Am I Transmitting

Guy killed me, Mal. Killed me with a sword. How weird is that? {Coffee 31}

[digitalkiddo]

If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.

[daftpatience]

this messed up vintage cat sewing pattern has tormented me since i saw it & like some other folks have done in that post - i tried my hand at tweaking the pattern to resemble the illustration (and my personal tastes) a little more. i've ended up with this. i bestow it upon you nice folks now 👐

(update 2, added instructions & it's also on my Kofi!)

go forth and make weird little beanbag kittens! pls show me if you do!

[correctopinionhaver]

So there are several species of frogs that have evolved to be so small that their vestibular balance system doesn't work well and I'm sorry but it's the funniest thing to watch them try to jump.

[sataidelenn]

[tumblingxelian]

OK I am just gonna say it.

In regards to the whole "The writers said Ironwood sacraficing his arm means he is giving up his humanity" thing?

I think that they are 100% talking from Ironwood's perspective there.

Now hear me out.

Ironwood is one of the people who most dehumanizes Penny. Yeah sure he's superficially 'nice' when everything is going his way. Be he explicitly had her made as a weapon and the moment its more convenient to treat her as a tool than a person he does so.

Ironwood is fucking weird about his prosthetics. He is always trying to hide them until they are too bulky to cover up with clothing. He's clearly deeply uncomfortable with them and defaults to blaming them for his own behavior.

Compare & contrast to other characters. All of the heroic characters constantly emphasize Penny's personhood and even when disagreeing with her never start couching their language in commands but convincing arguments as they would anyone else.

What's more, Yang, Maria, Fox, Pietro & hell even Tyrian all wear their prosthetics or disabilities very openly and without shame. The shows framing, theme & narrative do not present these things as some kind of loss of humanity or otherwise as a negative. If "Prosthetics eat your soul" was a thing the writers actually felt, it would be more obvious.

Note: I am unsure whether the writers regard Penny as disabled, so I didn't put her with the others.

Penny's new body. Much for much-ness is made about Penny "Becoming a real girl" as though the show hadn't consistently treated her as one from her first moment on screen. & while ignoring the fact that her new body was clearly a magical/Aura construct given it was made up of wobbly green energies under a scan not flesh and bone like other characters.

Even if we ignore all that, when it comes to her new body and that whole angle, while she did show an appreciation for her new tactile senses, she was also shown to be far more vulnerable & generally to be struggling with the new body & it ultimately led to her fall.

This is very much not on brand if we were meant to regard her mechanical form as some kind of problem outside of how others used it to mistreat her.

One of Atlas's core themes' is dehumanization. The people pf Mantle are dehumanized into a faceless mob, a few city blocks that can easily be crushed beneath Ironwood's heel.

Cinder Fall was "adopted" into child slavery where the rights of her abusers to own and harm her always took precedence over her humanity.

The Ace-Ops are trained to regard themselves, their fellows & everyone else as inherently expendable. Cogs in a machine that can be replaced and should not be cared for or mourned.

& most integrally, when Ironwood sacrificed his arm so he could beat Watts. When he had Watts dangling over a lava pit & said he would sacrifice anything to beat Salem. Watts smirked. Because Watt's knew Ironwood's penchant to view harming himself or others as "Ruthlessness" and thus pragmatism was alive & well & would destroy him. Which it did.

The 'other' statement. There is one other line people point to, namely Yang's V8 line, regarding "The mechanical bits are just extra" as somehow ableist. Even ignoring as I said before that I am unsure CRWBY even regard Penny as disabled, or as equivalent to a person using prosthetics. The fact is, I can only view taking that statement as dehumanizing Penny by virtue of her mechanical nature as at best, misinterpreting Yang's statement.

Seriously, they are talking about the fact Penny will still have a soul. IE the very metric of personhood that's used to define every person in universe! It'd be no different if she was made of clay or cloned flesh.

Conclusion. As I said above, if the writers really felt that way about prosthetics, it would be much more overt than one off hand statement that very much seems to reflect Ironwood's thinking not the writers. Ironwood thinks giving up his arm and replacing them with prosthetics is something that makes him less human, a trait he explicitly admired in/projected onto Salem. It makes so much more sense for the writers to be commenting on Ironwood';'s thought process here given it thematically does not align with the rest of the show at all otherwise.

[meckamecha]

I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.

[kuromi-hoemie]

u r absolutely right I have SO many complaints about Windows omg.

For anyone who'd like to follow along, I'm gonna share how to get around those things with group policies bc they're more user friendly and descriptive than registry editor imo :3 I'll also show how to get around needing a Microsoft account to get setup.

For the Device Setup

"OOBE" stands for Out Of Box Experience which is what that setup workflow is. But it also happens to be a folder with a little program in it that'll let you skip connecting to the internet; this makes it so you don't have to sign up with a Microsoft account and can just use a normal local one instead. And it already comes preinstalled! Here's how you get to it:

Hold Shift + F10, or Shift + Fn + F10 depending on your keyboard.

Click inside the window that pops up, type the following and press enter afterwards to run it: OOBE\BypassNRO

I believe it should restart your computer automatically, but if not then restart your computer or type: shutdown /r /t 0 /f

Now when you're brought back to the setup workflow, the page where you connect to the internet will have a new button on it that lets you say you don't have internet. Clicking that and proceeding through the rest of the setup lets you get around the Microsoft account thing.

Group Policies

You don't have to know much about them, these are just a bunch of specific settings for what your computer can or can't do that lets you decide how it works in different ways.

I'm gonna show you how to turn off the recommendations and internet stuff basically. For now bring up search and type gpedit, pick this

It'll open up to Local Group Policy Editor and we can get started :3c

Start Recommendations

In the side menu, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Click on Settings to sort them with all the "Turn off" ones bumped to the top.

Here's what you should set:

Turn off user tracking: enabled

Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications: enabled

Remove Recommended section from Start Menu: enabled

Remove Personalized Website Recommendations from the Recommended section in the Start Menu: enabled

Do not search Internet: enabled

Windows Spotlight

Back in the side menu, go down to Windows Components > Cloud Content

Turn off all Windows spotlight features: enabled

Do not use diagnostic data for tailored experiences: enabled

Cortana

In the side menu, this one's back at the top under Computer Configuration. You're gonna want to go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search

Allow Cortana: disabled

Don't search the web or display web results in Search: enabled

News and Interests

In the side menu go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > News and interests.

Enable news and interests on the taskbar: disabled

Microsoft Account Login Nudges

When you don't use a Microsoft account they'll nudge you repeatedly to sign in so you can "get the most out of your experience" *gag*. The group policy for turning that off has a note that suggests it might not work with Windows 11 though (implicitly), so you can close the group policy editor window now and for this last one let's just open up the regular settings.

Go to System > Notifications > Additional settings, then uncheck all the boxes. And there ya go! (✿◠‿◠)ﾉ u are done.

Group policies are kind of a rabbit hole so while there is a lot more you could change or read into, for your own sanity's sake I would advise against it and say call it a day lol

[meckamecha]

This is all extremely good information, thank you very much for the addition!

[commander-revan]

[is-bakugou-alive-yet]

Is Bakugou alive yet?

10/11/2023

Yes

[theangryinsomniac]

She named her pack of wolves after bts????

[theangryinsomniac]

"So this is how it ends. Eaten by wolves in space."

Caspar

[lg5]

It's crazy that these strikes are happening given that all the writers and actors are asking for is less than 0.3% of the revenue these studios make.

[rootbeergoddess]

This is what gets me. The writers and actors aren’t asking for much but these CEOs are digging their heels in

[vermilionstarlight]

It's because it sets a precedent that the CEOs are terrified to set. That they will acquiesce to worker demands if the workers are resolute enough.

Because in an ideal world for these rich fucks, the workers give up, and the CEOs win, and its reinforced in the collective public mindset that all a strike does is "disrupt the economy, deprive people of valuable products, and waste people's time". The goal is to maintain the assertion that Strikes Don't Work. I don't think they genuinely give a shit about 0.15% of their revenue. What they care about is the OPTICS.

They cannot back down, for the exact same reason that WORKERS cannot back down. Because if the workers win, it shows people just that bit more that The Poors have power and ultimately we can make the rich do what we want if we put our fucking minds to it. And that, to the rich, is bad news bears to the highest degree.

[stumupm]

I really do wanna stress the Trocadero thing is fucked, like.

The various intro pieces across the series (Intro, Big Prize, the opening to Contact, Relay, ect.) are iconic. The Meta would not be scary without 'When Your Middle Name is Danger'. The way 'First Wave' greatly boosts the impact of the Director's final letter. And this might just be me, but 'Fifty' still fucks me up this day.

Or how some songs are just synonymous with a character. 'A Girl named Tex,' 'Another One Down' for Tucker, 'Good Fight (Instrumental)' for Wash, 'Half Life' for Kimball, 'Loom' for Locus.

Blood Gultch Blues. Contact.

And that's just Trocadero. Doesn't even touch the work of Jeff and Casey Williams, Sandy Lee Casey, Lamar Hall, David Levy, or Meredith Hagan.

The music of a show is so important to setting the tone of the work, and it greatly helps those emotional moments to hit, especially in a series where the characters physical acting is so limited. I sincerely believe that Trocadero and collaberators' work contributed massively to rvb's longrunning success, especially as the series became more dramatic in tone.

But rather than respect these contributions Trocadero has made to the series for the last 20 years, RT would prefer to hire newcomers or use stock music bc it's cheaper.

RT doesn't value it's artists' labor. When Restoration comes out y'all better be pirating that shit.

[sporesgalaxy]

"I can fix him" good for you. I need to craft a scenario in which he betters himself, to prove to myself that I can meaningfully atone despite how much of myself I see in him.

[sporesgalaxy]

"I can make him worse" I can too but first I have to prove that there was hope for him somewhere, at some point, which he rejected. Because if there was never any hope for him, what hope is there for me?

[theangryinsomniac]

Hello??? More people need to appreciate this

[nejires-hado]

[doodlejoops]

Soft blushy boy

[niuniente]

Death-Head’s Deal story #25 is the longest with 50 pages! Excuse me while I lay down and eat ice-cream sloppily… (＿ ＿*) Z z z 

Kizzie decided to change her ear color so I let her. She’s based on an actress Mamie van Doren and her dress is from Jessica Rabbit. Thank you for my Patreon supporter Effy for coming up with Kizzie’s name!

Tumblr is horrible with long comics so head over to Webtoons to enjoy this update. Also, my inbox is ALWAYS open DHD for messages, asks, thoughts etc.

READ DEATH-HEAD’S DEAL ON WEBTOONS OR TUMBLR

[theeggoman]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BAKUGOU