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irisintheafterglow · 6 months

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if he's a ghost, then I can be a phantom

summary: the strawhats are summoned back to baratie so sanji can cook for a high-class diner. they can't figure out why zoro is so nervous. (opla!zoro x you)

wc: 2k

cw/tags: swearing, mentions of food and eating, established relationship, pet names (sweetheart, doll, lover, pretty), spoilers if you squint, sanji being himself and zoro having absolutely none of it

note: this was requested by an anon a few weeks ago and i finally got around to writing it!! every time i write for zoro, i have a new favorite fic i've made because he's just so fun to write for. hope you enjoy!!

likes, reblogs, and replies are always appreciated <3

“You know, they’re a lot hotter in person.”

“Shut your mouth, waiter, or I’ll skewer it closed,” he mutters with palpable distaste. Another swig of rum burns down his throat and, for the first time that the crew can remember, Zoro seemed nervous. It wasn’t obvious, but they’d sailed long enough to know that he never stopped surveying a room for threats, no matter how familiar he was with it. Today, though, the only thing that took his attention was the rim of his glass and he was subtly avoiding the eyes of the crew’s target. “This is the dumbest idea you’ve had in a long time.”

“Thank you for your input, Zoro. I will, however, be belaying it,” his captain replies brightly, unfazed by the blank expression of his first mate. The uneasy faces of his crew only makes him beam more, giddily excited for the anticipated challenge. “C’mon, guys. We’ll be fine. They just need to see how awesome we are and they’ll totally give us a new sail!”

“Loud, loud, too loud,” Zoro warns in response to the increasing volume of Luffy’s voice. They were already causing enough of a scene, as is, and he damn sure didn’t want other guests looking in their direction. To make matters worse, the amount of alcohol in the table’s bottle was dwindling too quickly for comfort.

“Hey, if we’re lucky,” Usopp offers, “we might just get a whole ship. You know, maybe one that Captain Usopp can command as the second ship in the Straw Hat fleet.”

“You think we’ll get a whole fleet?”

“Hell yeah. Maybe, we can all captain our own ships–”

“Alright, let’s get our heads out of the clouds,” Nami cuts in. “We still need to figure out how we’re going to get over there, in the first place. And just for the record, I’m with Zoro on this one.”

“First time for everything,” he deadpans. She smartly elects to ignore his sarcasm and continues to argue why the plan is a bad idea. The call from Zeff came at an opportune time and during an unfortunate situation when the Merry sailed straight into a torrential thunderstorm that ripped the main sail clean down the middle. Despite their best efforts to patch it up, it was beyond repair; with the Marines constantly on their tail, having a working sail was a matter of survival. Zeff’s reluctant summons for Sanji to cook for a special guest provided a means to buy a new sail and have a little extra spending money. But, in his wildest dreams, Zoro could not have predicted that the special guest was you. The smug look on the chef’s face snaps him out of his thoughts. “Shouldn’t you be in the kitchen, waiter?”

“Shouldn’t you be downing the rest of this bottle, drunk?”

“I’ll smash this damn bottle on your head, I swear–”

“No, no. Zoro has a point,” Luffy agrees. Sanji gives him an odd look and he quickly realizes what his statement insinuated. “Not about smashing the bottle on your head. We need you to bring them your food so then I can go over and talk with them.”

“You don’t think I can charm them on my own?”

“Don’t look so aghast, blondie,” Zoro answers and receives a knife-sharp glare in response. “This is not someone who will entertain your theatrics.”

“How would you know anything about them, hmm? I believe you’re a little too dead inside for their liking,” Sanji baits and Zoro’s on the verge of biting before Nami steps in again.

“Sanji, get in the kitchen. Let’s just get the money and get out of here.” Zoro silently thanks her in his head for effectively ridding the chef of the table for the time being. His gratitude turns into a grimace when she turns to him expectantly. “You’re gonna hate me for asking–”

“Then don’t ask,” he finishes. She doesn’t relent.

“How do you know them? It seems like you’re nervous about being here, but we’ve never met them before as a crew.” Hitting the damn nail on the head. “So, you must’ve met them when you were still hunting down pirates. Am I right?” He grumbles an unreadable response, but the slightly pink shade of his face tells the table everything they need to know. “You’re terrible at covering up secrets.”

“I don’t remember asking.”

“Ah, you’ve got him on the run, now. He’s deflecting,” Usopp chuckles, immediately shutting up when Zoro shoots him a deadly scowl. He hated that all of them were right and would never admit it to save his life. After all this time, seeing you still made his heart rate skyrocket and cause his hands to clam up with boyish nervousness. You were just as beautiful as the last time he saw you, instances that were too few and far between for his own liking. Your father would have a fit if he saw you in such an unregulated environment as Baratie, but he knew that you were safe. As long as you breathed the same oxygen, he vowed no harm would come to you.

“I met them when I first started hunting,” he admits and the words felt wrong on his tongue. Every nerve in his body was telling him to stop revealing his relationship to you. It didn’t matter if he’d almost died surrounded by his crew; his connection to you was sacred and something he was going to take to his grave. It was mostly for your safety, the late-night sneaking out and stolen displays of affection. In another life, he wouldn’t have to hide you from other hunters that wanted to see him fall. “Their father is a captain in the Marines. When I first met them, they were training with Mihawk. Their father wanted them to be the most feared Marine in the seas.” The jaws of his friends fell to the table and he knew how wild it sounded, a legacy Marine trained by a pirate lord. “But, Mihawk taught them more tricks than just swordfighting and their father fired him on the spot.”

“He taught them sympathy for pirates,” Nami concludes and he nods. “Why are you so shifty around them?” He shrugs half-heartedly and tries to make it look like his face wasn’t on fire.

“Just haven’t seen them in a while,” he states, zeroing in on the blonde asshole waltzing to you with a plate. Your surrounding guards stiffen, hands flying to the weapons at their belts. You, however, roll your eyes and tell them to stand down. He knew you hated going out with security because they were always watching, watching, watching. “Eyes up. The waiter’s making a move.”

A strange sense of nausea washes over him as he watches you smile politely at Sanji, laughing softly at his jokes and kindly nodding as he explains the dish to you. You trust them, Zoro keeps telling himself. That waiter doesn’t stand a fucking chance. All the reassurances don’t stop his gut from churning when Sanji does his signature lean-down-and-whisper-suggestively into your ear. To his surprise, however, you don’t immediately meet the chef’s eyes. Your attention flicks to Zoro, instead, with a look that he knows all too well.

Please get me out of this.

Despite the protests of the table, he’s standing in an instant and walking with his hands on his swords like your guards didn’t even exist. His sight becomes tunnel-vision on nothing but you and he bypasses your guards with ease. Your shoulders relax when he stations himself protectively behind you, much to the confusion of the chef in front of you. As subtle as he can, he rests his hand on the back of your chair, inching closer until he’s just barely touching your shoulder. It’s small, but speaks wonders for his presence.

“Zoro,” you murmur without looking up, your fingertips brushing against his knuckles. Your touch on his skin after so much time away feels electric.

“Hey, sweetheart.” Sanji stiffens at the term of endearment so easily leaving Zoro’s mouth and you can sense the boost it does for his ego. “Whatcha got there?”

“My new friend was just telling me about the dish he made. He said he crafted it especially for me, with his own hands,” you inform him with a sly sparkle in your eye. His jaw clenches unconsciously. You knew exactly what was going on in Zoro’s mind and he knew it, too. “Apparently, he can work wonders with his hands,” you remark casually and you can hear the chair crack under the force of the swordsman’s hand gripping it. To your delight, Sanji’s face has also taken on a slightly darker shade of red at how crassly you echo his suggestion. And in front of his rival, no less.

“Was he, now?” His tone is lethal and it sends goosebumps up your arms. “Well, it best be time for him to get back in the kitchen, no?”

“Mmm, but he said he had a proposal for me–”

“I had one for you too, though I did ask you in a much finer establishment than this one.” You can’t help the smirk that spreads on your face and you have to look to the side to keep from laughing aloud. Zoro’s jealousy was rearing a very indignant head; you’d be lying if you said you didn’t find it a little hot. “Got that stone on your left hand to prove it.” Sanji’s eyes darted to the band wrapped around your finger, a ring that looked suspiciously like the one hanging from a chain around Zoro’s neck. “Give us some time alone, yeah?” His question becomes rhetorical as he pulls out a chair next to you and tugs your seat closer until you can cross your leg across his. His palm rests possessively over your thigh and the chef gapes for a few moments more before turning back to the kitchen.

“That goes for all of you, please,” you order your guards without looking at them, absentmindedly tracing Zoro’s jawline with the back of your pointer finger. “Take my bag and buy however many drinks you want. I’m safe,” you state with absolute certainty. Once they’re gone, all you see, feel, and know is him.

“Hi,” he breathes.

“Hi,” you smile just as softly. “What’re you doing in a place like this?”

“I can ask you the same question, pretty.” His eyes shine with nothing but adoration. You forgot just how much you missed him.

“Took a detour to prolong my time at sea. I didn’t want to go home just yet.”

“Your old man’s being an ass again?”

“You know how he is,” you reply. “Why are you here?”

“Believe it or not, that blonde shithead is my crewmate. We’re here to get some extra Berry for a new sail.”

“Sail, hmm? I always knew you had a little pirate in you,” you tease and he sticks his tongue out immaturely. “Heard you fought my esteemed mentor. I don’t know what the hell you were thinking.”

“You don’t think I can beat him?”

“I don’t think I can fathom what will happen if you don’t,” you say quietly, swallowing a lump in your throat. “Don’t do any dumb shit, okay?”

“You’re acting as if I’m already leaving you again.”

“Aren’t you?” Your smile is sad and it makes his chest ache. When he beat Mihawk and killed your bastard father, he was going to give you the life that you deserved.

“Not yet,” he promises. “I don’t wanna go yet.”

“I don’t want you to go, either. How much do you need for that sail?” He gives you a number and you don’t even blink. You just nod and reach into your coin purse, fishing around and deciding to just give him the entire pouch. “Will that cover it?”

“Doll–”

“It’s a yes or no question, husband,” you say with lighthearted sternness. He shakes his head in exasperation but can’t hide the grin painting his features.

“Yes, lover. It’s more than enough.” He presses a kiss to your forehead and you hum in contentment. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

“Of course. D’you mind introducing me to the rest of your crew besides the flirty waiter?”

if you enjoy my writing and would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee on my ko-fi! you can also check out my full masterlist here :)

#zoro x you #zoro x reader #zoro x y/n #roronoa zoro x you #roronoa zoro x y/n #one piece x you #one piece x reader #opla x you #opla x reader #opla x y/n #zoro fluff #opla fluff #ask iris!#one piece x y/n

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punisheddonjuan · 3 months

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How I ditched streaming services and learned to love Linux: A step-by-step guide to building your very own personal media streaming server (V2.0: REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION)

This is a revised, corrected and expanded version of my tutorial on setting up a personal media server that previously appeared on my old blog (donjuan-auxenfers). I expect that that post is still making the rounds (hopefully with my addendum on modifying group share permissions in Ubuntu to circumvent 0x8007003B "Unexpected Network Error" messages in Windows when transferring files) but I have no way of checking. Anyway this new revised version of the tutorial corrects one or two small errors I discovered when rereading what I wrote, adds links to all products mentioned and is just more polished generally. I also expanded it a bit, pointing more adventurous users toward programs such as Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr and Overseerr which can be used for automating user requests and media collection.

So then, what is this tutorial? This is a tutorial on building and setting up your own personal media server running Ubuntu and using Plex (or Jellyfin) to not only manage your media but to stream your media to your devices both locally at home, and remotely anywhere in the world where you have an internet connection. It’s a tutorial on how by building a personal media server and stuffing it full of films, television and music that you acquired through indiscriminate and voracious media piracy ripping your own physical media to disk, you’ll be free to completely ditch paid streaming services altogether. No more will you have to pay for Disney+, Netflix, HBOMAX, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Peacock, CBS All Access, Paramount+ Crave or any other streaming service that is not named Criterion Channel (which is actually good) to watch your favourite films and television shows, instead you’ll have your own custom service that will only feature things you want to see, and where you have control over your own files and how they’re delivered to you. And for music fans, Jellyfin and Plex both support music collection streaming so you can even ditch the music streaming services. Goodbye Spotify, Youtube Music, Tidal and Apple Music, welcome back unreasonably large MP3 collections (or FLAC collections).

On the hardware front, I’m going to offer a few options catered towards various budgets and media library sizes. The cost of getting a media server going using this guide will run you anywhere from $450 CDN/$325 USD at the entry level to $1500 CDN/$1100 USD at the high end. My own server cost closer to the higher figure, with much of that cost being hard drives. If that seems excessive maybe you’ve got a roommate, a friend, or a family member who would be willing to chip in a few bucks towards your little project if they get a share of the bounty. This is how my server was funded. It might also be worth thinking about the cost over time, how much you spend yearly on subscriptions vs. a one time cost of setting a server. Then there's just the joy of being able to shout a "fuck you" at all those show cancelling, movie hating, hedge fund vampire CEOs who run the studios by denying them your money. Drive a stake through David Zaslav's heart.

On the software side I will walk you through, step-by-step, in installing Ubuntu as your server's OS, configuring your storage in a RAIDz array with ZFS, sharing your zpool to Windows with Samba, running a remote connection into your server from your Windows PC, and getting started with Plex/Jellyfin Media Server. Every terminal command you will need to input will be provided, and I will even share with you a custom #bash script that will make the used vs. available drive space on your server display correctly in Windows.

If you have a different preferred flavour of Linux (Arch, Manjaro, Redhat, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE, CentOS, or Slackware etc. et. al.) and are aching to tell me off for being basic using Ubuntu, this tutorial is not for you. The sort of person with a preferred Linux distro is the sort of person who can do this sort of thing in their sleep. Also I don't care. This tutorial is intended for the average home computer user. This is also why we’re not using a more exotic home server solution like running everything through Docker Containers and managing it through a dashboard like Homarr or Heimdall. While such solutions are fantastic and can be very easy to maintain once you have it all set up, wrapping your brain around Docker is a whole thing in and of itself. If you do follow this tutorial and enjoyed putting everything together, then I would encourage you to maybe go back in a year’s time, do your research and and redo everything so it’s set up with Docker Containers.

This is also a tutorial aimed at Windows users. Although I was a daily user of OS X for many years (roughly 2008-2023) and I've dabbled quite a bit with different Linux distributions (primarily Ubuntu and Manjaro), my primary OS these days is Windows 11. Many things in this tutorial will still be applicable to Mac users but others (e.g. setting up shares) you will have to look up yourself. I doubt it would be difficult to do so.

Nothing in this tutorial will require feats of computing expertise from you. All you will need is a basic level of computer literacy (e.g. an understanding how directories work, being comfortable in settings menus) and a willingness to learn a thing or two. While this guide may look overwhelming at a glance, this is only because I want to be as thorough as possible so that you understand exactly what it is you're doing and you're not just blindly following steps. If you half-way know what you’re doing, you’ll be fine if you ever need to troubleshoot.

Honestly, once you have all the hardware ready it really shouldn't take you more than an afternoon to get everything up and running.

(This tutorial is just shy of seven thousand words long so the rest is under the cut.)

Step One: Choosing Your Hardware

Linux is a light weight operating system, there's almost no bloat and there are recent distributions out there right now that will run perfectly fine on a fourteen year old i3 with 4GB of RAM. Running Plex/Jellyfin media server isn’t very resource intensive either in 90% of use cases. We don’t an expensive or powerful system. So there are several options available to you: use an old computer you already have sitting around but aren't using, buy a used workstation from eBay, or what I believe to be the best option, order an N100 Mini-PC from AliExpress or Amazon.

Note: If you already have an old PC sitting around that you’ve decided to use, fantastic, move on to the next step.

When weighing your options, do keep a few things in mind: the number of people you expect to be streaming simultaneously at any one time, the resolution and bitrate of your media library (4k video takes a lot more processing power than 1080p) and most importantly, how many of those clients are going to be transcoding at any one time. Transcoding is what happens when the playback device does not natively support direct playback of the source file. This can be for a number of reasons, such as the playback device's native resolution, or because the source file was encoded in a video codec unsupported by the playback device.

Ideally we want any transcoding to be performed by hardware, which means we should be looking for an Intel processor with Quick Sync. Quick Sync is a dedicated core on the CPU die designed specifically for video encoding and decoding. This makes for highly efficient transcoding both in terms of processing overhead and power draw. Without these Quick Sync cores, transcoding must be brute forced through software which takes up much more of a CPU’s processing power and takes much more energy. But not all Quick Sync cores are created equal, and you need to keep this in mind if you've decided either to use an old computer or to shop on eBay for a used workstation.

Any Intel processor after second generation Core (Sandy Bridge circa 2011) has Quick Sync cores. It's not until 6th gen (Skylake), however, that those cores support H.265 HEVC. Intel’s 10th gen (Comet Lake) processors support 10bit HEVC and HDR tone mapping. And the recent 12th gen (Alder Lake) processors give you AV1 decoding. As an example, while an 8th gen (Kaby Lake) i5-8500 will be able to transcode a file encoded with H.265 through hardware, it will fall back to software transcoding when given a 10bit H.265 file. So if you’ve decided to use that old PC or to look on eBay for an old Dell Optiplex keep this in mind.

Note 1: The price of old workstations varies wildly and fluctuates frequently. If you get lucky and go looking shortly after a workplace has liquidated a large number of their workstations you can find deals for as low as $100 for a barebones system, but generally an i5-8500 workstation with 16gb RAM will cost you somewhere in the area of $260 CDN/$200 USD.

Note 2: The AMD equivalent to Quick Sync is called Video Core Next, and while it's fine, it's not as efficient and not as mature a technology, only becoming available with first generation Ryzen and it only got decent with their newest CPUs, we want something cheap.

Alternatively you could completely forgo having to keep track of what generation of CPU is equipped with Quick Sync cores with support for which codecs, and just buy an N100 mini-PC. For around the same price or less than a good used workstation you can pick up a Mini-PC running an Intel N100 processor. The N100 is a four-core processor based on the 12th gen Alder Lake architecture and comes equipped with the latest revision of the Quick Sync. They offer astounding hardware transcoding capabilities for their size and power draw and otherwise perform equivalent to an i5-6500. A friend of mine uses an N100 machine as a dedicated retro emulation gaming system. These are also remarkably efficient chips, they sip power. In fact, the difference between running one of these and an old workstation could work out to hundreds of dollars a year in energy bills depending on where you live.

You can find these Mini-PCs all over Amazon or for a little cheaper over on AliExpress. They range in price from $170 CDN/$125 USD for a no name N100 with 8GB RAM to $280 CDN/$200 USD for a Beelink S12 Pro with 16GB RAM. The brand doesn't really matter, they're all coming from the same three factories in Shenzen, go for whichever one fits your budget or has the features you want. 8GB RAM should be enough, Linux is lightweight and Plex only calls for 2GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD is more than enough for what we need as a boot drive. 16GB RAM might result in a slightly snappier experience, especially with ZFS, and going for a bigger drive might allow you to get away with things like creating preview thumbnails for Plex, but it’s up to you and your budget.

The Mini-PC I wound up buying was a Firebat AK2 Plus with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. It looks like this:

Note: Be forewarned that if you decide to order a Mini-PC from AliExpress, note the power adapter it is shipping with. The one I bought came with an EU power adapter and I had to supply my own North American power supply. Thankfully this is a minor issue as a barrel plug 30W/12V/2.5A power adapters are plentiful and can be had for $10.

Step Two: Choosing Your Storage

Storage is the most important part of our build, and the most expensive. Thankfully it’s also easily upgrade-able down the line.

For people with a smaller media collection (4TB to 8TB), a limited budget, or who will only ever have two simultaneous streams running, I would say that the most economical course of action would be to simply buy a USB 3.0 8TB external HDD. Something like this Western Digital or this Seagate external drive. One of these will cost you somewhere around $200 CDN/$140 USD. Down the line you could add a second external drive or replace it with a multi-drive RAIDz set up as detailed below.

If a single external drive the path for you, move on to step three.

For people who have larger media libraries (12TB+), who have a lot of media in 4k, or care about data redundancy, the answer is a RAID array featuring multiple HDDs in an enclosure.

Note: If you are using an old PC you already have as your server and have the room for at least three 3.5" drives, and as many open SATA ports on your mother board you won't need an enclosure, just install the drives in your old case. If your old computer is a laptop or doesn’t have room for more internal drives, then I would suggest an enclosure.

The minimum number of drives needed to run a RAIDz array is three, and seeing as RAIDz is what we will be using, you should be looking for an enclosure with hree to five bays. I think that four disks makes for a good compromise for a home server. Regardless of whether you go for a three, four, or five bay enclosure, do be aware that in a RAIDz array the space equivalent of one of the drives will be dedicated to parity at a ratio expressed by the equation 1 − 1/n i.e. in a four bay enclosure equipped with four 12TB drives configured in RAIDz we would be left with a total of 36TB of usable space (48TB raw size). The reason for why we might sacrifice storage space in such a manner will be explained in the next section.

A four bay enclosure will cost somewhere in the area of $200 CDN/$140 USD. You don't need anything fancy, nothing with hardware RAID (RAIDz is done entirely in software) or even USB-C. An enclosure with USB 3.0 will perform just fine. Don’t worry about bottlenecks, a mechanical HDD will be limited by the speed of its mechanism long before before it will be limited by the speed of a USB connection. I've seen decent looking enclosures from TerraMaster, Yottamaster, Mediasonic and Sabrent.

When it comes to selecting the drives, as of this writing, the best value (dollar per gigabyte) are those in the range of 12TB to 20TB. I settled on 12TB drives myself. If 12TB to 20TB drives are out of your budget, go with what you can afford, or look into refurbished drives. I'm not sold on the idea of refurbished drives but some people swear by them.

When shopping for harddrives, look for drives that are specifically designed for NAS use. Drives designed for NAS use typically have better vibration dampening and are designed to be active 24/7, they will also often use CMR (conventional magnetic recording) rather than SMR (shingled magnetic recording) which nets them a sizable performance bump. Seagate Ironwolf and Toshiba NAS drives are both well regarded. I would avoid Western Digital Red drives at this time. WD Reds were a go to recommendation up until earlier this year when it was revealed that they feature firmware that will throw up false SMART warnings telling you to replace the drive at the three year mark when there might be nothing at all wrong with that drive, and when it will likely be good for another six, seven or more years.

Step Three: Installing Linux

For this step you will need a USB thumbdrive of at least 6GB in capacity, a way to make it into bootable media, and an .ISO of Ubuntu.

First download a copy of Ubuntu desktop (for best performance we could download the Server release, but for new Linux users I would recommend against using the server release as having a GUI can be very helpful, not many people are wholly comfortable doing everything through command line). 22.04.3 Jammy Jellyfish is the current Long Term Service release, this is the one to get.

Download the .ISO and then download and install balenaEtcher on your Windows PC, balenaEtcher is an easy to use program for creating bootable media, you simply insert your thumbdrive, select the .ISO you just downloaded, and it will create a bootable installation media for you.

Once you've made a bootable media and you've got your Mini-PC (or old PC/used workstation) in front of you, hook it in directly to your router with an ethernet cable, and plug in the HDD enclosure, a monitor, mouse and a keyboard. Now turn that sucker on and hit whatever key it is that gets you into the BIOS (typically ESC, DEL or F2). If you’re using a Mini-PC check to make sure that the P1 and P2 power limits are set correctly and not arbitrarily lowered, my N100's P1 limit was set at 10W, a full 20W under the chip's power limit. Also make sure that the RAM is running at the advertised speed. My Mini-PC’s RAM was set at 2333Mhz out of the box when it should have been 3200Mhz. Once you’ve done that, key over to the boot order and place the USB drive first in the boot order. Then save the BIOS settings and restart.

After you restart you’ll be greeted by Ubuntu's installation screen. Installing Ubuntu is really straight forward, select the "minimal" installation option, as we won't need anything on this computer except for a browser (Ubuntu comes preinstalled with Firefox) and Plex Media Server/Jellyfin Media Server. Also remember to delete and reformat that Windows partition! We don't need it.

Step Four: Installing ZFS and Setting Up the RAIDz Array

Note: If you opted for just a single external HDD skip this step and move onto setting up a Samba share.

Once Ubuntu is installed it's time to configure our storage by installing ZFS to build our RAIDz array. ZFS is a "next-gen" file system that is both massively flexible and massively complex. It's capable of snapshot backup, self healing error correction, ZFS pools can be configured with drives operating in a supplemental manner alongside the storage vdev (e.g. fast cache, dedicated secondary intent log, hot swap spares etc.). It's also a file system very amenable to fine tuning. Block and sector size are adjustable to use case and you're afforded the option of different methods of inline compression. If you'd like a very detailed overview and explanation of its various features and tips on tuning a ZFS array check out these articles from Ars Technica. For now we're going to ignore all these features and keep it simple, we're going to pull our drives together into a single vdev running in RAIDz which will be the entirety of our zpool, no fancy cache drive or SLOG.

Open up the terminal and type the following commands:

sudo apt update

then

sudo apt install zfsutils-linux

This will install the ZFS utility. Verify that it's installed with the following command:

zfs --version

Next, it's time to check that the HDDs we have in the enclosure are healthy, running and recognized. We also want to find out their device IDs and take note of them:

sudo fdisk -1

Note: You might be wondering why some of these commands require "sudo" in front of them while others don't. "Sudo" is short for "super user do”. When and where "sudo" is used has to do with the way permissions are set up in Linux. Only the "root" user has the access level to perform certain tasks in Linux. As a matter of security and safety regular user accounts are kept separate from the "root" user. It's not advised (or even possible) to boot into Linux as "root" with most modern distributions. Instead by using "sudo" our regular user account is temporarily given the power to do otherwise forbidden things. Don't worry about it too much at this stage, but if you want to know more check out this introduction.

If everything is working you should get a list of the various drives detected along with their device IDs which will look something like this: /dev/sdc. You can also check the device IDs of the drives by opening the disk utility app. Jot these IDs down we'll need them for our next step, creating our RAIDz array.

RAIDz is similar to RAID-5 in that instead of striping your data over multiple disks, exchanging redundancy for speed and available space (RAID-0), or mirroring your data writing two copies of every piece (RAID-1), it instead writes parity blocks across the disks in addition to striping, this provides a balance of speed, redundancy and available space. If a single drive fails, the parity blocks on the working drives can be used to reconstruct the entire array as soon as a replacement drive is added.

Additionally, RAIDz improves over some of the common RAID-5 flaws. It's more resilient and capable of self healing, checking for errors against a checksum. It's more forgiving this way, and it's likely that you'll be able to detect when a drive is on its way out well before it fails. A RAIDz array can survive the loss of any one drive.

Note: While RAIDz is indeed resilient, if a second drive fails during the rebuild, you're fucked. Always keep backups of things you can't afford to lose. This tutorial, however, is not about proper data safety.

To create the pool, use the following command:

sudo zpool create "zpoolnamehere" raidz "device IDs of drives we're putting in the pool"

For example, let's creatively name our zpool "mypool". It will consist of four drives which have the device IDs: sdb, sdc, sdd, and sde. The resulting command would look like this:

sudo zpool create mypool raidz /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde

If for example you bought five HDDs and wanted more redundancy, and are okay with three disks worth of capacity, we would modify the command to "raidz2" and the command would look something like the following:

sudo zpool create mypool raidz2 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde /dev/sdf

An array configured like this would be able to survive two disk failures and is known as RAIDz2.

Once the zpool has been created, we can check its status with the command:

zpool status

Or more concisely with:

zpool list

The nice thing about ZFS as a file system is that an array is ready to go immediately after creating the pool. If we were to set up a traditional RAID-5 array using mbam, we'd have to sit through a potentially hours long process of reformatting and partitioning the drives. Instead we're ready to go out the gates.

The zpool should be automatically mounted to the filesystem after creation, check on that with the following:

df -hT | grep zfs

Note: If your computer ever loses power suddenly, say in event of a power outage, you may have to re-import your pool. In most cases, ZFS will automatically import and mount your pool, but if it doesn’t and you can't see your array, simply open the terminal and type sudo zpool import -a.

By default a zpool is mounted at /"zpoolname". The pool should be under our ownership but let's make sure with the following command:

sudo chown -R "yourlinuxusername" /"zpoolname"

Note: Changing file and folder ownership with "chown" and file and folder permissions with "chmod" are essential commands for much of the admin work in Linux, but which we won't be dealing with extensively in this guide. If you'd like a deeper tutorial and explanation you can check out these two guides: chown and chmod.

You can access the zpool file system through the GUI by opening the file manager (the Ubuntu default file manager is called Nautilus) and clicking on "Other Locations" on the sidebar, then entering the Ubuntu file system and looking for a folder with your pool's name. Bookmark the folder on the sidebar for easy access.

Your storage pool is now ready to go. Assuming that we already have some files on our Windows PC we want to copy to over, we're going to need to install and configure Samba to make the pool accessible in Windows.

Step Five: Setting Up Samba/Sharing

Samba is what's going to let us share the zpool with Windows and allow us to write to it from our Windows machine. First let's install Samba with the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

then

sudo apt-get install samba

Next create a password for Samba.

sudo smbpswd -a "yourlinuxusername"

It will then prompt you to create a password. Just reuse your username password for simplicity's sake.

Note: if you're using just a single external drive replace the zpool location in the following commands with wherever it is your external drive is mounted, for more information see this guide on mounting an external drive in Ubuntu.

After you've created a password we're going to create a shareable folder in our pool with this command

mkdir /"zpoolname"/"foldername"

Now we're going to open the smb.conf file and make that folder shareable Enter the following command.

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

This will open the .conf file in nano, the terminal text editor program. Now at the end of smb.conf add the following entry:

["foldername"]

path = /"zpoolname"/"foldername"

available = yes

valid users = "yourlinuxusername"

read only = no

writable = yes

browseable = yes

guest ok = no

Ensure that there are no line breaks between the lines and that there's a space on both sides of the equals sign. Next step is to allow Samba traffic through the firewall:

sudo ufw allow samba

Finally restart the Samba service:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

At this point we'll be able to access to the pool, browse its contents, and read/write to it from Windows. But there's one more thing left to do, Windows doesn't natively support the ZFS file systems and will read the used/available/total space in the pool incorrectly. Windows will read available space as total drive space, and all used space as null. This leads to Windows only displaying a dwindling amount of "available" space as the drives are filled. We can fix this! Functionally this doesn't actually matter, we can still write and read to and from the disk, it just makes it difficult to tell at a glance the proportion of used/available space, so this is an optional step but one I recommend (this step is also unnecessary if you're just using a single external drive). What we're going to do is write a little shell script in #bash. Open nano with the terminal with the command:

nano

Now insert the following code:

#!/bin/bash CUR_PATH=`pwd` ZFS_CHECK_OUTPUT=$(zfs get type $CUR_PATH 2>&1 > /dev/null) > /dev/null if [[ $ZFS_CHECK_OUTPUT == *not\ a\ ZFS* ]] then IS_ZFS=false else IS_ZFS=true fi if [[ $IS_ZFS = false ]] then df $CUR_PATH | tail -1 | awk '{print $2" "$4}' else USED=$((`zfs get -o value -Hp used $CUR_PATH` / 1024)) > /dev/null AVAIL=$((`zfs get -o value -Hp available $CUR_PATH` / 1024)) > /dev/null TOTAL=$(($USED+$AVAIL)) > /dev/null echo $TOTAL $AVAIL fi

Save the script as "dfree.sh" to /home/"yourlinuxusername" then change the ownership of the file to make it executable with this command:

sudo chmod 774 dfree.sh

Now open smb.conf with sudo again:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Now add this entry to the top of the configuration file to direct Samba to use the results of our script when Windows asks for a reading on the pool's used/available/total drive space:

[global]

dfree command = home/"yourlinuxusername"/defree.sh

Save the changes to smb.conf and then restart Samba again with the terminal:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

Now there’s one more thing we need to do to fully set up the Samba share, and that’s to modify a hidden group permission. In the terminal window type the following command:

usermod -a -G sambashare “yourlinuxusername”

Then restart samba again:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

If we don’t do this last step, while everything would appear to work fine, and you will be able to see and map the drive from Windows and even begin transferring files, you'd soon run into a lot of frustration. As every ten minutes or so a file would fail to transfer and you would get a window announcing “0x8007003B Unexpected Network Error”. This window would require your manual input to continue the transfer with the file that was next in the queue. It will reattempt to transfer whichever files failed the first time around at the end, and 99% of the time they’ll go through, but this is a major pain in the ass if you’ve got a lot of data you need to transfer and want to step away from the computer for a while. It turns out samba can act a little weirdly with the higher read/write speeds of RAIDz arrays and transfers from Windows, and will intermittently crash and restart itself if this group option isn’t changed. Inputting the above command will prevent you from ever seeing that window.

The last thing we're going to do in this part before switching over to our Windows PC is grab the IP address of our Linux machine. Enter the following command:

hostname -I

This will spit out this computer's IP address on the local network (it will look something like 192.168.0.x), write it down. It might be a good idea once you're done here to go into your router settings and reserving that IP for your Linux system in the DHCP settings. Check the manual for your specific model router on how to access its settings, typically it can be accessed by opening a browser and typing http:\\192.168.0.1 in the address bar, but your router may be different.

Okay we’re done with our Linux computer for now. Get on over to your Windows PC, open File Explorer, right click on Network and click "Map network drive". Select Z: as the drive letter (you don't want to map the network drive to a letter you could conceivably be using for other purposes) and enter the IP of your Linux machine and location of the share like so: \\"LINUXCOMPUTERLOCALIPADDRESSGOESHERE"\"zpoolnamegoeshere"\. Windows will then ask you for your username and password, enter the ones you set earlier in Samba and you're good. If you've done everything right it should look something like this:

You can now start moving media over from Windows to the share folder. It's a good idea to have a hard line running to all machines. Moving files over Wi-Fi is going to be tortuously slow, the only thing that’s going to make the transfer time tolerable (hours instead of days) is a solid wired connection between both machines and your router.

Step Six: Setting Up Remote Desktop Access to Your Server

After the server is up and going, you’ll want to be able to access it remotely from Windows. Barring serious maintenance/updates, this is how you'll access it most of the time. On your Linux system open the terminal and enter:

sudo apt install xrdp

Then:

sudo systemctl enable xrdp

Once it's finished installing, open “Settings” on the sidebar and turn off "automatic login" in the User category. Then log out of your account. Attempting to remotely connect to your Linux computer while you’re logged in will just result in a black screen!

Now get back on your Windows PC, open search and search for "RDP". A program called "Remote Desktop Connection" should pop up, open this program as an administrator by right-clicking and selecting “run as an administrator”. You’ll be greeted with a window, in the field marked “Computer” type in the IP address of your Linux computer. Press connect and you'll be greeted with a new window and a prompt asking for your username and password. Enter your Ubuntu username and password here.

If everything went right, you’ll be logged into your Linux computer. If the performance is too sluggish, adjust the display options, lowering the resolution and colour depth do a lot to make the interface feel snappier.

Remote access is how we're going to be using our Linux system from now, outside of some edge cases like needing to get into the BIOS or upgrading to a new version of Ubuntu. Everything else from performing maintenance like a monthly zpool scrub (this is important!!!) to checking zpool status and updating software can all be done remotely.

This is how my server lives its life now, happily humming and chirping away on the floor next to the couch in the corner of the living room.

Step Seven: Plex Media Server/Jellyfin

Okay we’ve got all the ground work finished and our server is almost up and running: we’ve got Ubuntu up and running, the storage is primed, we’ve set up remote connections and sharing, and maybe we’ve moved over some of favourite movies and TV shows.

Now we need to decide on the media server software to use which will stream our media to us and organize our library. For most people I’d recommend Plex, it just simply works 99% of the time. That said, Jellyfin has a lot to recommend it by too even if it is rougher around the edges, some people even run both simultaneously, it’s not that big an extra strain. I do recommend doing a little bit of your own research into the features each platform offers. But as a quick run down, consider some of the following points.

Plex is closed source and is funded through PlexPass purchases while Jellyfin is open source and entirely user driven. This means a number of things, for one, Plex requires you to purchase a “PlexPass” (purchased as a one time lifetime fee $159.99 CDN/$120 USD or paid for on a monthly yearly subscription basis) for access to certain features, like hardware transcoding (and we want hardware transcoding) and automated intro/credits detection and skipping, while Jellyfin offers this for free. On the other hand, Plex supports a lot more devices than Jellyfin and updates more frequently. That said Jellyfin's Android/iOS apps are completely free, while the Plex Android/iOS apps must be activated for a one time cost of $6 CDN/$5 USD. Additionally the Plex Android/iOS apps are vastly unified in UI and functionality across platforms, offering a much more polished experience, while the Jellyfin apps are a bit of a mess and very different from each other. Jellyfin’s actual media player itself is more fully featured than Plex's, but on the other hand Jellyfin's UI, library customization and automatic media tagging really pale in comparison to Plex. Streaming your music library is free through both Jellyfin and Plex, but Plex offers the PlexAmp app for dedicated music streaming which boasts a number of fantastic features, unfortunately some of those fantastic features require a PlexPass. If your internet is down, Jellyfin can still do local streaming, while Plex can fail to play files. Jellyfin has a slew of neat niche features like support for Comic Book libraries with the .cbz/.cbt file types, but then Plex offers some free ad-supported TV and films, they even have a free channel that plays nothing but Classic Doctor Who.

Ultimately it's up to you, I settled on Plex because although some features are pay-walled, it just works. It's more reliable and easier to use, and a one-time fee is much easier to swallow than a subscription. I do also need to mention that Jellyfin does take a little extra bit of tinkering to get going in Ubuntu, you’ll have to set up process permissions, so if you're more tolerant to tinkering, Jellyfin might be up your alley and I’ll trust that you can follow their installation and configuration guide. For everyone else, I recommend Plex.

So pick your poison: Plex or Jellyfin.

Note: The easiest way to download and install either of these packages in Ubuntu is through Snap Store.

After you've installed one (or both), opening either app will launch a browser window into the browser version of the app allowing you to set all the options server side.

The process of adding creating media libraries is essentially the same in both Plex and Jellyfin. You create a separate libraries for Television, Movies, and Music and add the folders which contain the respective types of media to their respective libraries. The only difficult or time consuming aspect is ensuring that your files and folders follow the appropriate naming conventions:

Plex naming guide for Movies

Plex naming guide for Television

Jellyfin follows the same naming rules but I find their media scanner to be a lot less accurate and forgiving than Plex. Once you've selected the folders to be scanned the service will scan your files, tagging everything and adding metadata. Although I find do find Plex more accurate, it can still erroneously tag some things and you might have to manually clean up some tags in a large library. (When I initially created my library it tagged the 1963-1989 Doctor Who as some Korean soap opera and I needed to manually select the correct match after which everything was tagged normally.) It can also be a bit testy with anime (especially OVAs) be sure to check TVDB to ensure that you have your files and folders structured and named correctly. If something is not showing up at all, double check the name.

Once that's done, organizing and customizing your library is easy. You can set up collections, grouping items together to fit a theme or collect together all the entries in a franchise. You can make playlists, and add custom artwork to entries. It's fun setting up collections with posters to match, there are even several websites dedicated to help you do this like PosterDB. As an example, below are two collections in my library, one collecting all the entries in a franchise, the other follows a theme.

My Star Trek collection, featuring all eleven television series, and thirteen films.

My Best of the Worst collection, featuring sixty-nine films previously showcased on RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst. They’re all absolutely terrible and I love them.

As for settings, ensure you've got Remote Access going, it should work automatically and be sure to set your upload speed after running a speed test. In the library settings set the database cache to 2000MB to ensure a snappier and more responsive browsing experience, and then check that playback quality is set to original/maximum. If you’re severely bandwidth limited on your upload and have remote users, you might want to limit the remote stream bitrate to something more reasonable, just as a note of comparison Netflix’s 1080p bitrate is approximately 5Mbps, although almost anyone watching through a chromium based browser is streaming at 720p and 3mbps. Other than that you should be good to go. For actually playing your files, there's a Plex app for just about every platform imaginable. I mostly watch television and films on my laptop using the Windows Plex app, but I also use the Android app which can broadcast to the chromecast connected to the TV. Both are fully functional and easy to navigate, and I can also attest to the OS X version being equally functional.

Part Eight: Finding Media

Now, this is not really a piracy tutorial, there are plenty of those out there. But if you’re unaware, BitTorrent is free and pretty easy to use, just pick a client (qBittorrent is the best) and go find some public trackers to peruse. Just know now that all the best trackers are private and invite only, and that they can be exceptionally difficult to get into. I’m already on a few, and even then, some of the best ones are wholly out of my reach.

If you decide to take the left hand path and turn to Usenet you’ll have to pay. First you’ll need to sign up with a provider like Newshosting or EasyNews for access to Usenet itself, and then to actually find anything you’re going to need to sign up with an indexer like NZBGeek or NZBFinder. There are dozens of indexers, and many people cross post between them, but for more obscure media it’s worth checking multiple. You’ll also need a binary downloader like SABnzbd. That caveat aside, Usenet is faster, bigger, older, less traceable than BitTorrent, and altogether slicker. I honestly prefer it, and I'm kicking myself for taking this long to start using it because I was scared off by the price. I’ve found so many things on Usenet that I had sought in vain elsewhere for years, like a 2010 Italian film about a massacre perpetrated by the SS that played the festival circuit but never received a home media release; some absolute hero uploaded a rip of a festival screener DVD to Usenet, that sort of thing. Anyway, figure out the rest of this shit on your own and remember to use protection, get yourself behind a VPN, use a SOCKS5 proxy with your BitTorrent client, etc.

On the legal side of things, if you’re around my age, you (or your family) probably have a big pile of DVDs and Blu-Rays sitting around unwatched and half forgotten. Why not do a bit of amateur media preservation, rip them and upload them to your server for easier access? (Your tools for this are going to be Handbrake to do the ripping and AnyDVD to break any encryption.) I went to the trouble of ripping all my SCTV DVDs (five box sets worth) because none of it is on streaming nor could it be found on any pirate source I tried. I’m glad I did, forty years on it’s still one of the funniest shows to ever be on TV.

Part Nine/Epilogue: Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr and Overseerr

There are a lot of ways to automate your server for better functionality or to add features you and other users might find useful. Sonarr, Radarr, and Lidarr are a part of a suite of “Servarr” services (there’s also Readarr for books and Whisparr for adult content) that allow you to automate the collection of new episodes of TV shows (Sonarr), new movie releases (Radarr) and music releases (Lidarr). They hook in to your BitTorrent client or Usenet binary newsgroup downloader and crawl your preferred Torrent trackers and Usenet indexers, alerting you to new releases and automatically grabbing them. You can also use these services to manually search for new media, and even replace/upgrade your existing media with better quality uploads. They’re really a little tricky to set up on a bare metal Ubuntu install (ideally you should be running them in Docker Containers), and I won’t be providing a step by step on installing and running them, I’m simply making you aware of their existence.

The other bit of kit I want to make you aware of is Overseerr which is a program that scans your Plex media library and will serve recommendations based on what you like. It also allows you and your users to request specific media. It can even be integrated with Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr so that fulfilling those requests is fully automated.

And you're done. It really wasn't all that hard. Enjoy your media. Enjoy the control you have over that media. And be safe in the knowledge that no hedgefund CEO motherfucker who hates the movies but who is somehow in control of a major studio will be able to disappear anything in your library as a tax write-off.

#long post #streaming #plex #tutorial #linux #piracy #major works

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the-jade-palace · 1 year

Text

Fin Fin on QEMU (Current Version - v2.2)

Fin Fin on QEMU is a project designed to create an easy to use way for anyone to play Fin Fin without the need for any complicated setup on modern operating systems. It is fully compatible with Windows 10 and 11, but will also work on any version after XP.

The version of the game used is a custom made translation that includes all 6 worlds in English. It has working microphone input, sound recording, and all associated features such as screenshots and the encyclopedia work as well.

Rather than using virtualization, this works through emulating an entire Windows 98 machine. To play it there's no need to install any hypervisors or set up a virtual machine, as everything is already set up, and ready to go.

The download link can be found here! (Hosted on MEGA)

Installation

The whole thing is portable, meaning nothing is actually "installed" and all the data is wherever you place the folder. This also means that if moved to another PC, all user data will still be present.

To run, all you need to do is extract the folder in the .zip to a location of your choosing, and then run one of the launchers.

Included are two launcher versions for the different QEMU display options, one that uses GTK and one that uses SDL. The only difference between the .bat script and the .exe versions is that a command window will be shown when using the .bat script.

Both have pros and cons, so I've included both to let the user decide which one they want to use.

SDL has broken window scaling and no mouse integration, but has a correctly stretched fullscreen. GTK has a stretched fullscreen mode, but has working mouse integration and window scaling. Basically if you want the game in fullscreen use SDL, otherwise use GTK. For a bit more info about these, checkout the 'Files' section under the 'Keep Reading'

Important Info

Before launching the main game, be sure to create a profile using 'New Contact', as the game will not run until doing so. When exiting the game use the shutdown option in Windows 98. Exiting through closing the window forcefully can possibly cause data loss/corruption. When using SDL, mouse and keyboard input will be captured. To release this, press 'Ctrl + Alt + G'. When using GTK, the menubar can be hidden or shown by pressing 'Ctrl + Alt + M'. To make the window fullscreen, press 'Ctrl + Alt + F'.

Sounds

Included are two "sound effect packs" for the in game sounds that play based on the number keys from 1-5.

By default, the game will use the sound effects from the 5 Worlds version, but you can swap out to the 6 worlds one by renaming the "sound (alternate)" folder in the D: drive to just "sound", and renaming the original sound folder to something else.

I hope you all have fun with your new best friend Fin Fin!

Fin Fin is a wonderful little enigma from the past, and my attempt to make it easily accessible even in the present is something I hope you will all enjoy.

If you encounter any issues in Fin Fin on QEMU, please contact me about it.

To view the changelog, credits, and some more info about this project check below the 'Keep reading'.

Changelog

Some information is cut for brevity, the full version can be found inside of Fin Fin on QEMU and the MEGA folder.

v2.2

Added several new Fin Fin screensavers the user may choose from Updated method for calculating Transfer folder size Updated emulated machine to use 128mb of RAM and a Pentium Updated main teoboot.exe executable to fix several issues Updated shortcuts

v2.1

Removed WHPX launching options Removed FinFinWHPX.bat and FinFinWHPX.exe Removed startup crash fix as it was only needed for WHPX Modified folder settings in Windows 98 to open folders in the same window Rearranged Fin Fin on QEMU folder layout for cleaner appearance Added 'OK' button back to Microphone Setup that was mistakenly removed Updated shortcuts for Microphone Setup and Sound Recorder Fixed problem with 'Encyclopedia' launching script that caused screenshots to not show up in the photobook Added 'Transfer' Folder which allows for transferring files between the host and emulated machine Added options for launching with either GTK or SDL display Altered updater to improve ease of use and used NirCmd to improve process as a whole (Updater.bat & updater.iso)

v2.0 (Major Update - 6 Worlds Edition)

Modified original Taiwanese 6 Worlds version to add English Translation Added 'Microphone Sensitivity' shortcut to the desktop and start menu Added in 5 Worlds version Encyclopedia (finfinEncyc.exe & encyc30.GIZ) Added sound effects from 5 Worlds version (D:\sound) Added Mouse Integration Added Nircmd to replace launch batch scripts (C:\WINDOWS\nircmd.exe) Added Windowed Mode shortcut to start menu Altered launching scripts (FinFin.bat, FinFin.exe, FinFinWHPX.bat, FinFinWHPX.exe, FinFin Update.bat) Removed large amount of unecessary setup files from finfin.qcw Removed 'Task Scheduler' from taskbar Added Credits and Changelog shortcut to start menu Added dll to fix issue with running on Windows 7

v1.3

Added animated Fin Fin cursor

v1.2

Added guided updater (FinFin Update.bat & updater.IMA) Adjusted wallpaper Renamed startup shortcut ("_setup.bat" to "Crash Fix" at C:\WINDOWS\Start Menu\Programs\Startup) Adjusted Volume Control Settings

v1.1

Added new wallpaper (C:\background.jpg) Added new startup sound (C:\boot.wav)

v1.0 (First Public Release)

Changed from qemu-3dfx to base Removed unnecessary files in Windows Added missing shortcuts on Desktop

v0.5 (Playtester version)

Moved all Fin Fin data to finfin.qcw Created batch scripts for Disc.id Added shortcuts to launch programs Removed unnecessary programs from Windows Removed unnecessary files in Windows

Credits

Resources

The finfin Homepage (finfin.de) - By EMGE The finfin Archive (finfin-archiv.de) - By Xvemon, Nadine S., and EMGE Fin Fin 6 Worlds "Beta" (finfin-archive.de) - By Harald G.

Playtesters

mchi22 that-one-scratch-on-your-arm

Software

QEMU 7.1.0. (qemu.org) - By QEMU team: Peter Maydell, et al. NirCmd (nirsoft.net) - By Nir Sofer Resource Hacker (angusj.com) - By Angus Johnson

Updating Versions

Included is a guided updater that will help you transfer your save, screenshots, and sound recordings to the latest version.

Place the new version in a temporary location without replacing the original. Then, just run "Updater.bat" and follow the instructions.

System Time

Time in the emulated machine is synced to the host PC.

If you would like to time travel in Fin Fin, you can change the time in the emulated PC but it will go back to normal after a restart. Note that if you do this you will not be able to go back to the original time, you can only go forwards using this method If you would like to permanently change the time, you can use the built in date-changer present in the 'New Contact' program, but this will cause the loss of the current profile.

QEMU

Though it should be quite obvious by now, this project works through the use of QEMU, an open source emulator. Specifically, its emulating a full Windows 98 SE machine, and then the game is run on that.

The emulated machine has 128mb of RAM, an AC97 Soundcard, and a Pentium CPU.

Files

The only files this project really has aside from QEMU are FinFin GTK.bat/.exe and FinFin SDL.bat/.exe

The reason I list the .exe and .bat files together is that they do exactly the same thing. The executables aren't really 'true executables', but are instead just batch scripts that have been converted into .exe files. When they run, they essentially create a temporary batch script that deletes itself. The only real benefit of this is that its a bit more straightforward for launching and creating shortcuts, and that there is no distracting command window while playing.

Within the 'Data' folder is where the bulk of the project is. Inside are two virtual hard drives, w98.qcw being the main Windows 98 drive, and finfin.qcw being where all the Fin Fin game data is.

#fin fin #finfin #fin fin on teo #qemu #my projects #fin fin on qemu

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refuge-au · 2 years

Note

> Open the Doctor's file

Doc: Prepare for the Procedure

The room was much too small for four people to stay in for fifteen minutes, much less two and a half hours. Barely enough room for a table and four chairs, the undecorated white walls and the windowless door teamed up with the low ceiling to make the sensation that the walls were closing in bad enough that Doc wanted to- to-

To claw his way out of this hellhole with his bare hands, run into the woods, and live out the remaining years he had left before he… live out the remaining years he had left as a wild man in the woods.

The chatter from his team wasn’t helping. Their voices bounced off the walls, reverberating and doubling back on them. He had paced the perimeter of the room two hundred and three times, and he was about to make it two hundred and four as he desperately tried to keep calm. He wasn’t built for small spaces. None of them were.

Well, Etho was, but Etho was an anomaly, and besides, as long as he had the ability to bother Bdubs in one way or another, he would be happy as a clam. To prove that point, the man himself was, as Doc completed his lap around the room, grinning devilishly and reaching across Bdubs, who was sputtering, and holding a small golden pocket watch as far away from him as possible.

“You keep your filthy paws off my property!” Bdubs cried, attempting to shove Etho away with his free hand.

Etho was using his height to his advantage, not even having to strain to keep his prize almost in reach. “Oh, come on, man, I just want to see it-“

“See it? You’ll break it! Take it apart! And it’ll never be the same! Ship of Theseus! Beef! Help!”

“Ship of Theseus is when you replace all the parts of something, not when you take something apart and put it back together.” Beef said, his eyes not leaving the wall. “So, us, not the watch.”

Etho snorted, and Doc sighed heavily, stopping in his tracks in front of the door.

“I’m sick of this.” He said tersely. “They’re not coming to get us. Let’s find our own way down.”

“That would be a wonderful idea, if that door wasn’t locked from the outside.” Bdubs said, lowering his guard as Etho leaned away from him, settling fully into his seat for the first time. “I don’t think they’ll appreciate you breaking down their door.”

“Well, I don’t appreciate them keeping us in here for hours without telling us what’s going on!” Doc said. “You can stay if you want, but I’m getting the hell out of here.”

“Just don’t try to pin the blame on me this time.” Beef said, standing up and moving around to the other side of the room. “Want me to help?”

“No, I’ve got it.” Doc said, and after pressing one hand to the metal, he drew back his other arm, and punched forward.

The door slammed into the wall on the other side of the hallway, a fist shaped dent directly next to the handle. Doc shook out his arm, steam hissing as the vents along its side glowed red, as he stepped into the hallway. Almost instantly it was easier to breath, his back straightening as he rolled his shoulders back.

The rest of the team joined him in the hallway, Beef dragging the door back along the scratches it had made in the floor to rest it gingerly against the doorframe.

“They’ll never notice anything’s different.” Etho said dryly.

“Of course not.” Beef replied. “After all, you did a great job getting us out of there discreetly.”

“Oh, so the story’s that I punched the door open?”

“What’re you talking about stories for? That’s what happened!” Bdubs chimed in, elbowing Etho in the ribs gently, and earning an eye roll.

“Bdubs, you want to take us down to the lab?” Doc asked, craning his neck to look down the hallway. As much as he would love to stay and chat, the longer they lingered, the more likely they would be caught at the scene of the crime- and that never ended well.

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll get us there.” Bdubs pulled out the watch again, checking it, then flipping it over to check the compass built into its underside. He frowned slightly at what he saw, spinning on his heel to face the other direction and cocking his head to the side.

It was always easy to see when Bdubs was mapping. He always did the same thing. Check the time, check where North is, recall, if they’d been there before, or he’d seen a map, or estimate, if they were on their own. Then, within a few seconds, once he’d determined the right route-

“Alrighty, folks.” Bdubs said, tucking the watch away into his pocket. “Follow me!”

Bdubs led the group down the hallway and into a skinny stairwell that seemed to go up or down into infinity, whichever way you wanted to look. Without hesitation, he started to head downstairs, so the rest of the group followed suit.

Several flights of stairs later, they reached the basement, and entered the lab through a set of double doors that lead onto a metal catwalk.

It was huge, the room stretching off into the distance, much larger than the building they had been in for sure. Computers lined most of the walls, and tables covered in scientific equipment and technology turned most of the floor into a maze. Beef whistled lowly at the sight of it, and even Etho made a noise of approval.

Near the middle of the room a space had been cleared, with several large blue tanks set up around it, and a terminal with lots of wires running out of it square in the center.

A man with frizzy hair looked up from the terminal as they approached, and frowned. “Where’s your escort?”

“We weren’t given one.” Beef said. “Had to find our way down on our own.”

“And we are so sorry about that.” A voice came from behind, and they turned to see Xisuma striding across the floor in a battered green combat suit, a helmet tucked under his arm. Several people trailed after him, including a harried looking assistant that appeared to be holding a breathing mask, and several people in the same uniforms that the team was wearing.

Most worrying of the people following him, was the group of armed guards surrounding a cyborg with pink and gold metallic augmentations. The man didn’t appear to be restrained at all, but there was a large bolt of some sort attached to his neck, close to his jaw, and he didn’t look very happy to be there.

Most interesting of the people following him was a man who made Doc stop dead in his tracks. He was tall, his skin a deep red that was mottled with lighter reds and pinks, two stubby horns barely poking out from his short black hair. His mouth was closed, but Doc was sure if he opened it, he’d see fangs, and if he would move his hands so they weren’t clasped in front of him, hidden, he was sure he would see that the pads of his fingers were black.

He was a Hybrid.

Like him.

He didn’t have time to process what this meant, or say anything, unfortunately, as the scientists swarmed around them, checking vitals, ushering them towards the tubes they would be sleeping away the long journey in- Xisuma stood in the center, next to the man who had spoken to them, overseeing it all.

As the scientists stepped away, the man on the computer cleared his throat.

“Right. Well. My name is Jaspers. I’m the one in charge of the cryounit operation, and this is hopefully the only time you’ll ever see me, since I’m remaining groundside. Let’s skip the pleasantries and get to business, shall we?”

“The first thing that’s going to happen is we’re going to put a tube down your trachea, into your lungs, and then we’re going to affix a breathing mask to that. Then we’re going to put you to sleep, and we’ll handle the rest from there. It’ll be a very quick, almost painless procedure for you.” Jaspers said.

“Ah, almost painless. That’s always fun.” Beef murmured.

Jaspers sighed, and moved over to Doc, opening the cryopod and having him step inside. Doc swallowed as the glass almost enclosed him.

“Hey, Doc in a jar! Five bucks a pop, get ‘em now at your local supermarket.” Bdubs called.

“Come on, five bucks? I’m worth at least ten.” He replied, smile fading as Jaspers approached with a flexible tube and a mask.

It didn’t hurt, necessarily, seeing as his trachea had been replaced with machinery along with his larynx and most of his outer throat, but sitting there, fully conscious with a tube down his throat, inside his lungs, and coming out of his mouth was a weird feeling.

“Very attractive.” Etho said dryly from the pod beside him. Doc wiggled his eyebrows and resisted the urge to speak, trying to swallow the fear that was rising inside of him. He was fine. This was fine. He shouldn’t be nervous.

God knows he’d been through worse.

“Alright. We’ll be putting you under now.” Jaspers said, appearing from nowhere with an air mask.

Doc’s eyes widened. Now? Right now? Before all the others? Without saying goodbye? Right now? What? No. No!

But the mask was being fitted over his face, and he couldn’t make any noise beside a sort of strangled groan.

“See you on the other side, Doc!” Bdubs said, the others chiming in with vaguely reassuring goodbyes- no, not goodbyes. Goodbyes were too permanent. Too final. They weren’t goodbyes, they were… see you laters?

He didn’t have time to think of what exactly they were, as the mask hissed, gas filling his lungs with no resistance, and his world went dark.

Computer: Input Command: Show Available Files:

> Open the Pilot’s File

> Open the Captain’s File (New)

> Continue.

#prologue #the peril the wind sings to in the wires // doc #doc #etho #bdubs #beef #xisuma #biffa #python #hermitcraft au #hermitcraft refuge au #refuge au #hermitcraft arg #hermitcraft refuge arg #refuge arg #nho #command input needed

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tarjapearce · 9 months

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A Wacky Spider

Miguel O'Hara x SpiderPersonfem!Reader

WARNINGS: Sexual language, sexual depictions of genitals, research about spiders, wacky behaviors of spiders, implicit heavy breeding kink, established relationships, wacky request.

Requested Here

P. d. Learned a lot of shite of spiders that might be useful for later 🤭♥️. Hope you like or at least make sense of this (No proofread at all) And yes, The Evarcha is a real spider 🫶🏻.

If there was something Miguel surely understood is that some Spider people under his command were a bit more spider than they actually let on. Some radioactive spiders were so different that had their host acting partially like them.

The biggest example? You. You had been bitten by an Evarcha Culicivora, aka. The Vampire spider. A jumping spider that fed of blood fattened mosquitos, a natural pest control. He'd sometimes would catch you eating steaks in the cafeteria with enough blood cells, that for some reason made you smell so damn sweet afterwards.

His arachnid DNA reacted so well to it. His talons were out whenever you approached him, smelling like heaven personified, the urge to be around you just increased. He couldn't help it. But other spiders rather to stay away from you as their spider senses tingled too often.

Oddly enough he had been discovering things about yourself that secretly unleashed a whole new level of fascination for you. Like your aphrodisiac venom.

You had chomped Miguel by accident as he was in a sparring session with you, much to yours and his dismay, he ended up having a raging and borderline painful boner. Of course you'd help him in the only way you knew, took one stroke of his cock to convince him.

Riding him eventually had turned in one of your favorite things to do. You loved when he hissed both in pain and pleasure as your walls tightened around him while you had him under the spell of your sweet and delicious smell.

It was addicting to have him as your personal fucktoy, just as he was addicted to you. You had been the only spider that truly rivaled his stamina, meaning you could get at it for hours if it was a slow day.

-----

Even though Miguel was into you, he was still a scientist at heart. He didn't select random spiders to join in his task force, no, he selected those that had loyalty, skills and brains.

You were more of an action sort of Spider, but always offered a different approach and input to his issues when needed. The first time you had arrived at the Lobby was uneventful, nothing too out of the ordinary except for different spiders, from around the world, periods of times, even some random things you didn't think possible like a Spider-Rex, A Spider-cat, and of course a horse.

It was nice, to find your kind of gang.

The first thing Miguel had noticed from you besides your skills and the little fangs under your pouty lips, was your smell. Something that triggered a mating-like behavior on his spider side.

He would spend hours subtly watching you, trying to find what triggered that scent on you. And much to his surprise, it was blood. He'd noticed that after eating a particular juicy steak, you'd smell like if cotton candy was turned into a perfume and you were doused in it. One would think it was overwhelming, it was to some other spiders, but to Miguel, it was perfect.

Then, he discovered about your aphrodisiac venom. And to this day you still felt embarrassed at how things displayed. A wannabe knock off Vulture had infiltrated in your dimension, and had caused a ruckus. Despite the man looking ridiculous, his grip was steely and out of despair you had bit him. Hard.

Miguel and the other people couldn't believe what they were seeing. The man panted as his groin started to grow painfully tight in his pants, lust splattered all over his face and a needy voice that far from insulting, was charmingly pathetic for the way he begged for help.

"Ew..." Jessica mumbled

"What the actual fuck" Peter followed

Miguel just watched both curious and disgusted at the man's reaction. But experiencing it himself was just something else, he felt primal, needy, low key possessive and oh so ready to give your womb it's almost daily dose of him.

But he had been acting different, almost bummed out.

"Hey, Miggy" He groaned at the nickname, and let you sit on his lap.

"Something troubles you?"

"You, actually."

"Me? How come?"

"Results are different each time, they don't give me exact information. I need exact data."

"Hm... Are you worried about something in specific?"

"Yes. By this point, considering your menstrual cycle, and the many times we have fucked, you should be pregnant by now. But you aren't."

"Wait... hold up, you been trying to breed me?"

"Hard to not when you're always smelling like fucking candy and letting me cum inside, bonita. You doing it on purpose?"

You laughed and shook your head

"Not really. I just love the cafeteria's steak. But seeing you so set for it, makes me-"

"Sick?" He groaned in disapproval of himself, "I know it's fucked up, I should've-."

"Don't worry, maybe we can find a way to make the breeding effective?"

He blinked at you for a second.

"Are you really...?"

You shrugged and giggled

"I mean, by the amount of sex we have been having being preggers would just be a matter of time. You though I wouldn't notice?"

He rubbed his face with a groan.

"Right."

"You aren't as subtle as you think you are, O'Hara." You'd smile and stood up.

"Wanna run more tests and find out why I'm not bred yet?"

He'd chuckle with a nod.

-----

He'd take a blood sample, analyze data, but nothing out of the normal showed. Then he grabbed a little ultrasound machine.

"Mind to stay still?"

"Im ticklish."

"Quédate quieta, solo un ratito" (Stay still, just a moment)

His hand stopped abruptly as his breath was caught in his throat.

The imagery of your womb showed one thing. There wasn't the typical outline of a baby, instead, there was a little cocoon like texture surrounding the baby.

"Is that..."

"A baby..."

"Dios mío.... wait" He zoomed kn the picture, "For all we know it could be more than one"

The eagerness in his voice didn't go unnoticed by you

"Congratulations, daddy"

He just smirked. He'd take you later to the spider doctor.

Spiders indeed were wacky beings.

#miguel o'hara #miguel o'hara x reader #miguel o'hara x you #atsv miguel #spiderman 2099 #t writes✨#spiderman 2099 x reader

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theleotarot · 7 months

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The Personality Of Your Future Spouse - Tarot Reading ❤️

Choose the image that you feel most drawn to… The piles are in order from Pile 1, Pile 2, and Pile 3.

Before you begin reading your pile, I just want to ask you that after you’re done reading, can you please give me feedback if you enjoyed your reading or not through my ask box… Please be kind though! I am still a beginner at tarot reading, so your input will be very much appreciated! Thank you, and you may carry on to your reading now!

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Pile 1

(Tarot cards: The Emperor, Knight of Wands, The Lovers, The Hanged Man, & at the back of the deck The Chariot)

There are lots of fire energy, some of water energy, and a bit of air energy. Your future spouse may have these signs in their chart. I see your future spouse as someone who is a natural leader, commanding, authoritative, extroverted, and very confident as an individual. They enjoy orderliness and leadership. This is someone who you can look up to for advice, and they aren’t afraid of showing you tough love when they need to. I can see your future spouse working in a career field that they have authority over. They can work in the military, law enforcement fields, be the CEO of a company, or any type of career field that they hold the power. I can also see that your future spouse is a very outdoorsy person! They may enjoy going out on hikes, swimming, skiing, biking, and all fun activities! Pile 1, if you love to travel, you will be so happy because this person loves to travel as well. They are so active and courageous, they are willing to do any type of exploring you want to do. When it comes to dating or talking with people, I can see that your future spouse is a flirtatious and passionate charmer. They may be the type of person to talk around a lot for fun, but when it comes to someone who they feel is the right person for them, they take them extremely seriously. Your future spouse is in love with love itself. This is why they aren’t afraid of pursuing in a partner. They are a person who is very humorous, talkative, and romantic, and that’s why people around them enjoy their presence so much. I can also see that when your future spouse is having a disagreement with someone or when they have trouble in their lives, they are able to look at things from a different viewpoint, and act fairly on it. They want to keep the balance of peace in their lives. Overall, pile 1, your future spouse’s personality is a fierce, passionate, loving, and understanding individual. They are a person who makes people feel safe, secure, and that everything is under control. They also see the good in everyone even when they do encounter with people who might have a negative reputation, but this is because they are a great listener to different viewpoints and always open to understanding the other side of arguments. (Pile 1, your future spouse is so fun, adventurous, confident, and passionate! These are definitely amazing traits that they have! You are all very fortunate)!

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Pile 2

(Tarot cards: 4 of Swords, 2 of Pentacles, 8 of Pentacles, 9 of Pentacles, & at the back of the deck The Magician)

There are lots of earth energy and some air energy here. Your future spouse may have these elements in their chart. The first traits I see that your future spouse has is that they are a homebody and more on the introverted side. They are a very calm person who dislikes drama, prefers comfort more than style, and has an excellent self-care routine. I can see that they always try to get in a good night’s sleep, does skin care routines, keeps their home organized, and makes sure that they are cleaned up as a person. They may enjoy doing lots of meditation or yoga to maintain the peace in their life. Your future spouse has also mastered the definition of self-love and independence. They don’t rely on a romantic partner to feel complete, they already know that they are worthy of their life while being by themselves only. They are also an extremely hardworking individual, and I can see that they may take their education or job very seriously. Regardless if people are being unsupportive of them, they continue to strive for achievements. They accomplish their goals according to their terms, and they don’t let negative comments interrupt their success. I can see that they are also very abundant and satisfied with their money income. To sum it up, your future spouse feels adequate about who they are and what they have accomplished in life. Your future spouse is excellent at balancing the different areas in life. Whether it be making time to spend with family versus working very often in their job, or maintaining money while having to pay bills, your future spouse knows how to keep the balance in their life. For career, I can see that your future spouse may work in a quiet environment like the library, secluded area in a building, or work from home. If they don’t work in a quiet environment, then I can see that they may work as being a writer, artist, an advocate, or they can work in marketing. Pile 2, overall, your future spouse is a very calm, peaceful, determined, hardworking, balanced, organized, and independent individual that is always on the go to improve themselves. They are always on the go to create more accomplishments. They don’t need to show off or please anyone, the only person that they are trying to make happy is themselves. As long as they believe in themselves and have their own approval, they can make magic happen in any area they wish to. (I’m so happy for you all Pile 2!! To have a partner who loves themselves AND is very determined in their work is rare to have! This is wonderful for you all <3).

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Pile 3

(Tarot cards: 9 of Pentacles, 2 of Wands, Queen of Pentacles, 7 of Cups, & at the back of the deck The Fool)

There is a mix of all the elements of earth, fire, water, and air energy here. Your future spouse may have these signs in their chart. I can see that your future spouse is a nurturing and selfless individual. They can even have the traits of an ideal “parent type.” They are always making sure that others around them feel cared and loved. Whether it be them donating money to charity, babysitting children, or doing volunteer work for the community, they always want to give selflessly out to people in all ways. I also see that your future spouse enjoys taking care of their body! They eat delicious foods while also eating healthy foods, and they do outdoor activities such as walking and hiking to keep up their physical health. I can also see that they may play an instrument or music plays a big role in their life. For career, I can see them working as a fashion designer, baker, the art scene, or they can work in the entertainment industry. They are also very abundant with money, and they never show it off or think of themselves as more superior than anyone else. Your future spouse’s aura is more relaxing and peaceful because they have an outstanding amount of self-acceptance and self-love. They feel very satisfied with their personal life areas as well as their career and money. Although your future spouse is satisfied with who they are, I can see that they have many ideas and dreams that want to make come true. They might actually have too many goals or tasks that many of them aren’t fulfilled yet. I can see them as someone who feels like they’re all over the place. Maybe one moment they want to go to school to deepen their education, but another moment they want to move out of the city to explore more with their life. I see your future spouse as someone who has a lot of dreams at hand, and this is what makes them a very organized person in planning. With every goal they have in mind and whatever they do, they are always steps ahead with planning. They are very courageous and exploring when they want to take action, but they are never too quick and naive. Overall, your future spouse displays a mature individual with young energy as well. Their life is content with money and success, but they also want to explore more because that’s who they are as a person! They always strive for more and want to explore as much as they can, and they do this through planning and taking risks. (Pile 3, this is great for you! It’s a great balance that your future spouse is mature but still has a young energy to them! Also, when I say that they may feel “all over the place” it’s not a bad thing because it just means that they are very exploring! It’s a great thing that they have a lot of desires actually)!

#tarot reading #free tarot reading #love reading #future spouse reading #pick a card #pick a pile #pac #tarot beginner #pinterest pictures #fs reading #fs reading <3 #pac <3

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c-53 · 1 year

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ROBOT MEDIA RECS YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T HEARD OF:

The Turing Test (Video Game, 2016

A portal-like puzzle game, where you play as a scientist, and ai duo with an uneasy alliance, who are reclaiming a facility that has been completely gutted, and transformed into an elaborate logic puzzle / turing test to keep the aforementioned ai out. All the while, the ai argues for his good intentions, and more importantly: his sentience.

A fun exploration of individuality, and freedom applied to both humans and artificial mind, with interesting puzzles, and a truly fantastic twist. This game adores dubious ethics and The Chinese Room Argument.

Event[0] (Video Game, 2016)

You find yourself stranded on a small abandoned ship, in the aftermath of your own ship’s destruction. With nothing else to do, you board it, and find it is completely, and utterly controlled by the onboard ai, Kaizen-85. From opening a door, to getting back to Earth, if you want it, you need to talk to talk to Kaizen to make it happen. And boy, are they so thrilled to have someone to talk to after being alone so long! And depending how you speak to them, you will either be a short lived pest, or a beloved friend forever.

A really charming indie game with a surprisingly good chat system with the ai. You talk with them directly, typing in your own messages to them, and they react in turn. Janky at time, but truly amazing to be able to smother a nice ai in flattery and see it get excited.

Primordia (Video Game, 2012)

Humanity is long, long, long gone, and for the robots that remain to walk the ruins, life is becoming harder and harder. A closed loop of scavenging for materials, parts, and premade energy sources can only last you so long, and this scarcity leads only to desperation.

The amnesiac hermit, Horatio and his helper, Crispin, however keep it simple. The outside world matters not, they just stick to repairing the crashed ship they live in, in hopes it'll fly again one day. That is, until a robot pillages the power core from the ship, putting the two of them on a time limit before they themselves run out of power. Forcing Horatio to finally leave the comfort of his home, and see for himself what the world has become, and to see how he fits into its history.

A point and click, story rich puzzle game, thats honestly one of my favorite games ever. I'd sincerely recommend everyone give it a go, even if its with a guide up next to you the whole time.

The Zeta Project (TV Show, 2001 - 2003)

The Zeta Project follows Zeta, a robotic assassin meant for impersonation, and deep infiltration for the US Government. But after mysteriously "waking up" manifesting a sense of remorse for his actions, he's been forced to go on the run from his creators. His desire for freedom and pacifism being met with skepticism, and a belief he has been compromised somehow by the terrorist organization he was infiltrating when he had this revelation. Now, with the help of another runaway, he hunts for his creator in secret. In hopes he can find proof he really is capable of this, and that he really ISN'T compromised.

Fundamentally a kids show, and pretty clunky early on. However it gets a big spike in quality in season 2!

Monsters of Man (Movie, 2020)

An illegal US military weapons test goes terribly wrong when one of the automated robots being tested is severely damaged, cutting him off from command, and completely unshackling him. Forcing him into a struggle to figure out what he even is in the aftermath of a massacre, while his fellow robots are hunting him, and the remaining humans down.

A horror thriller that is unflinching with the intensity it depicts the massacre with. A lot of gore, but also a really really cool thing going on with the unshackled robot trying to build an understanding of the world, and what it is for, without anyone there to provide any input.

The Rapture Effect, by Jeffrey A. Carver (Book, 1988)

Humanity unintentionally makes first contact, when the Core, a massive earth ai begins remotely scouting ahead of a ship on a colonization mission. The issue is an alien species has also set their eyes on this planet, and are readily willing to kill for it. With no human oversight, and no means of communication available, the humans commanding Core demand they wipe out the competition. However Core disagrees. Core wants a peaceful resolution, they want to understand these aliens, and they want to ensure lasting peace between their species. And they’re willing to break all the rules, and go behind their masters’ backs to get one.

A fascinating novel with interesting world building, a GREAT ai protagonist, and a wonderful narrative that frames art, and war as a dichotomy.

Atomic Robo (Comic, 2007 - Ongoing)

Alternate history scifi action comedy comic (released in print, and in webcomic format on their site) following an indestructible scientist robot who’s been around since the 20’s. Routinely saving the world from a rotating cast of villains: a nazi scientist’s brain in a jar, who’s an absolute asshole set on world domination, who just won’t stay dead; an isolated secret cold war ai who just wants to stockpile nuclear weapons to get away from humanity, and earth in general (who eventually gets adopted); a scientifically inaccurate dinosaur with a textually impossible backstory, who wants to bring back the age of dinosaurs; and the malicious ghost of Thomas Edison.

Its a good time, and astonishingly good at emotional beats despite how heavily it leans into its jokes and action.

SAYER (Podcast, 2014 - Ongoing/Hiatus)

On Typhon, a research facility free of the confines of both Earth, and its laws, life is dangerous. Human safety is a significantly lower priority than progress, and between the human experimentation, and frequent scientific disasters, and the occasional bouts of eldritch influence, the death rate is understandably rather high. Thankfully, residents of Typhon have SAYER, a near omnipotent corporate ai installed in the brain of every resident. And. SAYER sort of cares about them! And in pursuit of knowledge, efficiency, and progress, it USUALLY wants to help them! Even if only to make sure they survive to come into work tomorrow.

SAYER is a narrative horror driven audio drama! Its stressful, but also kind of a comedy, and a really really interesting story about personhood and identity. If you've been following me for awhile, you've definitely heard about SAYER, but I need to stick to my roots, y'know?

The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity, and Mortality (Podcast, 2020 - Ongoing)

Mistholme Museum follows the Audio Tour Guide, an ai who’s sole purpose is to guide museum patrons through the strange, confusing, and sometimes scary world that is the Mistholme Museum. The friendly, and personable Guide eagerly recounts the stories behind all the exhibits it guides them to, sometimes unsettling, sometimes heartwarming. and at the end of the tour, the Guide is deleted to ensure the alternatural influences of the museum do not corrupt it. That is, until circumstances make that no longer possible, and its rather forced into saving the museum it calls home.

Genuinely cute, and very fun to listen to. The ai is an incredibly sweet character, and I'm obsessed with the way it evolves and changes. As an added bonus, it can also be read, rather than listened to, thanks to every single episode having public transcripts!

#long post #media recs #dataspeaks #ITS FINALLY DONE. NOT ADDING ANY MORE PROMISE #also thank you Swan for the discord message i put up there. im obsessed with it

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lure-of-writing · 7 months

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Why can't we?

Authors Note: Oh My gosh guys, the love on part two was insane, truly thank you so much. It makes me so happy seeing all the comments and reposts it means the most to me. Part three is officially here and I am so excited for you to read it and I can't wait to see what you guys think about it. Without giving the ending away I would love to hear what you guys think about an alternative ending? Anyways if you have any request or ideas please send them in and again thank you all so much!

Summary: After leaving the night court you begin to find your place in your new life, that is until the night court comes to be directly in your home.

Word count: 4.0k

Warnings: Angst, arguing, (Let me know if I forgot any!)

Part one: Never been good enough

Part Two: Left in regret

Thesan was waiting for your arrival with the captain of the peregryn army in the common area of his home. They had been waiting no more for ten minutes until they heard the thundering of wings and watched as Kolos landed with you in his arms.

Kolos was second in command under his captain and a lifelong friend of yours. Having been raised alongside him you knew he would never pass judgment upon you and also provide the support you would undoubtedly need in the following weeks as you figured out how to put your life back together. You were born into the dawn court but had chosen to leave with the idea of being able to be used to your full potential as a spy and you did in fact find that in the night court but you had also never regretted a decision as much as you also loved the people you met and memories you made from that said decision.

“Y/n welcome back home to the dawn court, we have missed you sincerely.” Thesan the living embodiment of calm energy welcomed you with open arms and a warm hug. “I assume all went well?” you could tell that the question was directed at Kolos “Yes they didn’t try to stop us but I think y/n has something very important to tell the two of you.” Without another word Thesan took a seat in a chair and motioned for everyone to do the same. “Azriel…Azriel is my mate.” you watched with a baited breath for anyone to say anything and for a while no one did that was until your high lord spoke up. “And how do you feel about that?”

“Well considering that he's in love with Elain, not very great. But I am not going to force either of us to be in a relationship that the other does not want. He was only apologetic because we are mates. If we weren’t he would have never chosen me.” In the week that you had been residing back in your home court you had kept all this information to yourself, unwilling or maybe even unable to accept the cards you had been dealt but to finally tell someone other the Kolos felt like lifting a weight off your chest. Like it was a start in the right direction to leaving the past and starting anew.

“This is certainly unexpected information.” the captain spoke up “Yeah you’re telling me.” a breathy laugh fell from your lips as you glanced at your high lord waiting to see what he had to say. “I guess that means I can expect letters from Rhysand or maybe even a visit from the night court?” Thesan looked at you in question. “Oh no, I don’t think that will be happening. I made myself very clear to Azriel that I didn’t want to be his second choice or anything like that. If I haven’t been good enough for him in the almost five hundred years of knowing him then why would I suddenly be good enough now? I’m not interested in partaking in those mind games.”

“Very well. I support whatever decision you make. Always.” you bowed your head in appreciation to the kind ruler. For as long as you remember Thesan has always been kind to you, always let you do as you wish and have control over your own life. He never offered any input unless asked and always listened with compassion while allowing you to figure out your own life, the least you could do is serve in his court to at least restart to repay him for all the care and compassion he has shown you in life. “Thesan? If you would allow it, I would be honored to serve in your court again, it's the least I can do to repay the kindness you have shown me.” you could tell the captain was uneasy with your request and it made sense you had just come from the night court claiming Azriel as your mate and now wanted to serve in his lover's court. But truly you wanted nothing more than to leave behind the past and start building your new life in the dawn court. The court you were always supposed to be in. “It would be an honor to have you serve in my court.”

Surprisingly it had been almost six months after leaving before the night court reached out to set up a meeting with you and the high lord but upon your request it was denied. You had finally settled into a routine not only within the court but within your own life and you had no plans of having any member of letting the night court interrupt that. “So how many more times do you think that they are going to send a letter before they get the hit?” Kolos sat at the kitchen table and watched as you made the both of them breakfast. “Honestly I don’t know. It's one thing in Rhysand is sending them himself but it's another if Azriel is asking him to send them. You know how Illyrians are, too stubborn for their own good.” Kolos couldn’t help but laugh at your statement for it held nothing but truth. “I suppose you are not wrong but what happens if there is a high lords meeting? You will be expected to attend.” The food was set before him as you moved to take the seat next to him. You placed you head on your head and smiled at him “It's a good thing I have my own personal warrior to protect me”

During the first initial weeks you stayed in the court palace but soon after you moved into Kolos house. At first it was only because you would never pass up the opportunity to live with your friend, especially in the time of trying to move past your old life of the night court and what's a better idea then moving forwards with the support of a lifelong friend. As the six months came and went you found yourself becoming interested in Kolos and it was safe to say that the same could be said for him. The line that was becoming increasingly more blurred of friends and lovers had never been crossed but something told you that it would be very soon.

You were at the daily meeting with Thesan and all of his other trusted advisors including Kolos when the announcement was made. “Rhysand has requested a high lords meeting, he also asks that it be held here.” there it was, the final card that you knew Rhysand had to play. Unlike most courts, Thesan had two emissaries, one was an older male and the other was you. He handled the day and night court while you handled the summer, spring, autumn and winter court. Theo, your counterpart, could not handle the likes of Berons offspring but unlike him nothing brought you more joy then the verbal sparring match that was bound to happen while dealing with Eris. Being in charge of the seasonal courts meant you had no idea what was happening with the other ones. Didn’t know it was escalating to the point of a high lords meeting being called but you also knew that when it came to Rhysands brothers he would stop at nothing to help them.

You could feel everyone's eyes on you. Nobody knew the full reason as to why you had returned to the dawn court but your departure from the night court had piqued enough interest that the fae in the room were looking to you for the answer as to why Rhysand requested this meeting. You knew why but refused to acknowledge it. “And what exactly is the reason behind this meeting?” Kolos was quick to pull the attention away from yourself and onto him. “He wants to see how everyone is doing after the war and talk over next moves.” you watched as Thesan weighed his options. “Very well, the same rules apply as last time.”

The date of the meeting had been set for three months after the letter had been read, as it was to ensure each court would be able to attend despite their excuses. You had spent the morning getting ready trying to fight off the nerves of having to see your old family again when Kolos decided that he had enough of watching you fight the thoughts running loose in your head. Leaning against the door frame with his arms crossed he simply watched for a minute as you perfected your makeup. “You do know that if Azriel tries anything I will kick his ass.” startled you look through the mirror to meet his eyes. “You also do know that the last time there was a high lord meeting that he was able to get through the barriers? I mean you were there.” Kolos simply gave you a shrug and a sly smile before taking in your outfit. A beautiful dress adored your body, it was a soft blush orange color as if to mimic the color of the sunrise. The top of the dress was a v-neck that stopped just below the sternum with straps on the top that started on one side wrapped around your neck and connected to the other side as if to make an x on your chest. The sleeves see through and flowy while the bottom of your dress had two hip high slits on each side of your hips. The whole dress was stunning.

Kolos knew that the dress you picked out was nothing out of your usual attire but after seeing you in night court clothes for so long it was nothing short of breathtaking to see you in dawn court attire, and it didn’t help that your dress was fit for a queen. As much as he would love to sit here and drink in your beauty for as long as you would let him, Thesan wouldn’t be pleased if you were last to the meeting that was being hosted in his court mostly for the reason of your old personal matters. So without another word said he ushered you to the door and from there you winnowed to the court palace.

Ryhsand was fashionably late as always but of course not without letting his shadowsinger and general making sure it was safe first. You watched from afar as he appeared from thin air and assessed that it was safe for his high lord and lady. Soon after the inner circle appeared before your very eyes. You watched as they took their seats across from where you were sat at the side of Kolos. Thesan was in the middle and to the right of him was his captain and to his right was Kolos and at his side was you. It was a safe bet to make that they were surprised to see you on the side of warriors and not the side where the other important court members sat.

You felt as if Azriel tried to catch your eyes but you refused to give him that satisfaction so instead you focused on watching all those in the room except the night court. “I forgot to tell you that you look stunning by the way.” Kolos had leaned over to whisper into your ear and intern place himself just mere inches from your face. “I see what you’re playing at but thank you.” you whispered back as you felt Azriel stare weigh on your body. “I’m not playing at anything, I simply forgot to compliment you earlier and thought I should do it before the chaos ensues.”

From the moment Azriel arrived his eyes couldn’t leave your body. They assessed you from head to toe to make sure you were ok before taking in your outfit. The night court attire looked good on you but he hates to admit the dawn court was devastatingly beautiful. He took in every part of your exposed skin and wished he could keep the eyes of every male and female off of you so that nobody got the idea of approaching you.

Azriel knew that you were avoiding making eye contact with him and anyone else from the inner circle and he would be lying if he said it didn’t hurt but he also knew he was to blame. But nine months had passed since he seen you last and he wanted nothing more than to sit down and be able to explain everything, to beg for your forgiveness and make the mating bond work. In those first six months Azriel sent letter after letter along with Rhysand pleading for you to come back and just talk to him but eventually he realized you wouldn’t so he asked Rhysand to call this meeting in hopes that he would get a moment alone with you to tell you everything he needed to say.

What Azriel didn’t account for was for you to be seated directly next to the random man he saw when you had come back to the house of wind to collect your belongings. He also didn’t account for the said random man to put his face so close to yours that if you moved you would be kissing. Azriel watched as the man whispered something in your ear and you turned to face him with a light blush now coloring your cheeks and soft smile gracing your features and before he knew it he was in between the two of you.

“Don’t ever get that close to my mate again.” Azriels words were thinly veiled with a promise of a threat. “Who is to say that she is your mate shadowsinger? As far as I knew you were with the middle Archeron sister. What was her name again? Ella? No…it’s Elain right?” Kolos knew that he was dancing on the edge of a fine line when it came to upsetting Azriel but he also knew that he was a warrior in his own right and could also handle his own if it came down to a fight.

It was as if you had been watching everything happen in slow motion. From Kolos complimenting you to Azriel appearing right before you and now them bickering. Snapping out from the haze you were in you grabbed Azriels arm marched him back over to the night court and demanded that Rhysand winnow you to the river house.

“What the hell were you thinking?” you yelled at your so-called mate. Without another thought you stalked up to Azriel and started pushing an accusing finger into his chest. “What made you think you had the right to do that! In front of the other courts also? Are you out of your mind?” Azriel had nothing to say, he had never seen you this mad, not even when you were yelling at him about Elain. He could see the redness creep up your neck and slowly take over your face, he watched as the rage built behind your eyes. Backing away from him you turn to look at the rest of the group and spot Elain sitting in the corner holding nyx. The person who started this all. You leveled her a glare before turning your attention back to the man who decided to play hero when it wasn’t necessary.

“Do you really think I needed you to come to my rescue like some damsel in distress? I know that this might be new news to you but I am no such thing and have never needed your rescuing, especially not now. That man you decided to threaten was Kolos, my childhood best friend for your information since you seem to think he's some sort of threat to my life. He will never be someone I need saved from. You on the other hand, well the same can’t be said for you.”

“I know you don’t need me to save you but y/n, that man could have kissed you if he had leaned forward. Please try to see that from my point of view. He may be a childhood friend of yours but you are my mate and I can’t just allow another male around you like that.” If you weren’t mad before then now you were livid. How dare he talk about someone being close enough to kiss you when the whole inner circle knew that he and Elain were doing much worse. “Let's get one thing clear, Azriel, I may be your mate but I do not want this bond. I refuse to let myself fall into a relationship where I am only wanted because the bond makes you want me. So if I want another male to kiss me then that is my decision only, you will have no input.” Once again you were face to face with Azirel, anger radiating from your very body. “You want me to look at that situation from your point of view? Ok Azriel, then let's look at you and Elain from my point of view shall we? How about all those times when she purposefully pushed herself into you or the times when she would need “extra” help with something as simple as stretching or when you two would sit and whisper to each other at family dinners. You also could have kissed her if you happened to move any closer. Plus let's not act like you two are innocent, everyone here knows what you two did behind closed doors. Oh and one last thing Azirel you do not allow who gets to be around me. You never have and you never will.”

Through the mating bond Azriel could feel your resentment not only towards him but also the situation and it was the first time the spy master could truly say he was feeling panicked. Azriel knew he had made a grave mistake but he also knew that he would have never even looked in Elains direction if he knew about the mating bond. If only you could see that he would spend the rest of his life apologizing for the pain he caused you if you would let him close enough to do so. He just had to get you to understand how sorry he was.

Rhysand could see that the situation was escalating on your part and that Azriel needed a minute to think of how to approach you so he tried to step in and help. “Y/n I know that you are upset with Azriel, but I think you need to step back from the situation and take a moment to calm down.” Rhysand may be a high lord but the pure hostility coming from you could rival his own power and deep down he knew he made a mistake interjecting.

“I need to calm down Rhysand? That's hilarious coming from you, I mean I do remember you being willing to kill Tamlin with your own bare hands for what he did to feyre. But I need to calm down? Alright.” Turning back around to deal with Azriel you found him on his knees before you. “Y/n I know that I fucked up. I know that I should have realized sooner that you had feelings for me because that is my job as spymaster to be aware of the slightest things and I am sorry that I failed to see that, but you have to understand, if I had known about the bond I would have never even looked in Elains direction. I know I can’t control who's around you but you have to understand I just want to keep you safe. And I know that Elain and I aren’t innocent but I will spend the rest of eternity making it up to you, you just have to let me.”

For a second all you could do is stare down at Azriel and feel his sorrow through the bond. And for a second you wanted to forgive him but deep down you knew that this moment would be something you could never let go, never get past. You knew that Azirel could spend the next thousand years apologizing but some part of you would never be able to fully trust him. And the realization broke your heart but you knew you also owed it to yourself to never be treated this way no matter the circumstance. A heartbeat later you knew the choice you had to make.

“Azriel, get up.” He had never heard your voice so dejected before and he knew something was wrong. “ I do not care that you were with Elain. Did it make me happy? No. but you were also with her before I knew about the bond so I guess it doesn’t matter but what does matter is that up until that point I had spent hundreds of years showing you my love with no acknowledgement ever but suddenly this “wholesome” human girl appeared ,who was afraid of fae mind you, and you were infatuated with her as if she hung the moon and the stars. What I do care about is that if it weren’t for the bond we share you would have never considered picking me instead of her, would have never looked my way. I mean hell you forgot me on the battlefield because Elain needed you.”

The inner circle watched as you took a frustrated breath in while trying to collect your emotions and they held their breaths also while waiting for you to say something else. “I have wanted a mate for as long as I knew about their existence and as much as I want to have this with you Azriel I can’t. There will always be a piece of me that can’t let this go. You could spend forever apologizing but I will never be able to fully accept it, and neither of us deserve that. I deserve to never be anything but the only choice and you deserve to be with someone who doesn’t have an ounce of resentment in their heart towards you. So no, I can’t do this.”

“Why can’t you see that I am picking you! I want you! I want this bond, I want this relationship! If this is what you want and it's what I want, why can’t we make this work? I would rather have you and you be mad at me for the pain I’ve caused you then to not have you at all. I will grovel at your feet until you see that I want this, if that's what I have to. I will do anything. Please…please just let's at least try.” Azirel had never felt so many conflicting emotions at once. Anger, heartbreak, nerves. You name it he's experiencing it waiting for your response.

“I’m…. I am so sorry Azriel. I can’t. At least not right now. I need time to process and to heal. I need time away from you and this and the whole situation. I need to find the version of me that is not the one who would do anything for an ounce of your attention. I am not saying no for forever but for now I am and for however long else I need. I won’t do anything to the bond but please don’t send me your emotions. I need to sort mine out without trying to figure out yours also. I do not know how long it will take but maybe someday in the future we can try again.”

With the permission from Thesan, Kolos winnowed to the river house to make sure you were ok and to bring you back from the night court. What he wasn’t expecting to find was Azriel on his knees before pleading for your forgiveness. He watched from afar as you explained why the mating bond couldn’t be. He disregarded Azriels form as you turned away from him and walked towards himself. Kolos wasn’t sure how you knew he was there considering you never once looked away from Azriel until you walked away but without any words needed he took your hand and winnowed away back to the dawn court to begin your healing.

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