#it took me a moment‚ but: #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #puns #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
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)
He appears to her in the darkness- And is immediately terrified and transfixed because even though it’s totally dark, she’s looking right at, and through him, and Can See Him Exactly As He Is.
Which is Spooky, because he’s been having some serious self-esteem issues lately- Demon has his own problems, you see- He’s a Prince of Hell and thus he’s the victim of Hellish Politics and beset by all his fellow demons. And he’s Terrible at machinations and scheming because he too feels an attachment to The Truth and it’s making him feel Demonically Inadequate, even if he’s got the Wrath and Violence part down pat.
…So He’s been lurking on the material plane to get away from it all and been watching her suffering, because he too feels the kinship of being betrayed and hunted by all that ought love him and telling The Truth no matter how easy it would be to lie.
So now, here he is in the darkness, and his crush is looking RIGHT AT HIM and he’s genuinely frightened because he’s never cared about someone’s opinion of him before.
His aria about this is pretty great, but THEN:
She reaches out to him and says
“There is something wrong with you
There is something wrong with you that is also wrong with me
What is this kinship I feel with you? The affliction grants you Grace and Beauty, and leaves me a Hobbling wretch
Yet I believe we share some kinship- I know the fear in your eyes, for I see it in every mirror”
(I know the first two lines are from a poem in Mirror Traps by Hera Lindsay Bird, but this is what my eye-pain-delerium brain supplied me with)
He goes down on one knee in front of her and promises to do anything she wishes- He’s seen how she suffers and If he cannot have his own recompense, he will have hers- -For what price?
You are wise, and I am weary- I am a Demon and there is but one currency we trade in. Give me your soul, and I will give you everything you desire.
She thinks about it for a bit, and he makes every offer he can- I will torture your stepmother as she tortured you! The Judge lusting after your sister? I’ll make his dick explode! That bishop that has his head up his ass- I’ll make him shove it up there so far he turns inside-out!
-Love me. She says. The suffering of others will do nothing to ease my own, though some bitter part of my would thrill to see it. Love me, Truly love me as neither of us have been but deserved, and my soul will be yours.
…If I were to Truly Love you, then my soul would be yours.
-Would that be such a terrible thing?
…It would not. He says, and promptly spirits her off to his palace in hell, and explains his situation as he tends to her.
{{archivist’s note: the next paragraph is in a larger font size and a fancy cursive font}}
[At this point my brain extensively hallucinated some real smutty hurt/comfort, because I am hurting and need the comfort]
Once they understand each other, they decide to do a strangers on a train-
He goes to Earth where the mother is planning to marry the younger daughter off to the creepy old judge and tricks everyone into betraying everyone else in disguise as a simple manservant, and spirits the younger daughter away back to Hell to play with Hellhound puppies all while making sure he Never Tells A Single Lie, because it’s not a sin for a demon to be honest- it’s a demonstration of his Mastery that he doesn’t NEED to.
Meanwhile, She goes to the royal court of Hell and goes around to all the Demons and tells them The Truth about themselves, which they can’t stand as all their power is based on a sense of self-importance and secret rules that don’t actually have anything to do with reality. After losing most of their power to The Divine Wrath Of Autsim, they scamper off to Earth to get more power from their humans, who are all in a tizzy because there’s some kind of political thing going on, and the Elder Daughter and the Demon play off each other’s work to get everyone ready to fuck up each other’s shit.
(This part of the dream got muddy because Actual Plot is something I have to do while conscious and I’m not doing more than I have to until my eye stops trying to to persuade me to gouge it out with a spoon)
ANYWAY, The Final Act is the Big Wedding where all the Humans are plotting to murder each other and the Demons are all shriveled up little creatures and The Daughter and The Demon Prince turn up and reveal it was them all along and that ALL of you suck and have also ruined each other- the Judge has gotten the lawyer disbarred, the Lawyer had gotten the Bishop caught committing fraud, the Bishop has gotten the judge excommunicated and ALL the mother’s friends and allies are broke and their careers are dead and now that they have no social agency, they can’t hurt anyone anymore.
And then the caterer steps forward and reveals that He’s Actual For Real God, and he is SO PROUD of the daughter and the demon for stopping this corrupt fracas without violence or lying! The shriveled demons are Human Souls that had been cast into hell to atone but weren’t learning the lesson, and the humans are headed that way unless they really get their shit together.
The demon prince remarks that it’s odd that God would be pleased with the work of a demon.
What Demon? Says the Daughter, who always says the truth.
Yeah what Demon? Laughs God. You’re one of my Best Angels, who oversees the rehabilitation of the wicked. You looked like you were getting overwhelmed though, so I found this Paragon of Truth for you. And you Paragon looked like you were in need of help so I found this Angel for you! Now, is someone getting married today or are we just gonna let this cake go to waste?
God marries them, there’s a big party and The All Live Happily Ever After as the King and Queen of Hell, and her sister gets big into Demonic Dog Breeding.
and then I explicitly dreamed the voice of some art historian saying “-And then it got banned EVERYWHERE.”
Tags:
#storytime #dreams #demons #illness tw #murder 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
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 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.
†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.
Tags:
#101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #disappointed permanent resident of The Future
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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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.
Tags:
#bringing this back for its advice #FFNet #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #amnesia cw #recs #the more you know
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.
Brinens and Things 