148 posts
Latest Posts by magicarcherylessons - Page 2
just gonna set this down here
burning text gif maker
heart locket gif maker
minecraft advancement maker
minecraft logo font text generator w/assorted textures and pride flags
windows error message maker (win1.0-win11)
FromSoftware image macro generator (elden ring Noun Verbed text)
image to 3d effect gif
vaporwave image generator
microsoft wordart maker (REALLY annoying to use on mobile)
you're welcome
who needs they Crete Conked
i feel like we don't appreciate these days how much the twin towers sucked, like, design-wise
they were contemporarily hated for just being these giant grey monoliths
like there probably could've been an easier way to get rid of them, but they probably needed to go either way
Oh my god
slowly approaching bear
currently on my first play through. hot take half life 2 is pretty good. can't take any of it seriously because of all the gmod idiot box I watched in high school but it's cool to see how much later games tried to learn from it
Half-LIfe 2's 20th Anniversary Update is Almost Here!
And the game is currently Free on Steam for everyone to keep if you get it by the 18th. If you've never played HL2, now's the time. Or maybe wait until the update drops tomorrow. Up to you.
Seriously. Go. RIGHT FUCKING NOW, SOLDIER! THAT'S AN ORDER!
(chronologically ordered from bottom to top) Finally found a worthy use for the Hand-E-Nuke I rolled from my starting quest - +1000 reputation with the Mechanimists in a single artifact offering. Live and drink, Eschelstadt II, your Forcefield + Disintegrate combo is a sight to behold. However, like all companions in this game thusfar, he's almost more trouble than he's worth. I'll take waiting for his fields to drop over the execution-style friendly fire you get from anyone you give a gun. I love how he belts out his sermon wherever we are, and am sure it will not grow tiresome.
into my soul is not deep enough, he 【ｓｔａｒｅｓ ｆｕｒｔｈｅｒ ｂｅｙｏｎｄ】
WHERE DO YOU FIND THIS MANY COOL ANIMALS?!?!?!
ALL OVER THE WORLD!!!
Here's a cool animal friend for you...
Northern Boobook (Ninox japonica), family Strigidae, order Strigiformes, Philippines
photograph by Jopet Sy
I just got described as an "ad hating commie" by someone because I said a minute of youtube ads is unpleasant. fully spent 5 minutes arguing and defending youtube ads. insane stuff
I raise an eyebrow. "not much different? I would've listened to Parmenion, bro. that shit you pulled at the Granicus? you're lucky Cleitus the Black was there.
"worth it..." he replies, blazed-ass eyes now distant.
i pass the bong to alexander the great. he has been surprisingly quick to grasp the idea and is now taking fat rips that make my eyes water to watch. he pauses after clearing the chamber, the stem lightly pinched between two slender fingers covered in gold filigree and tiny glittering emeralds. he holds it for a count of 5 and then blows the cloud out his pursed lips and flared nostrils. "delightful. much like a dragon." he says calmly, his eyes red and watery like sea-glass held to the sunset. "you know," he drawls, "we're not much different, you and i"
my halloween dressup:
captivated by this style and execution. 10/10 character distinction. this is what appears in my head whenever I wish for a stormlight adaptation
hard images 😎
One for the history books.
ok I guess this blog of mine is swiftly becoming "neat and silly things I'd like on a t-shirt". Medjed!
tis the season to remember Medjed aka The Smiter, an invisible egyptian deity with laser eyes and nonbinary swagger:
rotating them gently in my mind as they do a spiffy little dance number
>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.
>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.
>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.
>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.
>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.
>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.
>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.
>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!
>Lemmings problem now solved.
>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.
>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.
>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.
>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.
>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.
>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.
I'll never forgive those vampires at Hewlett Packard. Their little arms race of "how ludicrously hard can we gouge these peasants" has brought me the closest I've been to going full chaotic tinkerer and just tearing out that proprietary Ink Cop crap and coding a humane replacement, then daring a court to convict me once HPs pillaging is laid bare. until then, When my current printer dies, I'll just pick up another one off the side of the road, and it'll last me another 5 years. except oh wait that one I found in hard rubbish is ~20 years old so it's probably better made than most nowadays. isn't society fun and not at all rotten to its core, hidden only by a thin shiny veneer? yay!
A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge
Animals keep evolving into crabs; it's a process called "carcinisation" and it's pretty weird. Crabs just turn out to be extremely evolutionarily fit for our current environment:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-crabs/
By the same token, all kinds of business keep evolving into something like a printer company. It turns out that in this enshittified, poorly regulated, rentier-friendly world, the parasitic, inkjet business model is extremely adaptive. Printerinisation is everywhere.
All that stuff you hate about your car? Trapping you into using their mechanics, spying on you, planned obsolescence? All lifted from the inkjet printer business model:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
That GE fridge that won't make ice or dispense water unless you spend $50 for a proprietary charcoal filter instead of using a $10 generic? Pure printerism:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate
The software update to your Sonos speakers that makes them half as useful and takes away your right to play your stored music, forcing you to buy streaming music subscriptions? Straight out of the HP playbook:
https://www.wired.com/story/sonos-admits-its-recent-app-update-was-a-colossal-mistake/
But as printerinized as all these gadgets are, none can quite attain the level of high enshittification that the OG inkjet bastards attain on a daily basis. In the world championships of effortlessly authentic fuckery, no one can lay a glove on the sociopathic monsters of HP.
For example: when HP wanted to soften us all up for a new world of "subscription ink" (where you have to pre-pay every month for a certain number of pages' worth of printing, which your printer enforces by spying on you and ratting you out to HP over the internet), they offered a "lifetime subscription" plan. With this "lifetime" plan, you paid just once and your HP printer would print out 15 pages a month for so long as you owned your printer, with HP shipping you new ink every time you ran low.
Well, eventually, HP got bored of not making you pay rent on your own fucking printer, so they just turned that plan off. Yeah, it was a lifetime plan, but the "lifetime" in question was the lifetime of HP's patience for not fucking you over, and that patience has the longevity of a mayfly:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/#inkwars
It would take many pages to list all of HP's sins here. This is a company that ships printers with half-full ink cartridges and charges more than the printer cost to buy a replacement set. The company that won't let you print a black-and-white page if you're out of yellow ink. The company that won't let you scan or send a fax if you're out of any of your ink.
They make you "recalibrate" your printer or "clean your heads" by forcing you to print sheets of ink-dense paper. They also refuse to let you use your ink cartridges after they "expire."
HP raised the price of ink to over $10,000 per gallon, then went to war against third-party ink cartridge makers, cartridge remanufacturers, and cartridge refillers. They added "security chips" to their cartridges whose job was to watch the ink levels in your cartridge and, when they dip below a certain level (long before the cartridge is actually empty), declare the cartridge to be dry and permanently out of use.
Even if you refill that cartridge, it will still declare itself to be empty to your printer, which will therefore refuse to print.
Third party ink companies have options here. One thing they could do is reverse-engineer the security chip, and make compatible ones that say, "Actually, I'm full." The problem with this is that laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) potentially makes this into a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, for a first offense.
DMCA 1201 bans bypassing "an effective means of access control" to a copyrighted work. So if HP writes a copyrighted "I'm empty" program for its security chip and then adds some kind of access restriction to prevent you from dumping and reverse-engineering that program, you can end up a felon, thanks to the DMCA.
Another countermove is to harvest security chips out of dead cartridges that have been sent overseas as e-waste (one consequence of HP's $10,000/gallon ink racket is that it generates mountains of immortal, toxic e-waste that mostly ends up poisoning poor countries in the global south). These can be integrated into new cartridges, or remanufactured ones.
In practice, ink companies do all of this and more, and total normie HP printer owners go to extremely improbable lengths to find third party ink cartridges and figure out how to use them. It turns out that even people who find technology tinkering intimidating or confusing or dull can be motivated to learn and practice a lot of esoteric tech stuff as an alternative to paying $10,000/gallon for colored water.
HP has lots of countermoves for this. One truly unhinged piece of fuckery is to ask Customs and Border Patrol to block third-party ink cartridges with genuine HP security chips that have been pried loose from e-waste shipments. HP claims that these are "counterfeits" (because they were removed and re-used without permission), even though they came out of real HP cartridges, and CBP takes them at their word, seizing shipments.
Even sleazier: HP pushes out fake security updates to its printers. You get a message telling you there's an urgent security update, you click OK, and your printer shows you a downloading/installing progress bar and reboots itself. As far as you can tell, nothing has changed. But these aren't "security" updates, they're updates that block third-party ink, and HP has designed them not to kick in for several months. That way, HP owners who get tricked into installing this downgrade don't raise hell online and warn everyone else until they've installed it too, and it's too late:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
This is the infectious pathogen business model: one reason covid spread so quickly was that people were infectious before they developed symptoms. That meant that the virus could spread before the spreader knew they had it. By adding a long fuse to its logic bomb, HP greatly increases the spread of its malware.
But life finds a way. $10,000/gallon ink is an irresistible target for tinkerers, security researchers and competitors. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but the true parent of jaw-dropping ingenuity is callous, sadistic greed. That's why America's army of prisoners are the source of so many of the most beautiful and exciting forms of innovation seen today:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention
Despite harsh legal penalties and the vast resources of HP, third-party ink continues to thrive, and every time HP figures out how to block one technique, three even cooler ones pop up.
Last week, Jay Summet published a video tearing down a third-party ink cartridge compatible with an HP 61XL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE
The third-party cartridge has what appears to be a genuine HP security chip, but it is overlaid with a paper-thin, flexible, adhesive-backed circuit board that is skinny enough that the cartridge still fits in an HP printer.
This flexible circuit board has its own little microchip. Summet theorizes that it is designed to pass the "are you a real HP cartridge" challenge pass to the security chip, but to block the followup "are you empty or full?" message. When the printer issues that challenge, the "man in the middle" chip answers, "Oh, I'm definitely full."
In their writeup, Hackaday identifies the chip as "a single IC in a QFN package." This is just so clever and delightful:
https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/man-in-the-middle-pcb-unlocks-hp-ink-cartridges/
Hackaday also notes that HP CEO Enrique J Lores recently threatened to brick any printer discovered to be using third-party ink:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/
As William Gibson famously quipped, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." As our enshittification-rich environment drives more and more companies to evolve into rent-seeking enterprises through printerinisation, HP offers us a glimpse of the horrors of the late enshittocene.
It's just as Orwell prophesied: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a HP installing malware on your printer to force you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink – forever."
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches
Image: Jay Summet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE
kind of obsessed with this comment from the aoteaora nz subreddit….
i needed this.
another person has self-immolated in protest of the ongoing genocide happening in Palestine. his name is Matt Nelson, he self-immolated in front of the Israeli consulate in Boston, he is the 5th known person to have done this. Before he did this, he stated his intentions and reasoning in a Youtube video which has been reposted across several platforms and the condensed transcription is as following:
“My name is Matt Nelson and I'm about to engage in an extreme act of protest. We are all culpable in the ongoing genocide in Gaza […] We are slaves to capitalism and the military industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care. The protest I'm about to engage in is a call to our government to stop suppling Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians, to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, and to support the ICC indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government […] A democracy is supposed to serve the will of the people, not the interests of the wealthy. Take the power back. Free Palestine.”
Remember his face, remember his name. Free Palestine. 🇵🇸
I miss the properly made paper manuals that games came with back in the day. Arcanum of Steamworks and Magick Obscura's is a whole ass world/setting book complete with a banana bread recipe.
I wonder what Concord's would have looked like. Or Godfall, or Redfall, or any of the other failed games with self-fulfilling titles.
Top: in Donkey Kong Country, the Master Necky boss is a bird whose main body is never seen. Instead, merely its head and neck appear from offscreen, being able to instantly switch what side of the screen it appears from.
Bottom: an official Japanese guide for the game contains a humorous illustration where Donkey Kong theorizes that the only way this is possible is if Master Necky actually has two heads, and each is simply hiding behind its own side of the screen.
Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Small Findings | Source: dkvine
lmao
great post. I misread the part with batman so I got a mental image of him driving the batmobile through a wall of hommus. quite thrilling.
Malevolent Foods
bananaville, population he
His posture is so good
not to go all Unabomber but the Authority of the Machine really fucked us up
just leaving this here
a list of 100+ buildings to put in your fantasy town
academy
adventurer's guild
alchemist
apiary
apothecary
aquarium
armory
art gallery
bakery
bank
barber
barracks
bathhouse
blacksmith
boathouse
book store
bookbinder
botanical garden
brothel
butcher
carpenter
cartographer
casino
castle
cobbler
coffee shop
council chamber
court house
crypt for the noble family
dentist
distillery
docks
dovecot
dyer
embassy
farmer's market
fighting pit
fishmonger
fortune teller
gallows
gatehouse
general store
graveyard
greenhouses
guard post
guildhall
gymnasium
haberdashery
haunted house
hedge maze
herbalist
hospice
hospital
house for sale
inn
jail
jeweller
kindergarten
leatherworker
library
locksmith
mail courier
manor house
market
mayor's house
monastery
morgue
museum
music shop
observatory
orchard
orphanage
outhouse
paper maker
pawnshop
pet shop
potion shop
potter
printmaker
quest board
residence
restricted zone
sawmill
school
scribe
sewer entrance
sheriff's office
shrine
silversmith
spa
speakeasy
spice merchant
sports stadium
stables
street market
tailor
tannery
tavern
tax collector
tea house
temple
textile shop
theatre
thieves guild
thrift store
tinker's workshop
town crier post
town square
townhall
toy store
trinket shop
warehouse
watchtower
water mill
weaver
well
windmill
wishing well
wizard tower
ha ha ha ha ha. you go Imane, take these sadsacks to task.
MANIFEST
MANIFEST
"Heresy is but a contrivance. all things can be conjoined"
i’ve started babysitting for a VERY christian family which is great because they pay me a lot of money but as someone who was raised almost completely agnostic it’s kind of insane. the 2 year old keeps asking me to read her stories from the bible. (why are we reading david and goliath to a 2 year old????) the 5 year old told me today that he was going to bring his legos to heaven with him. he also has repeatedly told me that the lego spaceships he builds are stronger than jesus. (not sure what to say to that. do i deny it??? are things allowed to be stronger than jesus??) had to stop myself mid sentence today because i almost told them im not going to heaven which would DEFINITELY have caused several meltdowns. they’re also both completely fascinated by my nose ring