thank u for the tag @celestialmickey my beloved 💖💖💖

your name with no consonants: LOL I originally wrote ‘km’ because I’m a moron and was just doing a proof and realized I read this wrong 😅

the last thing you drank: water from my ever-present water bottle

the last thing you bought: tiles for our kitchen backsplash 💁‍♀️

the last app you check before you go to bed: tbh honestly (more things I’m picking up in proofreading lmao what is wrong with me) lately it’s dropbox because I’ve been reading animorphs on there lol

favorite smell? my dog’s feet 👀 also normal things like vanilla and my perfume but that’s the first thing that popped in my head

favorite plant or flower? i love love love pansies. something about them is just so cute and silly

describe your phone case: rifle and paper co, floral print (to no one’s surprise!!!) 🌼🌸🌺🌸🌼

do you wear contacts or glasses? glasses! fun fact I’ve never tried contacts before because idk sometimes you just want to be unable to see in a hurry

would you rather read minds or be able to teleport? teleport 100% macy omg this question if anyone wants to read minds PLEASE let me know your reasoning and like...percentage mental stability haha I’m so curious

what’s your primary mode of transportation (car, bus, train, on foot)? currently car because I’m in the middle of fucking nowhere but we’re about to move back to a city soon so I can use public transit again!!!

you’ve been given one week’s paid vacation, how are you spending it? omgggg probably setting up a garden and laying in the sun like a lizard

finally, name something you like about yourself (NOT a physical characteristic): I’m a pretty fast reader! I was thinking about that the other day when I was signing a contract lol (it’s funny that I said I was a fast reader because clearly I’m not absorbing see above 🤦‍♀️)

#5yrsago Aaron Swartz was no criminal

Dan Purcell, one of Swartz' lawyers, writes about the spiteful and unreasonable charges that led to his suicide—and MIT's gutless support of his prosecutors.

I am a lawyer in San Francisco with a firm called Keker & Van Nest. I was one of Aaron's lawyers in his criminal case, in 2012 and early 2013.

I didn’t know Aaron that well, and our interactions were always colored by the fact that he didn’t really want to be talking to me. I was a criminal defense lawyer after all, and the only reason we knew each other was because he was facing a federal criminal indictment under the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) for computer fraud.

Those of you who knew Aaron don't need me to tell you what kind of person he was. Brian Knappenberger's excellent movie, "The Internet's Own Boy," will tell you more about Aaron than I could. But one thing Aaron was not was a criminal, and I'm here to clear up a few misconceptions you may have about what he did and what he was charged with.

One thing that drives me crazy is when people refer to his criminal case as a case about "hacking." And they do it in sort of a pejorative, scary way. And it's just nonsense. Aaron was, of course, a hacker in the broad sense of the term: he was an innovative thinker, looking for creative ways around problems. But in the criminal sense of the word, as somebody who breaks into a secure computer system for nefarious purposes, Aaron was no hacker, and he didn't do anything like that.

One thing that Aaron strongly believed was that the advances, the discoveries and the secrets we’ve collectively unlocked over the past millennia, about how the world works, belong to all of us. Aaron greatly resented people or entities who try to lock up scientific knowledge and keep it away from general use, so they might monetize it for personal gain.

You might be surprised at how much money is being made in this world by entities that follow just that business model. They take things that are in the public domain, and take them out of the public domain, and then charge for access to them. One field where this happens a lot is academic publishing. Obviously, there is so much information in so many books that it’s not practical to just have physical copies of them all. Digitizing all that data is an easy solution, and indeed there are many places to look up scholarly content online. But when you go to try to do that, you'll generally find that there's a subscription fee, or you can't access them unless you are affiliated with a certain institution. They're in the public domain—meaning that everyone is entitled to read it—but they’re not actually public or available for public use.

This bothered Aaron. It bothered him a lot. And he had fought against this problem throughout his life. He wanted to teach the system a lesson. So, he went to MIT, a university that had, and still has, one of the most permissive computer networks in the world—certainly for an institution of that size. At the time he did what he did, in 2010-2011, anyone in the world could walk onto MIT’s campus. With or without a student ID. With or without any affiliation with MIT at all. They could log on to MIT’s system as a guest. They didn't have to use their real name. And then they could do whatever they wanted on MIT's system.

One thing that MIT made available to its users was access to JSTOR, an online database of scholarly materials. So anybody in the world could go to MITs campus, they could get on to JSTOR, and they could download articles from JSTOR. Anyone.

That’s what Aaron did.

He went to the MIT campus, like anyone could have done. He logged onto the system, like anyone could have done. He went on to JSTOR, like anyone could have done. And he downloaded articles.

That is not hacking. That is walking through a door that MIT, the owner of the door, deliberately left open for anyone to walk through.

Of course, the story's not exactly that simple, because Aaron didn’t want to take the time to manually download thousands of articles, which would have been impractical. He wrote what experts have confirmed was a fairly simple computer program to automate the downloading. So he left his laptop behind, and he went on his way. He downloaded the files, but he didn't steal anything; he used the access freely given at MIT. All the articles that he downloaded stayed in the JSTOR database. They were still available to anybody with access to JSTOR. If you have a JSTOR subscription, and you go to the database, they are still there today. He didn't deprive anybody of access to that material.

After a while, JSTOR noticed the downloading activity and JSTOR shut down access to their database from MIT’s network. For a few days, nobody could get onto JSTOR using the MIT network. That was an inconvenience, for sure, but it was temporary, and MIT’s access to JSTOR was soon restored.

What Aaron did, whether you call it a prank or a consciousness-raising exercise, was not a crime. He downloaded a bunch of articles he was permitted to access using an automated program that made it easier. The idea that anybody could think that was a crime was insane to me. Was it inconsiderate? Possibly. Many acts of civil disobedience and conscious-raising are, and I think Aaron probably would have pleaded guilty to that.

JSTOR was the ostensible victim here, but JSTOR made it clear from the start that they didn't see this as a Federal case. They didn't want Aaron to be prosecuted; they just basically wanted it to be over.

So, why all the fuss? Why did this terrible thing happen?

The first reason is prosecutorial discretion. The prosecutor was Steve Heymann, the head of the Computer Crimes division of the United States Attorney’s office in Boston. You’ll hear a little from him, and a little about him, in Brian’s movie, but I have nothing good to say about him. You might ask, like I did, what Aaron’s actions had to do with “computer crimes.” Aaron hadn’t broken into a secure network and stolen credit card numbers. He hadn't stolen anyone's healthcare data. He hadn't violated anyone's privacy. He hadn't caused anybody to lose any money. There are things that are "computer crimes" that we all recognize are invasive and dangerous, and this was not one of them.

But Steve Heymann did what bureaucrats and functionaries often choose to do. He wanted make a big case to justify his existence and justify his budget. The casualties be damned.

Unfortunately, he had a lot of weapons on his side, in addition to having the power of the Federal Government. He had the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is an over broad federal statute that has been made more broad by federal prosecutors trying to stretch its terms. But under the indictment in Aaron's case, the government still had to prove that Aaron had gained unauthorized access to a computer system. Our defense was really pretty simple. There were going to be other nuances, and we were going to talk a lot about Aaron’s motivations and the type of person Aaron was, but our bottom line was going to be that Aaron had done only what MIT permitted him to do. He hadn't gained unauthorized access to anything. He had gained access to JSTOR with full authorization from MIT. Just like anyone in the jury pool, anyone reading Boing Boing, or anyone in the country could have done.

We hoped that the jury would understand that and would acquit Aaron, and it quickly became obvious to us that there really wasn't going to be opportunity to resolve the case short of trial because Steve Heymann was unreasonable.

Of course, after Aaron's passing, it's really easy for them to say "35 years. That was a bluff. It was never gonna happen." That was not what they were telling us. Heymann always insisted on a sentence of hard time in Federal Prison. We said, "this is really a very trivial thing. Can't we resolve it with probation or some other thing that made a little more sense and would make it possible for Aaron to go on with his life?”

He said "no." He insisted that Aaron plead to a felony and serve prison time. And of course, what he said, as prosecutors often do, is that if we go to trial, it won't be so easy, and if we lose, well, this is a tough judge, and the prosecution is going to recommend a very difficult sentence. Aaron may end up having a term of years.

These after-the-fact statements they're making in the media, to try to make them seem more reasonable? That's all they are.

It really goes to show you how much power prosecutors wield in our Federal system. They dictate the charges that are brought. They dictate how serious the sentence will be, because the sentence depends on how the crime is charged, and there are sentencing guidelines that limit the judge’s discretion. And if a prosecutor has bad judgment, as Steve Heymann did—blowing out of all proporition a harmless effort to point out a problem with how public-domain information is being locked up—there isn't a lot you can do about that other than fight, and the consequences can be terrible.

The second reason for this terrible outcome is MIT.

As a defense attorney, I never expect the prosecutors to do the right thing, but I did expect MIT to do the right thing. JSTOR, as I said, came out and said "We don't want to see Aaron prosecuted. We consider the matter closed." MIT never did that. MIT carries a lot of water in Boston. I don't know if they could have stopped Heymann from prosecuting Aaron, but they could have done a lot more than they did.

MIT is an institution that was known for creativity, for hacking, for pranks, for pushing the boundaries—and for showing that good can come out of it. In this case, they responded like a typical corporation. They were entirely gutless. They were supplicants to the government, and they did whatever they could to help the government's case. They were not cooperative with us. A lot of people in the MIT community are furious with MIT, and I think they have good reason to be.

There's no question that Aaron paid a price because of who he was, because he was in the habit of sticking his thumb in the eye of the government, of challenging things, and of challenging certain things that were happening that weren't fair. He was an activist, and he wasn't afraid to ruffle a few feathers.

We'll see what the FOIA requests come to. I don't think there were orders from on high to hurt Aaron, and that Steven Heymann was just the arm of the law. But there's no question in our society, those that go along, get along better, and Aaron wasn't willing to go along, much to his credit.

In the end, the whole thing makes me very sad. It is sad for all of us that Aaron is no longer with us. Sad for his family and friends, most of all. I’m sad I didn’t have the chance to try to help him, and walk him out of the courtroom a free man. We could have done that, and it was certainly what he deserved. But I'm glad to honor Aaron's memory, and to think about what we can do for our own sakes, and our country’s sake.

Photo: Wikipedia

https://boingboing.net/2014/11/18/aaron-swartz-was-no-criminal.html

Jan 28 Dancitron Movie Night - Gotham s2 e20-22

lmao this was two weeks ago idk what they did. i ain’t rereading the log. they finished the season. before the stream Prowl showed off his human avatar’s new t-shirt and after the stream he did some fancy bridging, and I only know that because I accidentally glimpsed it while preparing the log for posting. what happened during the stream itself is a mystery.

Today NoodlesAtNight 7:46 pm *Nothing new under the sun - he's just sitting on the couch, legs crossed at the knees, hands folded on his lap. Every now and then his foot bobs as if to say that, yes, he is in fact still alive.* Today SCProwl 7:53 pm *doesn't need to feel the subtle vibration from Soundwave's occasional foot movements to tell he's alive, but it's nice to know the energy signature that represents him on her visor is indeed alive* MedicalMurdersaurus 7:55 pm *scrambles indoors, covered in soot and excitement* HI NoodlesAtNight 7:55 pm *He'll ping his timeline's Prowl hello and get her set up with a feed and description. He is /prepared/ for tonight.*

[[Good evening, Swoop. He's going to start charging you a vacuuming bill.]] NoodlesAtNight 7:56 pm ((lol "the only cop u like" it's true)) MedicalMurdersaurus 7:56 pm Why? :V verdigrisprowl 7:56 pm *shows up as a fifteen-foot-tall human* Soundwave. NoodlesAtNight 7:56 pm *Casually points at the greyish-black smudges around Swoop's feet. That's why.* SCProwl 7:56 pm *ping of thanks before she finds her usual seat* MedicalMurdersaurus 7:57 pm *looks where Soundwave points, crouches down and immediately gets down to work doodling * NoodlesAtNight 7:57 pm *Soundwave finally shows something more than a minor movement when the human appears. He twists his whole upper body to stare for a moment, perplexed. Humans ddddooooon't come that tall. What is...?*

[[........Prowl?]] NoodlesAtNight 7:58 pm *Silently despairs over Swoop's nonsense.* MedicalMurdersaurus 7:58 pm *has plenty of nonsense for the whole floor* verdigrisprowl 7:58 pm Look. *he pulls out his t-shirt for Soundwave to observe. It's a black shirt with a white drawing and text of a baseball diamond, with each position labeled with the players' names from Who's On First.* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:00 pm *the dragon comes in with the cart full of treats, opens her freshly unbandaged mouth to speak, and nearly bites her tongue clean off at seeing a giant human. okay. welcome to cybertron, it's full of nonsense. she'll just... put the treats on the bar. like this isn't happening.* NoodlesAtNight 8:00 pm *Soundwave leeeeans and squints behind the half-visor. ... And his face splits into a horrible, toothy, open smile.*

[[/Delightful./]] MedicalMurdersaurus 8:00 pm *writes out BIRD WAS HERE because nothing says "I love you" like a pitifully obvious attempt at vandalism* NoodlesAtNight 8:00 pm *Laserbeak will love it as soon as she stops stuffing her face and actually shows up* NoodlesAtNight 8:01 pm [[Do not worry, dragon. That is not a real human.]] SCProwl 8:01 pm *fails to notice anything wrong with the Captain's appearance. holomatter is energy is holomatter is energy is--* MedicalMurdersaurus 8:01 pm *will spend his BIrd-free time writing other equally inspired sayings around the place in ash, insulting Buzzsaw, Shockwave, and so on* MedicalMurdersaurus 8:02 pm *let no one say he doesn't SORT OF half listen* NoodlesAtNight 8:02 pm *Soundwave stretches a feeler over to smudge out the one about Shockwave.* MedicalMurdersaurus 8:02 pm :V Rude NoodlesAtNight 8:03 pm *...After a minute, adds "Soundwave: also here" to the graffiti. If you can't beat them, join them.* MedicalMurdersaurus 8:03 pm *snickers* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:03 pm Smokescreen shows up to these movie nights. I take nothing for granted. *chuffs a little* But I suppose a real human would suffocate to death. NoodlesAtNight 8:03 pm ((ten minutes til start, get whatcha need now)) NoodlesAtNight 8:04 pm [[Only downstairs.]] verdigrisprowl 8:04 pm *he showed up in a funny shirt and as a reward got the most beautiful smile. the shirt was a good idea.* *he switches back to his usual avatar and sits* NoodlesAtNight 8:04 pm *Glances back to Prowl.* [[A greyface gave him a shirt once. Perhaps he should program it onto his own human form.]] MedicalMurdersaurus 8:05 pm *starts wandering around leaving handprints on things* NoodlesAtNight 8:05 pm [[Swoop! Go wash your hands.]] MedicalMurdersaurus 8:05 pm *stares at Soundwave* *licks both his palms and then holds them out for inspection* NoodlesAtNight 8:06 pm *Is still for a long moment. Then shudders.* [[What /are/ they teaching them over there...]] MedicalMurdersaurus 8:06 pm : > verdigrisprowl 8:06 pm What's the shirt? NoodlesAtNight 8:08 pm *Soundwave taps his chin, looks upstairs, and mentally adjusts one of the cameras in his storage quarters. He then lets the feed sit on screen for a moment.* verdigrisprowl 8:08 pm *looks at the xenomorph shirt* ... It'd suit you. NoodlesAtNight 8:09 pm [[Do you think so? He knows very little about human fashion.]] ((six minutes!)) SideswipeStriker 8:10 pm -just going to slide in, and sit. Blaster couldn't make it today- verdigrisprowl 8:11 pm From what I can tell, all humans are able to wear t-shirts. And they generally wear t-shirts with pictures of things they like on them. And that's a thing you like. NoodlesAtNight 8:11 pm *A nod to Sideswipe. He wonders, does everyone at that base share all the episode or movie data between themselves? They must. How else would they know what they were watching?* NoodlesAtNight 8:12 pm [[That is true.]] *Perks.* [[Did you get the base for the one you had from Earth?]] verdigrisprowl 8:12 pm It's actually kind of interesting. I can't think of any other species that have designed a specific garment that serves as a wearable art canvas. SideswipeStriker 8:12 pm -They do. Don't worry, the room chatter is filtered out before it's shared.- NoodlesAtNight 8:13 pm ((two minutes, lemme get some warnings up)) SideswipeStriker 8:13 pm -still, quick nod back to Soundwave- verdigrisprowl 8:14 pm The base for the t-shirt, you mean? No, it came default with the updated holomatter program I got on the Lost Light. The color is adjustable and it's even got a little layer where you can insert your own image to display on the shirt. MedicalMurdersaurus 8:14 pm *half listening to the t-shirt talk* Him Sideswipe do costume stuff. NoodlesAtNight 8:14 pm ((GOTHAM S2 20-22 // Violence, blood, death. Poor depictions of mental illness, ableist language, psychiatric and medical abuse. Flashing lights, rat, mild body horror, gross rotting head, needles, spider, weird eye, uhhhh... "meat dust", I don't know how else to describe what happens there without spoiling it.)) SideswipeStriker 8:15 pm I do what now? SCProwl 8:15 pm ((meat dust bwahaha SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:15 pm *if soundwave doesn't mind, the dragon will get loafed up on the couch by him and prepared for Movie* verdigrisprowl 8:15 pm ((so, bacon bits)) NoodlesAtNight 8:15 pm [[That is helpful - but he also meant the image. It is brilliant.]]

((oh my GOD)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:15 pm ((snort the meat dust like cocaine)) MedicalMurdersaurus 8:15 pm *blinks owlishly at this sideswipe* NoodlesAtNight 8:15 pm *Soundwave scootches closer to Prowl to make room for the dragon on his other side. He's pretty sure Prowl won't mind.* verdigrisprowl 8:15 pm Oh. I found it on the internet. SideswipeStriker 8:16 pm -waves back- verdigrisprowl 8:16 pm *An alien on the couch? ... Not enough to say anything about it.* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:16 pm *to be fair, it's not like she needs a lot of room. tiny dragons be tiny.* MedicalMurdersaurus 8:16 pm Not YOU. Him Sideswipe. At Ark. Him do costumes alllll the time. Him do Dinobots as Power Rangers for Halloween! NoodlesAtNight 8:17 pm *True, but Soundwave does tend to stretch out when he can.*

[[Their datanet is full of good visuals. He will have to look for some others...]] SCProwl 8:17 pm They could put those documents back together. SideswipeStriker 8:17 pm Oh. Heh. My alternate is really creative, ain't he? NoodlesAtNight 8:17 pm [[It would take time they do not have.]] MedicalMurdersaurus 8:18 pm yup verdigrisprowl 8:18 pm Gym shouldn't even be there. This is a police investigation. SideswipeStriker 8:18 pm Freelancing MedicalMurdersaurus 8:18 pm Me Swoop want alternate. Me Swoop never ever get to meet other Swoop. Us need more Swoops! Kehehheh! NoodlesAtNight 8:18 pm [[They can ban him despite his contract to investigate, eys?]] [[Primus. One Swoop is enough.]] verdigrisprowl 8:18 pm Clearly, they should confiscate the documents anyway. Maybe they don't have the time now but they could have it—and need the documents—later. SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:18 pm ((my favorite part of returning to college is hearing my roommate delightedly go "hi meeper!" as princess nugget /catapults/ herself at the roommate)) SCProwl 8:18 pm Exactly. NoodlesAtNight 8:18 pm ((hee hee!)) MedicalMurdersaurus 8:19 pm Ten Swoops NoodlesAtNight 8:19 pm ((also: again, i apologize for probable skips and stutters now and then, this is the best rabbitcast i could get tonight)) SideswipeStriker 8:19 pm You're ten by yourself, buddy MedicalMurdersaurus 8:19 pm Two hundred :V NoodlesAtNight 8:19 pm ((i so don't feel sorry for this priest tbh)) SideswipeStriker 8:20 pm ((yeah, that's kinda God's bag SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:20 pm ((my great aunt would've thrown him through a plate glass window)) ((my great aunt is, for context, a nun)) MedicalMurdersaurus 8:20 pm ((A+ suit)) SideswipeStriker 8:20 pm Swoop, buddy, let's /not/ NoodlesAtNight 8:20 pm [[You two have got a point. He generally assumes the GCPD is not competent enough to think about that.]] MedicalMurdersaurus 8:20 pm A miiiiiiiiillion Swoop :V NoodlesAtNight 8:20 pm ((and i can see why she would!)) verdigrisprowl 8:20 pm That's fair. SideswipeStriker 8:20 pm -snorts- SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:21 pm Penguin human. Clean up your den. That's a good way to become ill. SCProwl 8:21 pm They generally aren't unfortunately. SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:21 pm ((my great aunt is badass)) SideswipeStriker 8:21 pm ((pffff verdigrisprowl 8:21 pm ((why the hell did jim even quit, like,)) verdigrisprowl 8:22 pm (("oh i'm not being a cop anymore. ...... but i'm doing everything a cop does anyway, and hanging around the cops, and being constantly inconvenienced by the fact that i'm not actually a cop")) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:22 pm Is that even a real sword. It broke like stick candy, and it looks fake. NoodlesAtNight 8:22 pm [[It was a prop sword.]] verdigrisprowl 8:22 pm If it's shaped like a sword and it's made out of metal then it's a real sword. That doesn't make it a good one. SideswipeStriker 8:23 pm .... MedicalMurdersaurus 8:23 pm Guardian meansssss.....? Caretaker? SideswipeStriker 8:23 pm Yeah NoodlesAtNight 8:23 pm [[Yes. Guardian, someone who guards.]] MedicalMurdersaurus 8:23 pm Him Sunstreaker is Bob guardian NoodlesAtNight 8:24 pm [[Yes, he is.]] SCProwl 8:24 pm Human children need to be tended to, correct? MedicalMurdersaurus 8:24 pm Ratchet is Swoop guardian Wheeljack also guardian NoodlesAtNight 8:24 pm [[Very often. Few of them can stand on their own until close to their second decade.]] MedicalMurdersaurus 8:24 pm Buuuuuut them not GUARD us Dinobots keheh. Us not need guards. verdigrisprowl 8:25 pm Actually, they typically learn to stand within about a year. NoodlesAtNight 8:25 pm *Leans back.* [[What?]] MedicalMurdersaurus 8:25 pm Blooooooooddddd *giggles* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:26 pm It /was/ fake! SCProwl 8:26 pm Hm. SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:26 pm Well. It was a fake of a real sword. It was, however, made of bad metal and utilized for the purposes of stabbing people. verdigrisprowl 8:26 pm *looks at* ... New humans can stand on their own within about a year? MedicalMurdersaurus 8:26 pm *suddenly serious* Soundwave. Where Her Bird? SideswipeStriker 8:27 pm It was a copy of a sword SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:27 pm Unless that's a fascinatingly resilient sword, it is going to be very rusted from being buried with a dead body. SCProwl 8:27 pm So he's going grave robbing. SideswipeStriker 8:27 pm Good enough to stab a few, yeah? But, not good enough for a sword fight SCProwl 8:27 pm Only if it's made from a metal that rusts and whatever mythic properties it has might also prevent it from deteriorating. NoodlesAtNight 8:28 pm *Stares in confusion for a few moments before getting what Prowl is saying.* [[Oh. No, not - that is, he meant they are typically incapable of surviving by themselves until that age.]] *Shakes his head.* [[He supposes you are right in the literal sense. Still - even a year is a /long/ time for any newbuild not to know how to stand up.]] [[There are creatures on Earth that learn to stand and walk and run in minutes.]] verdigrisprowl 8:28 pm Oh! Yes. SideswipeStriker 8:28 pm ...... Sounds like a challenge NoodlesAtNight 8:28 pm *Bird is coming! She's dragging a small rag bundle filled with snacks.* {{Hiiii.}} SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:29 pm Do humans make swords of any material? *the dragon shrugs her wings* I guess it makes sense- what dragons use swords for and what other species use swords for can be different. MedicalMurdersaurus 8:29 pm *chirps with excitement* Hi, Bird! NoodlesAtNight 8:29 pm *She spots the graffiti on her way to Swoop and pauses to circle it.* {{Neheh. That lie. Bird not there early time.}} *She says while writing "It true" just beneath it.* verdigrisprowl 8:30 pm To be fair, most species' development rates seem slow to me. Even other Cybertronians. SCProwl 8:30 pm I don't know what humans make swords from but Cybertronian weapons are made from many different alloys. NoodlesAtNight 8:30 pm ((incoming skellie)) MedicalMurdersaurus 8:30 pm *is absolutely delighted by her reaction, all grins from audio to audio* SideswipeStriker 8:30 pm -snorts again. Crowbars work too- NoodlesAtNight 8:30 pm [[That is true. He still does not know how they fit everything they must know in two weeks...]] verdigrisprowl 8:30 pm There are swords on top of the coffin. They could at least TRY to grab those swords before opening up the crypt. SideswipeStriker 8:31 pm Aw, c'mon, the guy is dead, hush ...whoops NoodlesAtNight 8:31 pm [[She has seen the sword before; she would know if the ones atop the crypt were what they wanted.]] verdigrisprowl 8:31 pm Fair. verdigrisprowl 8:32 pm She's going to die. NoodlesAtNight 8:32 pm ((flashing lights, i think)) SCProwl 8:32 pm Stealing from the dead. *shudders* verdigrisprowl 8:32 pm Oh, never mind, she's going to change sides. SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:32 pm The dead can't use it. NoodlesAtNight 8:32 pm *Bird paps Swoop's cheek.* {{You good friend. Now Bird got alibi.}} SideswipeStriker 8:32 pm What's wrong with that? The dead thing. SCProwl 8:32 pm At least it wasn't part of the body. verdigrisprowl 8:32 pm Nope, she's trying to bring his memories back, I'm back to "she's going to die." SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:32 pm From a cruel, pragmatic perspective? The dead don't need to survive. Of course, no one really needs this sword, so I suppose the point is moot. MedicalMurdersaurus 8:33 pm *would blush if that was a thing Dinobots could do* Me Swoop helping : > SideswipeStriker 8:33 pm Oh. She's gonna die verdigrisprowl 8:33 pm Yep. NoodlesAtNight 8:34 pm [[Pity. He likes her.]] SCProwl 8:34 pm She reminded him of his real objective. SideswipeStriker 8:34 pm Not surprised you were right, Prowl SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:34 pm Did he gut-wound her? She might not die immediately from that. NoodlesAtNight 8:34 pm [[It is unwise to bring back the memories of a person who threatened to kill you shortly before they died.]] SideswipeStriker 8:34 pm Just alot NoodlesAtNight 8:35 pm [[Humans succumb to gut wounds very quickly, from what he has seen.]] verdigrisprowl 8:35 pm Their guts are minced very easily. NoodlesAtNight 8:35 pm [[Their own insides poison them.]] opatoes 8:35 pm /Smokescreen's coming in late, but is waving at Soundwave and Swoop and Round Prowl!/ Hey everyone! What'd I miss? SCProwl 8:35 pm I'm aware of the pragmatics of taking from the dead. It was a valid survival tactic during the war. SideswipeStriker 8:35 pm Death doom and destruction MedicalMurdersaurus 8:35 pm *waves* SideswipeStriker 8:35 pm And graverobbing SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:35 pm Yes. But, in dragons, it can still be sometimes survived with immediate medical intervention. If you intend to kill someone with a gut wound, you ought to be watching them die to ensure their death. NoodlesAtNight 8:36 pm [[You are missing the Galavan-Azrael human gathering his true sword and going after Bruce Wayne.]] verdigrisprowl 8:36 pm ((seriously why doesn't jim just rejoin the cops)) NoodlesAtNight 8:36 pm ((because he's still a dumbass who thinks Lone Wolfing it is the way to go at this stage)) SideswipeStriker 8:36 pm ((because plot bs? verdigrisprowl 8:36 pm ((there's. there's no sensible reason for him not to.)) MedicalMurdersaurus 8:36 pm ((man pain)) verdigrisprowl 8:36 pm ((literally the ONLY thing he's been doing is "cop things" and "pouting about being unable to do cop things")) opatoes 8:36 pm His true sword? I missed SWORDS? Man, I always miss the good stuff SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:36 pm ((okay, I'm face blind as hell, but is this the same selena as before?)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:37 pm ((she doesn't! look! right!)) NoodlesAtNight 8:37 pm ((and also because he wants to solve bruce wayne case and wouldn't be allowed or something since barnes has told him to let it go before)) verdigrisprowl 8:37 pm ((she straightened her hair, i think that made her look different)) NoodlesAtNight 8:37 pm ((it's her, she's just got straightened hair)) opatoes 8:37 pm ((wait yeah her hair looks- oh SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:37 pm ((augh. why must my brain be constantly confused)) verdigrisprowl 8:37 pm ((i seriously wondered too. i had to look away from the sceen and see if her voice sounded the same)) ((i don't like straight hair selina)) MedicalMurdersaurus 8:37 pm ((the straight hair is weird and inexplicable. Why would she waste time straightening it? SHe just shoved it in a beanie right after.)) opatoes 8:37 pm ((that's a mood asdczxnb SideswipeStriker 8:37 pm Ah, vents, always fun opatoes 8:38 pm ((I once thought a coworker was a different person because he cut his hair... NoodlesAtNight 8:38 pm ((wig?)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:38 pm Do humans typically keep food in their air vents? opatoes 8:38 pm I do! But I'm also not human SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:38 pm ... *stares at smokescreen* verdigrisprowl 8:38 pm ((her hair spontaneously straightened out of grief when bruce moved back home)) SideswipeStriker 8:38 pm ... opatoes 8:38 pm ... What? Sometimes, you need a good spot for snacks. MedicalMurdersaurus 8:38 pm *mock whispers* You Bird food in air vents? Kehehh NoodlesAtNight 8:39 pm *Bird whirls round on Swoop.* {{What you know? Who told?}} MedicalMurdersaurus 8:39 pm *briefly startled before laughing* NoodlesAtNight 8:39 pm ((upcoming scene is one of the ones that convinced me to watch Gotham at all)) ((this one here)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:39 pm *laughs* Hello, riddling human. MedicalMurdersaurus 8:39 pm *assumes they are playing because why wouldn't this be play fighting* Me Swoop never tell! SideswipeStriker 8:39 pm -gigglesnort- verdigrisprowl 8:39 pm They could just crawl around each other. SCProwl 8:40 pm ((same. i saw a gif set of that exchange and was like yup gotta watch this *tilts helm slightly toward Swoop and Laserbeak's conversation* NoodlesAtNight 8:40 pm {{What you Swoop want for telling?}} *HUFFS* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:40 pm I think she'd bite him if he tried to pass her. And she probably knows how to bite. NoodlesAtNight 8:40 pm [][][]Can you pick--[][][] opatoes 8:40 pm I wanna learn how to pick locks... opatoes 8:41 pm Like, I don't need to learn, but I wanna learn. NoodlesAtNight 8:41 pm *Shaking like a piece of tinfoil in a tornado* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:41 pm Ah, see? She's still alive. Just being poisoned by her guts. SideswipeStriker 8:41 pm Depends on the lock, Smokes MedicalMurdersaurus 8:41 pm Ahhhhhhhuuummmmmmm! *doesn't have a good answer, normally this is the part where someone tries to punch his lights out and the wrestling starts* You Bird.... ummm..... NoodlesAtNight 8:41 pm ((butch ;; <3 )) MedicalMurdersaurus 8:41 pm ((Buuuuutch)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:41 pm ((I'm having... feelings...)) SideswipeStriker 8:41 pm ((noooooo SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:42 pm ((Butch, just tell her that Galvan stabbed her)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:43 pm ((him)) ((I cannot fucking /brain/ today)) NoodlesAtNight 8:43 pm ((png telling it like it is)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:43 pm ((ah, png knows, nvm)) NoodlesAtNight 8:43 pm {{Me Bird what? What?}} verdigrisprowl 8:44 pm He didn't even signal before making that turn. SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:44 pm So. Who thinks that the Azrael human is just following the Jim human to find Bruce? NoodlesAtNight 8:44 pm [[It was a nice turn, though.]] SideswipeStriker 8:44 pm -raises hand- NoodlesAtNight 8:44 pm {{Bird think it!}} verdigrisprowl 8:44 pm It would've been nice if he'd done it without squealing. NoodlesAtNight 8:45 pm {{Oh. Maybe him Azrael already know.}} verdigrisprowl 8:45 pm And doubtful. Gym has a car. Galavant doesn't. SideswipeStriker 8:45 pm Yeah, that sounded paaaoh shit SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:45 pm Mhm. I was wrong. MedicalMurdersaurus 8:45 pm *looks up at Bird sheepishly, twisting back and forth* Youuu Bird... ahh... *wants to say a thing but DOESN'T WANT TO SAY A THING* UMMMM! NoodlesAtNight 8:46 pm {{...Ravage got Swoop tongue?}} [[Fool. At least put your escape route back correctly.]] SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:46 pm Well, there's more than one way to bait a hook, I suppose. Perhaps I oughtn't make predictions. verdigrisprowl 8:46 pm Amateur. SideswipeStriker 8:46 pm Not very smart MedicalMurdersaurus 8:46 pm yah :X NoodlesAtNight 8:47 pm {{Bird go shoot him. Coming back in minute.}} *She zooms up the stairs* MedicalMurdersaurus 8:47 pm *covers his face with his hands and giggles* NoodlesAtNight 8:47 pm ((get him alfred!!)) MedicalMurdersaurus 8:48 pm *remains in his giggly, unseeing state the whole while she's gone* SideswipeStriker 8:48 pm That's not good Arcee-Autobot 8:48 pm [[ Hey everyone! I'm actually awake late enough to Join this since I haven't in a while lol]] SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:48 pm Suspicious elevator. NoodlesAtNight 8:49 pm ((heeeey! haven't seen you in forever, welcome back!)) Arcee-Autobot 8:49 pm [[ Thank you! I can actually see things again!]] opatoes 8:49 pm ((: O !! Hey!! Arcee-Autobot 8:49 pm [[ Long story short I used a Hair dye and I had an allergic reaction that caused a lot of swelling around my face , But i'm okay!]] NoodlesAtNight 8:50 pm ((oh damn - i'm glad you're all right!!)) verdigrisprowl 8:50 pm ((oh yikes)) NoodlesAtNight 8:50 pm ((it early Croc)) SideswipeStriker 8:50 pm .......so SideswipeStriker 8:51 pm Um... NoodlesAtNight 8:51 pm [[Yes?]] SideswipeStriker 8:51 pm Humans aren't supposed to look like that MedicalMurdersaurus 8:51 pm *looks around to see if there is a nearby pillow or blanket* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:51 pm I mean, it could have been a much worse look for a human. NoodlesAtNight 8:51 pm [[Generally not, no. One of Strange's experiments, he expects.]] SideswipeStriker 8:51 pm Yeah, but what the frag? And yikes SideswipeStriker 8:52 pm Strange is kinda like....Shockwave verdigrisprowl 8:52 pm The shoes are a decoy. MedicalMurdersaurus 8:52 pm *yanks a nearby blanket away from its home and throws it over himself for maximum giggly hiding* NoodlesAtNight 8:52 pm [[He gave the human girl a reptilian arm, after all. Simple work to give this human... they looked like scales. He will go with scales.]] verdigrisprowl 8:52 pm Yep. NoodlesAtNight 8:52 pm *Pings Prowl. Good work, there.* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:52 pm I would assume scales. NoodlesAtNight 8:52 pm [[And yes, he is.]] verdigrisprowl 8:52 pm Back up. SideswipeStriker 8:52 pm Ah... verdigrisprowl 8:52 pm Double tap. SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:52 pm If you have to look for a corpse, your foe is not dead enough yet. Kill it again. verdigrisprowl 8:53 pm At any rate, don't get out of the car. Keep driving. SideswipeStriker 8:53 pm Ah. NoodlesAtNight 8:53 pm *Laserbeak comes down with Ravage, who has a mouthful of something. He wanders over to Swoop and promptly deposits it at Swoop's feet. Behold: a severed tongue.* {{Bird got it back.}} verdigrisprowl 8:53 pm Seriously? He blows off HOW many bullet shots, and now he's conveniently not wearing bulletproof armor? When and why did he take off his bulletproof armor? MedicalMurdersaurus 8:53 pm *peaks out from under the blanket, sees the tongue, and immediately starts SHRIEKING with laughter* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:53 pm No, he's not dead. SideswipeStriker 8:53 pm Ooooor not NoodlesAtNight 8:53 pm [[Oh, really, Ravage. He thought he told you to get rid of that thing.]] opatoes 8:54 pm throw the gun at him! SideswipeStriker 8:54 pm Oh slag SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:54 pm Throw the gun. NoodlesAtNight 8:54 pm ((AW YEAH)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:54 pm ((PENGUINO)) Arcee-Autobot 8:54 pm Arcee took a seat on the Floor and Hugged her Knees watching what was on [[ Its a Pengu boiii]] verdigrisprowl 8:54 pm HA! NoodlesAtNight 8:54 pm *Bird CACKLES* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:54 pm ...Oh no. SideswipeStriker 8:54 pm HAH opatoes 8:54 pm PHFFHF MedicalMurdersaurus 8:54 pm *looks over at the sound and OADSIHFIAUDSHFJDSFHGKHDFKJND* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:54 pm Finally, enough kill. Arcee-Autobot 8:54 pm That's going to leave a mark SideswipeStriker 8:54 pm Oh, oh that's a fun feeling SCProwl 8:55 pm *laughs* MedicalMurdersaurus 8:55 pm *could not laugh LOUDER than he is right now* *on the floor* *dying* verdigrisprowl 8:55 pm *covers mouth and collapses against Soundwave, shaking* MedicalMurdersaurus 8:55 pm *SO GOOD* SCProwl 8:55 pm W-well that's one way to make sure he won't come back a second time. NoodlesAtNight 8:55 pm *Soundwave valiantly tries to stay upright so Prowl has a support to laugh into. He's a bit wobbly himself, though.* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:55 pm ((I can't fucking breathe, that was /hilarious/)) SideswipeStriker 8:55 pm ((THAT WAS AWESOME SCProwl 8:56 pm ((that was the best scene this entire season NoodlesAtNight 8:56 pm ((i have been waiting m o n t h s in the hopes we would get to that so i could see y'all react)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:56 pm *the dragon hums contemplatively* They could have burned the rest of the effluvia as well. Leave no scrap behind. verdigrisprowl 8:56 pm ((it killed me)) SideswipeStriker 8:56 pm -face in knees, laughing still at the rocket launcher- MedicalMurdersaurus 8:56 pm *actually flailing he's laughing so hard* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:56 pm ((I spat water on the computer and also the cat)) NoodlesAtNight 8:56 pm {{Him Swoop dead. You Ravage take outside, bury.}} ((oh dear, poor cat)) MedicalMurdersaurus 8:57 pm *lets out a squeak at the "threat" and is just so delighted by the entire world right now* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:57 pm ...Oh no. opatoes 8:57 pm ((i might head out because i'm too busy to stay but that was a good scene and D : NoodlesAtNight 8:57 pm ((i'm glad you got to see that at least!!)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:57 pm ((the cat will forgive me later)) opatoes 8:57 pm Soundwave- Something came up in my universe, and I've gotta go, but- I'll catch up with you later? SideswipeStriker 8:57 pm ((awww ((g'night then! NoodlesAtNight 8:58 pm [[Oh? Be safe, then.]] SpecsTheSpectralDragon 8:58 pm Strange is starting a cult. Arcee-Autobot 8:59 pm *Arcee was pretty content hugging her knees wathcing* If she doesn't remind me of airachnid? SideswipeStriker 8:59 pm Yikes NoodlesAtNight 8:59 pm ((also, while i have most of you here: starting s3 in about two months from now, y/n? i do warn that it has a creepy opening storyline because the mad hatter's in it, and that you're going to fucking hate the riddler if you don't already, but aside from that it's good stuff)) SideswipeStriker 8:59 pm Goddess of Fire huh? verdigrisprowl 8:59 pm I wonder what would have happened if she'd held still and refused to run. If she didn't serve as a "test," would Firefly refused to fight her? MedicalMurdersaurus 8:59 pm ((I'm in it for the long haul, man.)) SideswipeStriker 9:00 pm ((yeeeees MedicalMurdersaurus 9:00 pm *flops out, limbs sliding out all over ot make himself into quite the lanky mess* ((I love harvey)) NoodlesAtNight 9:01 pm [[He expects Bridgit would still burn her.]] verdigrisprowl 9:01 pm Mmm, yes, the fact that they're talking about sacrifices leads me to believe she might have just killed her anyway. But until then, it could've gone either way. MedicalMurdersaurus 9:01 pm Bird! You funny. Me Swoop love You : > NoodlesAtNight 9:01 pm ((any other votes for y/n?)) verdigrisprowl 9:01 pm ((fine by me)) SCProwl 9:01 pm ((y SideswipeStriker 9:02 pm .....oh damn, there are more like Strange? NoodlesAtNight 9:02 pm ((in two months it is then)) [[...Fascinating. His eyes have no color.]] SCProwl 9:02 pm ((i want to get us to s4 because. reasons NoodlesAtNight 9:03 pm {{You Swoop silly.}} *She pats him. Ravage goes over to curl around Soundwave's ankles.* Arcee-Autobot 9:03 pm *Arcee felt herself Physically cringe as she covered her face* gross.. verdigrisprowl 9:03 pm ((his superpower is that he's a comic book character)) SideswipeStriker 9:03 pm .............. NoodlesAtNight 9:03 pm *Perks.* [[Octopod DNA? Then that is the ability to-- oh, fascinating. Fascinating.]] MedicalMurdersaurus 9:04 pm *leans into the pats a bit* NoodlesAtNight 9:04 pm @P: [[Strange has obviously never met Tarantulas.]] SCProwl 9:04 pm ((FIIIIISH verdigrisprowl 9:05 pm @S «Mm.» *he's too bothered by the whole "design their personas" bit to offer more of a reply than that.* SideswipeStriker 9:05 pm I....think it's a good thing I came tonight NoodlesAtNight 9:05 pm *That's less amused than he would have expected in an ideal situation. He suspects they've reached big discomfort levels again. He'll make a hand available* NoodlesAtNight 9:06 pm [[Oh? Why is that?]] SideswipeStriker 9:06 pm Uh....reasons verdigrisprowl 9:07 pm *... it was only a momentary flash of discomfort. ongoing comfort isn't needed. how does he indicate that?* NoodlesAtNight 9:07 pm *Oh, and cuttlefish now? He's obviously getting into the good Earth animals. Too bad this is how he chooses to do it.* verdigrisprowl 9:07 pm *............ low-fives Soundwave's hand.* NoodlesAtNight 9:07 pm {{Him got point.}} ((big flashy)) MedicalMurdersaurus 9:07 pm *was too busy mooning over Bird to pay attention* Huh? NoodlesAtNight 9:07 pm ((when it returns to her)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:09 pm ((poor ed)) NoodlesAtNight 9:09 pm *Soundwave tilts his head, trying to process what the hand slap means. It's not a proper slap - not angry - so that would make it... acknowledgment of hand presence? Which didn't linger. So Prowl knows it's there and didn't take it, yes? Then he's either all right or doesn't want that particular form. Soundwave will give a tiny nod and then let his hand settle back in his lap.* NoodlesAtNight 9:10 pm {{Them bit about - "her already dead," about electric damage. It good point.}} *She's pretty sure Swoop wasn't listening but she tries anyway.* MedicalMurdersaurus 9:10 pm Oh. *has no clue what Bird is referencing* Okay. : > NoodlesAtNight 9:10 pm *Yep, that is one blank Swoop.* MedicalMurdersaurus 9:11 pm You Bird tiniest visor eeeeeeever : > NoodlesAtNight 9:11 pm ((i LOVE this damn suit god)) verdigrisprowl 9:11 pm *look at that, Prowl aced that communication.* SCProwl 9:11 pm ((yass queen SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:12 pm *cackles* SideswipeStriker 9:12 pm Well SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:12 pm ((precision "bitch")) SideswipeStriker 9:12 pm Looks like, she came back with her memory Arcee-Autobot 9:12 pm *Arcee gave a little Happy Clap* verdigrisprowl 9:12 pm They mentioned that cuttlefish DNA enhances brains or something, didn't they? NoodlesAtNight 9:13 pm [[That they can repair brain cells.]] *Nods. And smiles. Such good creatures. How happy he is that she can't be fed one of Strange's stories.* SideswipeStriker 9:13 pm Ooooo that could have done it verdigrisprowl 9:13 pm Yes, that. ... Cuttle Fish Mooney. NoodlesAtNight 9:13 pm [[Heh.]] SCProwl 9:13 pm *huffs* MedicalMurdersaurus 9:13 pm Cuddle? :V *glances at Bird* NoodlesAtNight 9:14 pm {{Oh, look there! It Arcee. Hi, Arcee.}} *Floats over to escape any possibility of huggy Swoop.* MedicalMurdersaurus 9:14 pm *wilts just the tiniest bit* NoodlesAtNight 9:14 pm *Attempts to perch on Arcee's head with both feelers.* MedicalMurdersaurus 9:14 pm : < Arcee-Autobot 9:15 pm * Will only allow this because She is in a good mood* NoodlesAtNight 9:15 pm *...Bird wasn't expecting to be allowed to do this. She now has no idea what to do with this power.* *Sit there and preen, she supposes.* verdigrisprowl 9:15 pm ... They just, have him—hidden in the trunk, like— ...... Okay, I guess. MedicalMurdersaurus 9:16 pm *rolls on the ground to turn himself into a burrito* NoodlesAtNight 9:16 pm [[Oh, he kept his uniform?]] verdigrisprowl 9:17 pm ((i appreciate mr. fox subtly calling out how messed up the prison uniforms are)) SideswipeStriker 9:17 pm -snorts- NoodlesAtNight 9:17 pm ((same)) NoodlesAtNight 9:18 pm [[Do not drink it unless he does.]] SideswipeStriker 9:18 pm If he's smart he won't NoodlesAtNight 9:18 pm [[Rather a harsh punishment for bad joke telling.]] verdigrisprowl 9:19 pm *... suddenly huffs a laugh* NoodlesAtNight 9:19 pm *Glance and tilt.* NoodlesAtNight 9:20 pm *Oh, it IS Shockwave. Hmm.* verdigrisprowl 9:20 pm Ah—reminded me of—something Tarantulas did. NoodlesAtNight 9:20 pm [[Ah.]] SCProwl 9:21 pm Ugh. SideswipeStriker 9:22 pm ......... verdigrisprowl 9:22 pm That's some spectacular victim blaming. SideswipeStriker 9:22 pm Kid, up your acting skills NoodlesAtNight 9:22 pm [[Isn't it, though.]] [[Good youngling.]] SideswipeStriker 9:23 pm Good kid, bad idea verdigrisprowl 9:23 pm Good, but stupid. Agree with the killer while you're in the room, go home, work against him. NoodlesAtNight 9:24 pm [[He does have much to learn.]] SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:24 pm She did something. verdigrisprowl 9:25 pm ... ugh. *more mind control* verdigrisprowl 9:26 pm They have no appreciate for the scientific process. The fact that he hasn't succeeded /yet/ doesn't mean he's failed. That's nonsense. SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:27 pm ((he did)) MedicalMurdersaurus 9:27 pm ((of all the things to demand, I'm very entertained that's what she picked)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:28 pm ((to be fair, grilled cheese sandwiches are Tastey)) verdigrisprowl 9:28 pm ((on the one hand, the fact that she can control people to do her bidding is cool)) ((on the other hand, she's fish mooney. she already could do that.)) MedicalMurdersaurus 9:28 pm ((and goddamn is her hair perfect despite just being a corpse like half an hour ago)) SideswipeStriker 9:29 pm -back to silently watching the film- NoodlesAtNight 9:29 pm *...Quietly hopes she will get her claws on Hugo Strange. If she has it, at least she could do some good for everyone with it.* {{What DNA them give her, dragon?}} [[No, no. It is the suit she had before.]] MedicalMurdersaurus 9:29 pm *is a wiggly burrito who is having a hard time not bursting into sympathy flames* : > SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:30 pm Her face didn't burn, either. NoodlesAtNight 9:30 pm [[They did say she'd become fireproof last time we saw her.]] SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:30 pm Although, I must say, /I'm/ not fireproof. MedicalMurdersaurus 9:30 pm Me SWOOP am fireproof!!! NoodlesAtNight 9:30 pm {{...Maybe you dragon get him Swoop power.}} SideswipeStriker 9:31 pm Oh nice verdigrisprowl 9:31 pm Oh look, probable cause. ... They're going to be blown up, aren't they. SideswipeStriker 9:31 pm Probably SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:31 pm I think I'd have to eat him to get his power, and I don't want to do that. verdigrisprowl 9:31 pm This police department has the highest mortality rate. NoodlesAtNight 9:31 pm [[It /is/ Gotham. He doesn't know many human cities with these kinds of superhumans in it.]] NoodlesAtNight 9:32 pm *Amused by Prowl's complete lack of faith in them, though.* MedicalMurdersaurus 9:32 pm ((I love this Bruce but he is going to be so obviously, blatantly Batman once that time comes.)) NoodlesAtNight 9:33 pm [[...How does Strange know? A mole? Not that he would be surpr-- what in the Pits is that.]] verdigrisprowl 9:33 pm ((jim goes "who are you?" and bruce growls "i'm batman" and jim goes ah god fuck bruce kid that's not even convincing)) NoodlesAtNight 9:33 pm [[Are they baking him...?]] SideswipeStriker 9:33 pm Um NoodlesAtNight 9:33 pm ((lmao)) verdigrisprowl 9:34 pm ((turtleneck)) NoodlesAtNight 9:34 pm [[His neck looks nothing like a turtle's.]] verdigrisprowl 9:34 pm ... I don't actually know what a turtle's neck looks like. SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:35 pm ((OH IT'S CLAYFACE)) NoodlesAtNight 9:35 pm [[Very wrinkly, shades of green, black, grey, and brown.]] ((YES IT IS 😀 )) MedicalMurdersaurus 9:35 pm ((This Riddler is so strong at some points and so wat at others.)) NoodlesAtNight 9:35 pm ((octopuses can mimic, after all)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:35 pm ((that took me a lil too long)) SideswipeStriker 9:35 pm Um.... SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:35 pm ((durr)) That is decidedly not how evolution works. SideswipeStriker 9:36 pm Okay, I'm a bit worried They're all nuts NoodlesAtNight 9:36 pm [[Well, yes.]] SideswipeStriker 9:37 pm ......right, asylum NoodlesAtNight 9:37 pm [[A human Makeshift, then.]] NoodlesAtNight 9:38 pm *As he suspected.* SideswipeStriker 9:38 pm No idea who Makeshift is, but damn SCProwl 9:38 pm Shapeshifter. SideswipeStriker 9:38 pm Good disguise SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:38 pm ((BRB, gotta restart computer. it is drunk)) SideswipeStriker 9:38 pm Oh! Nice. NoodlesAtNight 9:38 pm ((go go go good episode)) SideswipeStriker 9:39 pm Well shit NoodlesAtNight 9:39 pm *She stretches a feeler out to the rag filled with food and brings it close to herself for maximum munch.* MedicalMurdersaurus 9:39 pm ((My internet is so jumpy tonight I can barely watch. It's getting too crunchy. Everyone enjoy just having a swoop burrito asleep in the middle of Dancitron. Feel free to trip on him lol)) NoodlesAtNight 9:39 pm ((aaaaah okay ;; i'm so sorry)) MedicalMurdersaurus 9:39 pm ((later!)) NoodlesAtNight 9:40 pm *Oh, yes. Ravage told him about this. Hand available again.* verdigrisprowl 9:41 pm *shudders* *this time, he'll take it.* Arcee-Autobot 9:41 pm *Arcee Physically covered her face and winced* verdigrisprowl 9:41 pm *a needle in your neck that forces you to give up your secrets* NoodlesAtNight 9:41 pm *Squeezes it gently. Prowl can crush his hand as much as he needs for this.* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:41 pm ((am back)) NoodlesAtNight 9:41 pm *Laserbeak pats Arcee.* ((wb)) SideswipeStriker 9:41 pm ......................... SideswipeStriker 9:42 pm -mutters- VERY good thing I came today SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:42 pm ((this is not a good jim)) NoodlesAtNight 9:42 pm ((one of my favorite things in any tv show/movie is an actor having to pretend to do a bad job of their own acting)) ((this episode is, therefore, utterly delightful)) verdigrisprowl 9:42 pm He's a very bad Gym. ((it's a delight)) NoodlesAtNight 9:42 pm [[For one thing, he smiles far too much.]] verdigrisprowl 9:43 pm And Gym would never say "he's connected to people we can't cross." He'd drive directly to those people's houses, and cross them. NoodlesAtNight 9:43 pm *Soft snort.* SideswipeStriker 9:43 pm From the sounds of the guy, he'd more run them OVER NoodlesAtNight 9:44 pm [[That is technically still crossing them. Just... more directly.]] verdigrisprowl 9:44 pm No, running them over wouldn't let him punch them in the face. SideswipeStriker 9:45 pm Fair enough, but damn he'd not say that NoodlesAtNight 9:45 pm [[She is a living being.]] SideswipeStriker 9:46 pm She's kinda...uh....wow SCProwl 9:46 pm Scientists like her and Strange don't care. *the Shockwave is implied* NoodlesAtNight 9:46 pm *Approves of Penguin's trophy-keeping habit.* SideswipeStriker 9:46 pm That's decaying verdigrisprowl 9:46 pm ((i think this is the only moment i've ever liked barbara)) SideswipeStriker 9:46 pm Be better if it wasn't NoodlesAtNight 9:46 pm [[He's a criminal overlord, not a taxidermist.]] SideswipeStriker 9:47 pm ......true NoodlesAtNight 9:47 pm [[Yes. Yes, it was, Jim.]] *Bristles at this "imagine I am god" business* verdigrisprowl 9:48 pm *squeezes* NoodlesAtNight 9:48 pm *Squeezes back.* SideswipeStriker 9:48 pm So. I don't like him NoodlesAtNight 9:48 pm [[He does not blame you.]] NoodlesAtNight 9:49 pm [[...This is an intriguing question.]] verdigrisprowl 9:49 pm Well, NOW he's heard of a secret council. SideswipeStriker 9:50 pm ...... SCProwl 9:50 pm I doubt Strange intends to let him live. NoodlesAtNight 9:50 pm [[It sounds as though you are correct.]] verdigrisprowl 9:50 pm Ah, fair. SideswipeStriker 9:51 pm -huffs- NoodlesAtNight 9:51 pm [[Oh, that is cruel.]] *He wanted to know.* verdigrisprowl 9:51 pm I think Strange gave us the answer. NoodlesAtNight 9:51 pm [[Well, yes. But he wants to know who this masked council IS.]] NoodlesAtNight 9:52 pm [[If they control Gotham, they do a terrible job of it.]] verdigrisprowl 9:52 pm I doubt he'd have told Add. SideswipeStriker 9:52 pm Um..... NoodlesAtNight 9:52 pm [[Probably not, no.]] *That is some Disappointment tone.* [[He must have hit the wrong button.]] SideswipeStriker 9:53 pm Pffff NoodlesAtNight 9:53 pm [[So do it. He wants to know.]] verdigrisprowl 9:54 pm ((i could make that mask)) NoodlesAtNight 9:54 pm ((they're gorgeous masks)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:55 pm ((lmao very very bad jim)) SideswipeStriker 9:55 pm Heh NoodlesAtNight 9:55 pm ((COMPLICATED POLICE BUSINESS)) SideswipeStriker 9:56 pm Disguise ain't good if you don't have the facts to back it up verdigrisprowl 9:56 pm I suppose the disguise only needs to work for a few hours. SCProwl 9:56 pm *huffs* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:57 pm *snickers* NoodlesAtNight 9:57 pm [[He didn't deny it.]] =She is good cat, for a human.= SideswipeStriker 9:57 pm True verdigrisprowl 9:58 pm *moving people like cargo.* SideswipeStriker 9:58 pm And.....holy shit. verdigrisprowl 9:59 pm *why is there always MORE of this stuff?* *why does the quantity never decrease? one person stops being mind-controlled and a new person learns to mind control. it never ends. prowl can't stand it.* SpecsTheSpectralDragon 9:59 pm She's going to eat him alive. SideswipeStriker 9:59 pm -because this series hates Prowl and anyone that went through what he has- verdigrisprowl 10:00 pm ((she didn't even mind control the other orderlies. they're just like "yeah okay we're following patient 13 now i guess")) NoodlesAtNight 10:01 pm ((they get paid either way, what do they care lol)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:01 pm ((to be fair, if Strange was my boss...)) SideswipeStriker 10:01 pm ((true enough NoodlesAtNight 10:02 pm *At least they have a vague idea something's wrong here.* *Too bad they think it's because he's ill.* SideswipeStriker 10:02 pm -heavy sigh- verdigrisprowl 10:03 pm Is she going to be the one who figures it out. Ah. NoodlesAtNight 10:03 pm [[...Oh, that is disgusting.]] [[At least /someone/ worked it out.]] SideswipeStriker 10:04 pm Hoooo boy NoodlesAtNight 10:05 pm ((i love that shot)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:05 pm ((fight! fight! fight! fight!)) SideswipeStriker 10:05 pm ((it's awesome SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:05 pm Oh, dear. He's dead. SideswipeStriker 10:05 pm HOLY SLAG verdigrisprowl 10:05 pm ((damn, i was looking in another window)) SideswipeStriker 10:05 pm Buddy, he ain't wakin' up NoodlesAtNight 10:05 pm ((i'll screencap it in a bit)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:06 pm Huh. He's /not/ dead. NoodlesAtNight 10:06 pm [[No doubt he is not well, at least.]] SideswipeStriker 10:07 pm WHAT SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:07 pm FAIRLY LOW IS NOT A GOOD ANSWER NoodlesAtNight 10:07 pm [[...He must be very scared of this council if that is his answer.]] SideswipeStriker 10:07 pm Hooooooly shit SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:08 pm ((lmao "fair enough")) verdigrisprowl 10:08 pm Don't say "just do it," "there's going to be a radioactive explosion if you don't" is a perfectly good explanation. SideswipeStriker 10:08 pm Good answer verdigrisprowl 10:08 pm What do you have against giving a normal, reasonable explanation. NoodlesAtNight 10:08 pm [[A temper?]] SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:08 pm Huh, the riddling human is as clever as before. NoodlesAtNight 10:09 pm [[Why would he not be?]] verdigrisprowl 10:09 pm ... Would pushing the red button again pause it. SideswipeStriker 10:09 pm Or it could set it off. NoodlesAtNight 10:10 pm [[Likely not. Large red buttons tend to be... final.]] *Nods in agreement with Sideswipe* *VERY scared, if he's not even running after all his self-preservation behavior* verdigrisprowl 10:10 pm They took the time to lock him up again? Why? SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:10 pm ...I feel like that should not work. NoodlesAtNight 10:10 pm [[He can't imagine they want him running around again.]] NoodlesAtNight 10:11 pm [[--Oh!]] *Huffing* SideswipeStriker 10:11 pm HAH Oh man, the luck on those two verdigrisprowl 10:12 pm Nobody's here, he can just climb out the vents again. NoodlesAtNight 10:12 pm [[Perhaps he will, when he calms down?]] verdigrisprowl 10:12 pm He'll have to do it fast, police are swarming the compound now. SideswipeStriker 10:13 pm Um.... NoodlesAtNight 10:14 pm [[That car is too small to win a game of cryochicken.]] verdigrisprowl 10:14 pm A moment of silence for the cop car that's about to get flattened. SideswipeStriker 10:14 pm That's an armored bus BAD IDEA NoodlesAtNight 10:14 pm [[But a valiant car nonetheless.]] [[Well. Human.]] SideswipeStriker 10:14 pm -winces- SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:15 pm *oof* SideswipeStriker 10:15 pm Oh, that's right, she used to be his boss SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:15 pm He shot her in the knee. He also shot the Penguin human in the knee, though. NoodlesAtNight 10:16 pm [[So much for loyalty.]] *Pause.* [[But then, he supposes he would be disturbed by an undead version of his bosses.]] SideswipeStriker 10:16 pm Yeah, I'd be running too verdigrisprowl 10:16 pm Did he know she'd supposedly died? I thought she was... off by herself when that happened. SideswipeStriker 10:16 pm ....ish NoodlesAtNight 10:17 pm [[He knew. He was there when Penguin pushed her over the cliff wall.]] SideswipeStriker 10:17 pm Kid is going diggin verdigrisprowl 10:18 pm ... Didn't she survive that and end up on that island? He's made too many attempts on her life, I can't keep track. I don't remember which one actually killed her. SideswipeStriker 10:18 pm Um.... NoodlesAtNight 10:18 pm [[No, no. The island was before that. She came back, attempted a coup, and was killed.]] SideswipeStriker 10:18 pm Oh no NoodlesAtNight 10:18 pm [[...Oh, this won't be good.]] SideswipeStriker 10:18 pm Lady, RUN verdigrisprowl 10:19 pm ((they'd BETTER be nice to her, she let them out)) SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:19 pm ((no good deed goes unpunished)) NoodlesAtNight 10:19 pm [[....What.]] SideswipeStriker 10:19 pm WHAT verdigrisprowl 10:20 pm ((GOOD. they were nice to her.)) NoodlesAtNight 10:20 pm [[Well. Now he has TWO things he wants to know.]] SpecsTheSpectralDragon 10:20 pm *the dragon stretches* Thank you for movie night, Soundwave! SCProwl 10:20 pm Only two? NoodlesAtNight 10:20 pm [[You are welcome, dragon.]] [[Well. Two /main/ things. He always wants to know much, much more than that.]] SideswipeStriker 10:20 pm The mimic thing, guy, wasn't on the bus! NoodlesAtNight 10:20 pm ((time marker, 10:41)) [[Of course not. He had already gotten out to play Jim.]] SideswipeStriker 10:21 pm The what was that? NoodlesAtNight 10:21 pm [[He has not the faintest idea.]] verdigrisprowl 10:22 pm Maybe there were two. NoodlesAtNight 10:22 pm [[...Actually - he does wonder. The Loeb human kept his daughter hidden because he did not want anyone to know about her. Perhaps this is the case with this human? Bruce's father already kept secrets.]] verdigrisprowl 10:22 pm Secret twin? SCProwl 10:22 pm A clone or a twin. NoodlesAtNight 10:22 pm [[Perhaps?]] SideswipeStriker 10:22 pm Huh Could work NoodlesAtNight 10:23 pm [[Then again, he did seem pleased with Basil's ability. Perhaps they /did/ make another shapeshifter. It would be useful.]] *Tapping his fingers.* SCProwl 10:23 pm Though them being a twin seems to go against everything we've heard about Bruce's father. SideswipeStriker 10:23 pm Soooo a clone verdigrisprowl 10:23 pm Maybe the twin was kidnapped at birth and Brace's parents were told the second one died. SCProwl 10:24 pm That is a possibility. SideswipeStriker 10:24 pm Wouldn't they want to see the body at least? NoodlesAtNight 10:24 pm [[He /has/ heard stories of humans kidnapping offspring while still in the hospital.]] [[Oh, that is a good point too... of course, a Gotham hospital /would/ be so corrupt as to find a way to lie about it.]] verdigrisprowl 10:25 pm ((until i find out who he is, i'm dubbing him Woose Brain.)) NoodlesAtNight 10:25 pm [[Surely not /every/ human newbuild survives...]]

((omg)) SideswipeStriker 10:25 pm But against a couple like the Waynes? NoodlesAtNight 10:25 pm [[Why not? Strange kept secrets from him.]] [[And was his best friend.]] verdigrisprowl 10:25 pm Worth millions in hostage fees down the line. SideswipeStriker 10:25 pm -huffs- True SideswipeStriker 10:26 pm Forgot this is Strange we're talkin' about Arcee-Autobot 10:26 pm [[ Im currently Video chatting with a New Knockout Page, so Knockout says Hello!]] NoodlesAtNight 10:27 pm ((hi knockout!)) [[That is a long, long term game for a human. The hostage fees. It would be most impressive... and within Strange's ability to scheme, he'd think.]] SCProwl 10:28 pm Well, I suppose we'll find out eventually if you show more recordings of that universe. NoodlesAtNight 10:29 pm [[He thinks he would like to, as... mm, aggravating as some things about it can be, sometimes. He really would like to find out how deep this conspiracy goes.]] SideswipeStriker 10:30 pm Same here SCProwl 10:30 pm Agreed. Either way, I need to be getting back. Good night, everyone. SideswipeStriker 10:30 pm 'night! NoodlesAtNight 10:30 pm *"Aggravating" being polite term for "all this damn mind control", and all.* [[Ah. Goodnight.]] SideswipeStriker 10:30 pm Annnnnd on that note, I gotta get goin' myself SideswipeStriker 10:31 pm Later! NoodlesAtNight 10:31 pm [[Very well. Tell Blaster and Sunstreaker hello for him, would you?]] Arcee-Autobot 10:32 pm *Arcee is still very much Here, and Enjoying a cold drink* NoodlesAtNight 10:33 pm *She may be if she wishes - for another eight minutes, at least.* [[You have been gone quite a while. No great threats to your timeline, he hopes...?]] Arcee-Autobot 10:34 pm No great threats I promise Arcee-Autobot 10:35 pm Just Knockout constantly asking for my attention 😅 NoodlesAtNight 10:36 pm [[Hm. Can't reach a spot on his back with his buffer, he expects.]] Arcee-Autobot 10:37 pm Exactly correct actually but now its handled NoodlesAtNight 10:38 pm [[Good, good. The Doctor can be temperamental when he isn't in tip top shape.]] NoodlesAtNight 10:39 pm [[But now, he must close for the night. There is much cleaning to do.]] *Stares at Swoop's soot marks.* [[Much, much cleaning.]] Arcee-Autobot 10:39 pm *Arcee will have to go soon, but wouldn't mind if anyone wished to invade her Ask box* verdigrisprowl 10:39 pm I'll help. NoodlesAtNight 10:39 pm *Perhaps he will do so soon. He's been Quiet lately.* [[Ah, thank you, Prowl.]] verdigrisprowl 10:39 pm *"""lately"""* Arcee-Autobot 10:40 pm Alright I'm going to go, See you both Later NoodlesAtNight 10:40 pm *Listen here, you.* [[Farewell, Arcee. He hopes you will attend again soon.]] verdigrisprowl 10:40 pm *LISTEN TO WHAT* *vague farewell nod to arcee* NoodlesAtNight 10:41 pm *LOOK, HE TALKS IN HEADS. IT COUNTS.* [[Thank you for your offer of assistance. The day the Autobots in that timeline ever teach Swoop manners is the day he will have to retire.]] NoodlesAtNight 10:42 pm *Vents and stretches feelers back to get rags and a spray bottle of solvent to get to work on the floor. From a sitting down position for the moment, because he'll let Prowl decide when to get up.* verdigrisprowl 10:43 pm *he was about to head for them himself. He thought he was going to clean the floor. apparently not.* ... Who's doing what? NoodlesAtNight 10:44 pm [[He thought he should tackle the graffiti soot, as he did draw in it himself as well. If you would like to handle the furniture...? He is certain you have seen him put the pieces back more than enough times to track where they go - and likely better than his own deployers, at that.]] verdigrisprowl 10:46 pm Yyyyes, I know where they go. *can he LIFT them is the question. how much of a load can a holomatter avatar carry. how heavy are the chairs.* NoodlesAtNight 10:47 pm *Soundwave pauses mid scrubbing motion.* [[Hesitation?]] *Prowl doesn't usually elongate a sound like that.* verdigrisprowl 10:48 pm ... I don't know if I can lift them. *TIME TO FIND OUT* NoodlesAtNight 10:49 pm [[...Oh. He never thought of that.]] *He stops to watch, curious as anything now.* *The couches are fairly heavy, but the tables and individual chairs shouldn't be too bad. It's not as though he ever needs to use the Tyton-sized ones for these nights, after all.* verdigrisprowl 10:50 pm *he'll start small and work up. tables first.* NoodlesAtNight 10:51 pm *Brings a hand up to rest his chin on his knuckles. Nothing wrong with a good bit of observing a handsome mech in action.* verdigrisprowl 10:52 pm *he's a couple tables in when he realizes that he may, in fact, actually be slowing productivity down.* ... So far so good. NoodlesAtNight 10:53 pm *...Oh! Oh. Yes. He should. He should be productive, shouldn't he. While he watches. He was supposed to learn that lesson last week, after - er. After that conversation.*

*So he'll keep his optics on Prowl and scrub at the soot again. There we go.* NoodlesAtNight 10:54 pm [[What happens if you cannot lift it in your avatar state? Does it--]] *Wiggles the fingers under his chin.* [[Slide through your hands, or...?]] verdigrisprowl 10:55 pm If an avatar is hit with a load that will shatter it, it turns off and reboots. I suspect trying to lift something too big for it to support will yield the same results, although I haven't tried. NoodlesAtNight 10:56 pm [[...We could find out. Unless the shattering is painful.]] verdigrisprowl 10:56 pm Only a little. verdigrisprowl 10:57 pm Anyway, I'm about to find out one way or another. *he's about to the couches.* NoodlesAtNight 10:58 pm *Scrubs faster in anticipation and leans forward. That floor is going to be SHINY clean with how productive he's trying to be to make up for his distraction.* verdigrisprowl 10:58 pm *surveys a couch criticially. circles it once. hmmm.* verdigrisprowl 10:59 pm *crouches down and attempts to lift it from the middle. nope. not moving.* *moves to one side and tries to lift the end. it barely lifts. sets it back down.* *regards it contemplatively.* NoodlesAtNight 11:00 pm *Oh, this is damned thrilling. It's like a movie. Will he lift it or won't he? It's ridiculous and such a little thing but Soundwave just Has To Know.* verdigrisprowl 11:00 pm *heAVES UP THE END* verdigrisprowl 11:01 pm *his avatar pops and resets, standing up, a few feet away. the couch crashes back down.* Hm. ... Sorry. NoodlesAtNight 11:02 pm *Soundwave lets out a long vent and collapses back against the couch he's currently sitting on, disappointed and yet not at all.* [[Do not be. Now he knows, and that is his favorite thing.]] verdigrisprowl 11:02 pm No no, I meant for dropping it. I'm not done. NoodlesAtNight 11:02 pm [[Oh, and he has gotten all the soo--]] *Sits up again and peers at the couch.* [[You're not done?]] verdigrisprowl 11:02 pm No. verdigrisprowl 11:03 pm *another moment of quiet calculation.* NoodlesAtNight 11:03 pm *Debates getting up to clean something else. ... One feeler to grab himself a snack while the other one puts the rest of the fuel away. He's right here munching and mesmerized.* *He does so love having extra limbs at times like this. Especially ones that do their own seeing.* verdigrisprowl 11:03 pm *then he scales up to 41 feet and... 3.2 inches.* NoodlesAtNight 11:04 pm [[Primus--]] *Oh no, he's hot. Ter.* verdigrisprowl 11:04 pm *the couch is MUCH easier to lift now* *sets it in place, and shrinks back down.* Yeah, I didn't like that. NoodlesAtNight 11:05 pm [[That's - it's quite all right. It's fine. You do not have to do it again. Though it was - impressive.]] verdigrisprowl 11:05 pm New plan. NoodlesAtNight 11:06 pm *Faintly, and bordering on hysteria* [[New plan?]] *Prowl's going to kill him. This is a murder attempt.* verdigrisprowl 11:06 pm *a space bridge opens underneath one couch. rather than the couch falling through the bridge, the bridge lifts up around the couch, until the couch has disappeared and the bridge shuts off.* verdigrisprowl 11:07 pm *the process is repeated where the couch is supposed to go, except this time the couch is emerging from the bottom of the bridge instead of disappearing into the top.* *ta da. didn't even drop.* NoodlesAtNight 11:07 pm *Stares. Openly. With a tee tiny o shape to his mouth.* NoodlesAtNight 11:08 pm [[...Why has he never thought of that?]] verdigrisprowl 11:08 pm Probably because you can lift them yourself. verdigrisprowl 11:09 pm *gets to work neatly banishing and re-summoning the remaining couches, one by one* NoodlesAtNight 11:09 pm [[Oh. Yes, he - he can, yes. That does make sense.]] *He'd be more composed there but he's watching Prowl pull this stunt multiple times, and damned if he isn't happy that he helped Prowl with what little bit Prowl didn't already figure out on his own. What a brilliant, creative mech his Prowl is.* verdigrisprowl 11:11 pm *and the deed is finished.* *looks at soundwave.* *completely deadpan:* Trap doors. NoodlesAtNight 11:12 pm *Slooooowly slides his face into the hand that was supporting his chin* verdigrisprowl 11:12 pm *proud* NoodlesAtNight 11:13 pm *Three affection pings. Even if he's quietly puffing into his skinny stick fingers while he does it.* verdigrisprowl 11:13 pm *ping ping ping* NoodlesAtNight 11:14 pm [[When should he expect--]] *Deep vent in. Come on, pull yourself together.* [[When should he expect your transfer to the arts and entertainment sector?]] verdigrisprowl 11:15 pm *barks a laugh* verdigrisprowl 11:16 pm When two plus two equals five. NoodlesAtNight 11:20 pm [[Pity. You would probably be a popular stage act here with some of the skills you've shown him over the years.]] *Finally gets up to offer a tiny bit of clapping and then finish up the bar cleanup.* [[But, you are an enforcer at spark, and who you are at spark is who he likes best. He will simply have to enjoy your juggling, balancing, and bridging in private.]] verdigrisprowl 11:21 pm *stops and thinks about that* ... I /do/ have enough tricks for a stage show. NoodlesAtNight 11:22 pm [[You do. You've never thought about that?]] verdigrisprowl 11:23 pm I can't say I've ever contemplated putting on a stage show, so no. NoodlesAtNight 11:25 pm *Nods. He's not that surprised by it.* [[Well, at least you know you have another potential cover should you ever have to be part of a big operation somewhere.]] verdigrisprowl 11:26 pm The ruse would fall apart the moment I opened my mouth. I do not have the demeanor of an entertainer. NoodlesAtNight 11:28 pm [[/That,/]] *waving one of the last snacks he's putting away before popping a piece in his mouth* [[is what long-distance audio broadcasts are for. Besides - there have been plenty of silent actors and entertainers. Some of the old human Earth ones he's seen you enjoy, even.]] verdigrisprowl 11:29 pm I do not have enough mobile parts in my face, much less the knowledge on how to use them, to be a Harpo. NoodlesAtNight 11:31 pm *Lightly dismissive gesture.* [[Masks only add to the mystery. But, he does not mean to push - only to offer ideas. If they do not suit you, they do not suit you, and that is as it is. Besides, there are already artists and entertainers in this building. A police officer - now that is a very different thing.]] *That is a very wide grin. He knows how shady they can be, and he knows Prowl knows too.* NoodlesAtNight 11:32 pm [[Thank you for moving the furniture. It was a welcome display of persistence and intellect.]] verdigrisprowl 11:32 pm It was also slow. It'll be faster next week. NoodlesAtNight 11:33 pm [[Oh? You mean to do that again, then?]] *Chews on that thought a moment.* [[Perhaps he'll trade a few of the pieces around from where they usually are on movie nights. Give you a bit of a game.]] verdigrisprowl 11:34 pm ... I'm trying to help you clean. I—I think we might have lost sight of that objective. NoodlesAtNight 11:35 pm [[There's no reason we can't enjoy the cleaning we do. It's certainly a mood lightener after half of Swoop's messes.]] NoodlesAtNight 11:36 pm [[In any case, it's clean in here now. The objective was completed.]] verdigrisprowl 11:37 pm Eventually, yes. I wouldn't call it a job well done, but at least it's a job done. NoodlesAtNight 11:38 pm [[It will do. He is coming to accept the realization that the first floor of his club will only be spotless from Tuesday nights through Friday afternoons.]] verdigrisprowl 11:40 pm ... Next week you'll be less distracted and I'll be faster. *he wants you to have that spotless club, soundwave* NoodlesAtNight 11:42 pm [[Oh, it isn't your fault. It is the nature of the general company he keeps. But he appreciates that. He is sure that between us, we will get as close to that as is possible.]] *You're so sweet, Prowl. Also, you can probably see why he tends to keep the apartment as close to sparkling as possible.* verdigrisprowl 11:43 pm It's not my fault, but it doesn't mean I can't help. NoodlesAtNight 11:44 pm *And helpful. Sweet and helpful. A proper good cop in the works if ever he saw one.* [[Thank you for that.]] *Offers a bunt?* verdigrisprowl 11:45 pm *he will lean in to accept it* NoodlesAtNight 11:47 pm *Bump. ... And quick affectionate nip. He just - has a lot of things he thinks and feels but cannot say, even if he /is/ the one of them that manages to talk about such things with less trouble.* NoodlesAtNight 11:48 pm [[So, then. What do you care to do with the rest of your evening? More bridging tricks? Rest? Ticket writing for Swoop's soot?]] *Curious tilt.* verdigrisprowl 11:48 pm *... he's gonna lean into that, too.* NoodlesAtNight 11:48 pm *Oh, oh, that's lovely. Good. Good.* verdigrisprowl 11:49 pm *that may end up being the answer to Soundwave's question.* NoodlesAtNight 11:51 pm *Oh! Well, then. He'll test tugging Prowl up closer to see if he can get away with settling his hands on those hip lights and nibbling again. Have to make sure. Good communications officers always double-check their work.* verdigrisprowl 11:53 pm *soundwave will be pleased to learn that he can, in fact, get away with all of the above, provided Prowl is allowed to get his hands around Soundwave's waist and find some biolights to trace* NoodlesAtNight 11:55 pm *Pleased isn't the word for it, but if it were? Yes. Yes, he is. And so is Prowl. Best they be left to that in peace - only one person here is a spy, after all. It'd be rude to step on such a fine, upstanding professional's toes.* verdigrisprowl 11:56 pm *indeed it would. a little privacy, then.*

The Train/Murder Story

Uuuughhhh, fine I can’t stop thinking about it. FINE. Here it is, the absolute worst, dumbest, evilest Tucker story.

Here’s how someone like this eases you into his “criminal history”.

In addition to a bizarre (I’m now told nonsensical) cocktail of serious illnesses and psychiatric conditions and extremely disturbing abuse stories, he’s a petty criminal who’s never been caught doing anything. Here’s one from early on, testing my boundaries:

Admittedly, I tend to think lowly of shoplifters. But he’d removed any selfish elements, and I’m never ever going to stop someone from telling a cool story. Which will come in handy later.

It’s very “Jesus of Suburbia”. Stealing for charity, returning just for the thrill of it, never getting caught. Apparently in someone else’s RP, he once proposed that his self-insert would do good deeds that were somehow so good that someone would map them out and notice they made a pattern on the map. Gran. Di. OSITY. It’s interesting noticing how little I ask of him in our convos. If he ever truly liked anything about me, it was probably that I let him talk about himself for hours. Other people with, like, needs? Weren’t so lucky around him.

Plus he makes all these references to being super manipulative (but toward people who deserve it!!! For being bigoted or annoying or something!!!! You’re different and smart and pretty and you’re changing me for the better!!!!!!!!!!), and stuff like the lock-picking incident from the last post. Pretty classic delinquency. My life was nothing like that, but sure, some people just have issues.

But then he starts hinting at something darker. I think I texted something joking like “what, didja kill someone?” and he acted really ‘nervous’ and admitted it involved “taking a piece of someone” (paraphrasing, obvs). A physical piece? An emotional piece? My prevailing theory was someone’s prosthetic limb. Surely it wasn’t really murder, hahahaha. Ha ha. But eventually he told me... teeth. 

The only proof of that I have of that is me teasing more later:

(He wrote posts about how great I was and would dramatically narrate the PAIN of writing them. I didn’t follow his blog at the time, so this was... very obviously a way to make sure I read them. I have shots of a few, but this post has enough digressions already.) 

“Murder” has 162 CTRL+F matches in these logs, which actually seems low to me. Most of them come before this story. We talked about my serial killer characters, Tucker’s fantasies about being killed by them (I know, but I was used to people doing this already), and lots of horror movies and shows like Bates Motel and Dexter. We were so comfy with the subject that seconds before the story came up, we were talking about his hypothetical modus operandi.

VERY, VERY COMFY WITH THE SUBJECT.

And then of course, he has that classic Tucker Lightbulb Moment, like, “funny thing!-- This conversation reminds me of my dark, twisted past.”

Intrusive thoughts. Watch what he’s about to say he did because of intrusive thoughts. I don’t think he fully understands what that term means.

I don’t know if I’m more like a wide-eyed kid with a juice box, a mom telling him I’ll wuv him no matter what, or an overzealous drooly journalist. Back then, I had absolutely no fear. The internet was a beautiful place where I could read great or horrible things, enrich myself with other people’s articles and blog posts, and just... click away, and not have to engage with anyone on an emotional level. THIS... was like winning the Omegle lottery and chatting with Jeffrey Dahmer for a while. Even as I was reading this story come in line-by-line, my brain was screaming “holy crap fuck stay cool, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, good thing I’m ready to ghost this messed-up dude when he runs out of stories.”

Which he has to do eventually, right? Nope. There was always a new one to string you along with.

So while we bonded over the fact that he trusted me with this confession he’d never made before (HUGE lie, check footnotes), this story actually backfired on him.

Because WHY WOULD YOU TELL SOMEONE YOU JUST WIG OUT AND HURT PEOPLE AT RANDOM? THAT YOU THOUGHT OF SOMEONE AS “PREY”? WORST CASE, IT’S TRUE. BEST CASE, IT’S WHAT YOU WRITE WHEN YOUR ONLY EXPERIENCE WITH MURDER IS... GOD, I EVEN THOUGHT PARTWAY THROUGH “THIS SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING I READ ON DEVIANTART IN 2004”. But I decided this story was “not self-aggrandizing enough to be fake”. He adds this “pathetic” element to every story. It’s like a humblebrag, but for dark pasts one normally gives to their most goth Neopets.

Note that the guy getting his head bashed in is even more stereotypical than the guy from the bar fight, and the motive is just bare. He’s a prop, a cardboard standee Tucker flipped over. This story isn’t about a guy dying, it’s about Tucker, who conveniently wrestled with no horror or guilt at what he’d done, doesn’t feel haunted by taking a life or by being chased by the police or by the fact that he uncontrollably killed someone and could do it again, OR THAT I would tell someone with authority what he did. But no, the only emotion he apparently knows is “sweaty”. 

It really felt like I was talking to a film character. A freshman film student-level one, at that. I had to convince myself these things were true, only because I couldn’t prove they weren’t, and I didn’t understand how he thought he was benefitting from these lies.

In retrospect, we think this version of the story was him trying to appeal on some level to my thing for evil characters. But he totally misunderstood that my focus is on charming, funny cartoon villains that like to break out in song, not “basically Johnny the Homicidal Maniac”.

So this story is scary as hell. People ask sometimes, “Why would you keep talking to a murderer?” Which is a fair question, but it implies that I would normally overlook a murder and become codependent on an obvious psychopath. Which, ew.

The thing was, he immediately went back to being a cutesy, relentlessly flirty guy worrying about nothing more serious than his day job and drawing furry commissions. Because... well, that’s what he really is. And the fact that I’d listened without saying “shut the hell up, freak” definitely endeared him to me further, so I got even MORE praise for being special and different and able to save his messy ass. And so the cycle of codependency continued, and we dug ourselves into a deeper hole.

He never really talked about being haunted by hurting another person, or worried that the police were onto him. He never wrestled with the fact that he could someday do this to someone he cared about. He didn’t even seem to feel guilty. He was about as nervous about this as I would be about stealing 20 dollars. The story was only made to give him faux pathos. That’s all.

I don’t think he’s hurt anyone without the help of a keyboard, honestly. Which, thank god.

To support that theory: there are OTHER versions of this story. 

Memories are imperfect and tainted by emotion, but I saw enough crap like this that I believe the core of these testimonies are true. Individuals are designated by color.

These are from the convo where I realized my experience wasn’t unique:

And from talking to a friend, one he’d devalued while getting obsessed with me, but not the one mentioned in the "Fake Ask” post:

The theme of trains is apparently common.

“Anika Harlson” is a fake name from when he would be high school age. Not being able to use your legs-- CLASSIC teen fib.

Ending this on a silly note: He still tells people he’s a murderer. Last I heard, he was still not denying it when asked, from the safety of private chats to all of 4chan. He would rather tell the whole internet he’s a murderer than admit he lies sometimes. That’s, haha… that’s the complete opposite of what a murderer would do.

God, this is the most fantastic mess. It’s just really freaking interesting, too.

And I really want to thoroughly illustrate how this stuff happens, cos I wish someone had told me! If I do another post, I’d love to touch on how someone like this serially creates codependent relationships, and the idealization > devaluation process.

Quan Zhi Gao Shou / The King’s Avatar Novel (Vol. 1, Ch. 1-10)

How these liveblogs work: I read five chapters of the manhua at a time, then the equivalent chapters in the novel. This is probably going to take forever seeing as there are 800+ translated chapters available as of the time of writing this post and over 1000 chapters total, buuut at least each chapter is short.

Fair warning: I always sound as if I don’t like what I’m reading or I’m criticizing it (just read my captive prince liveblog lol...), but I am actually enjoying it immensely.

Volume 1: Banished Battle God

Chapter 1: The Banished Battle God

My first comment of the entire novels: What is with the “eccentrically-shaped ashtray”? It doesn’t specify what this ashtray looks like, only that it’s unusual. Why include this detail in the first place if you’re not going to tell us what it’s actually shaped like? Now I need to know!

This was also in the manhua, but I didn’t bother bringing it up then: Why was the first bit of dialogue translated as “Arrived”? I’m pretty sure it’s this character: 来. I never managed to learn enough Chinese to be worth a damn, but I do Japanese to English translations on the side and I’m pretty sure a loose translation would work better. idk, it just bothers me. Don’t mind me, though. I like nitpicking over translation stuff. And I won’t get to do much more of it.

Anyway.

“He gently removed the card from Glory’s dedicated log-in device.”

I love this description, a little throwaway word ‘gently’ tells so much about Ye Xiu as a guy who really loves and respects this game. I think he already know what is in store for him to some extent, but he doesn’t take it out on the game. In fact, he was playing right up until it was time for the meeting. The novel states that the manager didn’t even him any advanced notice, I’m assuming of their decision to remove him from the team, but that Yu Xiu also wasn’t surprised.

“Only they quickly recovered because there was another important person that deserved their attention.”

Hm, pretty girl or new team leader asshole? Tough decision indeed.

Ah, ok. So that’s the deal with his pseudonym. It’s so close to his real name (in English lettering at least) that I confuse the two. But it’s far easier to tell the difference when I look at the characters 叶修 / 叶秋.

It’s kind of confusing because (at least in the translation), he is referred to as his alias Ye Qiu in this chapter, whereas the summary and other places refer to him as Ye Xiu.

lol “Mine!” How shameless.

“After one year, even if he wanted to return again, for the elderly, without a year of intense competition to maintain his skills...”

‘for the elderly’ is just...hilarious because he’s only 25. that’s not old. (well, in this game’s context it is, but geez is that an early cut-off age)

Chapter 2: Area 3 Number 47

“As tactful as he is, he wouldn’t think to blame the club for retiring him.”

But that’s?? exactly?? what happened??? You’re already kicking him out after all he did for the team over the years. I mean, it’s a sound business decision, but no need to be so nasty about it. The stuff Ye Xiu pulls off in-game aside, he seems to be a relatively decent person, even going as far as helping out his friends to the point where he doesn’t have enough left to pay the penalty fee, whatever amount that is.

Ah, Su Mucheng, I like her the more times I read these opening scenes across the various media...She has a cute character design in the animation, which I watched when it came out, but she actually turns out to be quite mature and adorably worried/supportive.

Icicles also formed on his head. If he didn’t take shelter, he would die.

Seems a bit dramatic, but so is icicles forming on your head!! It must be really, really cold out, huh...

Su MuCheng was always gentle and serene. Even during in an intense PK confrontation, she always held a smile. Speaking about her, Ye Qiu sometimes watched as she smiled while causing her opponents to explode into pieces. When she then politely said sorry, he would always inexplicably tremble a bit.

ah, yes, I’m pretty sure the animation skips this observation, which builds a bit more character for Su Mucheng since we don’t see her again for a bit. Ye Xiu, also, seems a bit more “alive” in a sense in the manhua/novel, because of little comments like these.

Chen Guo is also a fun character ^.^ “She slammed the keyboard directly shutting down the game.” definition of a rage quit, huh.

Chapter 3: Special Duty: Night Shift

“My hands were frozen cold or else 30 seconds would’ve been enough.”

show off. Though he doesn’t really come off as showing off. The poor opponent must have been so confused, though. Wins 52 times in a row and suddenly gets beat in 40 seconds flat haha.

“Ye Xiu… … Ye Qiu? It really is him!” Chen Guo excitedly thought. It looked like she really had uncovered his hidden identity! This showed that he really was Ye Qiu. If she had seen the name Ye Qiu written, then she wouldn’t have believed it.

This part confused me a bit in the manhua, but it’s clearer here. At least the Ye Xiu/Qiu mess is clarified early on. Still don’t know why the narrative refers to him as Ye Qiu in the beginning if his name is actually Ye Xiu (and is the one used in the summary)...??

She had been prepared to use everything she owned to get his signature. Ye Qiu’s signature, ah! Who had it? No one!

Chen Guo’s thought process is just fun to go along with, haha she’s so dramatic. And also works well narrative-wise to show how popular Glory is. I mean, she works at an internet cafe but that doesn’t mean she has to be into Glory herself; but she is, played for a long time, and is up to date with the professional scene to some degree if she knows the names and faces of all of Excellent Era’s members.

...she [had] a strong urge to change the word Xiu into Qiu.

haha.

“Oh, so it’s like this… … how generous.” Chen Guo sighed with sorrow. This person’s strength was powerful, his account definitely wouldn’t be weak. Powerful accounts were extremely valuable. Gifting it away so easily was very valiant.

The irony in this part never fails to amuse me.

Later, in Glory’s fifth expansion, a lot of experts obtained the qualifications to complete the Challenge skill becoming the first ones possessing access to all servers.

This is an interesting tidbit. I like the novel, where it’s easier to absorb all the rules of the game/professional scene.

Ah, so the account card Ye Xiu uses is actually one from 10 years ago? And he held onto it for this whole time, not using it. That’s...pretty amazing, I would have lost mine after 10 years.

His hair looked as if it hadn’t been taken care of in at least half a month. His face didn’t look too healthy. Although it was white and clear, it was that sort of sickly pale. His two eyes gazed at her listlessly...The guy in front of her didn’t look too young, but was unexpectedly also so dejected and disdained.

I remember people being upset that he looked more handsome in his other appearances. He’s the sort to not care about appearances, and I guess he doesn’t get out much, stuck inside playing Glory all day. But, well, if he looks dejected and disdained it’s probably from what just happened.

“full-time night cat“ AH this is why the manhua drew him as a cat when he said he likes nights. I guess it’s an expression.

His approving attitude made Chen Guo feel very apologetic. This small storage room truly wasn’t a place for living.

lol not to mention Chen Guo drops a bucket of paint on top of the bed along with a whole shelf in the manhua. She didn’t seem as apologetic in the other mediums as she does here, though.

Even after all this, he had never asked for his boss’s name.

haha kind of important don’t you think.

Chapter 4: Mysterious Expert

“If you also want to go out and eat, don’t ask my employees to go on an errand for you.” Chen Guo said.

“Next time, could you tell us in advance? Can’t you help deliver it to us?” A person said.

“The Internet Cafe only has so many people. How could we deliver it all back? Enough of this nonsense, if you really want to eat so much but are too lazy to buy it, go ask for their phone number. Wouldn’t they be willing to deliver it?” Chen Guo said.

“Sister Chen do you have their number? Lend it to me so I can copy it down.” A person said.

“What would I do with their phone number? I have people to run errands for me. Why would I inconvenience the restaurant?” Chen Guo said.

Chen Guo is pleasantly vicious. I wasn’t overly fond of her in the animation, but she has great expressions in the manhua, and her dialogue is just great in the novel.

lol “it looks like I’m forcing him play.”

This Heavenly Domain wasn’t a single map. It was another world. The map was as big as the combined worlds of five other servers. This place had difficult instance dungeons, powerful equipment, precious materials, and also freedom. All experts would meet up there. The Heavenly Domain was a player’s final destination.

So that’s what the Heavenly Domain is...I don’t know if I ever quite figured it out casually watching the animation.

“Don’t fake it. You actually haven’t retired. It’s just that you were unable to win a seat, so you were kicked out right?” Chen Guo said.

Ye Xiu was speechless.

“No offense… …” Chen Guo realized that her words had somewhat stabbed at his sore spot.

Way to hit it where it hurts! Unintentionally, of course. I seem to like manhua Ye Xiu for his expressions, and novel Chen Guo because it actually gives some more depth to her character.

“Oh so it’s like this?” Tears streamed down Ye Xiu’s cheeks. Ye Qiu was currently chatting with you face to face, sister.

lol wait is this just an expression or- he’s not actually tearing up in this scene is he.

“Oh?” when Ye Xiu flipped to the last page and looked, a sudden wave of shame hit. Thinking about it, this hand guide hadn’t changed much over ten years. This was something players couldn’t update any further. For missions that veterans would choose, how could no one have come up with this type of strategy already? Right now, he needed this type of strategy. Just as Ye Xiu was ready to follow this strategy to take missions, tears immediately began streaming down his face. He was once regarded as textbook level figure! Now with a beginners guide in his hands, how could he endure this shame?

Ye Xiu’s a lot, ah, more expressive than the animation gives him credit for. I’m sorry, I laughed. He’s just so thrown off by having to start from scratch.

Chapter 5: Skill Match

But at this point everyone was still level 0. Their jumping abilities were too poor and there was no way they could jump high enough. Everyone repeatedly bouncing up and down was truly a cute and beautiful scene.

WHAT LOL Ok this wasn’t in the manhua was it, it’s indeed a glorious image. I like how the narrator even describes it as a ‘cute’ scene haha.

Aah, I appreciate the little break away to explain the mechanics of the game. It’s not terribly useful seeing as the game doesn’t actually exist in real life, but it’s decently interesting.

But if this skill set that had been picked by peak-level expert like him was seen by ordinary players, they would definitely laugh.

And an area where Ye Xiu doesn’t have to feel ashamed of, haha.

Chapter 6: Thousand Chance Umbrella

It’s not as if it wasn’t explained in other mediums, but the novel definitely has the time to go through all the details like the evolution of Glory’s class system and why no one would suspect anyone to play the ‘unspecialized class’ anymore.

Soon after, he directly headed to the storage chest in the warehouse and opened it. An equipment unexpectedly lay inside.

Accounts that transferred servers should be empty...

But Lord Grim, which had just transferred to the tenth server, unexpectedly had an equipment inside.

No one knew how this happened, but it seemed as if Ye Xiu had been expecting it. He knew that he would find an equipment here...

This, too, is interesting! Because it seems as if the warehouse pops up out of nowhere in the other mediums, and you’re not really sure if it’s something that everyone else can access or not if you weren’t paying attention to the fact that the umbrella is a ‘silver’ weapon and thus a unique item that no one else would be able to acquire.

...there wasn’t a trace of happiness in Ye Xiu’s expression. On the contrary, it was filled with grief. A rare tremble once again emerged on his right hand.

but then, there’s this. ;-;

The customizable/self-made weaponry is actually quite smart. Reminds me of the custom furniture you can make and add to the Sims... (look, I really am not a gamer haha, I have no clue how many real life games have similar features) I didn’t really understand what was so special about the umbrella before (I probably wasn’t paying 100% attention...).

Only, it could be a unique surpassing peak Epic equipment or it could also be a unique piece of trash.

Or it could be a unique piece of trash. hahaha 

Ye Xiu gently retrieved the Thousand Chance Umbrella and placed it in Lord Grim’s hands.

Also the fact that he, gently, places a bunch of pixels into his inventory/avatar’s hands is telling how much this game and this item in particular mean to him.

Damn, reading about playing a game really puts me in the mood to play a game, too. I don’t really play games like this one, though...

Chapter 7: Midnight Phantom Cat

You saw clearly, spoke well, planned well, but in the end because of a single unexpected accident, your dreams and hopes all disappeared into nothing leaving only this incomplete Thousand Chance Umbrella to me.

“You originally had talent in Glory, a successful talent… …” His fingers gently wiped over the keyboard. With a quiver, Lord Grim cast a heal onto Sleeping Moon’s body. When Sleeping Moon promptly praised him again, Ye Xiu’s mind was no longer in the game.

More sad hints of the past. .-. 

“It’s here.” Ye Xiu saw that typing might have been slow, so he immediately yelled vaguely. His mouth still held onto the cigarette!

Ooh! He spoke! Or, ahem, ‘yelled vaguely’.

He was even a little skeptical thinking that his healing might snatch away the enemy.

Don’t you hate it when you’re minding your own business, not even fighting, and the monster goes to attack you anyway? lol you know how many times my teammates died from that in Final Fantasy Type-0...the worst part is that you can only control one of the 3 party members at a time, so to save them you have to keep switching between characters. or deal with having no one to heal you and only bring 1 character. idk I really liked that game.

Beautiful! Ye Xiu couldn’t help but praise him.

lol lots of praise going around in-game. everyone’s still playing nice-nice. Well, in Ye Xiu’s case I guess he is genuinely praising him.

Ah, so Ye Xiu was actually going to warn the others, was he. He just didn’t get the chance. I wondered if he purposely didn’t say anything even if he knew Sleeping Moon’s plan, I can’t remember what happened in the animation.

Chapter 8:  A Life and Death Struggle

In these seven seconds, not only would the mage die but Fallen Sun would die too. He might as well try to save one of them.

Ye Xiu had lost faith in Sleeping Moon and directly abandoned the mage to heal Fallen Sun.

I do like how they handled the back and forth for the battle scene here, it doesn’t have too much of a lag between action while explaining Ye Xiu’s thought process.

He couldn’t tell if Fallen Sun had bad luck attached to him. Right when the Bleed status wore off, the Midnight Demon Cat swiped at him again causing him to Bleed yet again. These types of status inducing attacks only had a small probability to appear. But it seemed as if someone added a 100% percent probability halo around Fallen Sun.

Don’t you hate it when that happens. I don’t think anything fishy is up? He just had bad luck. It’s also totally relatable haha. 

Could it be that this guy had seen through his own own plan at that time?

Sleeping Moon sure manages to get a lot of musings into the space between attacks here. This is funny though, because the novel gives confirmation that Ye Xiu only realized this recently, when Sleeping Moon purposely let the others get attacked. He isn’t that godly that he realized it from the start.

“50%? I like 100%!” and “...be at ease and drop dead!”

lol and there the shamelessness comes out. Well, Ye Xiu also lost all respect for this guy so.

Furthermore, he opened it extremely exaggeratedly and the umbrella actually flipped the other way. He retracted the umbrella a bit...

Um, so this is possible with a real umbrella of course, but a virtual one too...?

Chapter 9: Ye Xiu’s Two Hands

A pair of hands that made people’s cheeks stream with tears appeared in front of her eyes — Ye Xiu’s two hands.

Those must be some pretty impressive hands.

The hands were beautiful hands.

And in case you didn’t get it the first time: Ye Xiu has beautiful hands. Well, that is in the chapter title after all.

lol and Chen Guo examining his speed, I guess he must be taking it easy since the boss isn’t a difficult one.

Their banter is also so fun to read~

Chapter 10: Shameless Novice

lol did you really get out of the dungeon just so you could switch computers to get a smoke. I don’t think he particularly cared about finishing it, since it just provides exp probably.

Haha “the shameless novice” but what does Sleeping Moon gain from labeling him a novice? Shameless, yes, to discredit him.

These identical messages mixed together with other anger and hate. Although the system automatically blocked profanities, people’s intelligence were boundless. They used same sounding words to complete their mission.

ah, yes, the ways people get past profanity blockers, particularly fun in languages with hanzi! (hanzi right? Chinese characters?)

“Just because I’m angry doesn’t mean I have to show it.” Ye Xiu didn’t look angry. He was even smiling. While doing so, he logged out of the game and shut down the computer. Changing over to the smoking area was still his current ambitious dream.

Ah, I love this series. He just really wants a smoke.

But I can relate, I’m fairly expressionless most of the time, even when I’m excited.

Only players over level 20 could leave the beginner area. When that happened, PK’ing would be opened up. In the meantime, those level 20 and under could only point fingers and argue.

lol just...lol

But now that he couldn’t form a team, his leveling speed would only increase.

HAHA joke’s on you, it apparently works out better for him, they can’t even start PKing so there’s really no use getting into a tizzy over it...not that that stops people from creating drama. ever.

Lord Grim was equivalent to three people. Furthermore, with Ye Xiu’s skills, he wouldn’t be slower in clearing a dungeon than a five man team. He might even be a bit faster.

The video game context really gives validity to Ye Xiu’s ability to breeze through the early stages of the story as well as his strength being far above the others. Plus, it’s true. There are some games where teammates slow you down, you might as well go at it solo.

“Hello hello.”

xD

What a nice way to end this part! I’ll be bouncing back to the manhua now.

So, yeah, like I said. I’m actually having a lot of fun, the novels don’t linger on the mechanics long enough to become boring. Plus, Ye Xiu’s background - being 25 and already on the pro scene for 7 years - makes all of his overpowered-ness not just believable, but expected. Reading him go through the early stages of the game is sort of like watching a let’s play - relaxing.

Been Around

I’ve been working on an iteration of this tumble for a while.

My last one? Well. It was kinda. Sad? 

Like, basically, oh hey I’m on the edge of ruin guess we’ll see what happens!

Obvs some time has passed since then. And like, I dunno, maybe people are wondering how things turned out?

So I’m here to talk about that. Oh, and yeah, talk about what I’ve been playing watching and listening to.

Question Corner time!!!

Um did you get fired or what?

Shockingly, no! I kept my job. In fact, kinda got a clean slate- new manager, a new schedule, the works.

What the fuck? How?

Right? 

Basically, I kept my mouth shut when I needed to and stuck to one un-sophisticated but outrageously stupid lie about why my “work” wasn’t showing up in the reports.

And the person in charge of calling me on that bullshit just...didn’t.

I don’t know if it was kindness, or laziness, or what, but they basically let me off with a firm warning to not let my abject neglect of my job be so obvious next time around. Around the same time as all this was going down, there was also a big shakeup in management, and I got shifted to a new guy. Along with that, I also got approved to reduce my work week. 

So my best guess is amidst all the change they decided to just give me a free pass, cuz firing a union employee in the time of covid would be...a lot of work.

Wow. Sick. So. New schedule?

Yup. My job is having a bit of a budget emergency so they have offered to let us take unpaid time off while retaining our benefits. I’m now working 30 hours a week until the end of the year. I’ll miss the money, but honestly? I’m fucking stoked. I straight up need to be at work less, and while it’s some shit that I have to take a paycut just to stay sane, you better believe I was ON THAT the minute I learned it was an option.

You didn’t get fired. You got a new sup, a new supervisor...so...are you gonna try in the future, to, like, not get in that position again?

Yeah. I’m very okay with not putting myself through any of this ever again. 

I’m actually putting in a full day’s honest work. Logging in on time. Staying awake the entire shift. Doing actual work. It’s wild. And exhausting. And repetitive. So...so...so...repetitive.

Actually working my job the way it’s written out on paper is awful and draining. My work is deeply uninteresting and utterly without consequence. I don’t have any actual metrics to work towards because of how the pandemic has impacted things. You’d think that would be good! But actually, it sucks real bad cuz my bosses basically just say “you have no metrics, but you should also be demonstrably productive” which basically means BUSY AS FUCK. So every day is an exercise in how I can convincingly spin my tires for 10 hours a day.

The tradeoff for making a clean go at this whole gainful employment thing is that, presumably, I can forgo the stress of like, you know, having my entire life and sense of financial security implode at a moments notice. I guess it’s a fair trade. 

Still, I’m so very, very tired.

So...how are you feeling about things?

Honestly...pretty okay? 

Look, you gotta understand that for the past month I was unraveling at the seams. Barely sleeping, drinking way too much, gaining weight back and making zero progress on my creative hobbies. So any improvement at all? In 2020? Feels like a fucking windfall to end all windfalls, even if the job is still shit and the paycut is a bit of a kick in the ass.

Cool cool. You uh...still doin...?

Therapy? I mean you can just say therapy.

Yeah, I’m doing it. Results seem...limited?

I found out my therapist is a anti-vax covid truther so...that’s been an experience. But when she isn’t going on about how big pharma is just mining us for cash money (not totally untrue), she’s...aight?

I dunno. I have to talk a lot. I don’t usually do that, ya know? And sometimes I finish my sentences and I’m like lol that’s literally all I got and then have to wait for a response. And the response is usually something weird like “WELL THAT’S GREAT”.

I guess I was expecting to hear some high concept shit about my brain? And instead...it’s mostly just been affirmations of just how damn functional I am! I’m so functional! Look at me, being functional like I’m all sorts of hot shit.

I thought you were gonna fire her-

Yeah, uh, look. I’m...very bad at confrontation. I’ll fire the truther therapist next week, I promise.

Whatever, so...what are you gonna do now that you only work 3 days a work?

Hopefully more of this! I miss writing for an audience. I miss sharing what excites me with other people! I’ve missed having an online presence. I live my life on the internet these days. Like, yesterday, I had this distinct feeling that I was SO ONLINE that I was like, basically, on the verge of full Matrix.  Like, between Spriteclub and Twitter and Youtube and my online games, just stick a fuckin’ needle in the back of my head and get it over with. I’m like fuckin’ Neuromancer over here, 3 monitors at once all day every day.

So...when do we talk about what you’ve been up to?

RIGHT NOW ASSHOLE! That’s right folks, let’s talk about what I’ve been gettin’ into during my free time. 

WRITING-

Alice and the Pale Horse

I’m on page 123. Working on some edits. Seriously looking at how I can release my first few pages in an episodic format.

My dream is to someday have an animator for this story. A guy can hope, yeah?

Crash’s Corner

I’m gearing up for another anime post. I’m hoping it’ll be a bit shorter and more focused. Major show candidates include Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, Gleipnir, and Deca-Dence.

Film Journal

I’ve been guest writing for Ryan Sanderson’s year-long film journal the past few weeks. The last entry was about the Alien franchise. Give it a look!

ANIME-

God of High School

Man, this show is so damn lukewarm until it hits these wild action sequences that make your soul just fucking sing. The story feels like total nonsense, even for a shonen, but then you hit moments like this and it just doesn’t matter. It’s so imaginative it just absolutely soars. 

Gleipnir

OH MY GOD GLEIPNIR. Look, I can’t recommend this show to you. It’s that batshit off the walls wild. But...if you can handle the absolute of anime bullshit- and if you’re an anime fan, you know what I mean- then you might be able to handle this. I just finished the first season this week and it grabbed me by the neck and didn’t let go. If it doesn’t get renewed, I’ll absolutely find the manga. But just. Like. Holy shit. Yeah. (I said Holy Shit probably at least 2 or 3 times per ep, so be warned).

Fire Force

Honestly, season 2 has been a bit of a gas for me. It’s just lacked a certain juice that the first season had. Season 1 had so much wild worldbuilding going on, while season 2 seems to be all about tossing in as many tertiary characters as possible. Curious if the manga handles that better. As it stands, Fire Force still makes it onto my weekly rotation of anime I hit up while biking.

Deca-Dence

I heard hype for this on Twitter, and based on the stills and the trailer, I was kinda so-so. But I jumped in and gave it a couple ep’s and honestly? It kept my attention. It even surprised me several times. It’s deeply imaginative in its own right, and presents a couple of animation styles that play directly into the lore of its world presentation. I’m not resonating with it on an emotional level in the same way as I am with say, Gleipnir, but this is still a really damn good show that I’d have no reservations about recommending to anyone.

A Certain Scientific Railgun T

This one has me deeply conflicted. On the one hand, it is a gif generator, and I have a whole library of reaction gifs to show for it. The action is thrilling, the world gorgeous, the characters endearing and appropriately silly. But, like, also, it is the height of fan-service and there’s not much of a defense for it. So much so that I’ve only watched the first few episodes. I don’t know if I’ll keep on since the story hasn’t got its hooks in me yet. Reminds me a lot of Pandora in the Crimson Urn- deeply imaginative and funny but also full of yikes.

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU

I’m only a few ep’s into season 1 but I’m intrigued. It’s a rom-com/slice of life type anime, but it plays like a more straight-faced Kaguya-Sama: Love is War, but with the voice of the show centered around a deeply unlikable incel-type character surrounded by a terrifically enjoyable cast of fellow students who each bring their own quirks to the table. I’m interested to see how the plot continues to develop, as I’ve seen fans raving about the most recent season. However, this show has fallen to the wayside as I keep getting distracted by other anime. Kinda reminds me of Food Wars in the sense that I find its premise and characters compelling but also lose my focus on the story quickly.

Samurai Champloo

Finally finished it! Loved it, for the most part. As a guy who has watched his fair share of classic sword films, I deeply appreciated how much reverence the animators and writers had for the genre, while also infusing their own modern sensibilities. It’s not hard to see what this sword story is so well loved, even if its overwrought ending doesn’t come close to touching the charm of its early charm and wanderlust. 

Kaguya-Sama: Love is War

The best damn rom-com slice of life anime I’ve ever seen. Season 2 blew me away. I laughed. I cried. I enjoyed the new tertiary characters and was gratefully surprised by how easily the story was able to sustain the pace, brevity and sneaky depth of season 1. This show is special.

Dragon Ball

I want to enjoy this, if only ‘cuz I want to understand the story that is considered so foundational to many other fans. And I LOVE the trademark animation, of course. But...also..there’s a whole lot of moments in this that are just uh...they require explaining in 2020. Maybe I just need to get over my scruples and power through, idk.

Katekyo Hitman Reborn!

My current shonen project. I’ve been stalled out on the timeskip arc for about...a year now? But I’m not willing to call it quits yet! I need to see this bonkers time-traveling mafia war through to its conclusion. 

Gintama

I fucking adore Gintama. I love how it doesn’t give a fuck about skewering anime as a medium until it flips a switch and slaps you upside the head with some weirdly emotional and hopeful message. Every character is both hilarious and yet has this deeply emotional connection to the audience. It is perfect satire.

MANGA

Note: People often ask me where I get my manga. My answer can vary from title to title, but my usual go-to is Epilogue Books, owned and run by my dear friend and writing partner of many years. I have a semi-regular shipment of titles I receive from them depending on how quick I get through a given shipment. If you’re looking for these, or any other manga, give their site a gander or contact them directly. They’ll hook you up, and you’ll have the satisfaction of supporting literally anyone but Amazon.

One Piece

I’m on volume 33 of the Skypiea arc, which has been so-so compared to the previous arcs with Crocodile and the adventures in the Deep Blue. I do find the Kami to be a curious and compelling villain, but none of the Straw Hats have done much in the way of growth beyond “get separated, fight jobber bosses, come back together and let Luffy finish the fight”. I’m toward the end of the arc, however, so we’ll see how it rolls.

Berserk

Holy shit Berserk. A bunch of folks told me to read this when I asked for suggestions on twitter. I saw the cover art and was like “ok guy with big sword in a dark fantasy world, neat”. Wasn’t sure if it said more about the people who suggested it, or more about me that they thought I’d like it. I was also deeply nervous about dark fantasy after my fiasco with Goblin Slayer. But I went with it and gave the first volume a read and HOLY SMOKES. What a damn read. Not only does the story have me hooked, but also, it is GORGEOUS. It is dark. It is moody. It is occasionally humorous. But its STYLE just grabs me in a way that is reminiscent of the old Spawn comics from my youth. I immediately ordered more and I can’t wait.

Fairy Tail

Just finished the lullaby arc and now we are deep into the Deliora arc with the Cold Emperor. It’s really been fun to see how the manga differs from the anime. The anime was my first true shonen experience and a story that I credit with having saved my life, so I had high expectations coming into this. I’m happy to say that thus far, the manga of Fairy Tail is worth every bit of attention that the anime received. Can’t wait to keep going.

Fruits Basket

Fruits Basket is fucking precious and if you come at these characters I swear to god I will come back at you. *deep breath* Okay. Settle. This is a positively lovely story, centered in positivity, kindness, and found family. Each character is working through trauma in their own imperfect way, and I adore their journeys. You can tell the story was penned by a deeply vulnerable human and I can’t thank them enough for having the courage to share it. Read this manga- and then go see the equally gorgeous anime.

Eden’s Zero

Written and drawn by the same crew who did Fairy Tail, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call it Fairy Tail In Space. That said, volume 1 gave me just enough to get curious again about where Mashima is heading with his latest creative opus- and whether it will cross over with his wildly successful Fairy Tail universe. And yes, in case the above panel wasn’t enough of a cue- Mashima and co. can still play my heart for tears like no one’s business and it’s damn rude. 

 Sailor Moon

I love the Sailor Moon anime. I think it’s an adorable show with deeply relatable characters that approaches the monster of the week format with an effectiveness that would make even Buffy the Vampire Slayer jealous. The manga is just as wonderful- not to mention beautifully drawn. Volume 1 also works much, much faster than the show does, and I dare say it is better for it.

VIDYA GAMES

Warzone

I’m just seven levels out from completing my third battlepass straight. I’m going to try the Black Ops alpha this week. I’ve played Warzone a whole lot less lately, dedicating my evenings to reading manga, napping, or watching wrestling with pals instead, but it still remains my favorite shooter at this time.

Cities: Skylines

I started a new city last week. It’s a shithole industrial city on a desert map. I had to set my sewer drainage in a manmade lake outside of town that quickly overflowed. At one point the sewage flood disabled my powerplants which in turn caused my entire town of 8k to flee. I went into 3 million in debt while waiting for the town to rebound. I came out of it eventually, repopulating the town to the tune of well over 11k, and restoring my budget surplus, but it was a huge fucking ordeal. I love this game.

Yakuza 0

After chapter 1 of Yakuza 0 I was ready to write this game off. The camera angles pissed me off. The fight commands felt simplistic. The story was boring. But as I thought back to my experience of chapter 1, I realized that it more closely resembled some of my favorite action film sequences than I had initially realized. Did the button mashing make my wrists beg for mercy? Absolutely. Was it satisfying to overcome an absurd amount of enemies using little more than my x button and my wits? Also yes. And did those fights build on each other to create a sense of violent urgency as I propelled myself toward the “boss”? Definitely yes. And then you leave chapter 1 and get your run of a map that includes karaoke bars, Sega arcades and ramen shops- and yes, you better believe that I spent way too much time playing Sega’s Outrun. While jogging between shops and minigames random mobs of enemies pop up and try to start shit with you- much as they might in a JRPG. In fact, the game itself has a lot of RPG elements in it- stat boosts and inventory management and even a relationship meter. The more time I put in, the more the game opens up. I’m going to keep giving Yakuza 0 a shot for as long as that continues to be the case. Also, it is a perfect option to play as a streamed game on my phone.

Mario 64

Can you believe I’ve never played Mario 64? Seems embarrassing to admit now. So here I am, many, many years late to the party. I’ll let y’all know how I like it. So far...I’m already lost on the first course, so...hopefully things pick up.

Sky

Sky has been a bizarre experience. It’s the latest game from That Game Company, their previous work including Journey and Flower. Sky has that same aimless charm, but I also just can’t get into it to save my life. It’s free-to-play, but abstractly so- I’m not sure what the paid content even really does. I have a few friends on Sky- they typically have to drag me to the places they want to go. There’s nothing at stake in the world of sky- there are spirits you can free and content you can unlock, and occasionally you do encounter foes who pose a danger to you, but for the most part it’s basically a fetch quest with social elements added in. I appreciate those social experiences, and the community seems very chill, but it’s also a bit of a stress to log in and have everyone flock to you demanding your attention and time.  Also, this game is only playable on my mobile phone, which I am not used to gaming on, so...focus is limited. I mostly just vibe on the starter island and talk to acquaintances. 

Music

Powfu

DJ Blyatman

fawlin x Naits

Josh A

Tekken 7 OST

gothurted

Beast in Black

Battle Beast

Legos

Hey! I’m doing legos! That seems like a totally normal hobby to have at my age...yeah. Totally.

Anyway, I’m working on the Pirates of Barracuda Bay set. It’s about 3k pieces. It’s been a fun build so far! Here’s my progress...

WRASTLIN

Yes, I’m still watching wrestling. I usually get an episode or two in every week with my pals on discord. It’s not as many as I’d like to watch, but it’s for the best. If my viewing wasn’t forcibly tempered I’d have likely lost the past few months entirely to wrestling. And as you might have guessed from above, I’m someone who is happiest when their hobbies are varied and numerous. 

I’m in June of 1999 of the WWF storyline. Undertaker is the heavyweight champ, the Acolytes hold the tag belts, Jeff Jarrett has the intercontinental title belt and Owen Hart just died. King of the Ring is less than a week away. My friends and I have filled out brackets. I’m very excited to see who, if any of us, ends up being right about the winner. 

SPORTS???

I gave baseball the old college try. I ended up giving up. It just isn’t the escape I need. Something about those empty stadiums and players half-wearing masks and the shortened games just throws me off. I don’t feel at ease watching baseball in 2020. When I first got into baseball back in 2014 or so, it was because I was sick and baseball promised an illusion of normalcy- I could watch the rest of the world function in relative stability and hope that someday I too could join them. Now it’s the rest of the world that’s sick, and I’m relatively well, and all baseball can do for me in 2020 is remind me that I’m damn lucky I’m as well as I am, and that if I’m careless (or just plain unlucky) that I’ll be pretty sick to.

So where did I turn for competitive entertainment?

Well, there was wrestling, to be sure, but the real joy I’ve found is at SpriteClub.

The quick pitch- people just like you or me create fighters in M.U.G.E.N., a 2-D fighting game engine. These fighters, or sprites, are guided by AI, also designed by people like you and I. Think of it like a gundam and its pilot. They’re tossed into a pool with a whole bunch of other community creations and left to duke it out while the viewers bet fake money on the winners.

You would think that the idea might only appeal to gambling junkies and fighting game addicts, but the truth is this eclectic channel has a much wider appeal than one might initially give it credit for. 

For one, its catalogue of fighters includes everything from pop culture superheroes to obscure anime characters to widely shared memes. It is almost impossible to not find a character you’ll have some sense of loyalty to.

Beyond that, the crowd that populates the chat is courteous, kind, and downright educational- a remarkable mix for anywhere gamers populate. It’s a relatively small community, so the channel takes the feeling of an intimate corner bar. If you enter the chat respecting the chill and willing to listen, you will learn a great deal not just about the fighters, but about how the genre of 2D fighter works as a whole.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of SpriteClub is the exhibitions feature, which allows you to request custom matches with your favorite characters, which play out on the Twitch stream for others to view and bet on.  Although often chaotic, the exhibition mode is home to a number of long-running series set up my stream regulars. These series take on a life and lore of their own that is frankly fascinating. Think of it like a more frenetic video game karaoke. Yes, picking good fighters is a goal, but so is finding a good angle for the match- the right level of humor, the right pairing of unlikely characters, and set-up for matches that are competitive, as opposed to predictable stomps. 

I’ve never jumped into a Twitch channel as a regular before. I’ve never subbed to anything on Twitch before. The gamer community as a whole has always been one that’s left a bad taste in my mouth, rightfully so. But SpriteClub has been a lovely brightspot and proof that kind and informative gaming communities can and do continue to exist. I foresee myself being a regular viewer for some time to come.

And that’s it!

That’s pretty much everything I can think of sharing at this time! I hope y’all enjoyed it. As you can tell, I’ve done my best to keep busy. Hopefully I’ll have even more to share with you all in the immediate future. Until then, thanks for reading, and keep well!

The Art of Storytelling - Truth in Fiction

[Second exercise given by the Master. Why, oh why? did I commit to it?]

First part – Choose an embarrassing moment of your life and try to be “a little more honest than you’re comfortable with” while you write about it.

 I don’t want to do this. I really don’t. I knew the moment I read the assignment what I should write about but oh god! I don’t want to.

It happened fifteen years ago and to this day, whenever the memory comes back to the front of my mind, I cringe, I try to hide my face and I hum a nonsensical melody to drown the images and sounds in my mind. Usually, the tricks work. After a few seconds, my mind is able to latch onto other thoughts and the memory fades away. However, I can’t do that today. I’m supposed to look at it dead in the eyes and admit that is what happened and there’s no way to go back on it.

Even now, the words I write are a tactic to delay the assignment, to write about it without actually writing about it. But this morning, while I was doing my yoga practice, I was made to choose a word and dedicate energy to it. The word was “commit” because I knew I needed a principle to give me courage to do this.

Here goes.

As I said, it was fifteen years ago, I was a teenager. It was before social media, high speed internet was becoming more and more accessible. We had a computer at home, and on this computer was a program called MSN. Despite the fact that I could see my friends at school most days, I still felt the need to log on as much as I could and chat with them more once back at home. This went on for several months, and I ended up chatting with people I had never met before, because my address had been passed around and I was not in control of it. It was cool, I liked it. I was a bookish teenager, was not giving much trouble to anyone – at least, I think so – and very uncomfortable in my skin because everything I felt, I felt it for the first time and I didn’t know what to do with it. But behind the screen, I didn’t have to feel that way, I was free.

There were some bad experiences. I remember people tricking me into saying some things, or maybe I said them out of my own volition, I remember trying to reach out to my actual friends and smooth out the misunderstanding. Other times, young men I knew, that I would meet in real life at school would chat up to me and made very clear sexual references, and this would put my hormones in turmoil. I learnt to respond in kind. After all, in real life, they acted like they hadn’t said anything, so I figured I could do the same. I even remember a couple of time when I was on the offensive, taking innuendos and turning it into crass comments, because being the first to speak of it was putting me in a position with some modicum of control.

And then one day, a new address appeared on my log, I accepted it and we started chatting. I don’t remember if it happened during the first or the second chat. If it happened during the first, I know there wasn’t a second but I’m not sure anymore.

Anyway, he said some things that could be – and those are key words here, could be – understood as sexual innuendos. Looking back, I don’t think they were but at this point, I was so used to it, and to the ways I would respond to it, that I made the reference clear. I don’t remember what I said, I don’t think I can. When I realized the mistake I made, it was too late, emotions overwhelmed me and if I remember those well, but details and specific are lost.

There was five minutes of no chatting and then he wrote back, asking if I knew who he was. I didn’t. I had just accepted the contact. Turned out, he was a much older man, in his thirties, who was mentoring me during the aikido lessons I was taking at the time. He was somebody I could look up to and who was helping me with my practice, and I don’t remember him being ever anything else other than appropriate. He had taken my email address and added me to the list of contacts from the dojo.

When I understood what I did – coming on to somebody I thought I didn’t know when actually, they were very real – I stood frozen in front of my screen. Suddenly, everything felt very real and I was not prepared for the intrusion of reality. I felt hot and cold, tingling spreading from my spine to my limbs. This wasn’t not a teenage boy, who I could pretend I didn’t care about because they would do the same to me, this was an adult I was supposed to meet in a couple of days for the practice. Somebody who was putting his time every Saturday morning training me, because I wanted to get better. Somebody I would have to face, for real.

I don’t remember how it went after that. The conversation can’t have lasted very long after the revelation. I must have apologized and logged off, gone to my room and found a book, burying myself into it, so that I wouldn’t have to think. I met him the next Saturday, even though I didn’t want to go but my mother was taking me and there was no good reason not to go unless I told her what had happened, and I was not going to do that. After practice, I remember he asked me to stay longer to talk. I sat on the bench and he sat next to me. I don’t think the conversation was very long, and I don’t remember the specifics, but he told me that what I had done was very dangerous, that I was lucky it had happened with him because he wasn’t a bad man, and had had no other motive when he chatted with me but to talk about the practice.

I remember sitting on the bench, my hands curled and tense against the wood, looking at my shoes and listening to him. I don’t remember if I cried. It wouldn’t surprise me if I did. I felt very low, because I had the impression I was losing the respect and attention of someone who was important to me, in the context of my aikido lessons. I had made sexual advances to someone who not only had shot me down – with good reasons – but whose opinion of me would never be the same.

My practice of aikido dwindled after that. I was in my final year of high school, exams were coming up, decisions had to be made about where to go next, I happily agreed when my parents suggested I put extra-curriculum activities on hold to focus on my studies. Once I left the dojo, I never saw him again.

But to this day, the words that appeared on my screen during that conversation, they haunt me.

Him: Do you know who I am?

Me: No

Him: I’m […], from the dojo

Each time they pop into my mind, I want to hide, I want to scream, I want to go back and knock some sense into the teenager that I was. I can’t. All I can do is either bury the memory and move on, or look at it and take a deep breath, and accept. But it is really hard to do when I still don’t understand the why.

 Second part – Read your text out loud, pay attention to the way you feel and the way your body reacts, and write those impressions down.

I didn’t want to read out loud. I turned the volume down on the music and took some breath before starting.

I was sitting on my chair, I thought that at some point, I would want to stand up and walk, to shake off whatever I would feel, but once I started, I stayed put. During the reading, I was stroking my arm or my shoulder or my collarbone. I think I was trying to comfort myself.

I felt the tingle between my shoulders, the sense of uneasiness that spread from there. I wrapped my legs around each other twice, until I could feel the stretch of the muscles in my thigh and shin. Only when I stopped reading did I realize how much it hurts but during, it didn’t register.

My tone was monochord, I tried to instill a sense of distance, tried to find some humor in it but it didn’t work. I was mostly concerned about getting through. I tried to picture myself reading this text to the Viking but it could only last a couple of seconds before I started thinking about what I was reading again.

[So there you go, an exercise and a meta-exercise. I think I saw it through but “oh god! why?” is still my reaction.]

Research confirms Brexit's “disastrous effect” …

Recent months have seen the threat of Brexit looming over Britain, creating a climate of terrible uncertainty. Statisticians at the National Establishment for Researching Knowledge have compiled a damning survey showing how the chilling effect of not knowing exactly what the outcome will be (or even when or if that outcome will be ever decided) has prevented business as normal, with even the execution of the most routine functions being hampered.

In a comprehensive sampling of opinions, NERK researchers have found that all usual activity, (such as carping about too many guitarists, too many loud guitarists, too many loud white guitarists etc.) has all but ceased. “Completing endless on-line petitions and posting memes about Mark Francois has taken up all the available time and internet bandwidth usually reserved for bitching about Joe Bonamassa, defining the exact location of the boundary between bluesrock and rockblues, and making ludicrous overblown claims about bang average pub bands. And that’s when they’re actually at home: things get even worse when they’re all out standing about in Trafalgar Square all day.” Researchers believe that this phenomenon lay behind the recent failure to stir passions sufficiently to organise the usual annual Blues Awards cat fight, normally a cause for months of fervent condemnation and slavish adoration in equal, unjustified, abundance.

This catastrophic slowdown in hype and vituperation, dubbed the Twaddle Cliff Edge by NERK researchers, has an impact on the livelihoods of those who previously depended on it. One survey respondent, P.L. Unger, told NERK that they couldn’t remember things ever being this bad before. “You used to be able to log onto Facebook any time night or day and be guaranteed at least one pointless poll, ludicrous assertion or petty spat to get your teeth into. If levels of blues-related nonsense don’t pick up again soon we’ll be reduced to writing about politics.”

Fellow JTTW fan, I am a sad nerd who thirsts for more fan content. Do you know any good sites to find fanfics or fan art or anything besides Weibo and LOFTER? I can read Chinese but I have a difficult time writing it so It's difficult to find anything OTL

Hey there, buddy! You came to the right person. I’m like that guy with a shady trenchcoat roaming the streets of the big city, except instead of drugs, I carry around JTTW content B)

For fanart, I’m afraid Weibo and LOFTER are the best places to go. Anywhere else really depends on being there at the right time. Have you tried tieba? It works well with mobile, but it’s annoying harder to navigate on the computer, and it’s messier than weibo/lofter.

I’m assuming you’ve wandered through all of LOFTER lol. For shipping needs, the Wukong/Sanzang tag there is #孙唐, but you can get different results if you try #唐孙 and #藏空 (same for weibo). There’s also  #空藏 and #猴唐 as alt. names for Wukong/Sanzang because this ship can never agree on a default name. If you just want to poke through gen. content for fanart or something, try these tags if you haven’t already: #西游记之大圣归来, #西游记, #西遊伏妖篇 (I say these three because they’re the most active, but like I said, can’t guarantee the fanart will pop up easily since we’re out of the “hot” fandom period lol).

For fanvids, I recommend bilibili.com. Use the same tags as above for quality content TM.

That being said, I’ve got you covered with fanfics (tieba links)!

Wukong/Sanzang forum (This clique is more active on lofter/weibo, so there’s not a lot here, but I think it’s worth poking around)

JTTW slash forum (It’s mostly 2011-series based fics, but I don’t think it really matters if you’ve seen that series or not. This was really fun to poke around lol, and like all fic sites, quality varies. But pay attention to the labels on the fics- it’s mostly Wukong/Sanzang but Erlang/Wukong, etc. is in there too)

Some of my recs from that forum to get you started (again, I recommend using a mobile device for these- if you’re on the computer, baidu will prompt you to log in when you try to go to the next page in each story)

http://tieba.baidu.com/p/2740623595

http://tieba.baidu.com/p/4421822887

http://tieba.baidu.com/p/3691313176

https://wapp.baidu.com/p/3844782148?lp=5028&mo_device=1&is_jingpost=1

This story is good, but I’m not sure if you’re fond of things written in the original book’s Chinese style: http://tieba.baidu.com/p/2740623595

TVB (1996/98) JTTW forum (I love this adaptation, but not a lot of fanfics in this forum; more het stuff in the mix)

However, it comes with one of my all-time favorite Wukong/Sanzang fics here. (Might seem ooc if you’re not familiar with the TVB series, but rest assured that it’s perfectly IC for that one!)

There’s also this long-shot Wukong/Sanzang AU fic here (based on the 2015 animated movie; some parts are better than others lol, but overall enjoyable). The copy-able version here.

It’s harder to find good gen. fics because there’s no aggregate site like AO3 or ff.net to filter through (there are a couple gen. I can rec, but I think the stuff here can tie you over for now haha). I found everything I did through ship-fics or internet fame.

However, this “internet novel” The Tales of Wukong, is a JTTW fanfic that’s so successful it’s getting a film adaptation set for July 2017. It’s implied Wukong has a love interest in this, but honestly? I think it’s perfectly fine to interpret it as platonic on his side if we want- they don’t get together anyway.

Here’s the link to the story again, but with a bunch of side-stories tacked onto the end: http://www.5uks.com/book/wukongchuan/

The author’s written another JTTW “book,” but I won’t rec it unless you enjoy this story. It’s actually pretty good in total, but it’s one of those things where you have to read to the very end or you’ll be going “wtf.” I got to the end and was still saying “WTF” for the next two days.

For fancomics, this one is absolutely amazing. Links here. Updates slowly, but gosh, it is worth it. Gen. Action/Adventure/Gorgeous art, somewhat 2015 animated movie based.

Webcomics:

Xi Xing Ji is pretty good. It’s a fan sequel to JTTW, with focus on the dragon prince and an OC. Also Wukong’s kinda dead in it. Key word is “kinda.”

Cruel Journey West Epilogue is wild nonsense, but I actually enjoyed the humor/action lol. This other one by the same team… is not as good, like, the story is terrible- you can try if you want though.

The Great Sage Equaling Heaven’s Journey to the West is a pretty much a page-by-page adaptation of the original story. Aside from that hilariously pornographic cover, it’s just a pure, cute comic.

And lastly, there’s a section of JTTW on both ff.net and AO3. Very small amount of content, but nearly all in English.

Hope your question was answered! Also for copy/pasting reference (you probably know this already though haha), 同人 is how Chinese fandoms refer to “fanfiction/art” and cp is their term for ship. 

It was not consent, it was concealment 

Facebook’s response to the clutch of users who are suddenly woke — triggered to delve into their settings by the Facebook data misuse scandal and #DeleteFacebook backlash — to the fact the social behemoth is, quietly and continuously, harvesting sensitive personal data about them and their friends tells you everything you need to know about the rotten state of tech industry ad-supported business models.

Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

“People have to expressly agree to use this feature,” the company wrote in a defensively worded blog post at the weekend, defending how it tracks some users’ SMS and phone call metadata — a post it had the impressive brass neck to self-describe as a “fact check”.

“Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android . This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook.”

So, tl;dr, if you’re shocked to see what Facebook knows about you, well, that’s your own dumb fault because you gave Facebook permission to harvest all that personal data.

Not just Facebook either, of course. A fair few Android users appear to be having a similarly rude awakening about how Google’s mobile platform (and apps) slurp location data pervasively — at least unless the user is very, very careful to lock everything down.

But the difficulty of A) knowing exactly what data is being collected for what purposes and B) finding the cunning concealed/intentionally obfuscated master setting which will nix all the tracking is by design, of course.

Privacy hostile design.

No accident then that Facebook has just given its settings pages a haircut — as it scrambles to rein in user outrage over the still snowballing Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal — consolidating user privacy controls onto one screen instead of the full TWENTY they had been scattered across before.

ehem

Insert your ‘stable door being bolted’ GIF of choice right here.

Another example of Facebook’s privacy hostile design: As my TC colleague Romain Dillet pointed out last week, the company deploys misleading wording during the Messenger onboarding process which is very clearly intended to push users towards clicking on a big blue “turn on” (data-harvesting) button — inviting users to invite the metaphorical Facebook vampire over the threshold so it can perpetually suck data.

Facebook does this by implying that if they don’t bare their neck and “turn on” the continuous contacts uploading they somehow won’t be able to message any of their friends…

An image included with Facebook’s statement.

That’s complete nonsense of course. But opportunistic emotional blackmail is something Facebook knows a bit about — having been previously caught experimenting on users without their consent to see if it could affect their mood.

Add to that, the company has scattered its social plugins and tracking pixels all around the World Wide Web, enabling it to expand its network of surveillance signals — again, without it being entirely obvious to Internet users that Facebook is watching and recording what they are doing and liking outside its walled garden.

According to pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo Facebook’s trackers are on around a quarter of the top million websites. While Google’s are on a full ~three-quarters.

So you don’t even have to be a user to be pulled into this surveillance dragnet.

In its tone-deaf blog post trying to defang user concerns about its SMS/call metadata tracking, Facebook doesn’t go into any meaningful detail about exactly why it wants this granular information — merely writing vaguely that: “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with.”

It’s certainly not wrong that other apps and services have also been sucking up your address book.

But that doesn’t make the fact Facebook has been tracking who you’re calling and messaging — how often/for how long — any less true or horrible.

This surveillance is controversial not because Facebook gained permission to data mine your phone book and activity — which, technically speaking, it will have done, via one of the myriad socially engineered, fuzzily worded permission pop-ups starring cutesy looking cartoon characters.

But rather because the consent was not informed.

Or to put it more plainly, Facebookers had no idea what they were agreeing to let the company do.

Which is why people are so horrified now to find what the company has been routinely logging — and potentially handing over to third parties on its ad platform.

Phone calls to your ex? Of course Facebook can see them. Texts to the number of a health clinic you entered into your phonebook? Sure. How many times you phoned a law firm? Absolutely. And so on and on it goes.

This is the rude awakening that no number of defensive ‘fact checks’ from Facebook — nor indeed defensive tweet storms from current CSO Alex Stamos — will be able to smooth away.

“There are long-standing issues with organisations of all kinds, across multiple sectors, misapplying, or misunderstanding, the provisions in data protection law around data subject consent,” says data protection expert Jon Baines, an advisor at UK law firm Mishcon de Reya LLP and also chair of NADPO, when we asked what the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal says about how broken the current system of online consent is.

“The current European Data Protection Directive (under which [the UK] Data Protection Act sits) says that consent means any freely given specific and informed indication of their wishes by which a data subject signifies agreement to their personal data being processed. In a situation under which a data subject legitimately later claims that they were unaware what was happening with their data, it is difficult to see how it can reasonably be said that they had “consented” to the use.”

Ironically, given recent suggestions by defunct Facebook rival Path’s founder of a latent reboot to cater to the #DeleteFacebook crowd — Path actually found itself in an uncomfortable privacy hotseat all the way back in 2012, when it was discovered to have been uploading users’ address book information without asking for permission to do so.

Having been caught with its fingers in the proverbial cookie jar, Path apologized and deleted the data.

The irony is that while Path suffered a moment of outrage, Facebook is only facing a major privacy backlash now — after it’s spent so many years calmly sucking up people’s contacts data, also without them being aware because Facebook nudged them to think they needed to tap that big blue ‘turn on’ button.

Exploiting users’ trust — and using a technicality to unhook people’s privacy — is proving pretty costly for Facebook right now though.

And the risks of attempting to hoodwink consent out of your users are about to step up sharply too, at least in Europe.

Baines points out that the EU’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, tightens the existing privacy standard — adding the words “clear affirmative act” and “unambiguous” to consent requirements.

More importantly, he notes it introduces “more stringent requirements, and certain restrictions, which are not, or are not explicit, in current law, such as the requirement to be able to demonstrate that a data subject has given (valid) consent” (emphasis his).

“Consent must also now be separable from other written agreements, and in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language. If these requirements are enforced by data protection supervisory authorities and the courts, then we could well see a significant shift in habits and practices,” he adds.

The GDPR framework is also backed up by a new regime of major penalties for data protection violations which can scale up to 4% of a company’s global turnover.

And the risk of fines so large will be much harder for companies to ignore — and thus playing fast and loose with data, and moving fast and breaking things (as Facebook used to say), doesn’t sound so smart anymore.

As I wrote back in 2015, the online privacy lie is unraveling.

It’s taken a little longer than I’d hoped, for sure. But here we are in 2018 — and it’s not just the #MeToo movement that’s turned consent into a buzzword.

It was not consent, it was concealment 

Facebook’s response to the clutch of users who are suddenly woke — triggered to delve into their settings by the Facebook data misuse scandal and #DeleteFacebook backlash — to the fact the social behemoth is, quietly and continuously, harvesting sensitive personal data about them and their friends tells you everything you need to know about the rotten state of tech industry ad-supported business models.

Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

“People have to expressly agree to use this feature,” the company wrote in a defensively worded blog post at the weekend, defending how it tracks some users’ SMS and phone call metadata — a post it had the impressive brass neck to self-describe as a “fact check”.

“Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android . This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook.”

So, tl;dr, if you’re shocked to see what Facebook knows about you, well, that’s your own dumb fault because you gave Facebook permission to harvest all that personal data.

Not just Facebook either, of course. A fair few Android users appear to be having a similarly rude awakening about how Google’s mobile platform (and apps) slurp location data pervasively — at least unless the user is very, very careful to lock everything down.

But the difficulty of A) knowing exactly what data is being collected for what purposes and B) finding the cunning concealed/intentionally obfuscated master setting which will nix all the tracking is by design, of course.

Privacy hostile design.

No accident then that Facebook has just given its settings pages a haircut — as it scrambles to rein in user outrage over the still snowballing Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal — consolidating user privacy controls onto one screen instead of the full TWENTY they had been scattered across before.

ehem

Insert your ‘stable door being bolted’ GIF of choice right here.

Another example of Facebook’s privacy hostile design: As my TC colleague Romain Dillet pointed out last week, the company deploys misleading wording during the Messenger onboarding process which is very clearly intended to push users towards clicking on a big blue “turn on” (data-harvesting) button — inviting users to invite the metaphorical Facebook vampire over the threshold so it can perpetually suck data.

Facebook does this by implying that if they don’t bare their neck and “turn on” the continuous contacts uploading they somehow won’t be able to message any of their friends…

An image included with Facebook’s statement.

That’s complete nonsense of course. But opportunistic emotional blackmail is something Facebook knows a bit about — having been previously caught experimenting on users without their consent to see if it could affect their mood.

Add to that, the company has scattered its social plugins and tracking pixels all around the World Wide Web, enabling it to expand its network of surveillance signals — again, without it being entirely obvious to Internet users that Facebook is watching and recording what they are doing and liking outside its walled garden.

According to pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo Facebook’s trackers are on around a quarter of the top million websites. While Google’s are on a full ~three-quarters.

So you don’t even have to be a user to be pulled into this surveillance dragnet.

In its tone-deaf blog post trying to defang user concerns about its SMS/call metadata tracking, Facebook doesn’t go into any meaningful detail about exactly why it wants this granular information — merely writing vaguely that: “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with.”

It’s certainly not wrong that other apps and services have also been sucking up your address book.

But that doesn’t make the fact Facebook has been tracking who you’re calling and messaging — how often/for how long — any less true or horrible.

This surveillance is controversial not because Facebook gained permission to data mine your phone book and activity — which, technically speaking, it will have done, via one of the myriad socially engineered, fuzzily worded permission pop-ups starring cutesy looking cartoon characters.

But rather because the consent was not informed.

Or to put it more plainly, Facebookers had no idea what they were agreeing to let the company do.

Which is why people are so horrified now to find what the company has been routinely logging — and potentially handing over to third parties on its ad platform.

Phone calls to your ex? Of course Facebook can see them. Texts to the number of a health clinic you entered into your phonebook? Sure. How many times you phoned a law firm? Absolutely. And so on and on it goes.

This is the rude awakening that no number of defensive ‘fact checks’ from Facebook — nor indeed defensive tweet storms from current CSO Alex Stamos — will be able to smooth away.

“There are long-standing issues with organisations of all kinds, across multiple sectors, misapplying, or misunderstanding, the provisions in data protection law around data subject consent,” says data protection expert Jon Baines, an advisor at UK law firm Mishcon de Reya LLP and also chair of NADPO, when we asked what the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal says about how broken the current system of online consent is.

“The current European Data Protection Directive (under which [the UK] Data Protection Act sits) says that consent means any freely given specific and informed indication of their wishes by which a data subject signifies agreement to their personal data being processed. In a situation under which a data subject legitimately later claims that they were unaware what was happening with their data, it is difficult to see how it can reasonably be said that they had “consented” to the use.”

Ironically, given recent suggestions by defunct Facebook rival Path’s founder of a latent reboot to cater to the #DeleteFacebook crowd — Path actually found itself in an uncomfortable privacy hotseat all the way back in 2012, when it was discovered to have been uploading users’ address book information without asking for permission to do so.

Having been caught with its fingers in the proverbial cookie jar, Path apologized and deleted the data.

The irony is that while Path suffered a moment of outrage, Facebook is only facing a major privacy backlash now — after it’s spent so many years calmly sucking up people’s contacts data, also without them being aware because Facebook nudged them to think they needed to tap that big blue ‘turn on’ button.

Exploiting users’ trust — and using a technicality to unhook people’s privacy — is proving pretty costly for Facebook right now though.

And the risks of attempting to hoodwink consent out of your users are about to step up sharply too, at least in Europe.

Baines points out that the EU’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, tightens the existing privacy standard — adding the words “clear affirmative act” and “unambiguous” to consent requirements.

More importantly, he notes it introduces “more stringent requirements, and certain restrictions, which are not, or are not explicit, in current law, such as the requirement to be able to demonstrate that a data subject has given (valid) consent” (emphasis his).

“Consent must also now be separable from other written agreements, and in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language. If these requirements are enforced by data protection supervisory authorities and the courts, then we could well see a significant shift in habits and practices,” he adds.

The GDPR framework is also backed up by a new regime of major penalties for data protection violations which can scale up to 4% of a company’s global turnover.

And the risk of fines so large will be much harder for companies to ignore — and thus playing fast and loose with data, and moving fast and breaking things (as Facebook used to say), doesn’t sound so smart anymore.

As I wrote back in 2015, the online privacy lie is unraveling.

It’s taken a little longer than I’d hoped, for sure. But here we are in 2018 — and it’s not just the #MeToo movement that’s turned consent into a buzzword.

via Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2pJDNcq

It was not consent, it was concealment 

Facebook’s response to the clutch of users who are suddenly woke — triggered to delve into their settings by the Facebook data misuse scandal and #DeleteFacebook backlash — to the fact the social behemoth is, quietly and continuously, harvesting sensitive personal data about them and their friends tells you everything you need to know about the rotten state of tech industry ad-supported business models.

Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

“People have to expressly agree to use this feature,” the company wrote in a defensively worded blog post at the weekend, defending how it tracks some users’ SMS and phone call metadata — a post it had the impressive brass neck to self-describe as a “fact check”.

“Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android . This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook.”

So, tl;dr, if you’re shocked to see what Facebook knows about you, well, that’s your own dumb fault because you gave Facebook permission to harvest all that personal data.

Not just Facebook either, of course. A fair few Android users appear to be having a similarly rude awakening about how Google’s mobile platform (and apps) slurp location data pervasively — at least unless the user is very, very careful to lock everything down.

But the difficulty of A) knowing exactly what data is being collected for what purposes and B) finding the cunning concealed/intentionally obfuscated master setting which will nix all the tracking is by design, of course.

Privacy hostile design.

No accident then that Facebook has just given its settings pages a haircut — as it scrambles to rein in user outrage over the still snowballing Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal — consolidating user privacy controls onto one screen instead of the full TWENTY they had been scattered across before.

ehem

Insert your ‘stable door being bolted’ GIF of choice right here.

Another example of Facebook’s privacy hostile design: As my TC colleague Romain Dillet pointed out last week, the company deploys misleading wording during the Messenger onboarding process which is very clearly intended to push users towards clicking on a big blue “turn on” (data-harvesting) button — inviting users to invite the metaphorical Facebook vampire over the threshold so it can perpetually suck data.

Facebook does this by implying that if they don’t bare their neck and “turn on” the continuous contacts uploading they somehow won’t be able to message any of their friends…

An image included with Facebook’s statement.

That’s complete nonsense of course. But opportunistic emotional blackmail is something Facebook knows a bit about — having been previously caught experimenting on users without their consent to see if it could affect their mood.

Add to that, the company has scattered its social plugins and tracking pixels all around the World Wide Web, enabling it to expand its network of surveillance signals — again, without it being entirely obvious to Internet users that Facebook is watching and recording what they are doing and liking outside its walled garden.

According to pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo Facebook’s trackers are on around a quarter of the top million websites. While Google’s are on a full ~three-quarters.

So you don’t even have to be a user to be pulled into this surveillance dragnet.

In its tone-deaf blog post trying to defang user concerns about its SMS/call metadata tracking, Facebook doesn’t go into any meaningful detail about exactly why it wants this granular information — merely writing vaguely that: “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with.”

It’s certainly not wrong that other apps and services have also been sucking up your address book.

But that doesn’t make the fact Facebook has been tracking who you’re calling and messaging — how often/for how long — any less true or horrible.

This surveillance is controversial not because Facebook gained permission to data mine your phone book and activity — which, technically speaking, it will have done, via one of the myriad socially engineered, fuzzily worded permission pop-ups starring cutesy looking cartoon characters.

But rather because the consent was not informed.

Or to put it more plainly, Facebookers had no idea what they were agreeing to let the company do.

Which is why people are so horrified now to find what the company has been routinely logging — and potentially handing over to third parties on its ad platform.

Phone calls to your ex? Of course Facebook can see them. Texts to the number of a health clinic you entered into your phonebook? Sure. How many times you phoned a law firm? Absolutely. And so on and on it goes.

This is the rude awakening that no number of defensive ‘fact checks’ from Facebook — nor indeed defensive tweet storms from current CSO Alex Stamos — will be able to smooth away.

“There are long-standing issues with organisations of all kinds, across multiple sectors, misapplying, or misunderstanding, the provisions in data protection law around data subject consent,” says data protection expert Jon Baines, an advisor at UK law firm Mishcon de Reya LLP, and also chair of NADPO, when we asked him what the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal says about how broken the current system of online consent is.

“The current European Data Protection Directive (under which [the UK] Data Protection Act sits) says that consent means any freely given specific and informed indication of their wishes by which a data subject signifies agreement to their personal data being processed. In a situation under which a data subject legitimately later claims that they were unaware what was happening with their data, it is difficult to see how it can reasonably be said that they had “consented” to the use.”

Ironically, given recent suggestions by defunct Facebook rival Path’s founder of a latent reboot to cater to the #DeleteFacebook crowd — Path actually found itself in an uncomfortable privacy hotseat all the way back in 2012, when it was discovered to have been uploading users’ address book information without asking for permission to do so.

Having been caught with its fingers in the proverbial cookie jar, Path apologized and deleted the data.

The irony is that while Path suffered a moment of outrage, Facebook is only facing a major privacy backlash now — after it’s spent so many years calmly sucking up people’s contacts data, also without them being aware because Facebook nudged them to think they needed to tap that big blue ‘turn on’ button.

Exploiting users’ trust — and using a technicality to unhook people’s privacy — is proving pretty costly for Facebook right now though.

The risks of attempt to hoodwink consent are about to step up sharply too — at least in Europe.

Baines points out that the updated privacy framework, GDPR, tightens the existing privacy standard — adding the words “clear affirmative act” and “unambiguous” to consent requirements.

More importantly, he notes it introduces “more stringent requirements, and certain restrictions, which are not, or are not explicit, in current law, such as the requirement to be able to demonstrate that a data subject has given (valid) consent” (emphasis his).

“Consent must also now be separable from other written agreements, and in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language. If these requirements are enforced by data protection supervisory authorities and the courts, then we could well see a significant shift in habits and practices,” adds Baines.

The GDPR framework is also backed up by a new regime of major penalties for data protection violations which can scale up to 4% of a company’s global turnover.

And the risk of fines so large will be much harder for companies to ignore — and thus playing fast and loose with data, and moving fast and breaking things, doesn’t sound so smart anymore.

As I wrote back in 2015, the online privacy lie is unraveling.

It’s taken a little longer than I’d hoped, for sure. But here we are in 2018 — and it’s not just the #MeToo movement that’s turned consent into a buzzword.

from Facebook – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2pJDNcq via IFTTT

‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America

By Eli Saslow, Washington Post, November 17, 2018

NORTH WATERBORO, Maine--The only light in the house came from the glow of three computer monitors, and Christopher Blair, 46, sat down at a keyboard and started to type. His wife had left for work and his children were on their way to school, but waiting online was his other community, an unreality where nothing was exactly as it seemed. He logged onto his website and began to invent his first news story of the day.

“BREAKING,” he wrote, pecking out each letter with his index fingers as he considered the possibilities. Maybe he would announce that Hillary Clinton had died during a secret overseas mission to smuggle more refugees into America. Maybe he would award President Trump the Nobel Peace Prize for his courage in denying climate change.

A new message popped onto Blair’s screen from a friend who helped with his website. “What viral insanity should we spread this morning?” the friend asked.

“The more extreme we become, the more people believe it,” Blair replied.

He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends--a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.

“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”

Blair’s own reality was out beyond the shuttered curtains of his office: a three-bedroom home in the forest of Maine where the paved road turned to gravel; not his house but a rental; not on the lake but near it. Over the past decade his family had moved around the country a half-dozen times as he looked for steady work, bouncing between construction and restaurant jobs while sometimes living on food stamps. During the economic crash of 2008, his wife had taken a job at Wendy’s to help pay down their credit-card debt, and Blair, a lifelong Democrat, had begun venting his political frustration online, arguing with strangers in an Internet forum called Brawl Hall. He sometimes masqueraded as a tea party conservative on Facebook so he could gain administrative access into their private groups and then flood their pages with liberal ideas before using his administrative status to shut their pages down.

He had created more than a dozen online profiles over the last years, sometimes disguising himself in accompanying photographs as a beautiful Southern blond woman or as a bandana-wearing conservative named Flagg Eagleton, baiting people into making racist or sexist comments and then publicly eviscerating them for it. In his writing Blair was blunt, witty and prolific, and gradually he’d built a liberal following on the Internet and earned a full-time job as a political blogger. On the screen, like nowhere else, he could say exactly how he felt and become whomever he wanted.

Now he hunched over a desk wedged between an overturned treadmill and two turtle tanks, scanning through conservative forums on Facebook for something that might inspire his next post. He was 6-foot-6 and 325 pounds, and he typed several thousand words each day in all capital letters. He noticed a photo online of Trump standing at attention for the national anthem during a White House ceremony. Behind the president were several dozen dignitaries, including a white woman standing next to a black woman, and Blair copied the picture, circled the two women in red and wrote the first thing that came into his mind.

“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” Blair wrote. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem. Lock them up for treason!”

Blair finished typing and looked again at the picture. The white woman was not in fact Chelsea Clinton but former White House strategist Hope Hicks. The black woman was not Michelle Obama but former Trump aide Omarosa Newman. Neither Obama nor Clinton had been invited to the ceremony. Nobody had flipped off the president. The entire premise was utterly ridiculous, which was exactly Blair’s point.

“We live in an Idiocracy,” read a small note on Blair’s desk, and he was taking full advantage. In a good month, the advertising revenue from his website earned him as much as $15,000, and it had also won him a loyal army of online fans. Hundreds of liberals now visited America’s Last Line of Defense to humiliate conservatives who shared Blair’s fake stories as fact. In Blair’s private Facebook messages with his liberal supporters, his conservative audience was made up of “sheep,” “hillbillies,” “maw-maw and paw-paw,” “TrumpTards,” “potatoes” and “taters.”

“How could any thinking person believe this nonsense?” he said. He hit the publish button and watched as his lie began to spread.

It was barely dawn in Pahrump, Nev., when Shirley Chapian, 76, logged onto Facebook.

“Good morning, Shirley! Thanks for being here,” read an automated note at the top of her page. She put her finger on the mouse and began scrolling down.

“Click LIKE if you believe we must stop Sharia Law from coming to America before it’s too late,” read the first item, and she clicked “like.”

“Share to help END the ongoing migrant invasion!” read another, and she clicked “share.”

The house was empty and quiet except for the clicking of her computer mouse. She lived alone, and on many days her only personal interaction occurred here, on Facebook. Mixed into her morning news feed were photos and updates from some of her 300 friends, but most items came directly from political groups Chapian had chosen to follow: “Free Speech Patriots,” “Taking Back America,” “Ban Islam,” “Trump 2020” and “Rebel Life.” Each political page published several posts each day directly into Chapian’s feed, many of which claimed to be “BREAKING NEWS.”

On her computer the attack against America was urgent and unrelenting. Liberals were restricting free speech. Immigrants were storming the border and casting illegal votes. Politicians were scheming to take away everyone’s guns. “The second you stop paying attention, there’s another travesty underway in this country,” Chapian once wrote, in her own Facebook post, so she had decided to always pay attention, sometimes scrolling and sharing for hours at a time.

For years she had watched network TV news, but increasingly Chapian wondered about the widening gap between what she read online and what she heard on the networks. “What else aren’t they telling us?” she wrote once, on Facebook, and if she believed the mainstream media was becoming insufficient or biased, it was her responsibility to seek out alternatives. She signed up for a dozen conservative newsletters and began to watch Alex Jones on Infowars. One far right Facebook group eventually led her to the next with targeted advertising, and soon Chapian was following more than 2,500 conservative pages, an ideological echo chamber that often trafficked in skepticism. Climate change was a hoax. The mainstream media was censored or scripted. Political Washington was under control of a “deep state.”

Chapian didn’t believe everything she read online, but she was also distrustful of mainstream fact-checkers and reported news. It sometimes felt to her like real facts had become indiscernible--that the truth was often somewhere in between. What she trusted most was her own ability to think critically and discern the truth, and increasingly her instincts aligned with the online community where she spent most of her time. She felt as if she was being let in on a series of dark revelations about the United States, and it was her responsibility to see and to share them.

Now another post arrived in her news feed, from a page called America’s Last Line of Defense, which Chapian had been following for more than a year. It showed a picture of Trump standing at a White House ceremony. Circled in the background were two women, one black and one white.

“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” the post read. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem.”

Chapian looked at the photo and nothing about it surprised her. Of course Trump had invited Clinton and Obama to the White House in a generous act of patriotism. Of course the Democrats--or “Demonrats,” as Chapian sometimes called them--had acted badly and disrespected America. It was the exact same narrative she saw playing out on her screen hundreds of times each day.

Blair had invented thousands of stories in the past two years, always trafficking in the same stereotypes to fool the same people, but he never tired of watching a post take off: Eight shares in the first minute, 160 within 15 minutes, more than 1,000 by the end of the hour.

“Aaaaand, we’re viral,” he wrote, in a message to his liberal supporters on his private Facebook page. “It’s getting to the point where I can no longer control the absolute absurdity of the things I post. No matter how ridiculous, how obviously fake, or how many times you tell the same taters ... they will still click that ‘like’ and hit that share button.”

By the standards of America’s Last Line of Defense, the item about Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton was only a moderate success. It included no advertisements, so it wouldn’t earn Blair any money. It wasn’t even the most popular of the 11 items he’d published that day. But, just an hour earlier, Blair had come up with an idea at his computer in Maine, and now hundreds or maybe thousands of people across the country believed Obama and Clinton had flipped off the president.

Blair had fooled them. Now came his favorite part, the gotcha, when he could let his victims in on the joke.

“OK, taters. Here’s your reality check,” he wrote on America’s Last Line of Defense, placing his comment prominently alongside the original post. “That is Omarosa and Hope Hicks, not Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton.”

Beyond the money he earned, this was what Blair had conceived of as the purpose for his website: to engage directly with people who spread false or extremist stories and prove those stories were wrong. Maybe, after people had been publicly embarrassed, they would think more critically about what they shared online. Maybe they would begin to question the root of some of their ideas.

Blair didn’t have time to personally confront each of the several hundred thousand conservatives who followed his Facebook page, so he’d built a community of more than 100 liberals to police the page with him. Together they patrolled the comments, venting their own political anger, shaming conservatives who had been fooled, taunting them, baiting them into making racist comments that could then be reported to Facebook. Blair said he and his followers had gotten hundreds of people banned from Facebook and several others fired or demoted in their jobs for offensive behavior online. He had also forced Facebook to shut down 22 fake news sites for plagiarizing his content, many of which were Macedonian sites that reran his stories without labeling them as satire.

What Blair wasn’t sure he had ever done was change a single person’s mind. The people he fooled often came back to the page, and he continued to feed them the kind of viral content that boosted his readership and his bank account.

It was not consent, it was concealment 

Facebook’s response to the clutch of users who are suddenly woke — triggered to delve into their settings by the Facebook data misuse scandal and #DeleteFacebook backlash — to the fact the social behemoth is, quietly and continuously, harvesting sensitive personal data about them and their friends tells you everything you need to know about the rotten state of tech industry ad-supported business models.

Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

“People have to expressly agree to use this feature,” the company wrote in a defensively worded blog post at the weekend, defending how it tracks some users’ SMS and phone call metadata — a post it had the impressive brass neck to self-describe as a “fact check”.

“Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android . This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook.”

So, tl;dr, if you’re shocked to see what Facebook knows about you, well, that’s your own dumb fault because you gave Facebook permission to harvest all that personal data.

Not just Facebook either, of course. A fair few Android users appear to be having a similarly rude awakening about how Google’s mobile platform (and apps) slurp location data pervasively — at least unless the user is very, very careful to lock everything down.

But the difficulty of A) knowing exactly what data is being collected for what purposes and B) finding the cunning concealed/intentionally obfuscated master setting which will nix all the tracking is by design, of course.

Privacy hostile design.

No accident then that Facebook has just given its settings pages a haircut — as it scrambles to rein in user outrage over the still snowballing Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal — consolidating user privacy controls onto one screen instead of the full TWENTY they had been scattered across before.

ehem

Insert your ‘stable door being bolted’ GIF of choice right here.

Another example of Facebook’s privacy hostile design: As my TC colleague Romain Dillet pointed out last week, the company deploys misleading wording during the Messenger onboarding process which is very clearly intended to push users towards clicking on a big blue “turn on” (data-harvesting) button — inviting users to invite the metaphorical Facebook vampire over the threshold so it can perpetually suck data.

Facebook does this by implying that if they don’t bare their neck and “turn on” the continuous contacts uploading they somehow won’t be able to message any of their friends…

An image included with Facebook’s statement.

That’s complete nonsense of course. But opportunistic emotional blackmail is something Facebook knows a bit about — having been previously caught experimenting on users without their consent to see if it could affect their mood.

Add to that, the company has scattered its social plugins and tracking pixels all around the World Wide Web, enabling it to expand its network of surveillance signals — again, without it being entirely obvious to Internet users that Facebook is watching and recording what they are doing and liking outside its walled garden.

According to pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo Facebook’s trackers are on around a quarter of the top million websites. While Google’s are on a full ~three-quarters.

So you don’t even have to be a user to be pulled into this surveillance dragnet.

In its tone-deaf blog post trying to defang user concerns about its SMS/call metadata tracking, Facebook doesn’t go into any meaningful detail about exactly why it wants this granular information — merely writing vaguely that: “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with.”

It’s certainly not wrong that other apps and services have also been sucking up your address book.

But that doesn’t make the fact Facebook has been tracking who you’re calling and messaging — how often/for how long — any less true or horrible.

This surveillance is controversial not because Facebook gained permission to data mine your phone book and activity — which, technically speaking, it will have done, via one of the myriad socially engineered, fuzzily worded permission pop-ups starring cutesy looking cartoon characters.

But rather because the consent was not informed.

Or to put it more plainly, Facebookers had no idea what they were agreeing to let the company do.

Which is why people are so horrified now to find what the company has been routinely logging — and potentially handing over to third parties on its ad platform.

Phone calls to your ex? Of course Facebook can see them. Texts to the number of a health clinic you entered into your phonebook? Sure. How many times you phoned a law firm? Absolutely. And so on and on it goes.

This is the rude awakening that no number of defensive ‘fact checks’ from Facebook — nor indeed defensive tweet storms from current CSO Alex Stamos — will be able to smooth away.

“There are long-standing issues with organisations of all kinds, across multiple sectors, misapplying, or misunderstanding, the provisions in data protection law around data subject consent,” says data protection expert Jon Baines, an advisor at UK law firm Mishcon de Reya LLP and also chair of NADPO, when we asked what the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal says about how broken the current system of online consent is.

“The current European Data Protection Directive (under which [the UK] Data Protection Act sits) says that consent means any freely given specific and informed indication of their wishes by which a data subject signifies agreement to their personal data being processed. In a situation under which a data subject legitimately later claims that they were unaware what was happening with their data, it is difficult to see how it can reasonably be said that they had “consented” to the use.”

Ironically, given recent suggestions by defunct Facebook rival Path’s founder of a latent reboot to cater to the #DeleteFacebook crowd — Path actually found itself in an uncomfortable privacy hotseat all the way back in 2012, when it was discovered to have been uploading users’ address book information without asking for permission to do so.

Having been caught with its fingers in the proverbial cookie jar, Path apologized and deleted the data.

The irony is that while Path suffered a moment of outrage, Facebook is only facing a major privacy backlash now — after it’s spent so many years calmly sucking up people’s contacts data, also without them being aware because Facebook nudged them to think they needed to tap that big blue ‘turn on’ button.

Exploiting users’ trust — and using a technicality to unhook people’s privacy — is proving pretty costly for Facebook right now though.

And the risks of attempting to hoodwink consent out of your users are about to step up sharply too, at least in Europe.

Baines points out that the EU’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, tightens the existing privacy standard — adding the words “clear affirmative act” and “unambiguous” to consent requirements.

More importantly, he notes it introduces “more stringent requirements, and certain restrictions, which are not, or are not explicit, in current law, such as the requirement to be able to demonstrate that a data subject has given (valid) consent” (emphasis his).

“Consent must also now be separable from other written agreements, and in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language. If these requirements are enforced by data protection supervisory authorities and the courts, then we could well see a significant shift in habits and practices,” he adds.

The GDPR framework is also backed up by a new regime of major penalties for data protection violations which can scale up to 4% of a company’s global turnover.

And the risk of fines so large will be much harder for companies to ignore — and thus playing fast and loose with data, and moving fast and breaking things (as Facebook used to say), doesn’t sound so smart anymore.

As I wrote back in 2015, the online privacy lie is unraveling.

It’s taken a little longer than I’d hoped, for sure. But here we are in 2018 — and it’s not just the #MeToo movement that’s turned consent into a buzzword.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://ift.tt/2pJDNcq via IFTTT

It was not consent, it was concealment 

Facebook’s response to the clutch of users who are suddenly woke — triggered to delve into their settings by the Facebook data misuse scandal and #DeleteFacebook backlash — to the fact the social behemoth is, quietly and continuously, harvesting sensitive personal data about them and their friends tells you everything you need to know about the rotten state of tech industry ad-supported business models.

Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

“People have to expressly agree to use this feature,” the company wrote in a defensively worded blog post at the weekend, defending how it tracks some users’ SMS and phone call metadata — a post it had the impressive brass neck to self-describe as a “fact check”.

“Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android . This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook.”

So, tl;dr, if you’re shocked to see what Facebook knows about you, well, that’s your own dumb fault because you gave Facebook permission to harvest all that personal data.

Not just Facebook either, of course. A fair few Android users appear to be having a similarly rude awakening about how Google’s mobile platform (and apps) slurp location data pervasively — at least unless the user is very, very careful to lock everything down.

But the difficulty of A) knowing exactly what data is being collected for what purposes and B) finding the cunning concealed/intentionally obfuscated master setting which will nix all the tracking is by design, of course.

Privacy hostile design.

No accident then that Facebook has just given its settings pages a haircut — as it scrambles to rein in user outrage over the still snowballing Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal — consolidating user privacy controls onto one screen instead of the full TWENTY they had been scattered across before.

ehem

Insert your ‘stable door being bolted’ GIF of choice right here.

Another example of Facebook’s privacy hostile design: As my TC colleague Romain Dillet pointed out last week, the company deploys misleading wording during the Messenger onboarding process which is very clearly intended to push users towards clicking on a big blue “turn on” (data-harvesting) button — inviting users to invite the metaphorical Facebook vampire over the threshold so it can perpetually suck data.

Facebook does this by implying that if they don’t bare their neck and “turn on” the continuous contacts uploading they somehow won’t be able to message any of their friends…

An image included with Facebook’s statement.

That’s complete nonsense of course. But opportunistic emotional blackmail is something Facebook knows a bit about — having been previously caught experimenting on users without their consent to see if it could affect their mood.

Add to that, the company has scattered its social plugins and tracking pixels all around the World Wide Web, enabling it to expand its network of surveillance signals — again, without it being entirely obvious to Internet users that Facebook is watching and recording what they are doing and liking outside its walled garden.

According to pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo Facebook’s trackers are on around a quarter of the top million websites. While Google’s are on a full ~three-quarters.

So you don’t even have to be a user to be pulled into this surveillance dragnet.

In its tone-deaf blog post trying to defang user concerns about its SMS/call metadata tracking, Facebook doesn’t go into any meaningful detail about exactly why it wants this granular information — merely writing vaguely that: “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with.”

It’s certainly not wrong that other apps and services have also been sucking up your address book.

But that doesn’t make the fact Facebook has been tracking who you’re calling and messaging — how often/for how long — any less true or horrible.

This surveillance is controversial not because Facebook gained permission to data mine your phone book and activity — which, technically speaking, it will have done, via one of the myriad socially engineered, fuzzily worded permission pop-ups starring cutesy looking cartoon characters.

But rather because the consent was not informed.

Or to put it more plainly, Facebookers had no idea what they were agreeing to let the company do.

Which is why people are so horrified now to find what the company has been routinely logging — and potentially handing over to third parties on its ad platform.

Phone calls to your ex? Of course Facebook can see them. Texts to the number of a health clinic you entered into your phonebook? Sure. How many times you phoned a law firm? Absolutely. And so on and on it goes.

This is the rude awakening that no number of defensive ‘fact checks’ from Facebook — nor indeed defensive tweet storms from current CSO Alex Stamos — will be able to smooth away.

“There are long-standing issues with organisations of all kinds, across multiple sectors, misapplying, or misunderstanding, the provisions in data protection law around data subject consent,” says data protection expert Jon Baines, an advisor at UK law firm Mishcon de Reya LLP and also chair of NADPO, when we asked what the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal says about how broken the current system of online consent is.

“The current European Data Protection Directive (under which [the UK] Data Protection Act sits) says that consent means any freely given specific and informed indication of their wishes by which a data subject signifies agreement to their personal data being processed. In a situation under which a data subject legitimately later claims that they were unaware what was happening with their data, it is difficult to see how it can reasonably be said that they had “consented” to the use.”

Ironically, given recent suggestions by defunct Facebook rival Path’s founder of a latent reboot to cater to the #DeleteFacebook crowd — Path actually found itself in an uncomfortable privacy hotseat all the way back in 2012, when it was discovered to have been uploading users’ address book information without asking for permission to do so.

Having been caught with its fingers in the proverbial cookie jar, Path apologized and deleted the data.

The irony is that while Path suffered a moment of outrage, Facebook is only facing a major privacy backlash now — after it’s spent so many years calmly sucking up people’s contacts data, also without them being aware because Facebook nudged them to think they needed to tap that big blue ‘turn on’ button.

Exploiting users’ trust — and using a technicality to unhook people’s privacy — is proving pretty costly for Facebook right now though.

And the risks of attempting to hoodwink consent out of your users are about to step up sharply too, at least in Europe.

Baines points out that the EU’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, tightens the existing privacy standard — adding the words “clear affirmative act” and “unambiguous” to consent requirements.

More importantly, he notes it introduces “more stringent requirements, and certain restrictions, which are not, or are not explicit, in current law, such as the requirement to be able to demonstrate that a data subject has given (valid) consent” (emphasis his).

“Consent must also now be separable from other written agreements, and in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language. If these requirements are enforced by data protection supervisory authorities and the courts, then we could well see a significant shift in habits and practices,” he adds.

The GDPR framework is also backed up by a new regime of major penalties for data protection violations which can scale up to 4% of a company’s global turnover.

And the risk of fines so large will be much harder for companies to ignore — and thus playing fast and loose with data, and moving fast and breaking things (as Facebook used to say), doesn’t sound so smart anymore.

As I wrote back in 2015, the online privacy lie is unraveling.

It’s taken a little longer than I’d hoped, for sure. But here we are in 2018 — and it’s not just the #MeToo movement that’s turned consent into a buzzword.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2pJDNcq via IFTTT

It was not consent, it was concealment 

It was not consent, it was concealment 

Facebook’s response to the clutch of users who are suddenly woke — triggered to delve into their settings by the Facebook data misuse scandal and #DeleteFacebook backlash — to the fact the social behemoth is, quietly and continuously, harvesting sensitive personal data about them and their friends tells you everything you need to know about the rotten state of tech industry ad-supported business models.

Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

“People have to expressly agree to use this feature,” the company wrote in a defensively worded blog post at the weekend, defending how it tracks some users’ SMS and phone call metadata — a post it had the impressive brass neck to self-describe as a “fact check”.

“Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook.”

So, tl;dr, if you’re shocked to see what Facebook knows about you, well, that’s your own dumb fault because you gave Facebook permission to harvest all that personal data.

Not just Facebook either, of course. A fair few Android users appear to be having a similarly rude awakening about how Google’s mobile platform (and apps) slurp location data pervasively — at least unless the user is very, very careful to lock everything down.

But the difficulty of A) knowing exactly what data is being collected for what purposes and B) finding the cunning concealed/intentionally obfuscated master setting which will nix all the tracking is by design, of course.

Privacy hostile design.

No accident then that Facebook has just given its settings pages a haircut — as it scrambles to rein in user outrage over the still snowballing Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal — consolidating user privacy controls onto one screen instead of the full TWENTY they had been scattered across before.

ehem

Insert your ‘stable door being bolted’ GIF of choice right here.

Another example of Facebook’s privacy hostile design: As my TC colleague Romain Dillet pointed out last week, the company deploys misleading wording during the Messenger onboarding process which is very clearly intended to push users towards clicking on a big blue “turn on” (data-harvesting) button — inviting users to invite the metaphorical Facebook vampire over the threshold so it can perpetually suck data.

Facebook does this by implying that if they don’t bare their neck and “turn on” the continuous contacts uploading they somehow won’t be able to message any of their friends…

An image included with Facebook’s statement.

That’s complete nonsense of course. But opportunistic emotional blackmail is something Facebook knows a bit about — having been previously caught experimenting on users without their consent to see if it could affect their mood.

Add to that, the company has scattered its social plugins and tracking pixels all around the World Wide Web, enabling it to expand its network of surveillance signals — again, without it being entirely obvious to Internet users that Facebook is watching and recording what they are doing and liking outside its walled garden.

According to pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo Facebook’s trackers are on around a quarter of the top million websites. While Google’s are on a full ~three-quarters.

So you don’t even have to be a user to be pulled into this surveillance dragnet.

In its tone-deaf blog post trying to defang user concerns about its SMS/call metadata tracking, Facebook doesn’t go into any meaningful detail about exactly why it wants this granular information — merely writing vaguely that: “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with.”

It’s certainly not wrong that other apps and services have also been sucking up your address book.

But that doesn’t make the fact Facebook has been tracking who you’re calling and messaging — how often/for how long — any less true or horrible.

This surveillance is controversial not because Facebook gained permission to data mine your phone book and activity — which, technically speaking, it will have done, via one of the myriad socially engineered, fuzzily worded permission pop-ups starring cutesy looking cartoon characters.

But rather because the consent was not informed.

Or to put it more plainly, Facebookers had no idea what they were agreeing to let the company do.

Which is why people are so horrified now to find what the company has been routinely logging — and potentially handing over to third parties on its ad platform.

Phone calls to your ex? Of course Facebook can see them. Texts to the number of a health clinic you entered into your phonebook? Sure. How many times you phoned a law firm? Absolutely. And so on and on it goes.

This is the rude awakening that no number of defensive ‘fact checks’ from Facebook — nor indeed defensive tweet storms from current CSO Alex Stamos — will be able to smooth away.

“There are long-standing issues with organisations of all kinds, across multiple sectors, misapplying, or misunderstanding, the provisions in data protection law around data subject consent,” says data protection expert Jon Baines, an advisor at UK law firm Mishcon de Reya LLP, and also chair of NADPO, when we asked him what the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal says about how broken the current system of online consent is.

“The current European Data Protection Directive (under which [the UK] Data Protection Act sits) says that consent means any freely given specific and informed indication of their wishes by which a data subject signifies agreement to their personal data being processed. In a situation under which a data subject legitimately later claims that they were unaware what was happening with their data, it is difficult to see how it can reasonably be said that they had “consented” to the use.”

Ironically, given recent suggestions by defunct Facebook rival Path’s founder of a latent reboot to cater to the #DeleteFacebook crowd — Path actually found itself in an uncomfortable privacy hotseat all the way back in 2012, when it was discovered to have been uploading users’ address book information without asking for permission to do so.

Having been caught with its fingers in the proverbial cookie jar, Path apologized and deleted the data.

The irony is that while Path suffered a moment of outrage, Facebook is only facing a major privacy backlash now — after it’s spent so many years calmly sucking up people’s contacts data, also without them being aware because Facebook nudged them to think they needed to tap that big blue ‘turn on’ button.

Exploiting users’ trust — and using a technicality to unhook people’s privacy — is proving pretty costly for Facebook right now though.

The risks of attempt to hoodwink consent are about to step up sharply too — at least in Europe.

Baines points out that the updated privacy framework, GDPR, tightens the existing privacy standard — adding the words “clear affirmative act” and “unambiguous” to consent requirements.

More importantly, he notes it introduces “more stringent requirements, and certain restrictions, which are not, or are not explicit, in current law, such as the requirement to be able to demonstrate that a data subject has given (valid) consent” (emphasis his).

“Consent must also now be separable from other written agreements, and in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language. If these requirements are enforced by data protection supervisory authorities and the courts, then we could well see a significant shift in habits and practices,” adds Baines.

The GDPR framework is also backed up by a new regime of major penalties for data protection violations which can scale up to 4% of a company’s global turnover.

And the risk of fines so large will be much harder for companies to ignore — and thus playing fast and loose with data, and moving fast and breaking things, doesn’t sound so smart anymore.

As I wrote back in 2015, the online privacy lie is unraveling.

It’s taken a little longer than I’d hoped, for sure. But here we are in 2018 — and it’s not just the #MeToo movement that’s turned consent into a buzzword.