty-eight. Bad; Sixty. Bad; Seventy-two. Bad; Ninety-six. Bad.

Eight ‘bad’s and five ‘good’s. It fits that the sum of the ‘bad’s was a bad number and the sum of the ‘good’s was a good number.

Sometimes life turns out well.

“Genevieve?” My room’s door squeaks open. My mother kicks the pillows guarding me from her view aside. “Genevieve, what is the meaning of this phone call that I got from school?”

Sometimes life turns out terrible.

***

Weekend mornings were the best.

Avrie mornings were not.

I woke up on Saturday, and I got all ready for school, before realizing that there was no school today. I changed. Weekends were gifts from God. If there was a god. Or anything.

I was still contemplating this when my doorbell rang.

Avrie was on my doorstep. “Wassup, Genie!” She shoved me aside and stepped into my house.

“It is of kind courtesy to ask before crossing the threshold of someone else’s private property.” I chastise.

“It is of kind courtesy to not criticize my non-courtesy-ful life.” She strutted over to my refrigerator with a fake air of importance, much to my annoyance.

“Why are you here so early?” I asked.

Avrie frowned. “It’s almost lunch.”

Wow. I spent a long time contemplating religion.

“I do not remember inviting you over.”

Avrie shrugged. “I’m your best friend. You do not need to.” Then she turns to me with a hurt expression. “I am your best friend, right?”

“If you stopped talking and gave me time to think, maybe you would be.”

Avrie sniffed, and looked genuinely hurt. “Well then, I guess I’ll just go.” She said sincerely. Despite her straight face, I still expected her to turn around before she walked out the door. She did not even look back. Maybe I could not read her as well as I thought I could. I never even realized that Avrie could be so emotional. Other people are weird. I have three core emotions. Anger, that sparks in the light of retaliation. Embarrassment, that usually takes the spotlight after a burst of anger. And a cool, robotic front, completely devoid of emotion.

I was a robot right now. Unable to gauge human emotions and their reasons for acting on them. Yet, struggling to understand. No tears threatened to blur my vision, but I was calculating the ways that I could make it better between us when school resumed on Monday.

Or I could text her, I guess.

***

GenieInABottle joined conversation 11:41 AM

GenieInABottle: Avrie? You there? I would like to tell you that I am sorry.

GenieInABottle: Avrie.

GenieInABottle: Please answer.

GenieInABottle: Okay, bye.

GenieInABottle left conversation 11:47 AM

\***

Avrietheaardvark joined conversation 1:31 PM

Avrietheaardvark: u would like to tell me that you were sorry but do u rly mean it? would you actually apologize instead of just telling me that you would like to?

Avrietheaardvark: u just stood there like a statue as i walked away. r u robot or human?

GenieInABottle joined conversation 1:35 PM

GenieInABottle: I do not rightly know.

Avrietheaardvark: do u rightly know if u r my friend or not?

GenieInABottle: I do not seem to know enough about you to be your best friend, but if you would just tell me then we could be.

Avrietheaardvark: so u do rightly know then. u rightly know that u r not.

Avrietheaardvark: so i guess i am not either.

Avrietheaardvark: goodbye Genevieve.

Avrietheaardvark left conversation 1:44 PM

GenieInABottle: Goodbye, Avrie.

GenieInABottle left conversation 1:46 PM

\***

I am a bomb.

I blow up at teachers

I blow up at counselors.

I blow up at friends.

If they were even friends.

What is my fuse? Is it my hair? My short, brown locks that stop just below my ears? That would be a short fuse. It fits.

My teacher’s fault for having a box of scissors in her room. I take a pair of especially sharp ones with long blades and go into the bathroom. This could go two ways. With no fuse, I could possibly not be able to blow up anymore.

Or I would blow up immediately, at everything, with no way to bottle it up.

Into the bathroom I went.

I tentatively took a few strands of hair and carefully placed them in between the blades of the scissors. I closed my eyes, my hand clamped so tightly around the scissors that I was sure that my knuckles were turning white.

Snip.

I opened my eyes soon after, and watched as a few bits of hair, each a few millimeters long, drifted to the floor like feathers. Cringing, I trotted back into the classroom, eyes burning at my inability to be brave.

Yet, in my dark mind, there was only one thought I could find comfort in. A thought that usually is the brush that paints my mind the dark shade that it was the bigger part of the time today. And yesterday. And the better part of Saturday as well. Ever since the dramatic moment I had had with Avrie.

The thought was simple. My mind was used to repeating it several times a day, over and over again.

I would have never forgiven myself if I had done that.

***

Forgiving people is a dizzying process, but forgiving yourself for not forgiving a person is even more dizzying.

Especially if you go around in circles like that.

Sure, I did not have much control over my thoughts. Probably, definitely, a lot less than most people.

Sure, I viewed myself as crazy sometimes. Most of the time.

Sure, life would be a lot less confusing if it did not exist.

But if I could not forgive myself for my falling out with Avrie, and my very world has not imploded yet…

Maybe I could go without avoiding the unforgiving side of my brain.

Though I highly doubted it, it could work.

And I have not died yet.

***

Living in my universe

Means the possibility of living in many

Living in my universe

Means living with my brain

Living in my universe

Means living with my troubles

Living in my universe

Means liking triples but hating doubles

Living in my universe

Means saying thoughts aloud

Living in my universe

Means letting your mind run the show

Living in my universe

Means kissing dead loves

Living in my universe

Means thinking of what you can love

Living in my universe

Means being constantly worried

Living in my universe

Means fueling stupid worries

Living in my universe

Means asking lots of questions

Living in my universe

Means questioning lots of facts

Living in my universe

Means contemplating things

Living in my universe

Means learning to cope with stuff

Living in my universe

Means dealing with best friends

Living in my universe

Means the pain of meeting a friendship’s end

Living in my universe

Is full of annoyance and thoughts

Living in my universe

Means accepting unforgiveness as a given

While living in my universe

For that is a must

Nine stanzas. A bad number

Would have been better if it had been ten

But nine stanzas I could live with.

I could survive, I could live, in my own universe.

Because if I cannot, then who can?

It is, after all, my own universe.

***

End Note: Though it may seem confusing, Genevieve never truly gets her annoying thoughts to go away. These mindly intruders will stay with her forever. This is not a story about getting rid of your problems, but rather, learning to cope with them.

***

Epilogue

Avrie was hidden in the shadows of the hallway, concealed from view. She scanned each student as the passed by her.

Then, Avrie saw her. Genevieve was bright eyed, and had a small uneven bit of hair hanging above her shoulder. Her walk was confident. She was focused. Her thoughts did not seem to wander that much.

Avrie did not care how much Genevieve claimed she did not know Avrie. Avrie would always know Genevieve better than her little sibling.

“Genie?” Avrie whispered impulsively. She tried to take it back. No, she would not apologize to Genevieve.

Genevieve turned, searching for the origin of Avrie’s voice. Her eyes clamped on Avrie’s form, still half hidden in the shadows, and Avrie saw hope flash through Genevieve’s body, her form jolting like it was struck by lightning before straightening and standing tall.

“Avrie!” Genevieve allowed herself a small smile, that slowly morphed into something larger and more heartfelt.

Avrie grabbed Genevieve’s wrist and pulled her into a small, secluded corner.

“I’m sorry!” They both said at the same time. Then they both covered their mouths and laughed. Genevieve with her soft tinkle, and Avrie with her hearty chortle.

“Well, that was cliché.” Genevieve giggled.

“Very.” Avrie agreed.

“What do you have to be sorry about.”

“I just thought maybe I was not giving you a fair chance. I mean, I have jokingly walked out on you plenty of times before.”

“I guess.” Genevieve relented. “But I do have more to be sorry about than you do.”

“You got that right.” Avrie agreed,

“Hey!” Genevieve pushed Avrie’s shoulder playfully. “You’ll have a lot more to be sorry about once you hear my theory about colors.”

Avrie was overjoyed to have her thoughtful friend back. “Bring it on, Genie.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I love your universe.”

Genevieve glanced up at Avrie in surprise, her expression tense and guarded, before she relaxed, and snorted softly, her lips curling into a smile. “Yeah. I love my universe, too.”

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

Text

Website Security Guide

Your website is at risk.

I’m not saying this to try and scare you, but that’s the reality of the world we live in. More than 50,000 websites get hacked each day.

You can’t have the “it won’t happen to me” mentality. I encounter businesses all the time who feel this way. They think hackers have bigger fish to fry and don’t have any reason to target their website. That’s simply not the case. In fact, 43% of cyber crimes are against small businesses.

Roughly 54% of companies worldwide say they have experienced at least one attack within the last year. Just 38% of businesses say they’re prepared to handle cyber attacks.

I don’t have a magic crystal ball or some way to see into the future, but my gut tells me that cyber criminals aren’t going to just wake up one day and decide to stop hacking websites. So you need to take steps to improve your website security.

That’s what inspired me to write this guide. I’ll show you what needs to be done to secure your website today, in 2019.

Common website security threats

There isn’t just one way that websites get attacked. So before we proceed, I want to give you a brief overview of some of the most common threats to your website security. These are the things that you’ll want to avoid and be prepared for when taking security measures.

Spam

Usually, we perceive spam as something annoying. We all get spam emails delivered to our inbox or see the occasional spam popup when we’re browsing online.

However, sometimes spam is more malicious. Spam in the form of comments is extremely common on websites. Bots can hammer the comments section of your website with links to another site as an attempt to build backlinks.

While those types of comments are annoying and don’t look good on your website, they aren’t always damaging. But, some of those links might contain malware, which can harm your website visitors if they click on them.

Furthermore, Google’s crawlers can often detect malicious URLs and penalize your website for hosting spam. This will crush your SEO ranking.

Viruses and malware

For those of you who don’t know, malware stands for “malicious software.” So malware and viruses are essentially the same thing. Malware is arguably the biggest threat to your website. As much as 230,000 malware samples are created each day.

According to Statista, these are the most common types of malware used in cyber attacks across the world:

As you can see, malware comes in all different shapes and sizes. That’s why it’s such a big threat to your website.

These types of viruses are often used to access private data or use server resources. Criminals also use malware to make money with ads or affiliate links by hacking your website permissions.

With malware, both you and your website visitors are at risk. Someone visiting your site could click a link that downloads a malicious file onto their computer. It’s your job to keep your website secure and prevent that from happening.

WHOIS domain registration

Buying a domain name is like buying a house. The company that sells the house must know who they’re selling to and be able to contact them. This becomes public record.

The same goes for buying a website. Depending on the country you’re in, you’ll be required to release some information about yourself that’s recorded on WHOIS data. Outside of your personal information, this also contains information about your URL nameservers.

Hackers can use this information to narrow down the location of the server that you’re using. They can use this as a gateway to access your web server.

DDoS attacks

DDoS attacks deny access to users trying to visit a specific website. Basically, the hacker uses spoof IP addresses to overload servers with traffic. This essentially takes the website offline.

Now the host needs to scramble to get the server back up and running as fast as possible, which leaves the server vulnerable for malware.

Search engine blacklists

Technically, this isn’t a security threat. However, if your website isn’t properly secured, it can impact your SEO rankings.

According to a recent study, 74% of hacked websites were attacked for SEO reasons.

I briefly mentioned this earlier when we were discussing spam comments. If search engines detect malicious content on your website, your SEO ranking will suffer.

If lots of users are reporting your site as spam or unsafe, you could be added to a search engine blacklist. Once you’re on that list, it’s extremely difficult to get off.

How to keep your website safe

Now that you’re familiar with some of the most common security threats, it’s time to prevent them from happening.

You can’t just assume that your website is secure. If you haven’t done anything to beef up the security, it’s probably vulnerable for attacks. These are the steps you need to take to improve your website security in 2019.

Use HTTPS protocol

If your website isn’t currently using HTTPS protocol, it needs to jump to the top of your priority list. This essentially tells your website visitors that they’re interacting with the proper server and nothing else can alter or intercept the content they’re viewing.

Without HTTPS a hacker can change information on the page to gather personal information from your site visitors. For example, they could steal login information and passwords from users.

HTTPS protocol will also improve your search ranking. Google is rewarding websites that use this security measure.

This is comforting to people who visit your website as well. When they visit your site, they’ll see this next to the URL:

It’s secure and trustworthy. Now, compare it to a site that’s not using HTTPS protocol. The URL in the web browser will look like this:

Do you feel safe when you’re browsing on a website and see this? I don’t.

Furthermore, you can improve this security measure even more by combining your HTTPS with an SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate. This is required for ecommerce websites since users are submitting sensitive information like credit card numbers, names, and addresses.

While SSL certificates don’t necessarily prevent an attack or distribution of malware, it encrypts the communication between the server and the user’s web browser. Even if you’re not selling anything on your website, I strongly recommend using HTTPS protocol and adding an SSL certificate to add security.

Update your software

Any software you’re using on your website needs to be kept up to date. You need to update WordPress software, plugins, CMS, and anything else that requires an update.

Why?

In addition to fixing bugs or glitches, software updates typically come with security improvements. No software is perfect. Hackers will always be looking for ways to take advantage of their vulnerabilities.

Lots of cyber attacks are automated. Criminals use bots to just scan websites that are vulnerable. So, if you’re not staying up to date on the latest software versions, it will be easy for hackers to identify your site before you can do anything about it.

Choose a safe web hosting plan

In theory, if your web hosting provider has security on its servers, you’ll benefit from those same levels of protection. However, that’s not always the case.

Going with a shared hosting plan might be appealing because of the price, but it’s not the most secure choice you can make. As the name implies, you’re sharing servers with other websites if you choose this type of hosting plan.

If one of those other sites gets attacked, a hacker can gain access to the server that you’re using as well. I’m not trying to steer you away from a shared hosting plan, but if you want to boost your website security, you’ll be better off with another option.

Check out my list of the best web hosting services, which can help guide you in the right direction.

Change your password

Change your password! I can’t stress this enough.

All too often I speak to people who have the same password for everything they own, and it’s something they’ve been using since they were in college ten years ago.

Here’s the problem. Let’s say you’re a foodie. So you have an account with a popular restaurant review website that requires your email address and password to write reviews. If that platform gets compromised, hackers have access to your username and password. If they find out you own a certain website, they can try that same password and login to your administrative settings.

Shockingly, 25% of passwords can be hacked in just three seconds.

The information from this graph was obtained using an open source software called John the Ripper. Anyone can use this tool to crack passwords.

If software like this can figure out 53% of passwords in just two hours, I can promise you that the best hackers are cracking passwords even faster.

That’s why you need to constantly update your password. You can use a password manager like 1Password to help you generate long passwords with special characters that are nearly impossible to solve.

Furthermore, you should pick a web host that’s using two-factor authentication. This will add an extra layer of security for password protection. If your web host doesn’t offer this, there are other ways for you to enable it on your own using apps or third parties.

Secure your personal computer

Don’t allow your own devices to threaten your website.

There is malware out there injects malicious files into websites by stealing FTP logins. It’s easier for a hacker to accomplish this if they target your personal computer as a gateway into your website. So make sure your computer has antivirus software. Surprised that antivirus software is still a thing — it’s especially important if you use a PC or are downloading files online. You might unintentionally install malware onto your machine without knowing it.

The last thing you want is to be careless while you’re browsing online and have that mistake end up hurting your own website. Scan your machine on a regular basis.

Use tools to monitor your security

You can’t manually prevent attacks on your website. Instead, look for online tools and resources that will monitor your site’s security for you. I highly recommend looking at my guide on the best WordPress security plugins.

The plugins on this list add a firewall to your website while simultaneously fighting malware, spam, and other threats in real time. You can run security audits that will highlight your vulnerabilities so you can take preventative measures to stop an attack before it happens.

Limit user access

Don’t blame yourself, but 95% of cyber security attacks are the result of human error.

The best way to prevent this is to limit the number of humans who can make an error. Not every employee of your business should have access to your website.

If you’re hiring an outside consultant, designer, or guest blogger, don’t automatically give those people access to change settings on your website. Implement the principle of least privilege, also known as the principle of least authority or minimal privilege.

Let’s say you assign a project to someone that requires a certain level of access to your website. By applying this principle, you only give them access for the time it takes them to complete the task. Once complete, the person goes back to their regular access abilities.

Make sure each user has their own login credentials. If multiple people are sharing a username and password, it doesn’t give them any accountability. Your team is much more likely to be careful with sensitive information if an error or change can be traced back to them.

Backup your website

When it comes to securing your website, you should always prepare for the worst. Obviously, you never want to be in a situation where your website is compromised. But in the event that something goes wrong, your life will be much easier if your content is completely backed up.

So try using a backup plugin, like BackupBuddy, to make sure you don’t lose anything on your website as the result of an attack.

BackupBuddy is one of the five best WordPress backup plugins that I reviewed for this year. So check out the full list to see which option is best for your situation.

Some of these backup plugins also come with built-in security measures as well, which can help you prevent an attack.

Adjust your default CMS settings

As I said before, so many attacks these days are automated. Hackers program bots to find sites with default settings. This way they can target a wider range of websites and gain access using the same type of malware or virus. Don’t make it so easy on them.

Once you install your CMS, make sure you change some of the default settings:

Comments settings

User controls

Visibility of information

File permissions

These are all examples of some of the settings that you can change quickly and right away.

Restrict file uploads

Letting website visitors upload files to your website can be risky. That’s because any file could potentially contain a script that exploits vulnerabilities on your website when it’s executed on the server.

In some instances, the nature of your website might require file uploads. For example, you may want users to add photos of your products when they’re writing a review. In this case, you should still treat all uploads as a potential threat.

You could also set it up so that any files that get uploaded are stored in a folder or database in another location. You can create a script that will fetch those files from a private and remote location to deliver them to a browser.

This will require some coding and is a bit complex to set up, so I won’t go into too much detail on this right now. The simple solution is to avoid file uploads altogether, or at least restrict the types of files that can be uploaded to your site.

Conclusion

Website security needs to be one of your top priorities.

If you haven’t taken any steps to secure your website, you’re currently at risk while you’re reading this.

It’s nearly impossible for any website to be 100% safe and secure — hackers are always going to find new ways to attack websites and steal information. But you can make this difficult on them by taking the security measures that I’ve outlined above.

At the end of the day, if cyber criminals are having a tough time hacking a website, they’ll just move on to other sites that haven’t implemented the website security tactics that we talked about. You don’t want your website on that list.

http://www.quicksprout.com/website-security/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/03/website-security-guide.html

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medproish · 6 years

Link

Photo: Lea Kissner

Lea Kissner is back at her alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, armed with a crisp gray blazer, a slide deck, and a laptop with a ‘My Other Car Is A Pynchon Novel’ sticker on it. Since graduating in 2002, she’s earned a PhD at Carnegie Melon in cryptography and worked her way up at Google, where she manages user privacy and tries to keep things from breaking. She’s here to tell a hall of computer science students how she did it—and also how to create privacy-protective systems at a scale that you won’t find outside a handful of massive tech companies.

When privacy breaks down at a tech company, especially one the size of Google, it inevitably leads to countless headlines and congressional hearings. The word “Equifax” or “Yahoo” is more synonymous today with hacking than with any service either company offered. If its exploitation by Russian intelligence was not enough, Facebook’s reputation has been battered over the past month as its years-long negligence to protect user data from Cambridge Analytica has been revealed.

It’s a fate that Google, of course, would very much like to avoid. And making sure that Google products protect the privacy of users around the world—and that Google accounts for individual users’ varying definitions of privacy—is Kissner’s job.

Kissner’s responsibilities include making sure that Google’s infrastructure behaves the way it’s supposed to, transmitting user data securely and not leaving bits of data hanging around in the wrong spots. If someone sends an email, it needs to not leak in transit. If that person deletes the email, it has to actually go away without leaving a residual copy on a maintenance server. Another part of the job is making sure Google’s products behave the way users expect them to. This also involves considering how someone with malicious intent might take advantage of a Google product and patching up those holes before they’re exploited.

Kissner leads a team of 90 employees called NightWatch, which reviews almost all of the products that Google launches for potential privacy flaws. Sometimes, products just need a bit of work to pass muster—to meet the standard of what a former colleague of Kissner’s, Yonatan Zunger, calls “respectful computing.”

The fundamental challenge for a team like NightWatch, Zunger says, is making computing systems that people feel comfortable using. “They don’t feel safe, they don’t feel trust. They look at companies and they don’t know: Does this company have my best interests at heart at all? If you don’t deeply and intuitively understand the company’s business model, you can assume the worst,” Zunger explains.

Being respectful of a user can be as simple as giving her a way to respond to a product that bothers her, whether its an ad for a chicken recipe that’s not relevant for her because she’s a vegetarian or an abusive message that she wants to report. Sometimes, products have privacy failings at their core and they don’t get NightWatch’s signoff—and so they don’t launch.

“I’ve had a fair number of teams come out of that and they say, ‘We need to find a new project now because we need to cancel our project,’” Kissner tells me. “I heard a rumor that I’m scary when I go into these conversations, which I find very surprising because I don’t think I’m a very scary person.”

Kissner has even had to hit the kill switch on her own projects. She recently tried to obscure some data (which exact data she won’t say; Google is cagey about going into detail on its sidelined ventures) using cryptography, so that none of it would be visible to Google upon upload. She was looking forward to whiteboarding it out for Google’s lawyers—“Trying to explain crypto to lawyers is always exciting”—but it turned out that making the feature work would require more spare computing power than Google has in all of its data centers, combined.

“I’m keeping an eye on the crypto conferences in case something comes up that we can use,” Kissner says sadly. “I hope somebody else figures out how to solve a problem if I can’t solve it. One of the advantages to working at Google is that you have choices that would just be considered completely out of the question anywhere else. Even so, I can’t always get the answer right.”

Kissner is here at UC Berkeley to pitch paranoia—paranoia as a career asset, a life skill, a North Star. “There are a number of ways system failure can get really really tricky. Paranoia is awesome because then you can find them!” she cheerfully declares.

It turns out that implementing privacy at scale isn’t very captivating, at least not to this group of students gathered in a lecture hall after dark. I can see several of them chatting with each other on Facebook Messenger, one playing online chess, and another livestreaming a sports game. The problem with getting students—or anyone, really—excited about privacy at scale is that, when everything’s working as it should, it’s not exactly thrilling.

“Security is a basically adversarial thing. You are studying failures deliberately introduced by hostile actors. Your job is paranoia—literally, that is your job,” Zunger tells me.

The thing is, Kissner is not a naturally paranoid person. Kissner, who started programming in elementary school by mocking up elaborate password schemes in Basic on her dad’s calculator, spent her childhood as an amicable, trusting geek. She played a lot of mahjong and was part of her school’s band and worked on a Mars rover the summer after graduating from high school.

Kissner gave up her early fascination with robots to study cryptography instead, which she jokes was a decision owed to both the toxicity of solder fumes and a fascination with difficult math. “I have a lot of feelings for combinatorics and for group theory and for number theory—that stuff is beautiful,” she says, then corrects herself. “Sorry, number theory is cute. Abstract algebra is beautiful.”

I laugh, but she’s not kidding. “I’m serious!” she exclaims. “Abstract algebra is very, very, very elegant. Number theory, it’s just like all these cute things fall out when you do abstract algebra with actual numbers.”

Getting a read on people and gauging their trustworthiness was a skill Kissner learned later in life, she says—an uncomfortable experience, but one she immediately applied back into her work. “I am extremely aware that not everybody experiences the world the way I do. I’m actually surprised when I meet somebody who experiences the world the way I do,” Kissner says. “It took me a lot of work to be able to understand other humans at all—not at all, but reasonably well.”

Intimidatingly, precisely focused and eager to drill into complex topics, Kissner talks me through the finer points of building robots before breaking down the particulars of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. She’ll spend the next several months painstakingly preparing Google’s products for compliance with GDPR—regulation sets sweeping new data privacy rules and requires companies to comply if they serve customers within the EU—but the company is fortunately in pretty good shape already, thanks to its prior commitments to data portability.

As a grad student, Kissner attended her first CRYPTO, one of the largest academic cryptography conferences in the world. She’d gotten a paper accepted to the conference—a career-making opportunity.

But the trip was soured by a run-in with another conference attendee, a man who followed her around the conference making remarks about how he’d been dreaming about her. Kissner won’t say who he was, just that he was influential enough to have his own Wikipedia page.

“I didn’t know whether they would directly be able to influence my career. But I didn’t want that to be the thing people knew about me when I went to go look for a job in a few years,” she recalls. “The best case would be, ‘Oh it’s that girl that that guy did that creepy thing to,’ which is not really what I wanted to be known for.”

Kissner certainly isn’t the only woman working in cybersecurity who would probably prefer to be evaluated on the merits of her work. But even when you’re not thinking of your gender, cybersecurity is one of those industries that will remind you, often abruptly, that you are practically alone in the room. When the massive security conference RSA announced its keynote speakers earlier this year, there was just woman in the lineup—which prompted women in the industry to spin up a conference of their own. OURSA, a one-day conference taking place on Tuesday, is the result of that work. The entire event was planned in less than five days and sold out in under twelve hours, indicating the high demand for diverse conversations about security and privacy. Kissner will chair one of the conference tracks, Practical Privacy Protection.

Kissner has worked to make sure that diversity is reflected not just at OURSA but at NightWatch. The team recruits people with as many different skill sets and backgrounds as possible so that they’ll be better at recognizing privacy problems that others might not see.

Still, though, there are limits that NightWatch can’t recruit its way out of, Kissner concedes. For instance, the team won’t be able to have members that are currently experiencing unemployment, obviously, since they would need to be employed by Google to review its unreleased products.

“I think it’s incredibly important to have a lot of different ideas when you are designing security and privacy,” Kissner says. “You are taking care of the incredibly diverse set of people in the world and it’s hard to understand what they need and take care of that unless you have voices from all different backgrounds and skill sets.”

It seems like the Berkeley students aren’t buying into Kissner’s paranoia—until the end of the lecture when a student asks whether Google actually deletes data when it claims to and how long that process takes. Never mind that Kissner has just walked through exactly how Google deletes data—in moderate technical detail, no less.

“We really delete the data, like for reals,” she replies. But she can’t say exactly how long it takes for the data to disappear, even when the student presses the point.

“I want to tell people things we’ve learned. I want to build the world I want to live in, and the world I want to live in includes things like products being designed respectfully of users and systems being designed respectfully for users. I don’t think everybody has to learn everything the hard way,” Kissner tells me later. Then, the mathematician in her kicks in and she adds, “It’s very inefficient if nothing else.”

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awesomeblockchain · 6 years

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This piece is the third in a three-part series that explores the potential art-world impact of cryptocurrency. It proceeds as if the reader is already familiar with the core concepts and related terminology covered in Part I and Part II. If cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are new to you, we highly recommend starting from the beginning.

To hear any true believer tell it, blockchain technology will quite literally change everything about how we as a society do business, and the art industry will be transformed as a part of this wholesale reformation. The questions are only how and when it will do so.

Timing is the hobgoblin of every revolution. The right idea pursued at the wrong moment tends to be no more effective than the wrong idea at, well, any moment. To have the most fruitful discussion about the blockchain's possible effects on our business of choice, then, let's burn the calendar and shine the light on the three most promising use cases being pursued today, so that we can evaluate their solutions on the merits.

PROBLEM 1: THE LINGERING MYSTERIES OF PROVENANCE & AUTHENTICITY

Relatively few artworks today offer the air-tight security of a certificate of authenticity backed by an unbroken chain of title. Gaps in the provenance paper trail undermine both sides of the market, with collectors often left to wonder if they're being presented looted works or outright fakes, and sellers sometimes forced to accept lower offers due to buyers' hesitance over the uncertainties.

Tracing the provenance of artworks looted during the Nazi era has been a major topic of public discussion: World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder delivering a speech on the issue of Nazi-era looted art, at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, February 2, 2016. Photo courtesy Michael Buholzer /AFP/Getty Images.

BLOCKCHAIN SOLUTION: DECENTRALIZED TITLE REGISTRY

Most readers know that hundreds of databases for provenance information already exist in the industry. Every responsible gallery, auction house, institution, and major collector runs software to systemize their inventory and its history. So why would a blockchain-powered update be transformative?

Rather than siloing analog provenance data with individual players, blockchain technology provides an opportunity to build a publicly searchable, fully collaborative, tamper-proof title registry for artworks. This database would securely track more than just ownership changes. It would also verify and aggregate every other event that affects an artwork's value, such as professional appraisals, conservation treatments, inclusion in museum or gallery exhibitions, and much more.

Just as with cryptocurrencies, the blockchain's decentralized nature prevents provenance data from being either falsified or lost. If a bad actor tries to manipulate the ledger on one computer, the rest of the network hosting and verifying the blockchain would detect the deviance. And since the ledger exists in the cloud (i.e. the data is distributed across multiple servers in multiple places), it can't be lost or accidentally destroyed by a single record-holder. This makes a proper blockchain title registry more trustworthy and more durable than any centralized database tracking the same information, let alone physical archives or other analog records.

Furthermore, a blockchain provenance ledger could also be both far more robust than and, paradoxically, just as private as traditional alternatives. In an optimal structure, anyone who knew anything of value about any registered artwork could help fill out the database. At the same time, the information flow could also be designed so that the identities of participating informants remained anonymous to the public-as long as they are known and approved by the registry's creator.

Think of it like a book recommendation: If the end-user trusts the judgment of the go-between, they can be comfortable with the content even without knowing anything about its original source.

The outcome of this process would be two-pronged: a vast collection of blockchains, each one verifying, time-stamping, and digitally preserving every provenance event in the life of an artwork; and a publicly searchable database containing the data from those same blockchains, anonymized to protect privacy and incentivize participation within a frustratingly secretive industry.

In theory, then, a blockchain title registry would dramatically amplify the amount of confidence in the art market. Since the provenance for any registered piece would be thoroughly vetted by a neutral third-party and legible to anyone interested, this innovation should lead to more buyers willing to pay more money for the added layer of security.

As Nanne Dekking, co-founder of blockchain title-registry startup Artory, explained to artnet News, -The product is data integrity." With Artory and other players, including Codex and Verisart, actively building out decentralized provenance networks, developers seem convinced that the product could be lucrative.

Sotheby's employees pose with Tim Noble and Sue Webster's $. Image courtesy Adrian Dennis//AFP/Getty Images.

HOWEVER...

There are still significant challenges ahead of any blockchain title registry.

First, collecting and digitizing thousands of years worth of analog data on existing artworks is a gargantuan task, even if everyone in the market desperately wants to participate. If many people resist, though, the task could quickly slide into the realm of the impossible. So this solution may be best for newly created works, particularly those born digital.

Second, even if an artwork boasts a flawless provenance on the blockchain, it needs an equally secure mechanism for keeping the blockchain connected to the artwork itself in the physical world. Otherwise, a fraudster could detach one from the other and -verify" a fake by tying the forgery to a legitimate (block)chain of title.

Third, the viability of the project depends on buyers demonstrating that they are willing to pay a premium for data integrity. If the industry produces a robust title registry for artworks, but existing collectors refuse to pay more for the pieces it tracks than those it doesn't-and/or if the database's existence fails to motivate a significant number of new buyers to enter the market-then the value proposition of a blockchain title registry withers and dies.

PROBLEM 2: THE WEIGHT OF THE TRADITIONAL FINANCE SYSTEM

No matter how much old-fashioned money you have, a slew of transactional problems still clings to it like a musty thrift-store scent to a great vintage dress. These annoyances mostly take the form of fees and regulations. Banks generally charge their customers for everything from sending wire transfers to converting between currencies, while some federal governments apply internal restrictions to their own citizens (see: China) and/or provoke external sanctions from abroad (see: Russia). All of the above discourages, or outright precludes, some participation in the art market.

-When I came out as a gallery that accepts cryptocurrencies, that move was to open borders," London gallerist Eleesa Dadiani, who has heavily promoted her own use of Bitcoin, told the Cultural Frontline podcast, boasting about her ability to circumvent centralized law. -That way we struck a dialogue with Russia, with China, with many countries that find internal money transport difficult due to internal sanctions or any other thing that restricts the ebb and flow of money."

An IRL opening at Dadiani Fine Art in London. Image courtesy Dadiani Fine Art.

BLOCKCHAIN SOLUTION: TOKENIZED PAYMENT

Cryptocurrencies bob and weave around these obstacles through decentralization. An art seller merely has to set up and maintain a relatively simple digital infrastructure, called a cryptocurrency wallet, to accept blockchain-based payments. Without thrusting your entire head into the jargon swamp, cryptocurrency wallets can be either software or hardware that connects users to the network(s) of computers maintaining the ledger for various cryptocurrencies.

It's popular to analogize these wallets to virtual bank vaults or safety deposit boxes. Instead of old-school combination locks, users access them through a password known as a private key. To facilitate transactions, wallet owners hand out a public key-essentially an account number-to clients who want to pay them in cryptocurrency. From there, the rest of the transaction plays out in broadly the same way as a wire or ACH payment, with the blockchain ledger updating the new token exchange based on matching keys.

However, the crucial difference from these traditional payment types is that the exchange takes place entirely between the buyer and seller, i.e. completely free of intermediaries and centralized oversight. There are no banks to slow the exchange and charge exorbitant fees for services, like the standard three percent cost of currency conversion. (Cryptocurrency transactions sometimes still incur fees, but most can be executed for a few cents to a few dollars, and many others at no cost.) There are no government regulators to prevent the funds from changing hands, either. So transactions can happen faster and cheaper than through legacy channels, and the market benefits.

A user scans a QR code on their smart phone, allowing bitcoins to be transferred into their digital wallet, while using the world's first bitcoin ATM on October 29, 2013 at Waves Coffee House in Vancouver, British Columbia. Photo courtesy David Ryder/Getty Images.

HOWEVER...

Two big questions linger over tokenized payment: buyers' scale of need, and sellers' willingness to adopt the technology. Codex CEO Mark Lurie told artnet News that there are -innumerable new millionaires and billionaires" with cryptocurrency holdings anxious to enter the art market by -paying the ways they're used to paying." That's the same sentiment that Dadiani Fine Art has picked up on, and generated plenty of media attention as a result.

But for art sellers on the outside of the crypto community, the size and hunger of this underserved market remains mysterious. The only way to learn more is to take a leap of faith into blockchain-based payments. And the continued volatility of cryptocurrencies makes that leap seem all the scarier to many, if not most, traditional dealers.

In the apparent absence of a contract defining the terms of sale, Alec Baldwin's attorneys had to rely on email correspondence and other evidence in a 2016 civil suit against dealer Mary Boone, who Baldwin alleged sold him a new Ross Bleckner painting posing as an earlier work he had been chasing for years. Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images.

PROBLEM 3: THE BURDEN OF TRADITIONAL CONTRACTS

Even in fields that heavily rely on formal agreements, writing and executing contracts is a tedious, expensive process-one that often requires spending days or weeks working to hone the language with a counterparty, all while paying a knee-buckling hourly rate to an attorney. Worse, if the counterparty later violates the finalized contract, the only way to enforce the terms (short of vigilante justice, anyway) is to spend many more hours and thousands more dollars back inside the legal system.

The art world complicates matters even further, as the industry's longstanding aversion to contracts means that a potential deal can disintegrate if one side even proposes adopting a formal agreement.

BLOCKCHAIN SOLUTION: SMART CONTRACTS

Smart contracts are somewhat abstract, so an analogy is helpful. Near the end of Stanley Kubrick's Cold War black comedy Dr. Strangelove, the motley crew in the American war room learns that the Soviet Union has secretly assembled a nuclear deterrent called a Doomsday Machine. If an aggressor were to try hitting the USSR with a pre-emptive nuclear strike, the Doomsday Machine would nuke right back, even if the entire human military apparatus had already been vaporized. Strangelove explains that the device is -designed to trigger itself automatically... under a specific and clearly defined set of circumstances... programmed into a gigantic complex of computers."

14th March 1963: Filming on the set of Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Photo courtesy Express/Express/Getty Images.

A few decades before the blockchain's emergence, the Doomsday Machine basically ran on a smart contract: a digital agreement between parties where the terms-what is to be done, when it is to be done, and how-are all hard-coded in advance. After reading and executing the agreement, individuals can no longer disrupt it. Nor is an intermediary (see: the legal/judicial system) needed to monitor fulfillment, making the smart contract more secure, more efficient, and vastly cheaper than a traditional one.

Broadly speaking, smart contracts operate by the same underlying mechanism as cryptocurrencies (AKA -smart money"). Today, their main platform is the blockchain network Ethereum. Although Ethereum hosts its own cryptocurrency, called Ether, its architects designed the distributed ledger to be open-source-and capable of tracking more than just debt. This means Ethereum users can write code to automatically govern anything on the blockchain that is definable in simple contract terms, such as transfers of digital goods or services, as well as trigger events for those transfers.

Smart contracts could have multiple benefits to the art industry. By streamlining the administration and minimizing the costs of implementing legal protections, they could simultaneously increase the professionalization and the fluidity of art sales. Smart contracts could also be written to integrate longed-for (yet still controversial) advancements like artists' resale royalties, seamlessly.

Founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin during TechCrunch Disrupt London 2015. Photo courtesy John Phillips/Getty Images for TechCrunch.

Even more potential uses exist when the lens expands from art sales to art services. For example, Codex's Biddable app will leverage smart contracts to allow new buyers to do something unprecedented in auction history: register to bid as an anonymous party. Thanks to a -deposit-escrow system" built on the Ethereum network, any interested party with the resources can use cryptocurrency to pay a deposit amount set by a participating auction house for their desired lot. And since that payment is hard-coded to be lost to the bidder (or in the language of Codex's white paper, -burned") if they renege on the winning bid, the house can feel comfortable handing over a (virtual) paddle without resorting to the traditional process of first auditing the new bidder's identity and liquid assets through an invasive, inefficient document review.

HOWEVER...

John Watkinson, co-founder of Larva Labs and blockchain collectible sensation CryptoPunks, told artnet News that a smart contract -only achieves its ideal when you're dealing with digital assets or pure digital structures. As soon as the real world gets involved... it gets more complicated."

Examples of CryptoPunks, tradable digital icons based on Etherium. Image courtesy Larva Labs.

Watkinson calls this limitation the -blockchain air gap": the void that a smart contract, or any other crypto-solution, can never bridge IRL. So a smart contract could brilliantly streamline the marketplace for, say, certain new-media artworks. But if you used one to buy a house, the blockchain would be powerless to help you on move-in day if the home wasn't in the condition it was promised to be, or if the original owners decided to barricade themselves inside with your money.

Developers and entrepreneurs in this space are well aware of blockchain air gaps, and most are hard at work on minimizing the number and size of those voids.

Whether inside or outside the art industry, though, decentralized technology's transformative effects will depend on more than just coding skills. They will also depend on how the average citizen reacts to the imperfections impossible to eliminate from the technology. As history tells us, few revolutions hold without winning the hearts and minds of the common people.

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