#the website is technically free but sometimes it's not
Note
hey where are u watching doyoungs drama? is it free👀and is there english subtitles?
I'm still not watching!! just saw snippets on Twitter hehe but I'll watch on viki.com first episode should come out tomorrow 15/07
#the website is technically free but sometimes it's not#for example jaehyun's drama has 2 free episodes and the rest with subscription#but I'll wait for all doyoung episodes to come out too#sign for a free trial#binge both#and done ahahahhahah#I still want to watch on viki to support them bc it's an official website#all yes there's English and many other languages subs#sam answers
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Simblr.cc
I made a website!
Now you've probably seen the attempt before, people getting mad at tumblr and then making a 'Simblr' (Tumblr clone). Though, despite tumblr being sometimes a bit frustrating because of their changes, that's not why this site came to be...
I wanted a place where Storytellers, Creators, and just generic sim players can all be together and get the exposure and fun that they deserve.
Not only that, but also for a place where the TSM community and TS1 can belong somewhere too without the use of a forum.
And eventually, I hope we can make it the home for Life by you and Paralives when that comes out :)
Plus, it's also NSFW friendly! While the site is initially PG-13, we've got tags and profile settings that allow you to browse NSFW items as well.
Simblr.cc:
Discord:
What can I find on Simblr.cc exactly?
Anything for all sims games, really! TS1, TS2, TS3, TS4 and TSM
Practically anything you technically can find on Tumblr and really other sim websites. We've got...
Mods
I've specifically made filters for different games, and their needs in mind. For example, for TS2 there are so many awesome game fixes out there and clean templates, that you'll be able to navigate and find this easily.
Not only that, items can also be put in multiple categories! Especially great if you've uploaded a set!
You can also find Testers wanted only mods here if you feel like helping out fellow simmers with testing!
NOTE:
Mods do go through a "queue", but not in the same way as you may have experienced on MTS or TSR. I merely check if it's flagged as NSFW correctly, and then it's good to go! :) So the waiting time will be much less!
See TOU: Click me!
Eventually, I may see if I can get a bypass system in place, but that really depends on if NSFW isn't too confusing.
Work In Progress
To show off your work to others! Even if it's project #94882 that may never get released, any WIPS are fine!
Stories
It's really difficult to find new Sim stories or Legacies on Tumblr, let alone for these writers to get people to read their awesome stories! Hopefully this should make the process much easier now!
Also! You got any comic or "movie/cinematic" like stories? No problem! Just check the "carousel only" option, so no description needed!
Feed
... and for the Simblrs here, a feed to see all the people you follow, their content (stories, WIPs, mods and general posts)! Or, simply check out sitewide, or even game-related, what people have been posting!
Customizable profile pages
Just like tumblr, you can make your own profile page! With it's own colours and a pre-made theme. (if you need a different profile page, though, Let us know on the discord)
Want a peek? Here you go:
What about moderation?
While there's a report system in place, and the items in the queue are checked for NSFW, but users could still turn their non-NSFW to a NSFW, items may be stolen. So do report these as that will never be condoned!
Additionally, all comments you get on your mods, story, etc. Those are primarily moderated by you. You can delete them, you can turn comments off even if you'd like. If things really go wrong, you can always ask an admin.
Got any ideas? Feel free to share!
Since I really wanted it to be a website we all create together in some degree, if you have any features you're missing or would like to see, feel free to share on the discord!
Where are the Advertisements?
If you're currently not seeing them as of reading the post, that's because that's still being set up. This is merely to cover the cost of the website! Though, I promise you I won't bombard the site with ads, as that's just annoying.
#The sims 1#the sims 2#the sims 3#the sims medieval#the sims 4#sims 2#sims 3#sims 4#sims medieval#ts1#ts2#ts3#ts4#tsm#sims 1#simblr.cc#simblr
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[ID: My hand, in close-up, holding what appears to be a small black puck with a bee printed on it; it is a popsocket, one of those doodads that sticks to your phone and makes it easier to hold them one-handed.]
I just...I just wanted a popsocket.
When I dropped my phone last month, it was replaced for free but with a slightly newer model, which required replacing the phone case as well. Technically you can transfer popsockets, but my old one was a cheap knockoff I got free from a vendor and I thought, I'll replace it with something nicer. There was a whole fiasco with the first one I bought and immediately broke, so I just stuck the knockoff back on my new case so I'd at least have something while traveling (I did put a fun sticker on it over the worn-off vendor logo).
Got home, thought okay, I'll buy a second new popsocket now and I will not break this one. Got on the website, found the clearance page, saw a popsocket with a lil yellow bee on it, perfect.
Then it arrived and...
[ID: The popsocket appears...to have opened...to reveal a tiny compartment on the inside. Lid sure did just pop open. There's a bee printed on the inside, as well.]
When I looked at the packaging I realized I had not bought a normal popsocket on sale. I'd bought a promotional Burt's Bees Lip Balm popsocket. It came with a little tub of lip balm that goes into the tray that then snaps shut.
I just want a normal popsocket, but at this point, well, it's not that much bigger than a normal one and I do sometimes need to hide small secrets about my person. And it was cheaper than a normal popsocket, so I got a bargain. Unasked-for, but still.
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SoC Comic Adaptation and General FAQ
General
Who are you?
Hi, I'm Claire (she/they)! I'm currently studying to become a professional comic creator. I love drawing fashion, expressive characters, and anti-hero action.
Where else can I find your work?
You can find all my work on my website! I'm also on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Tiktok (sometimes...). You can find my fan art under the handle jccatstudios, and my original art under jcscottart (only on Instagram and Twitter).
How can I support your work?
Besides supporting my work through your lovely comments and reblogs, you can help monetarily support me on Ko-Fi. Your support helps fund my college education.
Six of Crows: A Comic Adaptation
Why are you doing this?
Ever since I read the duology, I always thought it would make a great graphic novel series. When my professor encouraged me to start a webcomic, I took the opportunity to make the comic I imagined into reality. I want to see the whole series illustrated through comics one day. If I got the chance to make the official adaptation, that would be one of my biggest dream projects. I'm also using this project as an opportunity to improve my skills before I graduate.
Will you post it on (insert webcomic platform)?
Probably not. Most online comic platforms are meant for scroll format, and I'm making a traditional format comic. Plus, I post on so many sites already, so I think adding another would take too much time out of actually creating the comic.
Will you draw the whole book/series?
I wish I could! Since I'm not doing this full-time or professionally, that's quite unlikely. It would take years to complete it full-time, who knows how long as a hobby. I'd love to add a six-volume SoC graphic novel series to my shelf, but that of course can't be done without some serious backing. I'm currently working on adapting Chapter 3.
Where's Chapter 1: Joost?
I never drew it! I started with Chapter 2: Inej because I wanted to draw the main characters first. The first chapter of the comic is the second chapter of the book. I name the comic chapters after the book chapters just to make it clear which part of the book they correspond to.
Can I repost your art, use your art for layouts/edits, etc?
Yes, you may with visible credit. If you use it for your profile layout, put my handle in your bio. If you're reposting it or using my art for edits/collages, put my handle in the description. As long as it's for personal use, you can use my art. Do not sell copies of my art, use it in merch, or use it for any sort of monetary gain. Do not use my art for prompting or generating images.
Can I use your character designs and headcanons in fanart, fanfic, etc?
Absolutely! Please tag me if you do. I don't need credit since I didn't create any of these characters, but I definitely want to see what you create. :D
How do you make the comic?
The comic is made with mostly traditional methods with some digital editing. I pencil and ink all of the pages on bristol board. I mainly use the G-pen nib for characters and technical pens for the backgrounds. Once I scan the pages, I do light adjustments to the line art and correct any mistakes. The gray tones come from a single sheet of ink wash adjusted to be lighter or darker. The bubbles and lettering are all digital.
If anything else comes up, I'll add it here! Feel free to send me an ask if you have a question that isn't on this post.
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I’ve been OBSESSED with the idea of trent having a football podcast post canon so here’s what I came up with:
trent’s a guest at a friend’s podcast to promote his book and he has fun and gets him thinking about the future
he writes pieces for some online websites and writes his own stuff for the podcast. It's something he really enjoys and allows him to have more time with his daughter
Ted never leaves for Kansas obvs (I mean, he does for the summer as he always did, but then comes back with Henry and Michelle -who broke up with the doctor guy)
Tedependent have started secretly seeing each other and don’t feel ready to go public yet. While dealing with the press for his book, Trent is working on the idea of the podcast and whenever he has some free time he writes down ideas on topics and starts writing the script for the first episode.
Ted offers to be his first guest but Trent declines and says he wants to do this on his own and that maybe in the future he will have Ted on.
the podcast is a big hit and they start doing merch (Keeley’s idea), live recorded events (interviews mostly) and what not
trent is mostly interested in telling stories rather than analysing tactics (although he does sometime do a deep dive in more technical topics)
I also came up with a mock fake website because I was bored (putting it under the cut cause it’s long)
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hi there, i'm trying to get into the coding community so to speak. what sites can i join to discuss/do coding related stuff? I know about stack overflow, github and leetcode but i'm sure there are more, do you have any advice on which spaces are worth joining? thanks!
Communities To Join For Coding/Programming
Yeah I can help! In terms of "which spaces are worth joining" would depend on you. What I see as a place worth joining is a place where I can teach others - I like giving knowledge back on what I learnt so some places that I listed don't work well for me to do that and some others I prefer the most like the discord servers I'll mention. So, you'll have to skim through these and see if they're something you like!
Anyhoo, here are some places I found:
Reddit: There are many subreddits dedicated to coding, such as r/learnprogramming, r/coding, and r/programming. You can also find subreddits dedicated to specific programming languages or technologies so you can get specific help or provide the help to those languages etc.
Codecademy Forum: They have a forum and a discord server where you can talk about the courses and get buddies to do projects together who are at the same level as you!
FreeCodeCamp Forum: This website offers free coding lessons and projects, and also has a community forum where you can ask for help and connect with other learners. I met 2 developers from there who helped me a lot.
Dev.to and Medium: Both a community where developers come to share their knowledge and experiences through blog posts and discussions. Developers sometimes gain good writing experience by writing these posts (great way to move towards being a technical writer). I've made a Dev.to account and I'm slowly adding my programming posts from here to there and I want to start using Medium too 🤔
Discord: There are many Discord servers dedicated to coding, where you can join discussions and get help with coding problems. I made a whole post with a list of discord servers I'm part of and would recommend it if you want to get into it! I made lots of developer friends from the discord servers. Intimidating at first but slowing you'll like it I think! I'm mostly there to help people with HTML and CSS problems and you can help people the same with whatever. you're strong in!
In the end, the websites and communities you choose to join will depend on your interests and goals. I recommend exploring a few different options and finding the ones that work best for you - I did that and I preferred the discord servers over the subreddits 😅
Good luck with your coding journey! 😸👍🏾💗
#my asks#coding#programming#studying#codeblr#progblr#studyblr#reddit#Codecademy#freecodecamp#dev.to#comp sci#computer science#discord#discord servers#programmer
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fun fact: officially, ci flower isn't the same character/entity as v4flower- and this has been confirmed by her companies several times now. on her official voisona character page you can find this little blurb...
...that says she's a new flower from a parallel world! so technically flower, but also ...not.
(which really isn't much of a surprise- the majority of cevios are representatives/dopplegangers of pre-existing fictional characters or virtual likenesses. for a cevio, I think ci flower might be the first to be based specifically on a vocaloid, rather than being a direct extension/continuation ala yukari and ia.)
the "what if" theme is assumedly why her design has always looked so different from vflower since the start (though I would argue that she has a lot of shared design motifs on close inspection, its just leans more to flower's V3 and talk designs than her V4). its also why she has a planetary motif/logo.
this is from an interview with her devs, source here. (its an entirely free article but it is in japanese. that last sentence should say "previous vflower designs", deepL botched that part, but the rest is accurate)
ci flower gets a lot of disdain for not being "vflower enough" but that's kinda... her entire point. she's an "au" flower so she is intended to be different. while you can intepret her however you like (use her as vflower continued or her sister or her reincarnation or her clone or whatever you want for your art lol) I feel like the general lack of understanding towards her concept/theme is why most people don't even bother to give her design, let alone her voice, a chance. vflower is still being sold and is extremely popular among producers (I do not forsee her going the way of piko anytime soon). even ci flower's official twitter has stated that she wants them both to be loved, including the differences!
its important to note that ci flower is being handled by a different company all-together, incs toenter (the same agency that supercell and honeyworks are under! incs also helped out with miku fes'24 spring and seemingly are business partners with crypton).
as for vflower's company, gynoid's current state is ??? ...what we know about them lately in regards to flower is that they apparently restructured their entire company and also fired the original development team behind her and the meikas. then, sometime after, they licensed out ci flower's rights to incs (who until this point, had never been publicly involved with ci flower's release, gynoid even wiped all their old articles about her development from their website). incs then released her... three years from initial annoucement.
I don't think its entirely unreasonable to believe that the reason ci flower is a "spin-off" is because of all the development hell her release went through. 🫠
...anyways, as a treat for reading this far, have this:
#meow.txt#ci flower#cevio#vflower#vocal synth#updated this with more info because this still gets notes :>#enough ci flower discourse... its been years im dying#her development history is fascinating to me because yukari and ia did not have this many problems as far as im aware. just ci flower lol
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Spoilers to the current SMG4 arc (and possibly WOTFI 2023???) down below
Okay idk if this actually counts as a theory but I just wanna ramble about it
So, since the newest arc video came out (Once Upon a SMG4), I noticed something in the community tab of SMG4's channel
It mentions that Mario Mysteries, the (technical) first Puzzlevision arc video wasn't rated well on the Puzzlevision website
As you can see, Mario Mysteries on the Puzzlevision website got 3 and a half stars on it. (It's also worth noting that Mr. Puzzles doesn't have his standard smile anymore, now having more... Nervous and/or disappointed look)
Now, my theory is basically that, depending on the rating on the next arc episodes will depend on what happens in the story. Why do I say this? Well, mainly cause of two things.
First is the end of WOTFI 2023, which is where we actually get to see what Mr. Puzzles looks like.
He mentions, as seen from above, that "we" should do something like this, WOTFI, again sometime. WOTFI 2023 let the audience decide what SMG4 and SMG3 should do. What do the end of Mario Mysteries and Once Upon a SMG4 encourage the audience to do at the end of the episodes? Rate the videos on the Puzzlevision website!
Second, the community tabs. Ever since "NO TV MAKES MARIO NO OKIE DOKIE", when not promoting new episodes, it tells the audience/viewers to go on the Puzzlevision website and rate the episodes, as I mentioned before. Though currently only 3 or 4 times, Mr. Puzzles (presumably) seems pretty persistent on wanting a good rating on the episodes, especially after the not so good review on Mario Mysteries.
But hey, that's just my theory. (If this counts as one) You are all free to point out stuff I may have missed or put your own input
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UNHEARD VOICE - Evaluating five years of pro-Western covert influence operations
Stanford University Cyber Policy Center | Graphika Internet Observatory
In July and August 2022, Twitter and Meta removed two overlapping sets of accounts for violating their platforms’ terms of service. Twitter said the accounts fell foul of its policies on “platform manipulation and spam,” while Meta said the assets on its platforms engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” After taking down the assets, both platforms provided portions of the activity to Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) for further analysis.
Our joint investigation found an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms that used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia. The platforms’ datasets appear to cover a series of covert campaigns over a period of almost five years rather than one homogeneous operation.
These campaigns consistently advanced narratives promoting the interests of the United States and its allies while opposing countries including Russia, China, and Iran. The accounts heavily criticized Russia in particular for the deaths of innocent civilians and other atrocities its soldiers committed in pursuit of the Kremlin’s “imperial ambitions” following its invasion of Ukraine in February this year. To promote this and other narratives, the accounts sometimes shared news articles from U.S. government-funded media outlets, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and links to websites sponsored by the U.S. military. A portion of the activity also promoted anti-extremism messaging.
As with previous disclosures, Twitter and Meta did not share the technical details of their investigations. Additionally, neither company has publicly attributed the activity to any entity or organization: Twitter listed the activity’s “presumptive countries of origin” as the U.S. and Great Britain, while Meta said the “country of origin” was the U.S. The findings in this report are based on our own open-source investigation and analysis of the two datasets shared by the platforms
The Twitter dataset provided to Graphika and SIO covered 299,566 tweets by 146 accounts between March 2012 and February 2022.1 These accounts divide into two behaviorally distinct activity sets. The first was linked to an overt U.S. government messaging campaign called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, which has been extensively documented in academic studies, media reports, and federal contracting records. The second comprises a series of covert campaigns of unclear origin. These covert campaigns were also represented in the Meta dataset of 39 Facebook profiles, 16 pages, two groups, and 26 Instagram accounts active from 2017 to July 2022. [...]
[Community network map of covert Twitter asset followers. Color represents major community groupings. Distance reflects network proximity, with accounts appearing close to those they follow and that follow them.]
We believe this activity represents the most extensive case of covert pro-Western IO on social media to be reviewed and analyzed by open-source researchers to date. With few exceptions, the study of modern IO has overwhelmingly focused on activity linked to authoritarian regimes in countries such as Russia, China, and Iran, with recent growth in research on the integral role played by private entities. This report illustrates the wider range of actors engaged in active operations to influence online audiences. [...] The assets identified by Twitter and Meta created fake personas with GAN-generated faces, posed as independent media outlets, leveraged memes and short-form videos, attempted to start hashtag campaigns, and launched online petitions: all tactics observed in past operations by other actors. [...]
The assets identified by Twitter and Meta created fake personas with GAN-generated faces, posed as independent media outlets, leveraged memes and short-form videos, attempted to start hashtag campaigns, and launched online petitions: all tactics observed in past operations by other actors. [...]
Although we identified a Central Asia-focused campaign based on a review of the assets’ activity, the map lacks a Central Asia community. The community’s absence is likely due to the reportedly limited use of Twitter in Central Asian countries, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, where Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram are considerably more popular. Accordingly, Twitter assets in the Central Asia group generated significantly less engagement than their counterparts on Facebook and Instagram. [...]
Accounts with a significant follower footprint showed a clear association with a specific national or regional group in the map. [...]
Iran: Three of the groupings, together comprising nearly half of the map (45.4%), are centered on Iran. The largest of these groups contains twelve clusters of politically focused accounts strongly supportive of the Iranian government. Another group of roughly equal size contains nine clusters of politically focused accounts strongly opposed to the government. A third group contains seven clusters comprising mostly personal accounts with nondescript characteristics but also accounts focused on writing and other cultural topics. This third group is generally critical of the Iranian regime to the extent that the accounts discuss politics. [...]
Arabic-speaking Middle East: Two of the groupings, comprising 20.6% of the map, each contain Arabic-language communities associated with a specific country: Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The Iraq group (15.5% of the map) contains ten clusters of accounts variously focused on personal life, social activism, government, and opposition politics. The Saudi group (5.1% of the map) contains four clusters of accounts. These clusters focused mainly on personal life and entertainment media, but one also followed political and government leaders.[...]
International: This grouping (2.9% of the map) contains two clusters. The first is made up of loosely connected, mainly personal accounts from across the MENA region. Accounts in this cluster follow a number of accounts that are now suspended or no longer exist. The second cluster comprises better-connected accounts that follow a range of international media and social influencers and are associated with a range of international locations [...]
After assigning each of the covert assets a label, we were able to visualize activity and posting patterns for each group. This provided an overview of each campaign and the set as a whole. Figure 2 is based on data provided by Twitter and Meta and shows posting volumes for each group over time. Tweets are represented in light blue, Facebook page posts in dark blue, and Instagram posts in purple. The scale of the y-axis varies by group. There are three key takeaways visible in the data [...]
[Posting volume by group. Tweets are represented in light blue, Facebook page posts in dark blue, and Instagram posts in purple]
Activity in the Afghanistan group peaked during periods of strategic importance for the U.S., including the months prior to and following the signing of the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan (U.S.–Taliban Deal) in February 2020 and the months leading up to the completed U.S. departure from Afghanistan in August 2021. • The Central Asia group was the most active campaign, with posting/tweeting volumes peaking at almost 200 a day in the months leading up to and immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February this year. [...]
Three of the groups also showed clear signs of automated or highly coordinated posting activity. According to data provided by Twitter and Meta, assets in the Afghanistan and Central Asia groups typically posted at roughly 15-minute or 30-minute intervals in any given hour. Furthermore, accounts in the Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Middle East groups almost exclusively posted in the first second of any given minute. [...]
The Central Asia group consisted of 12 Twitter accounts, 10 Facebook pages, 15 Facebook profiles, and 10 Instagram accounts. We also found connected activity on Telegram, YouTube, and Russian social media platforms VKontakte (VK) and Odnoklassniki. All the accounts were created between June 2020 and March 2022. As with other groups we analyzed, the assets have been suspended on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and largely suspended on YouTube. However, accounts in the Central Asia group remain active on Telegram, VK, and Odnoklassniki. Ten assets in the group posed as media outlets focused on Central Asia. The operation’s segment on Odnoklassniki involved using almost certainly inauthentic personas to spread content to Central Asian Odnoklassniki groups. [...]
The operation targeted Russian-speaking Central Asian audiences and focused on praising American aid to Central Asia and criticizing Russia, particularly its foreign policy. Two assets concentrated on China and the treatment of Chinese Muslim minorities, particularly the Uighurs in Xinjiang province. The assets also frequently shared content about growing cooperation between Central Asian countries. Content was almost exclusively in Russian, except for a small number of tweets written in Central Asian languages, such as Kazakh and Kyrgyz. [...]
two of the sham media outlets in the group produced two viral videos that received hundreds of thousands of views on Facebook (Figure 7 on the following page). The first video was about Kyrgyzstan’s reported ban on Russian war symbols, and the second was a non-political TV news excerpt about an Uzbek farmer growing fruits in the desert. [...]
The Central Asia-focused campaign first created assets on Instagram, Telegram, Twitter, and Odnoklassniki in 2020, before later setting up accounts on Facebook and VK in 2021. According to domain registration records, a website for the sham media outlet Intergazeta was created in March 2021.
Assets still active on Odnoklassniki and VK provide insights into how this cross- platform campaign operated. Fake personas created by the actors were typically linked to one of 10 sham media outlets, which posed as independent news entities covering events in Central Asia. These fake personas posed as individuals living in Europe and Central Asia, were listed as administrators for the sham media outlets, and posted content from the campaign to different social media groups. On Odnoklassniki, for example, the personas regularly posted to groups including Fighters of Kyrgyzstan [БОЙЦЫ КЫРГЫЗСТАНА] and Central Asia News [Новости Central Asia].
On Facebook, a page for the sham media outlet Vostochnaya Pravda claimed to focus on debunking myths and sharing “absolute facts” about Central Asia (Figure 8 on the next page). Vostochnaya Pravda and other assets in the campaign typically posted long text blocks about local news events and geopolitics alongside an illustrative picture. [...]
Facebook transparency data also showed the location for the administrators of four of the pages to be France, despite Meta saying the network originated in the U.S.
Some of the “news” pages, such as Stengazeta, used engagement-building techniques, including openly calling for interactions from their readers on what they had just read. We witnessed similar behavior from the only active Facebook profile posting original content. Attempts to grow a follower base were evident on Twitter, where the assets repeatedly tweeted at real users, including pro-Ukraine and pro-Russia accounts, such as the self-proclaimed Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Donetsk People’s Republic (@MID_DNR).
We believe the Facebook pages in the group likely acquired followers inauthentically in an attempt to look like real and organic entities, possibly by purchasing fake followers. According to CrowdTangle data, the pages quickly gained up to several thousand followers in their first few weeks. Subsequently, the pages experienced net losses in followers between June and August 2021, possibly as Facebook deleted the accounts of their fake followers (Figure 9 on the following page). The pages’ likes experienced the same phenomenon.
At least one of the group’s personas featured a doctored profile picture using a photo of Puerto Rican actor Valeria Menendez (Figure 10 on the next page). We suspect that at least two other fake users in the group used similar techniques, but we could not identify the original photos. Additionally, at least one cross-platform persona used a picture stolen from a dating website, and others often displayed pictures of Paris and its monuments, echoing the pages’ listed administrator locations. At least one asset on Odnoklassniki also had its location set to Paris.
[One persona in the Central Asia campaign used a doctored picture (left) of actor Valeria Menendez (right) as its profile picture. The asset that used this image was listed as the contact for Intergazeta’s VK page.]
The sham media outlet Intergazeta repeatedly copied news material with and without credit from reputable Western and pro-Western sources in Russian, such as Meduza.io and the BBC Russian Service. The sham outlet often made minor changes to the copied texts in a likely effort to pass them off as original content. Intergazeta also produced articles in Russian compiled from sections of different English-language sources. [...]
Intergazeta was not the only asset to translate content from English sources. Facebook pages in the group sometimes posted Russian translations of press releases from the websites of the U.S. embassies in Central Asia. These posts focused on U.S. financial and material support to Central Asian countries. The posts also copied or translated content from U.S.-funded entities, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the independent Kazakh news outlet informburo.kz. [...]
Assets in the Central Asia group showed clear and repeated signs of coordinated behavior: they posted simultaneously, used the same images, and recycled content over time across accounts.
At times, accounts in the group appear to have made an effort to mask this coordination. For example, when sharing identical content, assets would leave periods of hours or days between posts. The same images were also shared with slightly modified captions or headlines (Figure 12). At least half of the assets interspersed their posts with content promoting the cultures and natural beauty of Central Asia, possibly in an attempt to appear authentic and obscure their politically motivated activity. [...]
the coordination was especially clear when assets in the group posted about U.S.-related news or used translated content from official American sources, such as U.S. embassies in Central Asia. In one example, the Vostochnaya Pravda Facebook page posted a word-for-word Russian translation of an English- language news bulletin from the U.S. embassy in Tajikistan (Figure 13 on the next page). The post included a link to a Radio Liberty article on the topic, an excerpt of which was then shared by multiple other assets in the group.
The assets also sourced content from media outlets linked to the U.S. military, particularly Caravanserai (central.asia-news[.]com). This outlet is one of three that previously operated as Central News Online (centralasiaonline[.]com), which named the U.S. Central Command as its sponsor and, before 2016, was part of the U.S. government’s Trans-Regional Web Initiative mentioned at the beginning of this report.
Multiple Facebook pages in the campaign shared screenshots from central.asia-news[.]com, and the Linktree of sham media outlet Stengazeta directed visitors exclusively to the website, except for one link to an Avaaz petition demanding the Kazakh government ban Russian TV channels [...]
Around half of the assets posing as media entities, such as Stengazeta and Fakt Tobe, used batches of hashtags under their posts, likely in an attempt to reach broader audiences. The hashtags often corresponded to the names of Central Asian countries in Russian and other languages, such as #казахстан [Kazakhstan in Russian], #қазақстан [Kazakhstan in Kazakh], and #qazaqstan [romanized version of қазақстан]. Assets repeatedly used hashtags related to the topics of their social media posts but also generic Russian-language hashtags such as #интересно [interesting]. Occasionally, the promoted hashtags were unrelated to the topic of the post. This was especially true for cultural content, which sometimes featured unrelated hashtags about the war in Ukraine. [...]
At least four of the sham media outlets also made apparent attempts to launch hashtag campaigns related to the war in Ukraine. For example, posts about the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Puls Vostoka featured the hashtag #ЦАзаУкраину [Central Asia for Ukraine], Stengazeta promoted #СегодняУкраинаЗавтраЦA [Today Ukraine tomorrow Central Asia], and Shestigrannik promoted #украинаЦАстобой [Ukraine, Central Asia is with you] [...]
[Posts from Facebook pages Puls Vostoka (left) and Stengazeta (right) used the hashtags #ЦАзаУкраину [Central Asia for Ukraine] and #СегодняУкраинаЗавтраЦA [Today Ukraine Tomorrow Central Asia].]
The assets pushed at least four petitions on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. One called for Kazakhstan to leave the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). A second demanded that Kyrgyzstan curb Chinese influence in the country. The last two called on the Kazakh government to ban Russian TV channels. Three of these petitions were launched on the U.S. non-profit petition platform Avaaz, and one was posted on the Kazakh website Alash. Four separate articles from Radio Liberty’s Kazakh website, Azzatyq, shared one of the petitions. While we could not determine whether the operation created the petitions, CrowdTangle data shows that assets were often the first to share the links on Facebook
The Central Asia group focused on a range of topics: U.S. diplomatic and humanitarian efforts in the region, Russia’s alleged malign influence, Russian military interventions in the Middle East and Africa, and Chinese “imperialism” and treatment of Muslim minorities. Starting in February this year, assets that previously posted about Russian military activities in the Middle East and Africa pivoted towards the war in Ukraine, presenting the conflict as a threat to people in Central Asia.
Assets in the group heavily promoted narratives supportive of the U.S. on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram. These posts primarily focused on U.S. support for Central Asian countries and their people, presenting Washington as a reliable economic partner that would curb the region’s dependence on Russia. Other posts argued that the U.S. was the main guarantor of Central Asia’s sovereignty against Russia, frequently citing the war in Ukraine as evidence of the Kremlin’s “imperial” ambitions. Interestingly, the assets also promoted U.S. humanitarian efforts, mentioning the United States Agency for International Development 94 times on Twitter and 384 times on Facebook in the respective datasets.
Assets in the group consistently portrayed Russia as a threat to Central Asian countries. A recurring narrative claimed that Russia is abusing Russian-Central Asian partnerships, namely the CSTO and, to a lesser extent, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), to extract one-sided benefits (Figure 18). Posts frequently described the CSTO as a hazardous tool that Russia could use to circumvent Western sanctions and drag Central Asian countries into its war against Ukraine. The assets also said Central Asian countries must leave these organizations if they wish to retake their full sovereignty from Russia. As an alternative, the assets advocated for creating exclusively Central Asian partnerships. Accounts in the group celebrated steps taken by Central Asian governments to move away from Russia, such as Kazakh President Kassym- Jomart Tokayev’s decision to withdraw from the CIS agreement on the Interstate Monetary Committee or efforts to reinforce local languages and cultural identities.
Other posts criticized Russia’s use of propaganda to spread anti-West and pro- Russia narratives in Central Asia, depicting Russia as a nefarious actor working to undermine independent democracies [Editor's Note: haha, haha]. In January 2022, for example, the accounts covered mass protests that followed a sudden increase in fuel prices in Kazakhstan, but mainly through the lens of debunking Russian allegations of “foreign interference.” Some of the group’s media outlets also claimed that Russia sent Wagner Group mercenaries to seize Almaty airport and that Russia was using claims of foreign interference as a pretext to send Russian troops as CSTO peacekeepers to occupy Kazakhstan.
The assets also highlighted the repression and abuse of Central Asian migrants in Russia. Several posts covered the pressured, sometimes forced enrollment of Central Asian migrants into the Russian army in exchange for promises of Russian citizenship. This narrative overlapped with posts about the high casualty rate for ethnic minorities fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
Anti-Russia narratives advanced by the campaign frequently cited Russia’s “imperialist wars” in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa. The most recent focus of the group was on Ukraine, but assets previously posted about the activities of military contractors working for Russia’s Wagner Group in Africa and Moscow’s military intervention in Syria.
The assets posted about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through the lens of what it would mean for people in Central Asia. These posts often warned of Russia’s imperialist ambitions toward the former Soviet states and said the invasion of Ukraine showed what the Kremlin was capable of doing to its neighboring countries. Other posts outlined the direct impact of the war on Central Asian countries, such as food shortages, and said all Central Asian nations should reconsider their relations with Russia in light of its illegal invasion [...]
More broadly, assets in the group uniformly supported Ukraine, which they said was a country trying to free itself from Russia’s influence. Shortly after the invasion began in February, accounts promoted pro-Ukrainian protests in Central Asian countries. Later posts reported on evidence of atrocities committed by Russian troops and Russia’s block on Ukrainian grain exports.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, assets in the group frequently discussed Russian actions in Africa and the Middle East. The pages criticized Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, in particular, for his role in orchestrating state-backed covert influence operations and deploying Russian military contractors to countries including Syria, Mali, and the Central African Republic (Figure 21 on the next page). Notably, the Central Asia group mentioned “Вагнер” [Wagner] 193 times on Twitter and 312 times on Facebook.
The Central Asia group also criticized Russia’s relationship with the Taliban after the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan in 2021. For example, the Shestigrannik Facebook page repeatedly accused Russia and China of ignoring the Taliban’s ethnic cleansing of Afghan minorities and mistreatment of women (Figure 22 on the following page). Many of the group’s sham media outlets attacked Russia for disregarding the threat that the Taliban and Islamist terrorism represent to Central Asia, especially Tajikistan. According to several assets, Russia did not criticize the Taliban in the hope of gaining access to Afghanistan’s natural resources and has encouraged violence in the region by increasing the sale of weapons to Central Asia.
Before the war in Ukraine, many pages focused on Russia’s military actions in Syria. Assets denounced the Russian government’s support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian airstrikes that have killed and injured thousands of civilians in Syria since 2015 (Figure 23). Facebook and Instagram accounts also noted that Russia impeded humanitarian aid deliveries to Syrians by blocking decisions at the U.N., and promoted the work of U.S. humanitarian aid and support programs for Syrian refugees. The topic was one of the most covered across the group, as assets mentioned “Сирия” (Syria) over 600 times on Twitter and over 1,500 times on Facebook.
Lastly, the assets posted about Russian propaganda related to the war in Syria and analyzed the techniques used by Russian media to “twist narratives” around the war. At the same time, the group shared content celebrating U.S. successes in its fight against the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda in the Middle East, especially in Syria.
A small cluster of assets within the Central Asia group focused almost exclusively on China. These accounts—a fake persona and sham media outlet—mainly focused on the genocide of Uighurs and Muslim minorities in “re-education” camps in Xinjiang. Posts described alleged organ trafficking, forced labor, sexual crimes against Muslim women, and suspicious disappearances of ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang. The assets also posted about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) poor treatment of women in the country and often framed these stories around news about domestic violence
Other assets in the group also posted about China but asserted that Chinese authoritarianism and financial imperialism threatened Central Asia and other regions of the world. The assets frequently referred to China’s cooperation with Russia, especially on military issues, and said Beijing should be held responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because the CCP had secretly supplied the Kremlin with weapons. The group rebuked China for buying stolen Ukrainian grain from Russia and predicted that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine would precipitate a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. [...]
This section discusses the 21 Twitter accounts, two Facebook pages, five Facebook profiles, and six Instagram accounts that formed the covert campaign focused on Iranian audiences. These assets had names in Persian, and those that posted content mainly did so in Persian and about Iran. The Twitter accounts posted primarily from November 2020 through March 2022, and the Facebook pages and Instagram accounts posted primarily from May 2021 through June 2022. There were no visible posts for the Facebook profiles.
Several of the Twitter accounts were tied to the Facebook and Instagram accounts For example, they shared similar usernames. However, the Twitter accounts exhibited a wider range of activity and narratives that did not appear in the data shared by Meta, including content promoting hardliner narratives that advocated for anti-reformist and hawkish policies in Iran. We additionally found linked activity on YouTube, Balatarin, and Telegram. The accounts in this cluster frequently claimed to be Iranians and often Iranian women. Accounts listed professions such as “teacher” and “political analyst.” There were also two front media outlets that claimed to provide independent news.
Accounts in the Iran group employed many of the same IO tactics we saw from the other groups, though with a few innovations. These assets included accounts claiming to be independent media outlets, shared U.S.-funded Persian-language media, had a low-engagement cross-platform presence, and showed low-effort spammy follow-back activity.
Several suspended accounts were linked to two sham media outlets operating in Persian: Fahim News (tagline: “Accurate news and information”) and the more developed Dariche News, which claimed to be an independent media outlet. The about page of Dariche News’ website says it is “an independent website and unaffiliated with any group or organization.” It goes on to claim to have a commitment to providing “uncensored and unbiased news.”
While some Dariche News content appeared to be original to the outlet, many of their articles were explicit reposts from U.S.-funded Persian-language media, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Radio Farda and VOA Farsi (Figure 25 on the following page). The Fahim News accounts similarly shared content from these outlets, along with content from Iran International, a media outlet based in the U.K. that allegedly has financial links to Saudi Arabia. Many of the fake personas in the network also shared Iran International content.
The suspended media outlet accounts showed links to other social media accounts on Telegram, YouTube, and Balatarin. The Telegram and YouTube channels had few followers. Like other parts of this group, the sham media outlets’ YouTube channels created many short-form videos. Profiles on Balatarin, a Persian link-sharing platform, frequently linked to stories from Persian-language U.S.-funded media. While these sham media outlets had few followers, we found an interesting instance of Russian state media outlet Sputnik embedding an Instagram post from Dariche News into one of their articles [...]
While the accounts in this group primarily posted political content, they exhibited some spammy characteristics likely geared towards building a large online audience. Several accounts had follow-back language in their profiles, such as the phrase “follow = follow back.” Many accounts also posted non-political filler content, including Iranian poetry and photos of Persian food, in a likely attempt to build an audience and present themselves as authentic users (Figure 29). The Iran group tried to engage with real Iranians on Twitter, often by joking with users about non-political internet memes. Accounts often replied to tweets with the face with tears of joy emoji [😂😂😂].
We observed multiple instances of accounts in the Iran group sharing content from sources linked to the U.S. military. For example, in 2020 and 2021, a Twitter account that presented itself as an Iranian individual living in “Cambridge” posted links to almashareq[.]com and diyaruna[.]com 25 and 26 times, respectively. Both websites say they are sponsored by the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and post pro-Western articles in Persian and Arabic. This Twitter account was created on June 16, 2019, and its Twitter bio linked to a Telegram account with the same name and just three subscribers. The Twitter account was critical of the Iranian government and often used a sarcastic tone to mock Iranian state media and other parts of the state apparatus. It also tweeted about how Iranian meddling abroad only hurt Iranians at home.
Based on an analysis of shared technical infrastructure, domain registration records, and social media activity, we assess with high confidence that al- mashareq[.]com is the latest rebranding of al-shorfa[.]com, while diyaruna[.]com is the latest rebranding of mawtani[.]com and mawtani.al-shorfa[.]com. Prior to 2016, al-shorfa[.]com and mawtani[.]com were part of the U.S. government’s Trans-Regional Web Initiative mentioned at the beginning of this report.[...]
The network amplified programs to people wanted by the U.S. government to justice. For example, on Aug. 10, 2022, a Telegram channel linked to a suspended Twitter account shared an FBI wanted pamphlet for Shahram Poursafi, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) member accused of plotting to assassinate former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton. Dariche News, like some other covert accounts we reviewed, shared content from the U.S. State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program seeking information about Iranians who may have interfered in U.S. elections
The Twitter accounts in this group can be divided into those that criticized the Iranian government and a smaller number of accounts that shared hardliner views. [...]
Anti-government accounts criticized Iran’s domestic and international policies and highlighted how the government’s costly international interventions undermined its ability to care for its citizens. Posts claimed the government took food from Iranians to give to Hezbollah. One Instagram post said that by supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, the late Qasem Soleimani had brought poverty and misery to Iran. Soleimani was the former head of the Quds Force, a branch of Iran’s IRGC. Some tweets highlighted embarrassing events for Iran, such as a reported power outage that caused the Iranian chess team to lose an international online tournament.
Human and civil rights were another common theme from the group. Some tweets with higher engagement levels criticized the government, particularly Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for killing protesters in 2021. Tweets also highlighted a teacher protest in January 2022.
Across platforms, the group promoted Amnesty International content. One tweet from May 2021 highlighted an Amnesty International report about how the government executed four imprisoned Ahwazi activists in 2021 (see Figure 32) The Ahwazi are an Arab ethnic minority group in Iran. An April 2022 Instagram post shared an Amnesty International image drawing attention to the unjust imprisonment of human rights activist Behnam Mousivand. A July 2021 Instagram post highlighted, in poetic terms, the unjust imprisonment of an Iranian poet who has since died in prison.
The group also focused on women’s rights, though most prominently on Facebook and Instagram. Dozens of posts compared Iranian women’s opportunities abroad with those in Iran. Posts also noted that little has changed for women in Iran over time. Many posts highlighted domestic protests against hijab dress requirements.
Many tweets linked government corruption to domestic hardships. For example, one post said that “corruption and mafia relations in the IRGC, [...] judges and the families of the heads of Islamic Republic... [are the] main reason for Iran’s poverty and misery.” Tweets likewise blamed the government for the country’s rising cost of living, claiming that prices for food and medicine increased at the same time that hardliner Ebrahim Raisi became the country’s president in 2021. These tweets also noted that the IRGC controls the country’s domestic production of these goods.
Criticism of the IRGC was a particularly prominent theme in the group. Dariche News explicitly said its main focus was “to inform about the destructive role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in all the affairs and issues of Iran and the region.”
Multiple assets also claimed to be “Justice for the victims of #Flight752” accounts, referring to the Ukraine International Airlines flight that the IRGC shot down in January 2020. In addition to blaming the IRGC for this incident, tweets also placed responsibility directly on Khamenei. At the time of the incident, accounts discussed how it was playing out internationally. For example, accounts shared news articles about a Canadian court ruling the incident an act of terrorism. The Twitter accounts in this group used hashtags related to this flight (e.g., #PS752 and #ps752justice) hundreds of times.
Like other groups in the broader covert set, the Iranian group criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, often using it to frame local narratives. The group’s posts used Persian versions of the Russian opposition hashtags #no_to_Putin and #no_to_- war. Accounts noted that Khamenei verbally supported Putin and accused Iran of supplying drones to Russia, which Russia then used to kill civilians. In addition to claiming that Iran’s support for Russia was morally wrong, the group also pushed the narrative that Iran’s support would incur negative economic repercussions and made unflattering comparisons between Khamenei and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. One “has sold Iran to Russia [...] and ordered [their peoples’] murder,” an account tweeted. “The other is wearing a combat uniform alongside his people and has stopped the colonization of Ukraine by Russia with all his might.”
Accounts also criticized the Quds Force’s activities abroad and particularly its former leader Soleimani, calling him a murderer and saying that his values were inconsistent with Islam. The tweet in Figure 36 is from just after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 2021. It says that Quds Force personnel were pretending to be journalists and going to Afghanistan to squash the country’s opposition.
Four Twitter accounts in the group promoted hardliner narratives that advocated for anti-reformist and hawkish policies in Iran. Some of these narratives took aim at Iranian state officials for being too moderate, but any negative content about the Iranian government was infrequent. The hardliner accounts tweeted during the same period as the anti-regime assets and used similar tactics, but their purpose is unclear. These assets did not share anti-U.S. content, as one would expect from nationalistic voices in Iran.
Most of the hardliner tweets came from just one account, a self-declared “political science expert” whose account had 3,769 followers and was created on Nov. 25, 2020. This account mostly posted on Twitter and a related Telegram channel about the progress of Shi’a Islam over time. For example, in one tweet, the account asserted that Shiites were now able to exert influence in the Middle East after previously playing a more submissive role. This tweet received 84 likes. A Facebook and Instagram account linked to this Twitter account are also suspended, though they were not included in the dataset shared by Meta.
Four Twitter accounts in the group promoted hardliner narratives that advocated for anti-reformist and hawkish policies in Iran. Some of these narratives took aim at Iranian state officials for being too moderate, but any negative content about the Iranian government was infrequent. The hardliner accounts tweeted during the same period as the anti-regime assets and used similar tactics, but their purpose is unclear. These assets did not share anti-U.S. content, as one would expect from nationalistic voices in Iran.
Most of the hardliner tweets came from just one account, a self-declared “political science expert” whose account had 3,769 followers and was created on Nov. 25, 2020. This account mostly posted on Twitter and a related Telegram channel about the progress of Shi’a Islam over time. For example, in one tweet, the account asserted that Shiites were now able to exert influence in the Middle East after previously playing a more submissive role. This tweet received 84 likes. A Facebook and Instagram account linked to this Twitter account are also suspended, though they were not included in the dataset shared by Meta. [...]
A small group of assets in the Twitter and Meta takedown sets posted primarily about issues in Afghanistan but emphasized narratives critical of Iran, the Islamic State group, and the Taliban. [...]
Despite this group’s small number of assets, its campaign leveraged clear TTPs that we also observed in the broader set of covert accounts. All these accounts used fake personas, including one account claiming to be an Afghan man. Some of the personas attempted to present as real people by using profile pictures that were likely created using artificial intelligence techniques, such as generative adversarial networks (GAN). Like assets in the Central Asia group, the Afghanistan accounts typically included hashtag blocks at the end of their posts, often including #IRGCEXPOSED.
They also shared content from sources linked to the U.S. military, particularly afghanistan.asia-news[.]com, which names the U.S. Central Command as its sponsor. Based on an analysis of shared technical infrastructure, domain registration records, and social media activity, we assess with high confidence that afghanistan.asia-news[.]com (Salaam Times) is one-third of the latest rebranding of centralasiaonline[.]com, the other two being pakistan.asia- news[.]com (Pakistan Forward) and central.asia-news[.]com (Caravanserai). Before 2016, centralasiaonline[.]com was part of the U.S. government’s Trans- Regional Web Initiative mentioned at the beginning of this report. [...]
[Left: A fake persona in the Afghanistan group likely used artificial
intelligence techniques, such as GAN, to create its profile photo. Right: We have superimposed the same profile picture over two sample GAN-generated images from outside the network. The alignment of the eyes in multiple different images strongly suggests the profile picture was created using artificial intelligence techniques]
Accounts in the Afghanistan group consistently advanced narratives critical of Iran and its actions, often within a framework of issues and events relevant to Afghan audiences. Sometimes, these narratives included inflammatory claims accompanied by articles from the U.S. military-linked website afghanistan.asia- news[.]com. One example was a tweet from March 11, 2022, which claimed that relatives of deceased Afghan refugees had reported bodies being returned from Iran with missing organs. The post linked to an afghanistan.asia-news[.]com video, which was posted to YouTube and also shared in a Feb. 14, 2022 article by pakistan.asia-news[.]com. The article includes interviews with an Afghan official and Afghan nurse making the same unverified claims.
Another anti-Iranian narrative claimed in late 2021 and early 2022 that the IRGC was forcing Afghan refugees to join militias fighting in Syria and Yemen and that those who refused were being deported. Like accounts in the Middle East group, many posts focused on the actions of Iranian-backed militias in Syria, accusing fighters of committing human rights abuses and Tehran of sponsoring terrorism. Since February this year, the Afghanistan accounts began to weave in narratives related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, comparing the actions of Russian soldiers to those of IRGC-backed militias in Syria.
Accounts in the group also posted general criticism of Iranian policies that did not directly relate to Afghanistan. For example, the YouTube account we identified posted multiple Shorts showing Iranians protesting and looting supermarkets due to food shortages. The Shorts were captioned in Pashto, English, and Urdu and commented that “There is no difference between IRGC and ISIS” and “People looting shops in Iran, but the Iranian government is still interfering in other countries.”
Multiple accounts in this group shared posts and tweets that resembled Afghan military press releases. From 2019 to 2021, these posts highlighted successful Afghan military operations against the Taliban, Islamic State group, and other extremist organizations, such as a March 2020 post applauding police in Afghanistan’s Nimroz Province for seizing opium used to finance al-Qaeda. Posts also typically praised former President Ashraf Ghani.
After Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August 2021, accounts in the group began sharing advice for people trying to flee the country. Initially, this included warnings not to gather around Kabul airport without the necessary foreign travel documents as the scene devolved into chaotic evacuations by retreating U.S. forces. In the following weeks, posts highlighted women’s protests against Taliban authorities and criticized Afghanistan’s new government for its treatment of women and journalists.
Lastly, many posts attempted to undermine support for the Islamic State group’s affiliate in Afghanistan, claiming to reveal “the true fact” that the group is anti-Islam. A May 2022 tweet said in Pashto that the Islamic State group’s actions contradicted Islamic teachings and that the group “exists as the most dangerous terrorist group in the region and threatens all nations with weapons of ignorance.” Though often used without context, #NotMyIslam (in English) appeared frequently. [...]
The Middle East group of covert assets discussed in this section focused broadly on issues related to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. While not as distinct as other groups in the takedown sets, we identified multiple technical, behavioral, and content links between these accounts, which exclusively posted in Arabic about the same topics and themes.[...]
Our investigation identified clear signs of coordination and inauthentic behavior. TTPs employed by the accounts included sharing identical content across platforms, coordinated posting times, using GAN-generated faces, and creating fake profile pictures. One Facebook page in the group also posed as a person living in Iraq. This page shared the same name and picture as a Twitter account that previously claimed to operate on behalf of the United States Central Command (CENTCOM)
The group chiefly promoted narratives seeking to undermine Iran’s influence in the region but also took aim at Russia and Yemen’s Houthi rebels. For example, accounts on Twitter posed as Iraqi activists in order to accuse Iran of threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth. Other assets highlighted Houthi-planted landmines killing civilians and promoted allegations that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would lead to a global food crisis.
One of the Facebook pages in the group showed links to a Twitter account that has previously claimed to operate on behalf of CENTCOM. Created on Nov. 1, the page used the Arabic word for “discoverer” [مكتشف] as its name and presented itself as an Iraqi man posting predominantly about the misdeeds of the Iranian government and its influence in Iraq. Notably, Discoverer used a profile picture likely generated using artificial intelligence techniques, such as GANs. An Instagram account and a Facebook profile in the Middle East group used the same image as well. An account in the Twitter dataset also used the Arabic word for “discoverer” as its name and the same fake face as the three Meta assets. The Discoverer Twitter account was created in November 2016 and claimed in its bio to be “always in the service of Iraqis and Arabs.”
However, archived versions of the Discoverer Twitter account show that prior to May 2021, it used a different picture, listed its location as “Florida, USA,” and publicly identified as an “account belonging to the U.S. Central Command” that “aims to uncover issues related to regional security and stability.” At that time, the account promoted similar anti-Iran narratives related to Iraq and Syria but also posted statements presented as coming from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
Accounts in the Middle East group frequently used fake profile pictures to construct online personas. This is a common tactic in online IO, and we increasingly see actors leverage GAN-generated faces such as those shown in Figure 49. While at first presenting as photorealistic human faces, GAN-generated images are typically easy to identify due to their consistent central eye alignment, blurred backgrounds, and telltale glitches around the teeth, eyes, and ears.
But we also identified assets in this group using fake profile pictures that appeared to be collages of different images available online. This is a relatively novel technique, and though it is easy to spot images that have been edited in this manner, it could complicate strategies to detect inauthentic personas.
For example, an Instagram and Twitter account in the Middle East group used the same picture of a man in a suit holding a water bottle. Reverse image searches revealed that the man’s torso was identical to a photo from a 2012 fashion blog, which had then been edited to add a new face and background. We also saw accounts in the Central Asia group employ this TTP.
[Left: Original photo from a 2012 fashion blog. Right: Collaged photo used by assets in the group.]
We identified multiple instances of assets in the Middle East group sharing content and exhibiting coordinated posting patterns on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Typically, this activity involved supposedly independent accounts posting the same images or identical text content within hours, or even minutes, of each other.
For example, on Sept. 23, 2021, a Facebook profile using a likely fake persona and the Facebook page Here Is Yemen [نااليمن] posted the same video with identical captions about alleged mass executions planned by Houthi rebel leaders in Yemen. The two Facebook assets made these posts just two minutes apart.
Accounts in the Middle East group consistently shared content that supported the U.S.-recognised Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) while criticizing the actions of Iran and Iraqi militias backed by Tehran. These accounts repeatedly asserted that Iraqi militias supported by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were loyal to Tehran over the Iraqi government and were fighting to implement Iran’s imperialist project in the Middle East. Some accounts also accused Iranian- backed militias of causing civilian casualties through rocket strikes on Baghdad’s Green Zone.
In particular, accounts in the group promoted content critical of Qais al-Khazali, the leader of the influential Shiite paramilitary organization Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq. The U.S. designated Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq as a foreign terrorist organization in January 2020 after its members were accused of killing demonstrators at anti-government protests in Iraq in 2019.
Other posts from the Middle East group accused Tehran of engineering a drought in the country by jeopardizing the water supply of cross-border rivers, smuggling weapons and fuel through Iraq to Iranian fighters in Syria, and fuelling Iraq’s crystal meth epidemic.
Although the Middle East group predominantly focused on Iran, a small cluster of accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter promoted content critical of Russia, particularly its interventions in Libya and Syria. Beginning in February this year, these accounts tailored content to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and designed anti-Russian messaging to appeal to Arabic-speaking audiences in the Middle East. In addition to reports of Russian soldiers killing civilians, the accounts amplified the narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin planned to induce a global food crisis that would hit less economically developed countries the hardest. The accounts reported on Russian bombings of Ukrainian grain silos and Turkey’s detention of a Russian-flagged ship carrying “stolen” Ukrainian grain to bolster this narrative. These anti-Russian narratives overlapped thematically with content from some accounts in the Central Asia group.
At the same time, the accounts applauded ongoing efforts by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Iraq and posted about positive interactions between American troops and children in Syria (Figure 57 on the following page).
A second cluster of accounts in the Middle East group focused on issues in Yemen. These accounts, also present on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, primarily shared content critical of Iranian and Houthi rebel activity in Yemen. Posts accused Houthi rebel leaders of blocking humanitarian aid deliveries, acting as proxies for Iran and Hezbollah, and closing bookstores, radio stations, and other cultural institutions in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a. Recently, the cluster amplified a narrative highlighting Houthi forces’ widespread use of landmines, which human rights groups say have caused thousands of civilian casualties since the beginning of the conflict. These posts typically included the number of civilian casualties and highlighted the alleged Iranian origins of the landmines.
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Hey Sam, I remember reading a post or response from you about how to give to charities anonymously, but now that I’m searching, I’m finding a few different responses but still have questions. Any chance you could do a round up post? Wondering about the following:
1. How to give cash
2. How to give small amounts anonymously (e.g., if you can’t set up a DAF)
3. How to opt out of being sent branded junk if you can’t give anonymously, because it will end up in the garbage (seriously, no more pens, stickers or magnets please)
4. In giving anonymously, how important is the tax receipt? I only take the standard deduction on my taxes… is there a reason to bother with tracking the receipts?
Appreciate your help!
Ah yeah, it's rough knowing how to do some of these things. I've written about some of them, probably most of them, but disparately over several posts, so let me see if I can answer succinctly and all in one place.
How to give cash: You are pretty much confined to two options, giving cash to a staffer in person or mailing cash in an envelope. If you have access to the office of the nonprofit you may be able to swing by and drop the cash off, but it's not super convenient and often not possible. If you're at an event you can hand it in an envelope to a staffer, and that's really the only way my organization gets cash donations, but that requires you to be at the event. And technically I can't recommend mailing cash since the risk of theft is a real one. Giving cash is fine legally, but nonprofits often aren't thrilled with it because it can put their staff at risk and also there's, well, there's no way to track that donation to a person. But yeah, throw them dollars between two thick sheets of paper and mail that in with a note saying "This is for the XYZ organization" so they know they can accept it.
2. Giving small amounts anonymously: It depends on how you're defining 'small'; I have a DAF (for the readers: a Donor Advised Fund -- I talk a little about them here but I've never gone indepth) which has no minimum deposit or minimum monthly contribution, but they do have a minimum donation amount of $20. To me that's not especially large, but I know to many people it can be. Pretty much the only way to give an amount smaller than $20 anonymously is to give online through the nonprofit's website using a cash giftcard (like a Visa gift debit card), and just not give an address. If you custom-order checks you can sometimes order checks without a home address, or with the bank's address, and pay with one of those, but I've never tried that.
If you do use a DAF (and I can recommend Charityvest, they've been mine for several years now) you can always set up to pay small amounts into it and just have them send all that money in a lump sum once or twice a year. I pay in $75/mo and from that they pay out three $20 donations a month, and at the end of the year the extra $180 that has just sat there becomes a nice extra donation. Always bearing in mind of course that once you pay into a DAF that money is gone, you can't claw it back even if you haven't "donated" it yet -- just putting money in a DAF is considered a donation. Readers, if you're curious about DAFs I recommend googling, lots of banks have "what is a DAF" pages, but if you're not finding what you want to know do feel free to come ask me.
3. Opting out of swag when not giving anonymously: I'm tempted to just say "Ya can't" because it's hard, especially with larger orgs. Even if you opt out, often you'll still get mailings that are considered "stewardship" (maintaining a relationship) rather than "solicitation" (asking for giving) and swag counts as stewardship. You can always start with sending the org a letter saying "Please put me on a Do Not Contact list, I will continue to give but don't want to get your swag". If that doesn't work, start returning mailings -- if you get something from the org don't even open it, just write "return to sender -- no longer resident" and drop it in the mail. This is not guaranteed effective; some places will either just change the name to 'resident' or retry every so often just in case. You can call the org and ask to speak to "records" or "data", and then just be super up front: "I want to keep supporting you but I really don't want the swag, how do I get that turned off?" They can help, but if you give to another similar org, a lot of times orgs will do "list exchanges" where they swap mailing lists, and if the org does that and you're on the other org's list, you get put right back on the "ok to mail" list for the first org.
I will say, swag is very, very cheap and gets results, so you can also look at this as "well, it was wasted on me, but the five cents this pen cost will get them $1 from someone, so in accepting it, I am still helping them to gain donations." This depends on your tolerance for waste, of course, which I'll talk more about in a minute.
(I personally like getting magnets, because I put stickers over top of whatever's printed on the magnet, cut it out to the shape of the sticker, and behold! I have a cool magnet!)
4. Tax receipting: I'm not a CPA or a tax lawyer and I fucked this up the last time I talked about it, so take this with a grain of salt, but there is an "above and beyond" deduction -- after the standard deduction I believe you can deduct an additional up-to-$300 for charitable giving, and if you were to be audited you'd need receipts to prove that. (As I said, if you're planning on this, fact-check first, I am not a strong source for this information.) (Edited to add: comments informed me this is no longer the case, so I'm glad I added in the disclaimer :D) If you give via a DAF, no problem; the DAF tracks where and when and how much you gave, so I could use my DAF's records as "receipts". You can also, if you lost or didn't get a receipt, contact the org and ask them for your giving record for the year. Here's the problem -- if you are giving in a way that allows you to avoid giving your address, there may be no way to get those receipts, since you can't prove their record with your name on it is you. So if you want receipts but want to give semi-anonymously definitely make sure they have your email address. If you're giving $300 a year, you probably want to take that deduction; if you're giving $20 a year, probably it isn't worth it. But yeah, to get a receipt you generally have to give them enough information for them to identify you, but you don't need giving receipts if all you take is the standard deduction.
All in all, the options are -- give cash and get no receipt, give via DAF or using a giftcard and get receipts to your email, give with your address attached and just hope they honor your request to be removed from swag mailing, or give however you want, put up with the swag, and bear in mind that them sending you the pen or magnet or keychain wasn't much of a problem or cost for them and will get them money from someone.
Honestly, option four isn't the least irritating, but it's probably the least labor-intensive for you. But it really is a question of what you want from your relationship to the nonprofits you support, and how passionately you feel about the "waste" status of swag they send. Only you can determine where your tolerance point is between "having to put in so much effort not to get this stuff" and "having to throw this stuff in a landfill". It's a regrettable part of being a donor and building a relationship with a nonprofit, but we in the nonprofit field do appreciate your giving and your tolerance :) While there are some outlier bad-actors in the space, trust me, for most nonprofits, nothing we do is gratuitous. Almost all of us are on such a thin wire that if something costs us money and doesn't get us more money, it gets binned very quickly.
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hi, im an high school sophomore interested in computer science and im also new to your blog. i was wondering if you would recommend conputer science and what have been your strengths and pitfalls with the field? thank u so much for your time.
Hi! Welcome to my blog, haha thanks for stopping by and sending an ask!
My path was self-taught game dev/web dev -> CS degree -> cybersecurity, so that's the perspective I'm writing from. My current job is basically just writing code for cybersecurity-related things (which I really like!). I do enjoy computer science and I think it's a great field to get into because you can do so many different things! I listed out my personal pros/cons under the cut but the tl;dr is that CS is a good field if you like constantly learning things, building things, and knowing how stuff works under the hood.
things I like about computer science:
so many options and things you can learn/specialize in
having programming skills and knowing how computers work gives you the foundational knowledge to succeed in a lot of things, both practical and theoretical/research-based. if you don't really like programming, there is plenty of theoretical math stuff you can do that's related to CS (this is what my partner is going back to grad school for haha)
lots of info available online for self-guided learning
do you want to learn how to make X? someone has almost certainly already written a tutorial for that and put it online for free. there are lots of open-source projects out there where you can read their documentation and even look at the code to figure out how things work!
there is always more to learn
tech evolves and you have to keep your skills up to date - that means there's always something new and interesting happening!
being able to build things
do you want to make an app? a website? a video game? a quick script to automate some annoying task that you do all the time? you can do that. all you need is a computer and some time! once you have some skills, it's amazing when you realize you can just Make Stuff literally whenever
understanding how things actually work
in a world of apps & operating systems that actively try to hide the technical layer of how they work in favor of "user friendliness", there is power to understanding what's actually happening inside your computer
problem-solving mindset
this kind of goes hand-in-hand with being able to build things, but eventually you get the hang of looking at a problem, breaking it down, and figuring out how to build a solution. this is something that I knew was an important soft skill, but I didn't really have any concrete examples until I started working with some technical but non-programmer coworkers. knowing programming & how to build things really does just help you solve problems in a concrete way and I think that's pretty cool.
things that can make computer science difficult:
programming is a cycle of failing until you succeed
programming is not something you get right on your first try - there's a reason that patches and updates and bug fixes exist. this might take some getting used to at first, but after that it's not an issue. failing constantly is just part of the process, but that means that solving those problems and feeling great when you figure it out is also part of the process!
there's so much to learn, you will have to go out and learn some of it on your own
a CS degree will not fully prepare you to be a professional developer, you will likely have to learn other languages & frameworks on your own (this is kind of a good thing btw - the average college probably isn't updating their curriculum often enough to teach you relevant frameworks/some professional coding things).
there is always more to learn
this is the other side of tech always evolving - sometimes it can feel like you're constantly behind, and that's okay - you can't learn literally everything! just do your best, explore a bit, and figure out the subset of things that you're actually interested in
lots of screen time
there are tech jobs where you can be active and move around and stuff, but I work from home and write code most of the day so I spend a ton of time in front of my computer. this isn't a huge problem, I just make an effort to spend time on my non-computer hobbies outside of work. something to note when you're looking for jobs, I suppose!
occasional toxic culture?
I'm thinking of "leetcode grindset bros" here because that was a common character at the college I went to - just ignore them and do things at a pace that feels comfortable to you, you'll be fine
on a related note, in my experience there will always be some dude who has been programming since like the age of 5 and seems to know everything and is kind of an ass about it, ignore these people too and you'll be fine
things are getting better, but CS is still very much a male-dominated field. however, there are plenty of organizations focused on supporting minority groups in tech! you can find a support group and there will always be people rooting for you.
that got kinda long lol, but feel free to reach out if you have any more questions!
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Last year I had a chance to play Mörk Borg, which is the bleakest fantasy RPG I've ever played and I haven't stopped thinking about it since.
So how'd it go?
Mörk Borg was probably one of the easiest games to learn. I made the joke at the table, if you've ever played D&D you are overqualified to play MB. It uses the D&D OGL, loosely, and is technically compatible with it, but this is not that kind of game. That's just all so you can roll your little d20.
The rules are free in the "bare bones" edition but trust me, you'll want to own the full art edition, get a physical copy and put it on your shelf. It is a gorgeous book and has a style that a lot of games lack. If I could distill about 10% of the style into my own games I would be extremely satisfied with my work.
Seriously like. Go to their website. Experience this. Do it now (or don't, I'm not your mom. But you should though).
This game feels in line with the perceived brutality of first edition d&d and its ilk. You may name your character if you like but don't get attached. You can have as little as 1 hit point and nothing pulls its punches here. Deaths are common, and expected and add to the feel of the world. You're not trying to save the world, not really. You're on the precipice of doom and you're just scavengers picking over the bones of the preeminent corpse of the world.
But you can also generate a new character very quickly with SCVMBIRTHER. Don't like your new one? Kill them and make a new one. As many as you like. It's a riot just generating these wretches and seeing what could be in store for you.
But while it is fun and also sometimes necessary to generate characters quickly like this, doing so misses out on one of my favorite parts of any RPG. The Character Sheet!
To me a good character sheet is like a window into the soul of the game.
The game has this whole, doodled in the margins of your math homework, zine you found in a dirty puddle, graphited in a bathroom stall at a crust punk show ass aesthetic and the whole book is just like this. And I am eating this shit up! Here's the alternate character sheet provided:
This soul appears to be a little scrunkled, can I get a new one?
Now I haven't talked about how the game plays yet or anything but just drink this in for a minute. If looking at this character sheet does not make you want to try this game then I don't know what else would!
I mean I guess knowing how the game plays would but like... Okay.
The game itself uses d20 rules, but much lighter. You have small stats, and add them to a d20 roll. No skills no proficiency bonus. You'll eat your 1's and you'll like it. The target numbers are usually pretty low, floating around 10-ish, unless you're dealing with something nasty.
You may have powers, but they seem to be pretty limited in their availability and uses. The game itself plays like D&D-lite, in that you are probably doing a dungeon crawl, or other dirty work you do as an adventurer. But you are not an adventurer, you are lowly scum just trying to make a quick buck. There's no heroics going on here. If your d&d group already plays like a bunch of murder hobos then you're basically already playing mork borg in spirit but just cosplaying as a bunch of heroes. This is the game you should be playing if you want to be a cutthroat little bastard.
The game uses Omens, a limited resource that you can use to improve what you're doing; deal max damage, lower damage taken, reroll a die (or someone else's) that kind of thing. You only get them back after a rest though so if you blow through them quickly you're at the mercy of fate (and fate is not merciful here).
Our group played Rotblack Sludge which is the introductory game from the main book. We did it in a single session pretty easily, even between doing food and a fair bit of goofing off. I imagine your group could do it in 1 as well, but 2 sessions tops for sure. There are a bunch of free adventures available on their website too if you wanted to get a little deeper! That link is to their "content" part of their site which is just an endless slew of free stuff. They really just want you to play their game. And quality enough that they know enough folks will buy it.
My main criticism of the game is that I'm not sure how this plays out in the long term. I think that narratively and thematically, the game is crushing it. But mechanically, the game is light. This is by design but I can see this turning away people looking for a long term replacement for d&d. I mean some committed groups will enjoy this forever regardless, but I feel like this has the legs for a few decent adventures before you'd wrap up and move on.
But a big part of long term games is character advancement. My understanding was that the levelling system in the game is pretty light to non-existent. It didn't come up in a one shot for obvious reasons. I'll admit I only own the free rules at this time, I'm still waiting for my copy of the actual book itself. So I had to go to my friend who ran the game to understand how the leveling system works. There's no experience points, so the group levels together. You check to see if you gain some hit points, you check to see if your stats increase, and you get a random piece of gear.
And when I say check I mean you roll some dice and compare to current. For hit points you roll 6d10. If the result is higher than your current max HP then you gain 1d6 max HP. Roll under and you lose 1 max HP. This choice frustrates me. I actually like that there's a chance to lose HP, but is this really the best way we could do this?
Okay that's not fair that's a knee jerk response. Let's talk about why it might work this way. This is a bleak world so it doesn't make sense for your characters to be able to heroically weather any storm. They're just people who got lucky and survived. So we want the ceiling for how many hit points a character can have to be on the low side. The system does do that, but it takes a weird path to get there, which feels out of place considering this is otherwise a very light game. I'm gonna talk about dice math for a bit so feel free to skip ahead to the next orange part if you feel sleepy.
The average of 6d10 is 33 (5.5x6), which means that characters who managed to level up multiple times are at much higher risk of losing a hit point. Average result of +1d6HP means about 3 hit points a level on average (accounting for the fact that you still could lose some along the way instead of gaining them). Assuming you start with 5 hit points (you might have 1-10 depending on your class), you're looking at 9 level ups before the odds are against you to gain HP. You might think damn. That's a long time. And assuming a character even lives to see level 10. And I agree.
So why does it need to be so convoluted along the way?
To replicate this system without the cumbersome dice roll comparisons you could have players roll 1d8-2: there's always a chance you'll get -1 HP, even 0 HP. After a character has 20+ HP it could change to 1d8-3, then 1d8-4 at 30 and so on. If you don't like the idea of players losing multiple HP then just have it be that any resulting negative is only -1 hp. But this way you're making 1 roll and decreasing the gain over time, while still gaining. You could also just roll a flat die every level, but I think in Mork Borg it is very thematic to have something like leveling up, which is normally comforting, be cause for fear.
Anyway this is easy enough to home brew out and it seems like a lot of folks do that. But I'm judging the game based on how it is not how I could change it.
The hit point math is done... FOR NOW.
The way stats level up is simpler. Roll a d6 for each stat. If the die is equal to or higher, gain +1 in that stat (max 6). If it's less, subtract 1 (max -3), a 1 is always a -1. I like the idea that your stats could fluctuate and that high stats are not safe bets. A few levels and weird rolls later and your worst stat could end up being your best. I think this part could be controversial but I like it and I like how they do it!
But there's not really much more to advancement than that. This is fine if you're just playing a short game. But you hear stories about people running campaigns for years on end and I guess... I just don't see that happening with Mork Borg. I might say it's not that kind of game but it actually kinda is though? They have rules for long term games.
The Calender of Nerthrubel fortells the end of the world. When 7 miseries have been accumulated, the world ends. At the start of the game you choose a die to roll for Miseries; as little as 1d2, as high as 1d100. The game master rolls the die and on a 1, the world gains a misery. So the size of the die does determine the upper limit of the game, but it is possible for the game to be over in as little as 7 in-game days regardless of the die type chosen. This is a very interesting mechanic! In fact I think it's one of the most interesting parts of the game! Most games struggle with a sense of urgency. Short of "you have 48 hours to save this prince" or "if you don't return with 25 wolf noses tomorrow you don't get paid", it can be hard to wrastle the players together to try and save the world in a timely manner. Meanwhile in Mork Borg your days are literally numbered. I can't imagine the tension that would come from being on your 6th misery knowing that every single day could be the last. That is truly bleak.
The role-playing opportunities in this setting for someone trying to grasp at the last ray of hope in the darkness, to fight against fate, or to battle the darkness within is truly incredible. The Dark Souls series has already probably come to mind by now for you and it's hard not to see that as an influence or at least a spiritual contender. There is something to be said about overcoming the odds and surviving in a bleak world. The Dark Souls franchise and periphery games have thrived on that for years. But when you die in that game, you come back you just lost some progress.
You don't come back when you die in Mork Borg, you just die.
So with no significant character advancement in the game, how do you meaningfully advance a character in a game like this? The game literally urges you not to get attached to your character. It's a bit tongue in cheek about it but it's not wrong.
At our table I was the only one who survived start to finish with the same character. And that wasn't from skill on my part i got a lot of dumb luck! We had 6 players and I think we had about 10 deaths? One player was on their like 4th wretch by the end of it! This seems excessive and I don't know if this is a standard experience, but we understood that's kind how it would go beforehand so our expectations were pretty set.
While I am sort of criticising this aspect, there is something pretty thrilling about going into a game without being too committed to your character. It makes those moments where you do realize them as a character in the narrative all the more meaningful, and more tragic when they die a terrible meaningless death. Nothing is precious in Mork Borg not even your life. So make the best of what you've got while you still have it.
Mork Borg is definitely not a perfect game.
But I cannot stop thinking about it and would drop any game to play it again, or even run it.
(and that's not even to speak of all the Borg spin offs like Pirate Borg, Orc Borg or CY_BORG!!!).
If you already play D&D or Pathfinder, Mork Borg is definitely worth your time to try, because you already know how to play it. It might not be for you, but if you go with the free rules and play a free adventure the only thing you're out is your time.
If you play other RPGs and enjoy dungeon crawls or hack and slash game play, this is still a great choice and will be easy to pick up and try.
If you're new to RPGs, Mork Borg is maybe a pretty weird one to start with, but is a really polished experience to try and a really easy game to cut your teeth on, so still not bad!
If you're more interested in character role playing, then Mork Borg might not be what you're looking for, but there are so many interesting narratives that can be explored here that I think would be really interesting and hard to replicate in other games!
If you're a power fantasy gamer, then I think Mork Borg might be a skip for you. Unless your power fantasy is to be a lobotomized mouse in Alley Cat Alley. No judgment, you do you.
If you took one look at the characters sheets up top and said "oh hell yeah I'm gonna play that!" and didn't read the rest of this lengthy text then we are already best friends but alas you'll never know it because you didn't read to the end... Oh well.
Now excuse me, I'm gonna dream about being ripped apart by a skeletal ooze and dying a painful death tonight (affectionate)!
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“Aim For The Heart” Creator Spotlight: Lucy K. R.
Today, as we inch toward the finish line on our crowdfunding campaign for Aim For The Heart: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s “The Three Musketeers,” we have a modern setting alternate universe retelling from Lucy K. R.!
The Three Mic O’ Tears by Lucy K. R.
About the Author: Lucy K.R. (she/her) is technically in existence. Every time she is free, she writes. Sometimes when she is not free she also writes. This has occasionally created problems. She is fortunate to be supported (read: enabled) by her enthusiastic fiancée Tomo, a loving OG family, and a lively found family as well.
Eager for a change after a decade of waitressing, Lucy K.R. took the chance in March of 2021 to make her first steps into the world of published work. Prior to the success of the largely-fabricated German translation of the short-story found in this collection, ‘die Karaoke-Königinnen’, she was best known for her work on Mageling: Rise of the Ancient Ones and in the Duck Prints Press anthologies “And Seek (Not) to Alter Me” and “She Wears the Midnight Crown”.
In her stories, Lucy K. enjoys writing evil ideas as gently as possible, portrayed through unexpected lenses. She would like to acknowledge that she has never written a biographical statement that did not turn out weird, beg your indulgence, and express her hope that you enjoy her work in this anthology. The people at Duck Prints Press have been a delight, and she is deeply grateful to be included!
Links: Personal Website | Twitter
Story Teaser:
“The plan is to pay you back for the slight, not to ruin your life,” Ash agrees with such dead certainty that Dart feels a thrill of terror and excitement all jumbled up, merged into the same creature.
“You seem very sure you’ll win,” Dart offers, tilting her own head in return.
“Ooh,” Portia’s lips quirk into an even cheekier smile.
“Cute,” Artemis comments, appraising eyes still fixed on Dart.
“So, in order of offense?” Dart asks, feeling her inner performer awaken at their attention. “Ash first, then Portia, then Artemis?”
“You seem very sure you’ll make it to the last dance yourself,” Ash returns, even as Artemis strips off her jacket and neatly folds it, nodding her approval.
“I came here to sing karaoke,” Dart takes the opportunity to roll up her sleeves. “Nothing and no one is going to keep me off that stage.”
She’s never fought anyone before. She’s never had to. But she said it, and she meant it—nothing will keep her off that stage. She lifts her fists, only to be tutted at by Ash.
“Wrists straight, dear,” she says, lifting her one good arm in demonstration.
“Ah,” says Dart, and fixes her posture.
We’ve posted this and 18 other teasers at our campaign page, and shared a lot more info to boot, so if you’re looking for a fabulous anthology this summer, make sure you check it out!
#duck prints press#aim for the heart#lucy k. r.#story teaser#kickstarter#projects we love#kickstarter campaign#queer kickstarter
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Eyo! So I know that this blog (and the RestrainedFear one) really don't get used anymore, but I was wondering if you ever posted the content that got taken down because of the NSFW ban to somewhere else. (See, I've only been in the fandom for about a year, so I missed out on a lot of good, old content lol. I'm a big fan of Scarecrow, and your blogs really helped me to appreciate LockUp a lot more.)
//I've actually been making an effort to use this blog more recently! Dropped off on activity in a big way for awhile due to illness that I'm still technically overcoming but treatment has me feeling well enough to dip my toes in again! I planning to keep using this blog for any lyle content I come up with & rp, although I'm planning on being much more selective this go around when it comes to rp.
As for restrainedfear I've mostly lost my spark for it so apart from a stray old piece being unearthed and dusted off for posting I wouldn't expect much new content on that ship. Though you never know what might happen.
So far I've just been sending them over discord whenever anyones sent me a DM, which is still the best option because I have an assortment of restrainedfear from friends that I've collected over the years that I can share on top of my own(but obvs can't post without their permission) just every scrap of it that there is out there I've hoarded it all lmao
You motivated me to dump it all on pixiv! So for right this minute at least, you can see a good chunk of my nsfw art that was taken down here. TWs for abuse & noncon obvs. Old unsightly stuff as well as newer fyi. One batch of 22 pics has already been flagged by pixiv for not censoring(looks like per japan regulations they want mosaic tiling on any naughty bits). I'll have to figure out an alternative platform to post them to but I'm not sure which elephant website I should use.
Anyway it's soso soo nice to get any interest in the ship! I really never mind sharing the goods, believe me I know the suffering that goes along with having next to no content for a rarepair! So yeah, happy to share. And I'm ALWAYS sooo pleased to hear I've won ppl over on Lyle as a character! He has a lot of great potential and sometimes it's like, am I the only person fond of this guy? Thanks sm for the ask and please feel free to DM to get the other ship art I mentioned. That's an open invitation to anybody btw! You won't be bothering me, I'm supah chill.
#out of chains#restrainedfear#BoltonxCrane#Jonathan Crane#lyle bolton#ask#anonymous#I have a bad habit of fading off into liminal space whenever I'm not doing so good#gomen
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Public Library of Ruina - Yesod
I still dither a little about Yesod. He's either Information Technology, Information Services, or both. Both feels a little self-indulgent, but it's kind of what I want.
Information Technology is basically regular IT-- have you tried turning it off and back on again. The library doesn't add a huge amount to that-- more databases, a website, shitty civic budget, unpredictable public users. You're gonna replace a lot of keyboards. (You should probably take the ones where people rearranged the keys into swear words out of service. Or at least fix them first.)
Information Services is, at this point, extroverted IT. Back in the day, this was the department that specialized in "reference" questions-- the weird stuff. People would ask librarians for all sorts of weird facts in the pre-google days. It does still happen, but less and less every year as search engines become ubiquitous and the people who remember that was a thing slowly die off. Still, reference will never completely die. People are always going to come to libraries with weird questions; that's kind of the point.
So why am I calling it extroverted IT? Because that's the primary function. There's the fairly obvious part-- people sometimes need help searching the catalogue or reading e-books. But here's the less obvious part. Myrtle has a new laptop, but she's not sure how to do anything with it and her kids all live hours away. Who's she going to call? Who can help people learn how to use technology? Without many other options, the answer frequently is-- the library.
Think everyone has a cell phone? Ask a public librarian. We know there are still plenty of people without a phone or with a secondhand POS with no sim card. Curious what happens if someone can't remember their gmail password? If you're prepared to deal with a post-traumatic response, ask a public librarian. Have you ever tried to help someone with no available cell phone recover their google account? It would probably save a lot of time if we could just tell them at the start they're SOL. But maybe they can remember the password, and technically there's a reset function that might work in a few days if you're approved.... Fun times when you're dealing with an upset person who can barely type on a good day and has just lost a ton of personally valuable and literally valuable information, probably forever. Think 2-factor authentication is great? It sure is, if you have a second factor. We have a list of free email sites that don't require you to already have an email address or a cell phone. It's hella short. And we took one off cause it was too Russian. Protonmail is a good bet if you can remember passwords. Which is a significant if. Some people just can't. Which is OK if you can save them on your computer. Oh, you don't have one and you have to use public devices all the time? Well, write it down and hope it doesn't get stolen and that you can remember which one is which. (Have you already guessed that sometimes people ask librarians to remember their passwords for them?)
In short, the library also serves as a public IT department, for services and devices it has zero control over.
Whether he's internal or public IT support, Yesod is also going to snap. Though, he will also have access to an abnormality that can affect people outside the library, which is a nontrivial perk. He will use it exclusively on vendors. I am hoping some of his bullets bend space and time to successfully hit whatever asshats decided it was OK to build the entire backbone of library ebook lending on Adobe Fucking Digital Editions, an old ass program with literally zero support. It would seem impossible for them to still be shackled to it in the City, but it also seems impossible that we're still shackled to it now, so I'm pretty sure the ultimate capitalist dystopia couldn't let it die.
Hmm? My specialty? I'm a reference librarian. Why do you ask?
#yesod lor#public library of ruina#library of ruina#bad librarian!!#polite ways to explain what the shift key is#the sheer number of weird printing workarounds i require every shift i s2g
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