My friend's kid gave me pinkeye and I have been on a particularly fuckt up sleep schedule about it and dreamed an entire Italian Opera on the themes of heaven and hell and the power of love and recognition of the self in other and the tragedy of loving the idea of something rather than the thing itself and the dream ended with the phrase "-And then it was banned EVERYWHERE."
The plot starts off with a hybrid of Cinderella and the Taming Of The Shrew where a woman with her own daughter marries a Duke who has an older daughter, and then the Duke dies under "Mysterious circumstances".
But he leaves in his will that his fortune won't be disbursed until his daughter (the elder one) marries.
The elder daughter (like, 20ish?) is refusing to get married because her step-mother is trying to set her step-sister (age 12) with IDK A Medieval Italian supreme court judge?? (Age 65) , but the marriage can't go through until the Duke's fortune disburses and the mother can pay the dowry.
Other thing about the Eldest Daughter: She Always Speaks The Truth. Not only does she refuse to lie, but kind of like a retroactive Cassandra, everything she says is True. As you can imagine, this is not terribly popular In Fantasy Medieval Italian High Society.
The mother, big mad about being stuck with this stubborn, awkward girl, gets a Lawyer and a Bishop and a bunch of other authority figures to modify the will so that "Should the plague take my eldest, we will not be bereft *wink*" AKA if the eldest just dies or disappears without getting married, the mother will get the money anyway. (They all know she's going to kill the girl, but they're getting a cut.) The Step-Mother then, in true operatic fashion of Going Way Too Hard tortures the Elder daughter, and locks her in the basement to bleed out and die.
There, in the darkness, abandoned by God and the Law and Family etc. the daughter turns to the last thing she has left.
BLACK MAGIC
(Come on, it's Opera. Everybody knows Black Magic)
megasilverfist replied: “reminds me I need to replace mine soon”
smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud
this is gonna make me sound very Old Man Yells At Cloud but i just hate how many things in my life assume i will always have access to a quick, reliable internet connection and almost cease to function without it. Obviously certain things Have To Have An Internet Connection, but i want to be able to listen to music if my service is bad. i want to still watch movies if Netflix is down. i want to have a working map when i can’t get a cell signal. nearly every tech product these days bears the fingerprint of the extremely internet-rich places they are developed, high rent offices in Seattle, San Francisco, etc.. I think often the idea of the internet not being available is so remote to them it doesn’t even factor in to development. i remember when the Xbox One was debuted and Microsoft was almost mockingly like “if you don’t have reliable fast internet, then don’t bother buying this”, and there was such backlash they completely went back on so much of that. But now that attitude is just the tech norm.
I don’t trust the cloud.
This makes me happy I don’t use my phone for going online
i mean you can get a terabyte phone but it costs like $1600 USD (give or take a couple hundred, idk, i’m not looking it up)
what really pisses me off is that the samsung flagship phones have completely phased out their sd card slots. you can’t get a cell phone with expandable storage anymore
Yeah, it’s such bullshit that it’s a whole ordeal to dig up a model with a microSD slot now.
I *do* have a 2020-model phone (a slightly different model of which is still in production) with a half-terabyte microSD† in it. (For CAD$155 instead of CAD$70 I could have gotten a full terabyte of microSD, but I didn’t have the budget. Mind you, I *could* upgrade later, without having to replace the whole phone…) But that’s because a microSD slot was my single highest priority when deciding what model to buy, absolutely non-negotiable: if I’d cared any less, I’d probably have ended up with a Pixel or a OnePlus.
—
Hmm, I wrote an extremely outdated guide to orienting your phone setup around not having reliable Internet access in 2015, and a substantially outdated guide in 2018, so it sounds like I’m due for another one. Be right back.
[three months of on-and-off tinkering later]
Okay, here’s “Tips on Offline-First Smartphones, 2023 Edition”.
—
†Some of the specs for that phone model you’ll see around will say it takes “up to 128 GB”, but don’t be fooled: 64 GB - 2 TB microSDs are the same backwards-compatibility tier. If a phone can take 32 GB, it might not be able to take 64, but if it can take 64 it can take 2048.
I am told it legitimately (to a small degree) helps with waterproofing. Because a very small number of users like to swap out the SD cards regularly, like for photos and stuff for easier transfer. And some number of them are bad at it and tend to break the waterproofing around the card slot, which makes the phone less safe if dunked.
Now, this seems (a) true, and (b) like total bullshit. I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who talks about regularly swapping SD cards. And the ones who are doing it for semi pro photography stuff are generally going to be types who are more careful (or use, like, real cameras).
Right now you can get a 1TB SanDisk SD card (a better brand) for $100 USD. I’m sure the memory isn’t quite as fast as whatever is integrated into the phone. But also, 1TB can easily be fitted into that footprint. I’ve also seen chromebooks recently sporting 64GB, which is absolutely unacceptable and clearly them trying to offload like 5 year old stock. And honestly, that is part of it - the lower end processors or memory are outdated stock they are trying to get rid of. But also, since the base model seems to have been stuck at 128 for about 3 years, they are obviously still *making* the 128 for phones.
There is that point that upgrading storage (128gb to 256 gb for $100) does subsidize the lower models of phone. But also, this could easily be done for 512 to 1024GB for a $150 markup for similar profit margin (the cost to upgrade 128 to 256 sd card is about $10, from 256 to 512 is $25, and 512 to 1024 is $50.
(sorry about the additional delay: it’s been a weird couple of months)
---
The waterproofing complaint has the same vibe to me as, like, when people complain about the Internet connection being slow on an airplane, or that their laptop battery only lasts for five hours. All this time I have been taking for granted that these aren’t things it’s feasible to do (except *maybe* for the ultra-rich?), and the way I find out that things have changed is by overhearing people complain about the exceptions where things *do* still work the way I thought they did.
I just double-checked and indeed my phone model is not waterproof, exactly as I had unconsciously assumed of a delicate bundle of electronics with replaceable internal components.
---
(also there was a while there where I was having some file-sync issues and *was* regularly pulling my microSD card so that I could plug it into my laptop and sync it through there, but I’ve sorted that out now)
---
And yeah, I don’t feel like I have a good grasp of the reasons for what’s going on with internal storage.
Take it from someone who has been around the fandom block:
fanfiction.net is dying.
all the signs are there.
if you have no other record of any fics you have there… you might wanna… like… do something about that.
Whoops. I did not intend for this post to blow up in the way it did. I’m not saying this is gonna happen tomorrow or even this year. I don’t have any inside information, and I’m purely basing it off of past experience. They could surprise us. Who knows?
The signs I’m seeing are based off of watching other fandom-driven websites in their end days.
The biggest glaring red flag: they no longer have any visible active moderation team or admins that are working on Fanfiction.net specifically. Reports are going unanswered on everything from plagiarism to abuse to page-breaking ads. Emails are not returned. Twitter mentions are never addressed.
Based off of their limited Twitter activity, all of their resources appear to have been funneled to FictionPress, leaving Fanfiction.net to flounder. If a website does not have anyone actively attending to it, it will eventually die.
The abuse alone could drive users from the website. When users are receiving repeated death threats and they have no way of curtailing the abuse or banning abusive users from messaging them, users will eventually just leave. Admins would have the capability of blocking the IP addresses of people sending abusive reviews and messages, but… what admins?
The code update that went through a few years ago that broke many old fics was never fixed. Many users are reporting major issues in uploading fics. The more they leave the site unattended, the more things will break.
The domain is registered through 2028, but if they keep going in the way that they are sooner or later it’s just going to wind up as a barely-functioning corpse of a website.
I am convinced that the only reason they leave it up is to collect ad revenue. If users continue to leave due to abuse and unreliable service, that ad revenue is going to tank.
I’ve seen this happen to so many websites over the years, and they rarely - if ever - get a revival.
But again - they could surprise us. I’m not counting on it, though. Nobody’s home anymore.
This is well-timed, because I logged on there a couple months ago to back up all my old fics. Put in my username and password. Someone else’s account information loaded up. I literally logged into some stranger’s account with my own user info. My fics were there, but the profile (including the user ID number) was someone else’s. I took a bunch of screenshots and sent in a support email aaaaaaaand nothing. I managed to snag all my fics and that’ll be it for me for that site. I don’t know wtf is going on there but it ain’t good.
nug-juggler
Reblogging again because my friend mentioned being locked out of her account and ff.net blocks people from copy pasting, so she was afraid her fic would be lost forever when the site eventually goes down.
If you are in danger of losing all your old things, I found a reddit thread with a number of work arounds so you can get your fic off the site.
As of 26 March 2021, the staff of FictionPress have confirmed they are migrating FFN to the same server - which is extremely bad news for that server and for FFN as a whole. Lots of technical stuff is going haywire too based on using the Inspect tool in Google chrome. Get your fics while you can.
sacchariwrites
Hey! If you didn’t know you can copy and paste from ffn’s mobile site. If you want to copy paste from the browser for convenience sake go to m.fanfiction.net
The librarian in me just went into panic mode. Boosting this post!
There’s another way to get your old fics! And it’s pretty simple too:
1) Go to the “Publish” button on the sidebar
2) Select “Manage Stories”
3) Click the title of the story you want to save
4) Select “Preview” at the top of the editor
5) Copy and Paste the first chapter into a word doc, and go through each chapter to copy then as well.
If your story is broken into a lot of chapters, this might take a minute, but it’s worth it if the site is going down
Hope this helps! ♥️
There’s an even easier way of archiving fics. There are tons of free applications and websites you can use to directly save the fic as a PDF/HTLM/ePub/etc file. This is the application I use (usable on both Mac and PC). Also, this website lets you save fanfics as ePub files. This is much easier and quicker than copy-pasting fics.
I for one am going to go on an archive binge of all my favorite fics, just in case.
@tsuisou-no-despair, this post might be worth paying attention to.
Adding to the downloader rec list:
If you’d like to make sure that all the original formatting is preserved, I highly recommend SingleFile [Firefox, Chrome, Edge]. My local FFNet archives are SingleFile-based: works great, and means I don’t have to worry about whether the format translation to ePub or PDF or what-have-you broke anything. (I haven’t tried the specific downloaders mentioned above, but I know the downloaders I *have* tried often struggled to translate webpages into non-HTML formats without losing images or information-conveying fonts or other such issues.)
SingleFile is also handy for a wide variety of other use-cases involving manual downloading of individual webpages. (For use-cases involving automated mass-downloads, you’d want to look at wget (here’s some Dreamwidth-specific tips) or grab-site.)
—
This isn’t super relevant *yet*, but for anyone who stumbles across this post later *after* FFNet has completely collapsed and is thinking they might be too late: here are links to a scrape of FFNet from 2012 and a more barebones-formatted scrape from 2015. You might want to dig around in those and see if the stuff you were worried about is in there. And if all else fails, ask around and maybe you can find someone who saved a copy.
Looks like fanfiction.net is gone. Probably should have backed up the fic I had there. Woops. Too late now.
Okay, this is very weird. The green leafy thing is what I’m seeing but apparently there are multiple people who can still access the site? I’m very confused right now.
Mobile site m.fanfiction.net still up for me but I’ve taken this opportunity to download the few fics I’d posted there
the notes are already full of people saying this, but just in case:
fanfiction.net (currently) goes to the site with a green leaf banner.
www.fanfiction.net still works to take you to the fanfiction site.
no, i have no idea how that happened.
it's good for your mental health to have mutuals who are wildly horny about kinks which do nothing at all for you
this is both as in. sometimes you will realise that actually these kinks do do something for you and that can be very eye-opening and liberating
and also as in. sometimes you will hear someone decry these kinks as indicative of moral failing, and being friends with people like this makes you immune to that sort of knee-jerk outrage
#also I think it can be very eye-opening and liberating even when those kinks really *don't* do anything for you#infinite diversity in infinite combinations#sexuality and lack thereof#the wondrous variety of sapient life#this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn't want to dump it on you all at once
Salvete, Gaius Iuli'us Caesar sum et pilorum album quam nivem habeo et aureos, sed interdum virides lauros et imperium Romanum construxi et eius eram quasi primus Caesar (sic merui nomen meum) et multi indicant mihi me Marcus Crassus similem esse (si non scitis Marcus Crassus, vobis opus est pecunia). Brutus non est filius meus quod est bonum nam ET TU, MI FILI???!?. Iamia sum sed dentes albos et rectos habeo. Pallidam cutem habeo. Etiam, maga sum magicum ludum, nomine Pigverruca, visitans quod desinam (ego sum MMCXIV), veni, vidi, vici. Classicus sum (si vos id non suspexistis) et multas togas emptas in Basilica Iulia habeo. Ratio amo et bellum Gallicum gero. Veluti, hodie omnia Gallia occupata. Omnia Gallia? Certe! Non est vicus parvus inter Aquarium, Babaorum, Laudanum et Brevisbonum. Ambulabam foris Pigverruca. Ninxit et pluvit et Gallia divisa erat in partes tres, quod me fecit felix. Marcus Porcius Cato me observavit. Digitum medium illo monstravi.
diehellarache
(via @publicdomainbooksdevotee )
My Latin is pretty rusty, but I know enough to say that it’s a bunch funnier, so let me take a stab at translating. I’m breaking down the original so if I make any ridiculous mistakes through not having taken Latin in 15+ years, other people can correct me.
“Salvete, Gaius Iuli'us Caesar sum” – Greetings, all! I am Gaius Julius Caesar
“et pilorum album quam nivem habeo et aureos,” – and I have spears that are whiter than snow and golden
“sed interdum virides lauros” – but sometimes green laurels
“et imperium Romanum construxi” – and I built the Roman empire
“et eius eram quasi primus Caesar (sic merui nomen meum)” – and I was, like, its first Caesar (that’s how I got my name) [note: a more literal translation is “thus I earned my name”, but it’s obvious that this is a direct reference to the line “that’s how I got my name” in the original]
“et multi indicant mihi me Marcus Crassus similem esse (si non scitis Marcus Crassus, vobis opus est pecunia).” – and many people say to me that I seem to be like Marcus Crassus (if you don’t know Marcus Crassus, your work is money). [translator’s note: “your work is money” is not a phrase I’m familiar with. Google Translate suggests “you need money” as a more idiomatic translation. My best guess is it might mean something like “you work for your money instead of being a patrician with a family inheritance”.]
“Brutus non est filius meus quod est bonum nam ET TU, MI FILI???!?.” – Brutus is not my son, which is good because AND YOU, MY SON???!? [note: this is the more classically attested version of Caesar’s last words, famously quoted in English as “et tu, Brute?” or “and you [are killing me too], Brutus?”
“Iamia sum sed dentes albos et rectos habeo.” – I am a [vampire?] but I have white and straight teeth. [note: I’m more familiar with the Lamia as a Greek female monster similar to Scylla but with only one neck. However, Google Translate’s suggestion of “vampire” seems likely accurate from the obvious context.]
“Pallidam cutem habeo.” – I have pale skin.
“Etiam, maga sum magicum ludum, nomine Pigverruca, visitans quod desinam (ego sum MMCXIV), veni, vidi, vici.” – Also, I am a female witch [at?] a magic school, named Hogwarts, which I will stop visiting (I am 2094), I came, I saw, I conquered.“ [note: “Veni, vidi, vici” is famously what Caesar said when deciding to bring his army to Rome and become its ruler.]
“Classicus sum (si vos id non suspexistis) et multas togas emptas in Basilica Iulia habeo.” – I am classical (if you didn’t know) and I have bought many togas in the Julian Basilica.
“Ratio amo et bellum Gallicum gero.” – I love reason and I conduct the Gallic [French] wars.
“Veluti, hodie omnia Gallia occupata. Omnia Gallia? Certe!” – As if, today all Gaul is occupied. All Gaul? Definitely!
“Non est vicus parvus inter Aquarium, Babaorum, Laudanum et Brevisbonum.” – It is not a small village between Aquarium [pun: fish tank], Babaorum [pun: rum cake], Laudanum [pun: opium product] and Short Good.
“Ambulabam foris Pigverruca.” – I was walking outside Hogwarts.
“Ninxit et pluvit et Gallia divisa erat in partes tres, quod me fecit felix.” – It snowed and rained and Gaul was divided into three parts, which made me happy. [note: Caesar’s history of the Gallic Wars famously begins “Gaul is divided into three parts”.]
“Marcus Porcius Cato me observavit. Digitum medium illo monstravi.” – Marcus Porcius Cato [the Younger, a famous opponent of Caesar’s ambitions] stared at me. I put my middle finger up at him.“
Additional context:
The year is 50 B.C. All Gaul is occupied by the Romans. All? No! One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders. And life is not easy for the Roman legionaries who garrison the fortified camps of Babaorum, Aquarium, Laudanum and Petibonum…
(introductory spiel to every volume of Astérix)
My specialty at work (eg, what I tend to get thrown into) is wrangling clever but extremely poorly behaved children. (The children are adolescent, but children nonetheless.) They tend to be boys. They tend to have ADHD. (It's possible that the focus on the clever rules out the ADHD girls, who have cleverly developed better masking skills by adolescence.)
The current bright and terrible-on-purpose disaster, A, is aware of the ADHD diagnosis but has apparently been told nothing about the disability. So a lot of our conversations go like this:
Me: Well, I'd ask you why you decided to start making richly detailed but extremely inappropriate jokes during class, but I'm pretty sure the answer is that someone started yelling at you for doing it before you realized that you were.
A, leaning backward, looking concerned: Are you following me?
Me: Yes, that's what I do with the spare time I don't have during the day, follow aggravating children around. We have so few of them here.
A, put out either because I've called him aggravating or because he's not special and aggravating: Sarcasm isn't very nice, Ms. T.
Me, sarcastically: I'm so sorry. Maybe you looked at the work first, thought boring, and then decided to be an enormous brat.
A: You can read minds?!
--
Me: Clearly we need executive dysfunction strategies for you, because if we don't get in front of it you'll be an adult who sits on their sofa for forty minutes yelling at herself to do the dishes and never does them.
A, trying to politely muffle laughter: Are you doing all right, Ms. T?
Me: Out of dishes, but fine. What's working in your classes? Your Literature grade is good, why are you doing the reading?
A looks left. Right. Up. At his phone.
Me: ... You aren't doing the reading, are you? The other kids ask questions because they don't understand it, and you figure out what it has to be about from the answers and never read.
A: Are you in my Lit class??
--
Me: Okay, look, ADHD brains are weird, and we tend to get them from our families, so these -
A, immediately: My dad.
Me, derailed from my drug interaction speech: Yeah, okay. When your dad has coffee, does he get calmer?
A, backing away: You're stalking my whole family now?!
Dr Doolittle-style show about a detective who can talk to animals, except instead of talking like people the animals still talk like animals, just translated into English sentences, so the plot of most episodes centres around trying to figure out what the star witness testimony actually means.
Victim's murder was witnessed by her pet snake, whose tank was in the room. Unfortunately pet snake is incapable of describing the world around them except in terms of 'rocks' and 'meat', with their descriptions of individual forms of 'meat' focusing almost entirely on body temperature and smell.
(Solved when it turns out that their description of 'warm-cold meat with rock' was actually an attempt to describe a suspect with a prosthetic limb, which is pretty unnoticeable to a human, but looks dramatically different in infrared.)
Murder at a honey farm. Each witness managed to see about ~0.06% of the full crime, in order to get the full picture, you have to get them to swarm.
Victim was found several days after death, already crawling with maggots. Days into the investigation, protag begins a frantic search to find any surviving maggots/flies that were on the corpse, after realising that how the victim tasted would give vital information about the poison used.
Also there's at least one or two animals who actually do talk in full sentences and in terms humans can understand, and the reason behind this is never fully explained.
All cats in this universe talk in terms of 'mine/not-mine' and mainly focus on territory, mates and food, with the one exception of the main character's cat who is named Watson and knows how to use sarcasm.
All insects speak in one word sentences where everything is 'food', 'enemy' or (for hive insects) 'friend' and 'queen', with the exception of seven-spotted ladybirds specifically, who for some reason speak in full English sentences and are up to date and knowledgeable about world events. The protagonists is as concerned by the full implications of this as you are.
Crows are highly knowledgeable and erudite. They are also jerks.
i appreciate the content warnings and understand their importance but i can’t help but giggle a little bit when i click on a fnaf fic and half the chapters have child death warnings in their notes. sir this is the Child Death Game i think i know what i’m signing up for
*entering the child death and murder fandom* why the fuck is this place so full of child murder
are you in the right headspace to receive information that can possibly hurt you right now.
w. what the fuck is the incest fandom
ohmygodtheymeantgameofthrones
now are you in the right headspace to receive information that can possibly hurt you right now.
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog#Game of Thrones#Five Nights at Freddy's#(I knew the Game of Thrones one (at least in broad strokes) but not the Five Nights at Freddy's one)#this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what#child abuse cw?#this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn't want to dump it on you all at once
This is important, and it could save your life: the firefighters say that you should replace your smoke detectors every ten years. A whole-ass decade is a surprising amount of time for any electronic device these days to last, even when legislated to the nines. Although I don’t know that for sure, it probably isn’t this way out of guilt, at least.
Throwing something away after a mere ten years is antithetical to my very way of life. Every single thing has value, even when it might potentially malfunction when it comes time to keep you from dying. Even I will shoplift a new armload of the bastards (albeit wearing my most Home Depot-y shirt as I do so) and install them as need be.
Due to my hobbies and general dislike of throwing things away, I tend to have more risk of fire in my home than most. This results in a large surplus of sorta-good but untrustworthy smoke detectors, which slowly pile up in the corners of my home, unable to be banished at last to the municipal dump, who I am no longer on speaking terms with, ever since they didn’t let me take that old ceiling fan out of the junk pile. The foreman tried to taze me, even. Me, who has thought about paying taxes on at least two occasions this year. Customer service is awful these days.
What do you do with the old smoke detectors, you ask? Unfortunately, modern detectors no longer use exciting radiation sources as their emitter, so you can’t collect several thousand of them and then become the subject of a magazine article about how you got a new kind of cancer while trying to unlock the secrets of nuclear fission (it involves atoms.) That said, a “used-up” device is still an important safety device, but the kind of safety it provides has somewhat shifted. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to get the most basic ones: wheel chocks for when your parking brake (and transmission) don’t work on a hill. Imitation landmines to keep Bobby By-Law off of your property. Something to plug that open sewage pipe in the middle of what used to be the previous owner’s bathroom, so you stop falling in when you get up in the middle of the night to check if the power company has finally cut you off.
I’m sure there are hundreds of other ideas, but I only have like two working smoke detectors, and – due to the intransigence of the aforementioned power company – they’re both currently powered by a gas generator that I have welded onto the trunk of my Plymouth. It takes awhile to pile them up if I can only replace them every ten years. Maybe those eggheads in the government should consider cutting it to five years, give me some real inventory to work with. Hell, I bet if I had enough of these, I could use them as a tazer shield.
This headline is kinda dumb but the subhead is fantastic.
May you live an existence that doesn’t require constant resilience.
