#but if anyone does guess correctly and wants to join the server I | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

redorich · 3 years

Note

Heyo, I'm not sure if you would want to. But if you ever wanted to write a sequel? to your nightmare hermit craft tommy. I would be so down. Your work is amazing! 🐌

Anonymous asked:

The day Dream and the rest of the server find out about Tommy with the hermits, I can see dream (and possibly others) going there to “collect” Tommy thinking no one will put up a fight, only to have all the hermits protecting Tommy in there own ways with Xisuma at the front being the badass admin that he his, teaching dream a proper lesson.

-------

Tommy, his best friend, his brother, and some of the hermits spend weeks planning out how they're going to save Dream from the dreamon possessing him. Unfortunately, none of that matters in the end.

Tommy gets a message on his communicator. It's Technoblade.

<Technoblade> dream figured out you're alive and forced tubbo to tell him your location. he's invading hermitcraft TODAY.

<Technoblade> he's bringing george, sapnap, bad, ant, phil, ranboo, quackity, and fundy. i'll be there but i don't know how much i can do to stop them.

Techno won't answer any of Tommy's messages, won't pick up the phone. Fuck. On the verge of hyperventilation, Tommy takes off into the sky with the elytra that he only ever glides with, and spams rockets as fast as he can because fuck his stupid hangup with fireworks and the trauma behind them, he needs to see Xisuma now.

The admin is busy making another tower for his base, but drops everything when Tommy explains, in gasping breaths, the imminent danger. Xisuma teleports every player to the town hall, then takes off to remove all valuable items from the spawn area he created before anyone gets the chance to ask him what the teleport was for.

Tommy takes charge with help from the hermits that are more experienced in leading. He knows exactly what the opposition will be bringing, how many they'll be facing, the tactics they'll use.

Bdubs sets up beds in the town hall for everyone to set their spawns, while Doc rigs the place with every nasty trick he can think of. After working on his Target minigames for so long, Cub knows which hermits are the best with a bow. He forms a group and they strategically perch in the HEP tower. The bookstore becomes free to everyone who doesn’t have maxed-out gear, and Etho sweeps in behind them all, methodically looting every store that has anything the enemy could possibly get a benefit out of if they stole it. Stress sets up a makeshift potions lab on the front lawn. Cleo fetches her everything she needs.

Meanwhile, Ren loots his Quadrachopper for apples, then hands them off to Iskall to make stacks upon stacks of golden apples. Jevin darts off, but shortly returns with several shulker boxes of ender pearls. Each hermit has at least two totems of undying courtesy of Impulse.

This is what these people can do with less than a day to prepare, Tommy wonders. There’s enough supplies here to have taken back L’Manberg three times over, before it blew up. Still, these are the people that spar to three hearts instead of to the death. They shy away from making others suffer. Their calluses are born of concrete and stone, pickaxes and shovels. Dream’s calluses are born of blood.

The time comes. Stress packs up her brewing stands, places them inside the town hall on any space that isn’t a bed so she can keep supplying the fighters. Tango lets his lava bucket warm his shaking hands. Doc clutches his trident, resolute in his role of protector; no enemy will breach the town hall so long as he is there.

Messages of intruders joining the server flood the chat. Instant chaos. Three withers spawn all at once, and Grian sets about aggro-ing all three of them so he can dogfight them in the sky. Bad, George, and Ant head straight for the town hall. It’s the most important building on the island, as well as the most spacious, so the hunters correctly guess that town hall is the hermits’ base of operations. The three are met by Iskall, who stalls them long enough for Tango and Impulse to show up. Their fight pushes down the street to the steps of the town hall, so Doc joins in the fray. It’s an evenly matched fight.

Sapnap makes his way to the town hall as well, in order to support his fellow hunters, but Keralis cuts him off. In true Keralis fashion, the man taunts Sapnap until Sapnap completely loses sight of what he was meant to do, and instead chases Keralis, who narrowly evades him at every turn.

False engages a footsoldier-- Quackity-- in a battle that is tooth and nail. She nearly loses her arm to Quackity’s axe when Fundy makes the battle a two-on-one, but Fundy nearly loses his entire head when Techno roars triumphantly and swings his Orphan Obliterator sword at him with both hands. Quackity screams, fuelled not by his lungs but by his blinding hot rage at the betrayal. The battle is on.

It’s not all battles, though. Several hermits rain arrows down upon their enemies from the rooftops; meanwhile, Dream himself stalks through the streets under the effect of an invisibility potion, setting off TNT and End crystals indiscriminately. He isn’t the only invisible person, though-- Etho goes completely without armor, sabotaging anyone he can and collecting another invisibility potion on the way out of town hall each time he dies and respawns. Mumbo, eager for a chance to help, runs damage control as best as he can by putting out fires while Wels watches his back. Ren and Cleo run elytra interference; xB does the same from the ocean with a riptide trident.

Once Ant is down, Impulse feels safe in allowing Doc, Tango, and Iskall to take on George and Bad without him. Impulse peels off from the group to confront the nervous-looking man edging his way closer and closer to the town hall. The closer he gets, the more his heart drops into his stomach. Tommy’d described this Ranboo guy, but he’d neglected to mention that Ranboo was not a fucking adult. Impulse doesn’t think he can do this. He can’t inflict this level of violence on a kid, for all that Ranboo is an older teen.

Ranboo’s too good at fighting-- another child soldier, Impulse’s mind whispers-- for Impulse to be able to afford to be kind, but Impulse does anyway and Ranboo kills him. Stress gasps when he respawns, but steadfastly gives him everything he needs to go back out into the fray. His hands shake. This had better end soon, one way or another.

1K notes · View notes

bridgeportbritt · 3 years

Text

The Toxicity of Royal Simblr

alright guys. I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t have to make a post about this or that it would just go away. But, I’m seeing now that this is not the case. As the owner of the Royal Discord Community, I along with others in the community feel like this behind the scenes toxic behavior needs to be addressed because it’s been going on for a while now and a lot of people have been affected.

Please note that the intention is to bring attention to some of the toxic behaviors shown here so those involved will not continue further. We’ve blocked names of some people in the following screenshots to remove their identity as this is not about he said/she said stuff. It’s about bringing light to something that’s been affecting all of us.

This is a long post so be prepared to do some reading if you continue on. The following screenshots were provided to me because I took over the Royal Discord once the previous admins no longer wanted it. The rest is under the cut.

*Before you read on, I’m happy to let you know that a resolution has come since this initial post. Please read this post. Thank you!*

A lot of these messages are disheartening because myself, the other admins/mods, and the community as a whole has worked hard to bring the community back from a place where people honestly felt too scared to join because messages like these were playing in the background and this sentiment seeps into every part of Royal Simblr unfortunately. Due to how things were run previously on top of this toxic underbelly it’s made people hesistant to join in.

There is one thing I’d like to address first as it was directed at myself and I want to own up to anything I have done in this. When I first joined Royal Simblr, I participated in a Royal Sim Pageant. In one of the rounds, derogatory and racist remarks against Asians were made without the participants knowing. I truly regret to have been apart of it. When it was brought to my attention, I worked to correct the damage done with the owners of the pageant. I’m not perfect and don’t claim to be, but I’m always working to be better especially when it comes to correctly representing other cultures as it’s something I take very seriously.

To preface these messages, there are two things to know. There are two seperate servers. Server A) The server I’ve been admin of for a little over a month after the last admin transferred it to me. Server B) A smaller server that was created before Server A and made up a lot of the folks who also created and ran the Server A initially. The other thing is most of these people are not in Server A and haven’t been in over a month.

The conversation you see here started with a member of the community being accused of copying storylines. This person being accused is in Server A and this conversation took place in Server B on July 15, 2021.

The person speaking is saying they left Server A because a person is accused of copying storylines. For some reason, the whole community is then somehow involved in this as the conversation shifts. The person accused of copying happened to be a moderator in Server A which is mentioned.

From what I’ve seen from this server, this is fairly common behaviour and multiple people have been bullied, accused of copying, etc. many stemming from this server.

In this shot, Server A is put into question. Many stating they left because they don’t want to pretend to be positive or show interest in other stories as if they are being forced to. As you can see one person states that this is not the case of the server since I’ve been admin and don’t encourage people to show fake positivity.

However, this person is actually in Server A which I’m guessing is why they decided to sort of defend it. But, then they agree that those running Server A are questionable (ie myself and the other admins/mods).

More of the same, but speaking about the previous ownership of the server when referring to being asked to step down. Also more just toxic talk about the entire Royal simblr community for no reason. This comes from those who have “built the community” and “do so much for it.” But behind closed doors this is what is done.

In this shot, those in Server A are accused of not “making an effort to be anyone’s friend” with those who rarely interact, being nice to each other for clout, and just overall being fake. Although, keep in mind, one of these people (”I stay for the drama”) is in Server A and never expressed any of this to me or other admins. Yet talking trash about us in Server B. Note: the pageant is also brought up here which I’ve addressed above and I believe I was the only admin or moderator apart of the pageant.

Here they make fun of people speaking about their stories and other people encouraging them. Also, just want to point out if anyone ever feels unwelcomed in the server, please reach out to me of the other admins. It’s our goal to make everyone welcome, but we can’t do that if we don’t know. Also, being a jerk to people in another server for no reason isn't really a good way to make friends.

Some general nonsense about the server and those in the server. Again most of these people haven’t been in the server since I took over so sentiments about the status of the server are all from a month ago when those in Server B were in charge of Server A. The “felt like a corporation” and “crickets” is all things we’ve been working to reverse since we’ve taken it over.

In these shots, it’s talked about how so many people are stuck in their Royal stories and don’t plan methodically and decorate and how they take bad screenshots. Basically making fun of everyone else because they aren’t doing things exactly as they are or think they should be done. The community they “built” mind you. Then, they talk about some plan to rejoin Server A and bait people, but not wanting to get caught up so deciding against it.

This gives you a gist of what is happening in the Royal Simblr community. Some of the most beloved and talented among us are spending their time poking fun at everyone else, bullying, and being toxic in a server that is “not exclusive.” Many of my friends have been apart of this and even got swept into the toxicity which shows you the nature of this group. It’s very exclusive and meant to bully and mock others even going as far as making people want leave the community alrogether.

This is not me trying to bash anyone or continue bullying or single out these people specifically as bad people. There are a lot more screenshots that I did not share of just really mean stuff, but we’ve all done messed up stuff. I won't say who said what or even who had this particular conversation because at this point it doesn't matter, but I will address those who are in the server and actively participate in toxic conversations including @royaldevilliers @thesimsroyalfam @wa-royal-tea @royalfamilyofgrimalldi and @markinghamroyals

We all have a vision for the community and we’ve been working towards that and this is NOT it. It’s not about who’s best or being being better than everyone else. It’s supposed to be about community, sharing stories, and overall just having a good time with a fun HOBBY. Others are just taking it too far and too seriously. Things like this ruin it for EVERYONE.

When I took over Server A, no one interacted, people were nervous to join, and it was a place where people didn’t feel welcomed. Now, we just had a random 6 hour server stream yesterday, people are helping people daily and sharing their stories again. This is what we want for the community. But with behavior like this, we will NEVER get there.

To those who are doing this, please look at these nasty messages and see how this does so much harm. The toxic energy you bring does not stop just because it’s in your little bubble.

This is who you want to be known as?

This is how you want to “build a community?”

None of us are perfect and we don’t expect you to be either, but this is just mean especially to folks who haven’t done anything to you and even look up to you.

To those who’ve been affected by this, I’m really sorry. We have to do better if we want this community to continue and be a good place for us all.

167 notes · View notes

silverthetheorist · 3 years

Text

Wilbur returning as a writer is good (and why it will be an uphill battle)

I am back I guess. I disappeared for a while, which I tend to do. Anyways, my point today is explaining why Wilbur returning as the writer of the SMP is the best possible thing for the server. I’ve seen a lot of hate towards Wilbur and his writing, people say it was too focused on his own character and leaving everyone else out except for Tommy, to which I say.... Have you seen Season 2? They could have renamed the SMP the “Tommy, Techno, and no one else SMP”

Before showing proof to how Wilbur can improve the storyline let me talk about the Final Disk War Arc for a bit:

- It was very good!.... Until you start thinking about it for a little bit. When everyone showed up to say goodbye to Tommy and Tubbo and the Endgame moment were good, but then you remember half of those character either hate Tommy, barely interacted with him or have nothing to do with the plot of Season 2 (Because everyone who was not called Tommy, Techno and Dream were left out). So yeah, those moments are good on their own

- When Tommy starts listing all the horrible things Dream has done to everyone in the server and can’t think of any besides a joke about Quackity not wearing clothes... Even they know no one had any stake in the plot jesus

-Dream ending up in the prison was the perfect ending. Anyone else ending in that prison would not have made sense from a story perspective. Glad they dodged that narrative bullet.

Really, the Final Disk War made me realise the biggest problem with season 2. The exile arc is very good... on its own. Doomsday was very g- hahahahaah... I’m kidding Doomsday is the only bad bad event on the SMP. And the Final Disk War is also very good. But when you put it all together.... it just doesn’t fit. This is a classic example of something being worse than the sum of its parts (Not sure if I am using that phrase correctly but you get the point... hopefully). Each arc on its own is fairly competent but how did Techno’s execution affect the rest of the arcs? How was the Final Disk War affected by prior arcs? It lacks cohesiveness and consistent themes.

Now I have two more things to say before I give Wilbur his credit:

- I’ve mentioned Eret, Fundy and Nicki a lot because I think they were great characters with a lot of potential. But, as we know, the story completely ignored them in favor of Dream, Techno and Tommy (Even Tubbo was sidelined for most of the Story). I am not insinuating anything, but something about one of the few LGBT CC of the server, one of the two women of the server and the only (I think) canonically trans characters being left out of the story they have been a part of since the beginning just... doesn’t feel right to me.

- I LOVE Ranboo. You can see the passion and dedication he puts in his story and I love it. But, has he really done anything? Like... that affects the plot. He grieffed George’s house with Tommy but you can cut him out of it and nothing changes? Same with blowing up the community house, you can just say it was Dream and cut Ranboo’s character all together. If you can remove a character and the plot does not change then that is a bad character. And this is not Ranboo’s fault, you can tell how passionate he is and he is definitely the best actor of the SMP (Low bar there but whatever), but the Storyline says: No, your character cannot actually do anything. This also fits together with the Eret, Fundy and Nicki situation: A character giving his opinion and feeling over an event is not a character being involved in the plot. That is a reactionary character that never affects anything but is delegated to just reacting to the plot other characters move. Sad.

Now. How can Wilbur fix all of this? The evidence can be seen on his failed resurrection. He went directly to Eret to ask for help. That is the key to everything.

Tommy is the main character. There is no changing that this far into the story. But by writing stories that involve other characters you include them. Big shocker there, I know. Season 2 was more character centric (Although not in a good way), the problem is that character centric stories cannot handle that many characters. Wilbur has said that he prefers geopolitical plots and why is that? A country has many people, not only one. if you built and open narrative, it allows for anyone who want to be included in the story to... well, be included. And a story being more geopolitical does not mean it is not character centric, but a character-centric story cannot be geopolitical.

Why did I mention him asking Eret for help before Philza joining in? Because it is simple thing like that the way to go to include other characters. If you invite another CC into your lore event, then that CC can develop how his character interacts and grows from that event. You see this with Eret, he shows regret over the betray, he shows his love for Fundy and his respect for Wilbur. It really is not that hard to do, which makes everything season 2 has done way more infuriating. The ONE thing Wilbur decides in season 2 showed more skill that anything in season 1 (Kind of an exaggeration but you get the point).

So to summarize, Wilbur will improve season 3 in two ways: Writing a bigger narrative that sustains more character and inviting said left-out characters to help out on events that they may not really have a lot of stake in.

Why it will be an uphill battle you ask? Because they got rid of L’manberg. The geopolitical stuff is barely present anymore. And season 2 negative’s will still affect the future of the SMP forever just as the strength’s of season 1 impacted the mix reception season 2 had.

PS: English. Me make mistakes sometimes. Me sorry. Also sorry if I rambled a bit too much. Head full.

PS2: The egg plot is cool and new and refreshing. But I cannot say it is very good until I see what the emotional core of the story is. It is still fairly new so I will give it the benefit of the doubt.

PS3: Sorry if I was too negative again, but there are already so many people pointing out the good things about the SMP. This fandom forgets that they are allowed to not like things, and disagree with the CC. I see many post per day saying things like: If CC does this (Insert stupid idea) then we (Their viewers who they have to appease in some way or another) we CANNOT COMPLAIN EVER. Like, no. Have some critical thinking and point out bad when you see it, I know this fandom is capable of it but many suppress critical thinking in this fandom in favor of very weird hive-mind ideas.

PS4: Dream’s song is not it. I am sorry.

#dream smp #dream #georgenotfound #SapNap #tommyinnit #tubbo #eret #nihachu #fundy #wilbur #wilbur soot #technoblade #phliza #ranboo #awesamdude #badboyhalo #Skeppy #antfrost

250 notes · View notes

livewiregoth · 2 years

Text

Does anyone know how to install Babyz? I thought I did it correctly but it didn’t work I guess.(Or I messed something up)

I was waiting for a certain day to add a baby but I could have just readded the baby now that I think about it. When I excited without adding the code I couldn’t get back in without restarting my computer. When I finally tried to finally put in the code the game freezed & I had to close it down manually with task manager.

There’s a message board that could help but I’m hesitant to join cause I struggle to keep active sometimes.(I might join when I’m ready) They could help, & some threads have anonymous option so I might check especially since I’m curious about asking about personality hexing & stuff later.

If needed I can ask my dad to help me setup a virtual machine if needed, I’m just nervous about messing something up & I’m unsure if it’d freeze again if I tried the code again. I use Windows 10 if that helps, I installed the game in a folder I made for it in Documents cause I heard since it’s an old games act or something cause the program folder didn’t exist when the game was around or something.(I’ stupid & forget things sometimes)

Sorry if I’m bugging anyone, just want to get this game to work

Edit: Thanks for the advice, I’ve been distracted so I haven’t tried it right away. I’ll see if I can get help from the petz discord server when I can.

#babyz game #babyz #petz #game help

13 notes · View notes

eveningstar1516 · 3 years

Text

Rise of the Demon King ~ Chapter 11

Rise of the Demon King

Fic: Multi Chapter Paring: MC x Everyone (Mostly Lucifer) Type: Angst with a Happy Ending Total Word Count: 26,758 TW: Major Character Death, Reader gets stabbed with a sword through their chest so..., Abusive Parents, Past Child Abuse, Demon Hunters, Loss of Control Summary: You’ve done it. You’ve finally done it. You’ve managed to anger the demon king. Now you hold your head high as he hands down your sentence. AO3 Portal: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27065362 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~A/N: I gotta Discord server guys! It's primarily Obey Me but other fandoms are welcome as well. It's kinda baby and dead so me and the other members are looking to revive it and we'd love for you to come join us. A roleplay area is included :) https://discord.gg/F3YEmDZCPS Please remember to read and accept the rules once you join for access to all the channels. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Previously:

After that day, Beel would take responsibility for waking the youngest whenever he slept for too long and Belphie took responsibility for making sure Beel ate whenever he was awake. From that day forward, you’d never find one twin without the other close by. Their relationship strengthened, one relying on the other. Always being there when needed. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ CHAPTER 11 - 2 Realms, 2 Families (2003 words)

Making my way up the palace steps, I took notice of the lack of angels tending the gardens or palace. Oh well, I thought to myself. It is still too early for any of them to get to work. Michael led me through the castle towards the throne room. It was the same route we took on my first day here, only this time, I had a sneaking suspicion that it was about to be my last. Stopping in front of the door, Michael announced our presence and waited for the angels inside to open the doors for us. I’ve been in the throne room a small handful of times since my first day. Today, however, the atmosphere felt a little off. Normally, one would feel a sense of dread walking into this room, as it usually meant punishment. All ceremonies took place in the garden, the throne room being deemed as an unofficial courtroom. Today the atmosphere felt almost, denser than usual. Michael and I made our way towards the throne and kneeled before Father.

“Rise”

Both of us responded with a “Thank you Father” as we stood. God turned to face me.

“I apologize for calling for you this late. I do hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Not to worry Father, I was actually up finishing this week's work when Michael came to get me. If I may ask, why did you want to see me?”

“I called you to make an offer. I have observed how you ran the council this past millennium. I’ve seen your leadership and your dedication to your job. I’d like to offer you a permanent spot on the council.”

“Father, I’m sure-”

“I’m well aware of our initial deal. Bear in mind that this will not impede on your ability to see the Sins again. As head of the council, it will be your job to oversee business in the Devildom as Michael had been while you were here. You will be able to travel between the realms for business and visit the brothers while you’re there.”

“But I’d have to return and continue serving you, won’t I?”

“That is correct. You are a unique individual Y/N. You are a human with the blood of a fallen, you accepted the demons and was still elevated to the Celestial realm. As such, you have experience from all three realms. This is a powerful tool to have.”

“For you. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I am not interested in staying, nor am I interested in allowing you access to this “tool” as you so crudely labelled my experience. I made it abundantly clear that I serve you under the condition that I return once Lord Diavolo has been crowned. As the Father of the Celestials, I expect that your promises would be kept. Unless that is your telling me I’d have more luck trusting a demon if I wanted promises kept?”

“Y/N! While you’re here, you still serve Father. You cannot speak to him like that!”

“I’m not wrong though am I? If that is all, I’d like to get some rest before reporting in. Good evening, or should I say morning?” I didn’t wait for a response as I bowed to Father and walked out of the throne room without so much of a glance back.

“I apologize Father. I will see that they don’t speak that way to you again.”

“That’s quite alright Michael.”

“Father?”

“I find it to be one of their more enduring qualities. They don’t take anything from anyone, regardless of their position. It’s a valuable trait to have, if used correctly.”

“Father, you weren’t really going to cement their position as the leader of the council, were you?”

“No, I knew they wouldn’t have agreed anyway. I wanted to test them. By offering the position permanently, they would have gained an abundance of power and authority.”

“Instead they turned it down to be with Samael and his brothers. I still don’t understand what they see in them.”

“It would be wise to re-think your opinion on Lucifer and his family. Contrary to what you think, they haven’t changed much. If you looked at it from an outsider's perspective, perhaps you’ll find that they’re still very much angelic.”

“Are you seriously telling me that with a straight face? I appreciate your suggestion Father, however, I highly doubt my opinion on them could change.”

“I am not telling you to change your thoughts about them overnight.” Standing up God stepped down and put a firm hand on Michael’s shoulder.

“I’m just reminding you that Pride is a sin.” God exited the throne room towards his personal chambers leaving a perplexed Michael standing in the throne room.

“I’m not prideful.” Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he was wrong.

~3 Months Later~

“That is all for today. Does anyone else have anything that needs to be brought to attention before we leave?” I looked around the council table and took note of Azrael's continued absence. The angel of death was called for a quick meeting with God before the start of this meeting and had yet to return.

“Alright then. This meeting is adjourned. If anyone has anything they’d like to drop off, I’ll be working by the fountain." The council of 7 stood and started chatting amongst themselves as I packed up and left. A few weeks into leading the council, I found that much like the Devildom, I couldn’t find much peace anywhere indoors. As such, I turned to the gardens, in particular, the stone fountain. It reminded me of the one in my old village square back on earth and found a sense of peace here. I’m guessing the other angels got the hint of me needing some peace and quiet to complete my work as I’ve never been disturbed while I worked here. Anywhere else though, and it’s anyone’s game.

About halfway through my work, I decided it was a good time to take a break and get something to eat. Making my way to the makeshift kitchen area in the council building, I passed by Azrael and Michael conversing with each other. We exchanged some polite hello’s when something Azrael said caught my attention.

“I apologize for not making the meeting. There was an issue with a soul’s candle that was fluctuating that I had to deal with.”

“Fluctuating? I was under the impression that a soul’s candle can only slowly burn until the soul’s time runs out and the candle burns out or someone snuffs them out. How can a candle fluctuate?”

“It’s more like the candle was shifting, evolving. The flame itself is fine but the stick itself was changing. You see, the flame is just that, a flame that will never burn out until its designated time, or if as you put it, someone snuffs it out. It’s the stick that holds most of the magic. The type of wax used identifies the soul, its nature, and where it’s destined. Only angels of death, or reapers, can tamper with the stick and alter it, however, it seems this stick is changing itself without outside interference from myself or another reaper.”

“The stick is evolving on its own and this is a cause for concern because this type of thing shouldn’t be possible and has never happened before?”

“Essentially.”

“What did you do about it?”

“For now, nothing. We’ve tried manually altering it ourselves but it keeps rejecting the change. I have a junior reaper watching it now. He’ll update me if anything changes. That is all I can tell you for now.”

“That understandable, thank you for sharing anyway. Good luck with the candle.” At that, my stomach rumbled.

“Go enjoy your lunch” Azrael replied, walking away with Michael.

“Why did you tell them all of that?” Michael demanded of Azrael.

“They have a right to know. Besides nothing would be gained by hiding it from them. It’s best they are aware of the situation.”

“That’s not your call to make Az.” Michael responded angrily as he stopped. Azrael turned to face him, a calm mask slipped on.

“Yes, it is Michael. It’s my call as the leader of the reapers and the overseer of their candle. What isn’t right is how you keep insisting that they be left in the dark, blissfully ignorant. Despite what you may think, they are a bright soul and have brought much light with them, even to the brothers. I understand why you feel about them the way you do, but times have changed. They have changed, and so have the rest of us. Everyone but you. It’s time you change too before you do something you’ll regret.” With that, Azrael left, leaving Michael standing there thinking about what the reaper had said and thought back to what their Father had said 3 months ago. Threading his fingers in his hair, he made his way to his office, hoping to distract himself from these thoughts with some extra work.

~7 Years later~

“Y/N'' I woke up realizing that I fell asleep at my desk again. Looking up, I saw Uriel looking down at me. His hand on my right shoulder shaking me awake.

“Father would like to see you. Go get dressed please. I’ll be waiting outside.” Uriel left, closing the door behind him. I leaned back thinking about why God would want to see me, especially this early in the morning.

Not wanting to Uriel waiting for too long, I tidied up the papers at my desk, and sleepily made my way to the bathroom to take a quick shower and get ready. Once I finished, Uriel and I set out except this time, instead of heading to the palace, we headed for the gates.

When we arrived, I found that the rest of the council including Azreal and Simeon were already there and waiting for us. We landed and bowed our respects towards Father. Uriel joined the council in a semi-circle behind God.

“Y/N, as I’m sure you realized, the time has come for you to return to the Devildom. I offer you one last chance to stay here. You should know that once an angel falls, they’re not allowed back. Y/N, if you through with this, you will be cast out from the Celestial realm. Are you ready to make that sacrifice?” Looking to the council standing behind God. I recalled the past millennia I spent with them. While I tried to keep a professional relationship with them, they ended up growing on me and we became a little family of our own. I realized that I was going to end up missing them. None of that matters though, not anymore. I’m finally going home, to my real family. To the brothers. Ignoring God, I addressed the angels gathered behind him.

“Thank you, all of you. Despite our differences, you all still accepted me and let me into this little family of yours. I’ll be sure to remember all you’ve done for me and I hope we could meet again someday. Oh and Mike.” Michael looked at me, surprised that I singled him out. “You don’t belong down there. Don’t forget that.” I turned back to God giving him my answer.

“Yes, I am willing.” Giving me a nod of affirmation, God addressed me for the last time.

“Y/N, Virtue of Loyalty and former leader of the virtues. I hereby strip you of your angelic status and cast you out into the Devildom for the sin of misplaced loyalty.” I faced the edge, ready to jump when I realized I had forgotten something. Turning around, I looked God straight in the eyes and threw the strongest right hook I had ever thrown in my life before jumping backwards, tucking in my wings and closing my eyes. A content sigh leaving my lips as I let the darkness engulf me whole.

I’m coming guys. Wait up for me

21 notes · View notes

irkenheretic · 4 years

Text

(How I Learned) How To Read Irken: A Guide

(Pictured: Us....) (From @zimgay ‘s lovely animatic!)

Okay, I’m finally making this post.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you might have caught on that I can read Irken. When I started, I was completely confused over wether or not I was teaching myself correctly, how long it’d take, et cetera. But I’ve finally hashed it out for myself, and I thought:

Why not make a guide for anyone else who wants to learn but has no idea where to start?

So that’s what I’m doing. Some disclaimers, though:

- This is what worked for me. It may or may not work for you, I’m not sure. I think it’s a pretty good method, though.

- Reading Irken and Writing Irken are two different skillsets. I’m gonna show you how to do both, but don’t worry if you’re better at one than the other.

- This will probably take a while of daily (or near-daily) practice to learn. It’s not impossible, it’s not super challenging, but it’s not super easy, especially if you have memory problems like I do. (For context: I started in September. But I also have a really shitty memory so, like. It might take less time for you.)

Okay! Let’s do this!

First off, you’d probably do well downloading the Irken font for practice purposes. Messing around with it and typing in it is fun, and can help!

You’ll also need a notebook. It’s not required, but having it all in one place is super convenient. (And, if it’s tiny enough, you can carry it around whenever, and also have it on hand to whip out at cons.)

The first thing I did was write each individual letter over and over and over again. This is what’s at the start of my notebook, and writing the letters over and over helped me remember which were which. I also had to focus pretty hard on what letter this actually was, this is tedious as hell but it’s not something you can do mindlessly.

(Pictured: Normal levels of interest in a show.)

This is what my notebook looks like. Don’t worry about those simplified versions of the letters yet, but you’re gonna wanna leave room for them. Don’t worry about learning simplified/handwritten until later, it helps recognition if you really have to focus on actually drawing the letters, at first.

(And yes, I know my pen is really smudgy. And that my H’s suck.)

After this, three letter words are your friend. Pick just, common three letter words you know, and write them down a lot. I have just, the Irken for “THE” written in the margins of my class notebooks a TON. Once you feel like you can remember that word well, go onto another 3 letter word with a different set of letters. Recognition = good, so pick something you like, use all the time.

While I was doing this, I tried to string together Irken letters I knew into like, coherent phrases. I was very bad at this at first. Acronyms are your friend here, lmao. (I don’t think I can count the number of times I’ve written ‘u r a qt pie’ in my notebooks.) It doesn’t matter what you write, just that it makes coherent sense.

There are gonna be some uncommon letters that are gonna be hard to practice, like W and Z, off the top of my head. For Z, that was easy. I just wrote ZIM over and over and over. For W... I used UWU. You laugh now, but the absurdity of it cements that I will always recognize those two letters.

Four letter words are also good. (Please, absolutely write “FUCK” over and over in order to remember letters. I encourage it.)

There is also the absolute cuntwaffles. Y’know how in English, b, p, d, g, all look kinda the same? Yeah, Irken has that too.

(Pictured: Head hurting juice.)

The I and Z don’t look that similar now, but good luck without a translation guide. By this point, you should have memorized a good chunk of the Irken alphabet, and be able to recognize some others when you see them. If you’ve been writing common three- or four-letter words, it’s likely you’ve been using letters very common in the English language. Which brings us to our next stage, and the actual fun part:

READING!

You’re gonna want a translation guide on hand in these early stages, you will need it. The main goal of this stage is to read anything in Irken you can get your hands on- but start small! Fanart with Irken in it was a godsend to me. It’s not that long, so it’s not overwhelming. I did need to look up some letters at the beginning, and I read really slowly, but that’ll change quickly if you keep up with it! The specific fanarts I used are:

@inimoose ‘s The Last Irken comic, specifically chapter one: part one, and chapter two: part two have a lot of Irken. But I’d recommend reading the whole comic; it’s good!

@paketdimensioncomic ‘s page of lore for their comic! Spoilers, though. Again, I’d recommend reading through the whole comic, because it’s just that good.

@xryn-art ‘s Linguistic Au’s first comic has a good chunk of Irken! The other comics do have some, but it’s all translated. Still good practice, though, if you wanna... read them......... ;) ;) ;)

Yes, this segment was partially a way for me to plug my favorite fan-artists, (or at least the ones that use Irken,) sue me. It’s my guide and I make the rules here.

(I am very sorry if I bothered any of you by @’ing you.)

But just some sources isn’t enough, so I introduce you to browser fonts. And changing yours to Irken.

It will not effect everything in your browser, and it can be toggled on and off, so don’t worry. If you really want, you can download a separate browser to change the font of, and leave your normal one be. It’d be convenient if you could, since having your browser font be Irken is inconvenient if you need to use Wikipedia, like, ever.

Here’s a guide for that, for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer for some reason. You’ll see four options to change, I just changed all of them. Not every page is going to have Irken on it, though. For me, Wikipedia is all in Irken, and so is TV Tropes. And some Tumblr blogs (PAKet Dimension’s is one, just in case you need a reason to go back there ;)) But it might be different for you.

Whatever it is, now you have a nice way to practice. I read Wikipedia articles on stuff I already knew about (so I wasn’t completely lost and could figure out what letters I didn’t know were from context clues,) but not a page I’ve read before in recent memory- you might just be recalling what the page said, instead of actually reading it.

And about the absolute cuntwaffle letters: yes, this will help you in recognizing which are which. Seeing the letters in context is always going to be much more helpful than just, a bunch of meaningless squiggles floating in the void.

At this point, I personally am much better at reading than writing Irken. It’s one thing to know a letter when you see it, and another to recall it and write it down from memory. Right now, I’m trying to write song lyrics and dumb little phrases in Irken, to improve my writing skills. Again, nothing too long, don’t overwhelm yourself. This sounds stupid, but Vines are good. When I don’t remember a letter, I just leave it blank and look it up after I’m done.

Another thing that helps is having a friend to practice with, or someone to just give you Irken phrases for you to translate.

Once you’re around this stage, you can try to learn simplified/handwritten Irken. You can also try to learn it before this, I started it around when I started reading fanart for practice, it’s up to you. This guide is a good starting point, but you don’t have to follow it exactly. This is your handwriting, do what feels natural for you!

(Also, don’t even worry about speedwrite Irken. That has no place in this holy land and frankly I am scared of it.)

And that’s... pretty much it! Most of the process is just... practicing a lot.

If this post does well, I might make a server for people who wanna learn Irken to practice together and stuff. It all depends if anyone even wants to learn Irken.

EDIT: Well, guess what I ended up making just the next day. Here’s the post for the server, and please read the joining rules.

Also, if you wanna learn Irken numbers, here you go. But start with letters first, worry about numbers later. These are never used, aren’t even in the Irken font, and three of them look a lot like those cuntwaffle Irken letters.

Anyway I just really hope this guide helps someone out. If you do use it, tell me! And have fun learning Irken!! It really is just, a blast to do honestly.

#invader zim #invader zim irken #zadr #(for the animatic and one of the comics)#HHHHHUUUUUU IM NERVOUS TO POST THIS #ok. ok ok ok ok ok here goes. h.#live from conventia #if this is a godsend for even one (1) guy with a hyperfixation then i have done my job well

944 notes · View notes

selfships-in-spanish · 4 years

Text

A lengthy response to big accusations that were made of me

Hello everyone.

I’ve been forwarded screenshots of a certain person calling me out publicly after receiving an ask asking specifically about me. And well, the another one with a more meaner message, from them both. So much for no anon hate huh. But since this person (and I won’t mention names) has me blocked, I am literally unable to even defend myself from their accusations. And they made heavy ones with words that shouldn’t be used this lightly.

I decided to make a lengthy response with my own “version” of the events, so before judging me you can also have more info about this issue, about “the other side”. They may not want to stir the pot or create drama, but they did when they decided to say they hold the absolute truth to this and to reconsider if you should follow me without giving me a chance to explain my own side of the argument.

Well, that and openly insulting me. Welp.

I will attach the few screenshots I was able to gather to prove my points. The pictures attached will have a number so you can know what it references. Sadly I do not have more, but I hope those will suffice.

To be honest, this only shows me how they never actually cared about how I felt, even when we were friends. It’s easier to pin everything that went wrong in a friendship to the other side than to listen and recognise what you didn’t do well.

After our argument, I never posted anything related to them, insulting them or nothing of the sort. No tweets, no tumblr posts, nothing. This was something between us two, so I just let the issue die since I didn’t want anyone getting even more hurt because of two adults were unable to fix at the moment. I must admit I thought about contacting them, because I do recognise I worded my thoughts very wrong and I was hurtful and spiteful. I am not proud of that and of what I did and I am sorry for it. I was in a bad place and I directed my anger to them, took it out towards someone, and that is something one must never do. I am deeply sorry for that and I am working on correcting it because I don’t want that to happen ever again.

I recognise the wrong I did. But, as I said, I’m blocked everywhere, so I am unable to contact this person to even say this or talk it out like two civilized humans. I guess it’s better to make a public post and point fingers at me.

But, I’ve been accused of racism, of lying, of misleading and making them give me money, of grooming and corrupting minors, of ostracising people, creating servers, making myself pass as a woc… and I’ve never been more shocked to read all that with my own eyes than I am right now. Because all those accusations, what they say, the intention, is to cut any wings me or my art may have on this site. Art is my livelihood, and by throwing such heavy implications mean losing people, and we all know what that means when you are creative. Cancel culture doesn’t leave room for one to defend themselves, it’s easier to attack, to “consider who you give your support to.” Did I ever go after their head like this? I didn’t, because I am not that kind of person.

Right now I’ve been painted as some heartless monster. When I first started talking out with them, I was intimidated for sure; they were way more popular, got along with the “cool fandom cats” and I was (and still am) a nobody enjoying her little corner with her OC and bazillion AUs people enjoy. I knew they were very vocal with social issues and I was honestly glad that there were people being loud enough for others to hear, but when that was their whole life, that EVERYTHING had to do with social justice, every second spent with them was that same issue, it drained me down. My life was a mess, I was a mess, I was struggling with so many stuff that in that moment I didn’t need a person constantly telling me I was the fucking worst and a demon for almost anything I did or said. I couldn’t speak, my reasonings didn’t hold any importance because I was a white girl. I understood, even if it seems they do not think so, I understood why they were doing it, where they come from, but some days when you are struggling to even keep yourself alive, it was all too much. Being accused of being a racist is A Big accusation and something that shouldn’t be thrown to somebody’s face this lightly.

I do understand that I come from the privilege of being born with white skin. We are in a society, culture and education system that reinforces the racist behaviour, but it is also something us all are fighting against. We are not okay with racism, we want racism to end and that starts with acknowledging your own privileged ass. And I do, my boyfriend got stopped more than once in airports because he has tan skin and brown hair, easily mistaken for someone from middle east in the eyes of an ignorant. I do know it, but making me a monster doesn’t help it. Being constantly told that you are white scum (actual words if I recall correctly), aggressive tweets telling that all white people are vile and shouldn't be allowed anything, doesn’t help (1). I know what it sounds like, but becoming what you are fighting against only makes you become a bully yourself. I will always try to use my privilege to give poc a voice for them to speak and make their issues known. I’m still learning, I’m still unlearning what our society and culture has grinded down on us, but I’m making the effort to not be a white racist cunt like society expects me to.

I come from people who have been oppressed. Spain has a history of oppressing anyone on their path (colonialism, anyone?), and my people were part of it. We still cry for our freedom, and my grandfather and parents can vividly remember and tell you of how the Facist Spanish government would come in the night, take people and execute them to god knows where, because we still don’t know where our dead are. Until recently, Spain still had the fascist dictator in a mausoleum where people could come to pay homage to! Our culture, our language… everything was prohibited and on the verge of being wiped out from earth. So yes, I understood what struggles can other cultures and people face. Not the wholeness of it, because of course there are differences, but I can understand to a certain degree.

Does this mean I hate ALL spaniards because some do hate us catalans for who we are and where we come from? Absolutely not. So how could they say that because of me they hate all white women? Why do you make me the sole cause of your internalised problems? What about your white friends? You hate them too? Learn. Grow.

So, when they accuse me of lying about being woc, of not correcting them and misleading them when they thought Spain was full of poc people, when I explicitly said in more than one occasion, that I am NOT a woc, I am a spanish white girl and that Spain is in Europe, I was truly shocked to read that with my own eyes. If your educational system failed so bad on you, don’t accuse me of it. We all have google and we all can look where X country is placed. So I’m genuinely baffled that someone is pointing fingers at me for not correcting them and making themselves the victim when I did correct them. If they listened or not, is another matter. If they assumed something and expected me to know they assumed it… how would I even know?

I have never created a discord server in my whole life. I joined one (we all got those never-ending lists of discord servers you joined), but never created it. If people created one aside the previous discord where me and the person were in, that must be for some reason. Or not at all! Maybe some people get along better and decide to have their own chat so they don’t clog or make the other server members feel bad or weird. But, putting me as the whole “ringleader” of this all? Do you seriously think I got that kind of power over people? I’m a fucking nobody! I made some friends, true, but never ever encouraged them to do anything or obligated them to follow me. On the contrary, I joined other people. I never did anything of the sort! I got other friends besides this person, many other internet friends where we share discords, but I never created or instigated anything. In fact, I’m quite the opposite, I always lurk in the shadows minding my own damn business and not raining on anyone’s parade.

And linking on the whole discord servers, corruption of minors and grooming. How sick do you have to be to accuse me of that? Are you even conscious of what an accusation you are making? Understand what an uncomfortable position you are putting me in, of having to defend myself from those accusations, whether the claim is true or not. It’s a very heavy one to make and forces the accused party to go defensive, like it or not. You publicly said I’m a groomer as someone says it’s a sunny day. Just, what the hell is wrong with you?

Who is that minor? Where is that NSFW art you claim? Because I do not recall any NSFW art being gifted at me from a frigging’ minor. The only person I’m thinking about never, ever, drew NSFW. Ever. And the only person who did draw a NSFW picture of Ona and Connor, was a friend who was an adult. Also, when will you stop putting words in my mouth I didn’t say? Is it just to justify your anger towards me and keep painting myself as the heartless cunt and you the poor victim?

We never forced any NSFW content on those minors the person says, and the person who accuses me of this, even created a 18+ channel where all minors were excluded. But before that? That discord didn’t have one and spilled the NSFW on the general chat. Even the accuser spilled NSFW on a channel where a minor was present, but god forbid! I am the corrupting one! We only talked NSFW stuff in there dedicated 18+ channel and I don’t recall actively participating in it.

And, if we all recall it also, because I’m sure all of us who were in the discord do, there were mods there to prevent and do what their name says, moderate a chat. But instead of that, when one of us who talked about something NSFW in the general chat, the mod came over and said something along the lines of “i’m in public i don’t want to see nsfw when i enter the gen chat”. Then left.

1) It’s on the mod to keep NSFW things in the NSFW chat, and if they feel they need to enforce the rule with an iron fist, they do it. Instead said mod just moaned about it and did absolutely nothing. The affected parties apologised and made a conscious effort to keep the NSFW in its rightful place. Sometimes you may get carried away in a conversation and realise too late it was in the wrong place. It happens, you apologise and transfer the comments or continue the conversation in the right channel, deleting the old comments.

2) Said mod is unable to handle stressful situations, and when there’s a feud between users in the discord server, the mod decides to leave the discord for days, leaving the issue unattended.

Everyone has their right to self-care, but being a mod means you have to deal with such situations. If you are not fit, say so and there will be someone else to do it. No worries. But don’t come to complain about certain people behind their backs and face the issues.

Why am I the sole target of this, when in this case we were all to blame? Including the person who is targeting me in their call-out post, even more when they also talked about NSFW in the general chat, but the mod did not complain about it. Guess why? Because they were best friends. Which is another point to this all. The blatant favouritism in the discord chat.

As I said more than once already, it is totally okay to get along better with other people, it is natural and not something to fret over, but when your “getting along” means disregarding some people and only blindly listening and waiting for said people to follow your every whim? How they are able to hide their heads under their wings instead of facing the issues, even more when people are getting hurt by it? I’m not speaking for myself this time, but for people who was in there and left the server. It was there, they knew the favouritism over some people, and chose to ignore the damage they were doing by tearing the discord apart in two sections.

But, don’t you realise, person who is accusing me, what you just accused me of? The implications in it? For heaven’s sake, I even told this person about how my ex best friend was fucking a goddamn minor and I told her to rethink her whole fucking life. I was disgusted by it, talked several times with her to discourage her from doing that and even seek help, but instead she crossed me out from her life and demonised me. I am fucking disgusted. So, someone accusing me of such things, even knowing part of my past and life…?

How fucking dare you?

Also, how fucking dare you LIE about giving me a website? Paying for it? This person never did. I was planning on it on my own, when I got a job where I could pay for one, but they never once in their life bought me a website. They offered it? Surely, but I never told them to yes, pay for it right now. I always feel so fucking bad when people buy me stuff or give me money, and I never wanted them to do so under any obligation. And they never did, never explicitly told them so. A website was an objective I had as an artist, an illustrator, and I voiced such objectives with them as you would talk about your ambitions to a friend. But I guess I was wrong and they took it as ammunition to throw shade at me. But they did not buy it and I did not explicitly ask her to buy me one. Period.

And keeping on the money topic, they did donate money on my kofi, I think it was 9$ or 10$? I can’t remember right now, but you can look at the message if you’d like. But how sick and wicked do you have to be to emotionally BLACKMAIL people because you were such a saint and donated to someone who didn’t have a job at the time and was struggling in paying anything? How can you boast about how you donated money to someone who was in need of it, and then expect “I’m a good person points” for it? You donate to someone or something because you believe in them or the cause, because you genuinely want to help someone, but not to use it later to make the person you donated to feel bad after an argument. That is something seriously shitty to do. If I’ve donated money, I don’t expect eternal gratitude or the person I gave money to swear their loyalty to me. They are not in my debt. I gave them my money because I wanted to. I wasn’t expecting anything in return.

They talk about ostracising them, but in fact, it’s quite the other way. They created their own clique, which okay, it is fine, as I said earlier, everyone gets along better with some other people and that is fine. But when it gets to the point where the only important voices, the only ones that matter, are the ones in your own clique, and that any other voice who disagrees gets thrown under a bus? They said they supported everyone in the discord chat, but truth be told, they only supported what interested them.

They talk about the Notre Dame cathedral burning (2). I will speak for myself, but I was angry that they celebrated the burning of an artistic reference of a certain architectural style, a true exponent of it. I was angry because art was burning, and I was as angry and deeply saddened when the National Brazilian Museum burned too, because countless of art and knowledge of civilizations that were long gone were burned, to never be known again. You cannot celebrate the burning of art and culture, no matter where it comes from, and even less when you got a friend who is also deeply rooted to France itself. No “oopsie daises” will fix the fact that you said you were happy the cathedral burned down in front of a french person who was mourning the loss of a symbol of his culture.

But, as soon as those of us who got offended voiced those feelings, their excuse was that “it was just a joke”, which they also like to exclaim is an abuser and bigot tactic. How can you joke about that? Even more knowing that you got Europeans and even French people in your discord? How little do you regard your supposed friends feelings?

For example: someone says something racist, then people get mad. Then the person who said the racist thing defends themselves by saying it was just a joke.

Perplexing, right?

I just got one question for you. Did you ever think about how me, about how we all felt, when we also told you multiple times we weren’t liking where you were going? When we tried to talk to you about such issues, and you just lectured people instead of listening, trying to cover your ass? How many times we tried to fix everything up? Because we all make mistakes, we all think we have the absolute truth, but sometimes we don’t and it takes a great deal of willpower to apologise for those. It wasn’t that hard to get off the high horse and listen. If your white friends are hurt by you, stop and think as to why, instead of saying “good”. They are supposedly your friends, not your enemies. I told you you were becoming what you fought against for.

I was aggressive, I was angry, I was rude. And I do want to apologise to you for handling my feelings wrong. But you never gave me a chance, even less listen to a white spanish girl who you thought was a poc because you assumed things when I said in more than one occasion that I was European and Spanish and white. You jumped to the train when you saw a non-pasty white OC in the community. You yourself told me you were happy and gleeful to see my OC, which made me happy that it brought you joy. And now? Were those all lies? You lied to me for what purpose? What did you gain in getting close to me, as far as you saying two peas in a pod, to now disregard all that, thrash talk about my art, my OC whom you LOVED and praised, just because you’re hurt and angry at me and never, ever, dared to come after me in private, even if it was to yell at me? Never took my own feelings in mind because I was a white girl and thus I do not deserve empathy at all? And after a goddamn year?

But I guess it’s easier to paint me as a monster in public than try to talk things out, knowing where you could find me. Also it’s easier to accuse people of your problems than seeking out help to solve them. I admit I was immature in my execution of wording out my feelings, but that does not invalidate me or discredit me or the reasons pointed out. And it also doesn’t give you enough reason to call me a cunt publicly, besides more insults and truly hurtful things to my integrity and self. I thought better of you, but I guess you disappointed me on that, too.

Any of you who read this, first of all THANK YOU for sticking for so long. Feel free to do as you please. I only felt I had to at least try to defend myself from such hard and hurtful accusations, even more when I have no room to do so besides writing this out and hope it reaches their hands, in case anyone who wonders what is going on has another pieze of this puzzle. This is a direct attack to me, saying my name and also encouraging people to reconsider if they should be following me, telling my followers what they should do. What are you afraid of, accuser? I never once in my life told people to stop following them because of what little feud we might have. It was between them and me, and they didn’t care to solve it either, letting themselves fester in their hurt feelings instead of talking to me about them or moving on as I did.

Thank you for reading so far, and also thank you for the support you have all given me after all this time. It truly means so much to me that you decided to stick out here with me. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Have a good day.

SCREENSHOTS:

(1)

(2)

#discourse #personal #mius speaks

19 notes · View notes

miraculousubs · 7 years

Text

THE LONG AWAITED POST

Hey guys!

Long time, no see. We’ve decided to make this little (rather long) update post / log about what is currently going on with: the team, the future (and what it contains), and the most requested piece of information ever, the spreadsheet. We know that this post is quite lengthy (and brutal in some points), but we cover a lot of important and relevant information in here, so please read the whole post because asking us a question. Asks will not be answered if anything mentioned here is asked again to us for the 180+ time. We thank you in advance! :)

Let us start this off with the most important thing (to most of you, with it being the only point you will only read):

THE SPREADSHEET

Contrary to belief, we do know that the spreadsheet is down. In fact, we have made several post about it on our blog, which you can view in our most recent blog posts. We’ve run into some struggles with Google’s Terms of Services (ToS) and hosting with our episode files / RAWs. This is highly expected with hosting anything like this and with countries recently ruling fansubbing groups, like us, illegal. There are laws, regulations and protection acts in place to ensure everyone is happy and safe.

So what does breaking the ToS actually mean? It means that all of our episodes have been flagged - they are still there on our Google Drive, for our own, personal use. We cannot share them to anyone else and only we can view them using our login with our password. Of course some of you may want this login and ‘promise not to do anything expect watch the episodes’. For obvious reasons, we are not giving our GDrive login. We’ve also lost access to all the episodes hosted on MEGA, they have been completely removed from our account.

There is no way around this, we fully understand that we have broken these ToS and knew that this day would come from the start. It wasn’t a ‘what if?’ question but more of a ‘when will it happen?’ thing.

Is this the end of MiraculouSubs? Absolutely not, the spreadsheet will return, but not in a way you will expect it to do so.

Abbey has been working on producing the new spreadsheets. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s plural. Each dub will have it’s own designated spreadsheet, one for French, one for Korean and one for English. The English dub spreadsheets are already up and running, and you can find the link to them on Miraculous English. (In a nutshell we provide English subtitles for the English dub over there and HOH English subtitles, more can be found on @miraculousenglish)

New methods are being tested, tried and implemented. Please be patient with us, we are only human and we have an actual life to live. I know, it’s sad.

Click ‘Keep reading’ to find out more about the future, how you can get early access to new updates via Discord, be notified first when the new spreadsheet goes live and more about the current state of the team. It’s a long post that is servery overdue, I know.

THE FUTURE

Will we be subbing season 2? Yes, now stop asking us :)

Have we considered torrents, as mentioned in our FAQ? We have, but it just isn’t practical enough yet. For one member of the team, torrents can result in up to 10 years jail time and the risk just isn’t worth that. Other members can receive serious fines for torrents. Another issue is that most people just want to stream the episodes with lots of our followers not even knowing how torrents work or what they even are.

How will future releases be dealt with? As previously mentioned, we said updates and early access will be given through Discord. We have a brand new, MiraculouSubs Discord server coming soon, with bots currently being coded for it and spam prevention techniques being implemented. For now, updates are being given out through our Miraculous English server which you can join here. Fewer updates are being given out through our Zak Storm server, which you can join here.

THE TEAM (and briefly THE SUBBING PROCESS)

As we have previously mentioned, we are only human and not some super robotic team who can automatically translate everything amazingly perfect as soon as a new episode comes out, or even predict the future. Life is currently a mess, very hectic for every team member. (There are only eight of us here, we are trying our best :))

At least half of us are being lugged down with Exams / University / College / Homework / Other boring education things with the other half juggling jobs and other responsibilities. For some of us, we are currently in the exam period that can mean the difference between getting the grades for our dream career or ending up having to evaluate what we can do with the grades we achieved.

To put this all in a little perspective, Abbey has briefly made an update on each team member (She wanted to go full out update and there is no stopping her, so...):

Tech Surgeon (Alice) [QC] - About to enter sixth form. Eyesight just as bad as her grades. (Okay yeah I’ve seen Alice’s grades, they’re brilliant, although can’t say the same for her eyesight, she is stereoblind - Abbey ;)

Barbie girl (Abbey) [Timer, English Dub Subber] - Halfway through the second to last year of high school. Knee injuries are going okay, but may need surgery on them in the next year or so.

Halalfej (Rita) [The Rest] - Working as a help desk representative thingy, and doing the usual Rita thing of trying to learn nineteen new languages, working and managing several subbing teams and projects. Also she isn’t lost, she is dead.

God (Spacey) [French Translator] - Working in a fancy lab, you’ll have to ask her because I don’t really know.

Feather (Ari) [French Editor] - I’ve spoken to Ari a collective seven times I swear, so I’m not sure how she is, although I hope she is well.

Vodka Aunt (Olivia) [Blog] - Working her summer job and who knows what other things.

President (Chiatt) [Korean Translator] & Snail [Korean Editor] - The Korean team don’t speak on our group chat much, but I know that both Chiatt and Snail are slightly older than Alice and I, so most likely in their second to last / last year of high school.

Basically, we’re saying that we don’t currently have the time for subbing and we’re grateful that there isn’t a season currently being aired. (We did predict autumn and got that one right). However, we are all doing our best to get our work done efficiently and we are hoping to devote more time towards the blog and Miraculous!

We do admit that balancing actual life responsibilities and subbing life is a bit of a trek, and it can be quite tough on us at times, running on little to no hours of sleep just for an episode release. No, we’re not complaining about the subbing life and what it entails, we chose to sign up to this ourselves (Well Alice didn’t, in a way...). All we ask is that you all be patient with us as we continue to release episodes and transcripts, and don’t pester us about ‘how long until the episode’ and ‘where are the subs’, etc.

So what is it like to sub a standard episode? Standard episode are the around 21 minutes of Miraculous that air on Tfou (and now Disney Channel), in France, and us releasing the subs to that episode.

Take a guess at how long that takes. If you’ve never fansubbed an episode in your life, your guess is probably very wrong. If you have fansubbed before, you know how long and tedious the process is. A standard episode can take up to (and occasionally over) 12 hours, depending on the circumstances. Yes, 12 hours. It is a very long, tedious process, but the outcome is worth the wait. We are not paid for this. We do this all for fans, for free. Hence, please be patient with us. We are humans: small, tired and breakable.

And finally, thank you guys for remaining (mostly) patient throughout this!

#MiraculouSubs #updates #news

372 notes · View notes

holytheoristtastemaker · 4 years

Quote

A (mild) defense of Zoom Inc.'s troubles Let me start by quoting Citizenlab's report: For those using Zoom to keep in touch with friends, hold social events, or organize courses or lectures that they might otherwise hold in a public or semi-public venue, our findings should not necessarily be concerning. For those who have no choice but to use Zoom, including in contexts where secrets may be shared, we speculate that the browser plugin may have some marginally better security properties, as data transmission occurs over TLS. Unfortunately a few hours later, on the same day, the web client was put under maintenance and thus disabled for the time being, hopefully not for long. update: the web client has been restored, multiple sources confirmed. Please enable join from your browser as a default setting. Zoom probably didn't anticipate going from 0 to 100 (actually + 1126% of increased usage according to some estimates) in the span of a few weeks and the fact that their network hasn't melted down and rendered all calls impossible to make is a testament to the quality of the underlying technology. As we all can imagine there are challenges in scaling that big that fast, but most of the problems that have been identified up until now don't really have much to do with scalability or reliability per se, but with questionable software design choices and bad privacy or marketing decisions made by the company. To be fair, sometimes shortcuts seem a great idea when you're in the heat of the moment and have a booming product, but the more people use it, the higher the likelihood that these shortcuts will come back to haunt it. Also, Zoom devs are humans and like all humans, sometimes they just make bad decisions without malice. What worries me is how the company management, also entirely human AFAIK 😃, decided to handle the response, more on that later. Last but not least: the media piled up on them quite extensively and some security flaws (except maybe "zoombombing") aren't an inherent problem for those meetings that would otherwise be held in public if we weren't quarantined even though the extent of the problem with user generated content is that its severity differs case by case and here there would be millions of cases (each Zoom call) to analyze. Zoom is used by everyone: individuals, institutions, therapists, teachers, doctors, religious and secular organizations, goverment officials and even heads of state. Zoom, as of April 1st 2020, halted all feature development and vowed to fix privacy and security issues over the following 90 days. What went wrong is also a cautionary tale about the importance of implementing secure practices and caring about users privacy from day one because at the scale they are now it's quite understandable they are trying to put out fires left and right. What is or was wrong it with TLDR; Zoom has numerous known security holes. Some of those have since been fixed, some haven't. The company also made (and in some cases, still makes) questionable decisions related to privacy. (I'm going to use the past tense where I reasonably verified the issue has been fixed) Zoom has a security issue in its "waiting room" feature. The issue is currently unknown as the security researchers correctly disclosed it only to Zoom Inc. granting them time to get it fixed lest it gets in the hands of malicious actors. Security researchers are advising people to use passwords and not the waiting room feature. Recordings are easily findable on the web: Zoom saves recordings with a guessable name pattern, thus it's quite trivial to find them if they are uploaded to the open web. Search engines are literally built to find public data on the web. Again, "security through obscurity" is not a good practice if the content is sensible, and it was: the Washington Post was able to watch other people's therapy sessions and elementary school online classes by scanning the web (!!!!!). The ID of a meeting room is numeric, which means that people can guess it (manually or with scripts) and thus, being openness the default, people can hijack meetings, thus "zoombombing". The meeting ID has 9 to 11 digits, not even "obscured". Security researchers did actually find meetings and with scripts had up to 14% of a success rate guessing correct meetings URLs. Recurring Zoom meetings links can be found: they also contain info of the meeting organizer and whatever info the organizers disclosed as topic or description. Security researchers found meetings of large banks, government contractors and other companies. Screensharing by any participant is on by default, which means that people can stream whatever they want without oversight. Very handy for private and regulated meetings, not great if meetings rooms are open by default. File transfer is on by default: don't think this needs explaining in an app where a meeting is public. You can literally send to dozens or hundreds of people malware hoping at least one of them will click on it. The app has too many settings: I went through the configuration panel on both the app and the web version (before it was disabled) and I didn't understand half of the options and got bored after a few minutes (minutes!!!). As we all know as creators of sofware the default matters (most users don't even look at apps settings), and by default you should respect the user's privacy and be secure, otherwise hell can break loose when enough people come knocking with the receipts. The company lied about being end to end encrypted, that's it. They said they use end to end encryption (e2e) but they don't. They also own decryption keys for what is encrypted on the wire, which is definitely not *end to end encryption. *FYI: true end to end encryption means that only the participants in a communication exchange can actually see the data in the clear. Not the company providing the service, not any goverment, not anyone except who's invited. Zoom uses weakish encryption: even though the service is not e2e encrypted, calls don't travel in the clear on the transport network. They are encrypted using a central encrypting server which holds the keys. The issue is that they use a single AES 128 bit key in ECB mode which is definitely deprecated and has security holes. Security researchers were able to decrypt video and audio frames from "encrypted" calls. Zoom encryption and security protocols are not independently audited, which means that they most certainly contain flaws. We all know how hard is to pull off encryption done correctly, I can't imagine how hard it is to do it with video, audio, text and generic media. "Roll your own encryption" is 99.99% of the time a bad idea, it's monumentally bad in this instance. As Bruce Scheiner wrote: I'm okay with AES-128, but using ECB (electronic codebook) mode indicates that there is no one at the company who knows anything about cryptography. Zoom encryption keys are occasionally on servers under the jurisdiction of the Chinese goverment: under Chinese law the goverment of China can require companies to disclose their encryption keys and tools for oversight. This has happened also if all participants were outside the country. Likely a data routing problem (Zoom tries to keep calls local to the participants) but not reassuring nonetheless. Also makes me thing of sci fi scenario in which governments or attackers decrypt all of these calls and use facial recognition to create mass surveillance tools. 👀 The company sent data to Facebook unbeknownst to users: this is probably quite common in apps that embed the Facebook SDK without tweaking it (and it only applied to the iOS app which might mean it was truly unintentional), but it's not great anyway. Facebook already knows a lot about users (both those using it and those who don't). It has been fixed since discovery. Zoom's privacy policy was all encompassing. Basically it stated that all personal data (including recordings, chats and uploaded files) could be shared with third parties. It has been since amended. Zoom allowed hosts to monitor participant's attention. This is 1984-the-book kind of stuff 😱. It was removed since discovery, on April 1st. The app bypassed the usual installation process. This was probably done to be friendler to the user in the very common scenario in which a user gets a link, doesn't have the app on their computer and wants to be in the videocall as fast as possible. It's exactly what malware does. It has been fixed since the discovery. Zoom shares your contact info to everyone within certain email domains. What happened was that thousands of users whose emails belonged to a Dutch email provider where pooled together and their personal info shared with each other. The app let Windows users click on anything resembling a link. Basically you could automatically open a file on a shared drive sending your network credentials to an attacker. It has been fixed. Zoom sent your contact data to Linkedin. In some situations, if they could match you to a Linkedin Profile somehow, they did, without telling you and sharing your Linkedin data to other people. This feature has since been removed on April 1st. 0 day vulnerabilities leading to hardware take over were discovered. The likelihood of those happening was very low (the vulnerability window span the length of the installation process and just that). Fixed as well on April 1st. Records of private messages with the host are available in the export. This is not a huge problem in theory as the export doesn't contain private messages between other participants than those with the host. Zoom tracks lots of data about its users and has many third party trackers on its website. This to me feels like a very intentional choice. Part of those were amended when the new privacy policy was published the other day. What has happened in the "aftermath" So far: Privacy and advocacy groups started to notice Class actions are starting to mount The US government and the FBI have started to notice 👀 NASA, SpaceX and other companies moved away from Zoom New York City has banned Zoom from its schools Conclusions I'm sure you've noticed how this article doesn't talk at all about alternatives. The question of alternatives really depends on what the users requirements are and if the entire globe is your users, then it's hard to evaluate on the spot. It also takes a lot of time to evaluate all options and I think it'll take a few days before deeply researched articles about pros and cons of the alternatives start to appear. You also need a group of people distributed all over the world for thorough testing of each app. Let's also not forget that we mostly felt okay with Zoom until tens of millions of people started using it overnight and it got on experts's radars. Alternatives might be just as flawed, simply less popular right now. Trust in the company is important so I do understand why regular people are rushing to find alternatives. I'm also not a tech columnist nor a security expert, so I can't claim "X is better than Zoom for everything and for everyone". I'll see if I can find a reasonably well done comparison of alternatives in the next few days with what I think should be generic requirements: great video and audio call performance, secure by default with indipendently reviewed encryption and protocols, and absolutely no adtech on all of this sensible data (which wouldn't be possible anyway if they had e2e, though technically you can still sell metadata about users...). Echoing other people's sentiments I read online: Apple is sitting on a gold mine if they open Facetime, get it audited and make sure their e2e encryption has no "backdoors". I'm leaving last a long list of links, with some excerpts, which is what I've read to write this summary. Media (and other sources) coverage (in chronological order) Although there are past issues (like the "open web server" debacle from 2019), I've focused only on recent media coverage from March-April 2020. 20200317 - (Techcrunch) - Beware of ‘ZoomBombing’: screensharing filth to video calls 20200326 - (Motherboard, Vice) - Zoom iOS App Sends Data to Facebook Even if You Don’t Have a Facebook Account 20200330 - (Doc Searls, digital privacy expert) - Zoom’s new privacy policy: There will be no need for Zoom to disambiguate services and websites if neither is involved with adtech at all. And Zoom will be in a much better position to trumpet their commitment to privacy. That said, this privacy policy rewrite is a big help. So thank you, Zoom, for listening. 20200331 - (Motherboard, Vice) - Zoom Faces Class Action Lawsuit for Sharing Data with Facebook 20200401 - (Motherboard, Vice) - Zoom is Leaking Peoples' Email Addresses and Photos to Strangers: "I was shocked by this! I subscribed (with an alias, fortunately) and I saw 995 people unknown to me with their names, images and mail addresses." "I just had a look at the free for private use version of Zoom and registered with my private email. I now got 1000 names, email addresses and even pictures of people in the company Directory. Is this intentional?" 20200401 - (webrtcH4cKS, WebRTC technologists) - Does your video call have End-to-End Encryption? Probably not...: So yes, Zoom does not have end-to-end encryption. Quite often, WebRTC doesn’t either – not yet at least. If you are using a WebRTC service check their terms of service and privacy policy and make sure that you understand what they are saying about this. Hopefully we will see this change soon as WebRTC Insertable Streams matures. 20200402 - (Fight for the future, digital rights group) - New campaign calls for Zoom to (actually) implement end to end encryption to keep people safe: Digital rights group Fight for the Future, known for organizing massive online protests for net neutrality and Internet privacy, has launched a new campaign calling for video conferencing service Zoom to implement default end-to-end encryption on all video, audio, and chat content. 20200402 - (Steven Bellovin, security researcher and professor) - Zoom Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Business Model: There is, though, a class of problems that worries me: security shortcuts in the name of convenience or usability. Consider the first widely known flaw in Zoom: a design decision that allowed “any website to forcibly join a user to a Zoom call, with their video camera activated, without the user's permission.” Why did it work that way? It was intended as a feature I'm optimistic that things are heading in the right direction. Still, it's the shortcuts that worry me the most. Those aren't just problems that they can fix, they make me fear for the attitudes of the development team towards security. I'm not convinced that they get it—and that's bad. Fixing that is going to require a CISO office with real power, as well as enough education to make sure that the CISO doesn't have to exercise that power very often. They also need a privacy officer, again with real power; many of their older design decisions seriously impact privacy. 20200402 - (Krebs on Security, security expert) - ‘War Dialing’ Tool Exposes Zoom’s Password Problems: according to data gathered by a new automated Zoom meeting discovery tool dubbed “zWarDial,” a crazy number of meetings at major corporations are not being protected by a password. Lo said zWarDial evades Zoom’s attempts to block automated meeting scans by routing the searches through multiple proxies in Tor, a free and open-source software that lets users browse the Web anonymously. “Having a password enabled on the meeting is the only thing that defeats it,” he said. Lo shared the output of one day’s worth of zWarDial scanning, which revealed information about nearly 2,400 upcoming or recurring Zoom meetings. That information included the link needed to join each meeting; the date and time of the meeting; the name of the meeting organizer; and any information supplied by the meeting organizer about the topic of the meeting. 20200402 - (Reuters) - Elon Musk's SpaceX bans Zoom over privacy concerns -memo: In an email dated March 28, SpaceX told employees that all access to Zoom had been disabled with immediate effect. 20200403 - (NYTimes) - ‘Zoombombing’ Becomes a Dangerous Organized Effort: Zoom raiders often employ shocking imagery, racial epithets and profanity to derail video conferences. Harassers have begun to leverage every feature of Zoom’s platform for abuse. They have used the app’s custom background feature to project a GIF of a person drinking to participants in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and its annotation feature to write racist messages in a meeting of the American Jewish Committee in Paris. The frequency and reach of the incidents on Zoom prompted the F.B.I. to issue a warning on Tuesday, singling out the app 20200403 - (TidBITS) - Every Zoom Security and Privacy Flaw So Far, and What You Can Do to Protect Yourself: As detailed as this article is, I fear that this list of problems and choices will be far from the last we hear about Zoom’s security and privacy troubles. In fact, while writing and editing this article over the last 48 hours, we had to add six additional exploits, design-choice errors, and privacy concerns. Zoom has gone into what’s known as “technical debt.” The company’s developers made a lot of poor decisions in the past, which are likely difficult and costly to fix. The longer it takes Zoom to address the core problems, the harder and more costly future fixes will be, as additional code is built upon that weak foundation. 20200403 - (Washington Post) - Thousands of Zoom video calls left exposed on open Web: Videos viewed by The Washington Post included one-on-one therapy sessions; a training orientation for workers doing telehealth calls that included people’s names and phone numbers; small-business meetings that included private company financial statements; and elementary school classes, in which children’s faces, voices and personal details were exposed. 20200403 - (Citizenlab) - Move Fast & Roll Your Own Crypto: A Quick Look at the Confidentiality of Zoom Meetings: Until a few weeks ago, it would have been uncommon for high stakes business negotiations, high level diplomacy, political strategy conferences, and cabinet meetings to be conducted over platforms whose security properties are unknown. Zoom has not publicly disclosed information such as statistics of requests for data by governments, and what Zoom has done in response to these requests. Zoom’s policies concerning notifications to users over breaches or the handing-over of data to governments are also unknown During our analysis, we also identified a security issue with Zoom’s Waiting Room feature. Assessing that the issue presented a risk to users, we have initiated a responsible vulnerability disclosure process with Zoom. We are not currently providing public information about the issue to prevent it from being abused. As a result of these troubling security issues, we discourage the use of Zoom at this time for use cases that require strong privacy and confidentiality For those who have no choice but to use Zoom, including in contexts where secrets may be shared, we speculate that the browser plugin may have some marginally better security properties, as data transmission occurs over TLS. In the meantime, we advise Zoom users who desire confidentiality to not use Zoom Waiting Rooms. Instead, we encourage users to use Zoom’s password feature, which appears to offer a higher level of confidentiality than waiting rooms 20200403 - (Politico) - Multiple state AGs looking into Zoom’s privacy practices 20200403 - (Bruce Scheiner, legendary security researcher) - Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom: Privacy first: Zoom spies on its users for personal profit. It seems to have cleaned this up somewhat since everyone started paying attention, but it still does it. I'm sure lots more of these bad security decisions, sloppy coding mistakes, and random software vulnerabilities are coming. But it gets worse. Zoom's encryption is awful. First, the company claims that it offers end-to-end encryption, but it doesn't. It only provides link encryption, which means everything is unencrypted on the company's servers. 20200404 - (Steven Bellovin, security researcher and professor) - Zoom Cryptography and Authentication Problems: When companies roll their own crypto, I expect it to have flaws. I don't expect those flaws to be errors I'd find unacceptable in an introductory undergraduate class, but that's what happened here. 20200404 - (Chalkbeat, organization related to American schools) - NYC forbids schools from using Zoom for remote learning due to privacy and security concerns: Instead, the guidance says, schools should switch to Microsoft Teams “as soon as possible,” which the education department suggests has similar functionality and is more secure. 20200404 - (Techcrunch) - Zoom admits some calls were routed through China by mistake: Zoom said in February that “rapidly added capacity” to its Chinese regions to handle demand was also put on an international whitelist of backup data centers, which meant non-Chinese users were in some cases connected to Chinese servers when data centers in other regions were unavailable

http://damianfallon.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-semi-technical-explainer-of-all-known.html

#SEO #Local SEO training

0 notes