fight again

happy 420 and day i reserve a spot in hell

its that time again folks

@shubbabang

(Source)

‘Sonic X’ began airing 21 years ago today in Japan. Support us on Patreon

in recognition of World Down Syndrome Day on March 21

By LabradoriteKing on Pinterest

A handy guide for your Jewellers and Gem Cutters.

I accept payment in trillion-cut black diamonds.

Chop chop.

Solstoria updated!! | Page 308

It's the end of Chapter 6! I'm taking a break to research and start working on the pages this spring. I might change how I update too- maybe it'd work best to update in batches? We'll see we'll see--

Drew this to celebrate P3R's release and my DHB themed stream, but it's already been out for a few weeks and I haven't gotten to it!

What if the cast of YuGiOh were Gekkoukan students and Ryou Bakura was in SEES? That was the basic AU idea.

I'll get my shit together.

Was looking through my archives and remembered this piece from 2012! 2012 vs 2024

Ryou commission for @missmewachu !!

He has the sweetest face and tells the most morbid facts.

Porn gets banned on major internet space -> porn moves to new space -> new space gets surge of popularity usage and investors -> investors want porn gone because you can't advertise Better Help next to hq art of the scout from team fortress 2 getting backshots -> porn gets banned there -> porn moves to new space -> new space gets surge of popularity usage and-

"#it's all because of the puriteens"

teenagers don't run the payment processors you stupid fucking idiots

It's not just the advertisers- that's definitely also part of it, but this is also the direct, targeted action of a specific christian fundamentalist group, the "National Center on Sexual Exploitation," previously "Morality in Media" and "Operation Yorkville," a political lobbying organization that campaigns against pornography, who claim "Pornographers are committing the biggest crimes of the century!"

It was*this group specifically* (accompanied by another Christian anti-porn org, Exodus Cry) that put pressure on mastercard and visa to stop facilitating electronic payment for sites that hosted nsfw material. Faced with the risk of losing their ability to process payments, the sites partnered with visa and mastercard had no choice but to agree to porn bans.

They were behind Onlyfans flirting with banning sex workers last year, and they were one of the principle supporters of FOSTA/SESTA. I can not understate just how much influence this one well connected, well funded group has.

From their about page:

NCOSE convinced mastercard and visa to cut ties with porn not for the sake of advertisers, but because they convinced them that they could be potentially liable for facilitating illegal activity- the exchange of CSAM, prostitution and human trafficking- happening on the porn sites they were partnered with, which in NCOSE's opinion is all porn sites, and all porn period, since they believe all porn is human trafficking.

NCOSE has been around since the 60's, but hasn't seen much success until the last decade. Their previous campaigns, focused on pushing for the enforcement of obscenity laws from the 1800's and fabricating blatantly nonfactual research about porn as a mental health crisis, were not as widely received. But they've had much more success since they've started weaponizing concern for victims of abuse and trafficking, appropriating progressive language and trading in on the white moral panic about child sex trafficking that grew directly from the "Stranger Danger" and "Satanic Ritual Abuse" moral panics of the 80's and 90's- both themselves the result of a right wing reactionary movement using concern trolling about the safety of children to rail against drugs, loud music, and tabletop rpgs.

Blaming the sanitization of the internet solely on the vague specter of "advertisers" ignores the real, nameable groups and their extremely straightforward christofacist goals. It promotes apathy, pointing at an ambiguous target that feels as impossible to combat as the machine of capitalism itself. When it's literally just these specific guys, and like two or three similar, equally identifiable organizations!

I'm not saying sites like facebook don't have a vested interest in looking squeaky clean and family friendly, but tumblr, pornhub, onlyfans, patreon and gumroad did not move to ban porn because of advertising. Tumblr has never attracted the kind of advertisers who care, and pornhub, onlyfans, patreon and gumroad don't make the bulk of their money from ads, but from user transactions, which MUST be facilitated by an electronic banking platform in order to be safe and reliable.

Tumblr's porn ban was due to FOSTA/SESTA meaning the could not continue operating unless they either dumped nsfw content or went adults only and implemented costly and draconian age verification protocols that, frankly, no one was going to put up with for a mediocre blogging platform. The others folded under pressure from the electronic banking platforms, which threatened to drop them as partners due to the pressure *they* were under from NCOSE weaponizing public opinion to create a flurry of anger and condemnation towards these companies "facilitating human trafficking."

The enemy is not hiding, we know their names! They come not in the name of capitalism (who merely rides their coattails when convenient) but in the name of puritanical Christian Fascism.

So no, it's not the puriteens. It's their parents and grandparents, on an open crusade to enforce Christian anti-sex beliefs on as much of the world as they can manage.

gamefreak has the chance to do something incredibly funny actually

FYI, this was an actual streetlamp in Wrocław, Poland. Local services removed the overgrowth because apparently nearby people had trouble sleeping with this by their windows.

Antiphona character art

I've been itching to get around to posting about this for a few months now, but wanted to wait until I'd worked on enough for it, but also had the idea to create an announcement trailer to go with it for added good measure--after recording and editing clips for a couple weeks and leveling the audio last night, heremst we are! (For some clips, I forgot to turn off the PPSSPP emulator's DevMenu option so that shows up in the top-left, buuut I didn't feel like re-recording those, lmao.)

Details worth reading below the cut here, but tl;dr work has been in progress for over a year in between things, work will continue to be in progress for a while, and the release will happen when everything's ready, but stay tuned, fun's getting started etc etc~

Solstoria updated!! | Page 300!!

A milestone!!

So this was originally a response to this post:

****

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Which is about people wanting an AO3 app, but then it became large and way off topic, so here you go.

Nobody under the age of 20 knows how to use a computer or the internet. At all. They only know how to use apps. Their whole lives are in their phones or *maybe* a tablet/iPad if they're an artist. This is becoming a huge concern.

I'm a private tutor for middle- and high-school students, and since 2020 my business has been 100% virtual. Either the student's on a tablet, which comes with its own series of problems for screen-sharing and file access, or they're on mom's or dad's computer, and they have zero understanding of it.

They also don't know what the internet is, or even the absolute basics of how it works. You might not think that's an important thing to know, but stick with me.

Last week I accepted a new student. The first session is always about the tech -- I tell them this in advance, that they'll have to set up a few things, but once we're set up, we'll be good to go. They all say the same thing -- it won't be a problem because they're so "online" that they get technology easily.

I never laugh in their faces, but it's always a close thing. Because they are expecting an app. They are not expecting to be shown how little they actually know about tech.

I must say up front: this story is not an outlier. This is *every* student during their first session with me. Every single one. I go through this with each of them because most of them learn more, and more solidly, via discussion and discovery rather than direct instruction.

Once she logged in, I asked her to click on the icon for screen-sharing. I described the icon, then started with "Okay, move your mouse to the bottom right corner of the screen." She did the thing that those of us who are old enough to remember the beginnings of widespread home computers remember - picked up the mouse and moved it and then put it down. I explained she had to pull the mouse along the surface, and then click on the icon. She found this cumbersome. I asked if she was on a laptop or desktop computer. She didn't know what I meant. I asked if the computer screen was connected to the keyboard as one piece of machinery that you can open and close, or if there was a monitor - like a TV - and the keyboard was connected to another machine either by cord or by Bluetooth. Once we figured it out was a laptop, I asked her if she could use the touchpad, because it's similar (though not equivalent) to a phone screen in terms of touching clicking and dragging.

Once we got her using the touchpad, we tried screen-sharing again. We got it working, to an extent, but she was having trouble with... lots of things. I asked if she could email me a download or a photo of her homework instead, and we could both have a copy, and talk through it rather than put it on the screen, and we'd worry about learning more tech another day. She said she tried, but her email blocked her from sending anything to me.

This is because the only email address she has is for school, and she never uses email for any other purpose. I asked if her mom or dad could email it to me. They weren't home.

(Re: school email that blocks any emails not whitelisted by the school: that's great for kids as are all parental controls for young ones, but 16-year-olds really should be getting used to using an email that belongs to them, not an institution.)

I asked if the homework was on a paper handout, or in a book, or on the computer. She said it was on the computer. Great! I asked her where it was saved. She didn't know. I asked her to search for the name of the file. She said she already did that and now it was on her screen. Then, she said to me: "You can just search for it yourself - it's Chapter 5, page 11."

This is because homework is on the school's website, in her math class's homework section, which is where she searched. For her, that was "searching the internet."

Her concepts of "on my computer" "on the internet" or "on my school's website" are all the same thing. If something is displayed on the monitor, it's "on the internet" and "on my phone/tablet/computer" and "on the school's website."

She doesn't understand "upload" or "download," because she does her homework on the school's website and hits a "submit" button when she's done. I asked her how she shares photos and stuff with friends; she said she posts to Snapchat or TikTok, or she AirDrops. (She said she sometimes uses Insta, though she said Insta is more "for old people"). So in her world, there's a button for "post" or "share," and that's how you put things on "the internet".

She doesn't know how it works. None of it. And she doesn't know how to use it, either.

Also, none of them can type. Not a one. They don't want to learn how, because "everything is on my phone."

And you know, maybe that's where we're headed. Maybe one day, everything will be on "my phone" and computers as we know them will be a thing of the past. But for the time being, they're not. Students need to learn how to use computers. They need to learn how to type. No one is telling them this, because people think teenagers are "digital natives." And to an extent, they are, but the definition of that has changed radically in the last 20-30 years. Today it means "everything is on my phone."

we stopped having computer classes because 'everyone knows how to use a computer' and then we suddenly fucking didn't

Talked about this today in a training class I’m taking this week and how it’s going to start affecting our new generation of new hires. We operate everything on a PC. Everything. You need to be able to type 60-90mph. There are no apps. Everything is on a browser. We depend on searching for addresses and maps. They’re going to be doomed.

It was a grim fuckin day when I discovered that the IT department where I work-- the one whose specific job it was to build my group's website-- didn't know enough HTML to code a first-line indent in a paragraph.

There is no tumblr formatting option for "just the first line." You can't, on an individual post, just click a button and get a paragraph that's indented like one from a book or magazine article. In a similar vein, there is no option within the modular site builder my IT department uses to do that either.

So someone who made so, so much more money than me in a position that was significantly more respected within our tech-oriented company-- that someone put, in an actual literal quotable email-- that what I was asking for was "impossible" within their system.

...Which naturally made it pretty fucking funny when I logged into their little CMS platform and just. Switched from the built-in Rich Text editor to the HTML one--

       And made a first-line indent (JUST LIKE THE ONE IN THIS PARAGRAPH)-- after which, based on the response I got from the person who made $20k more than me AND YET couldn't figure out how I'd performed this witchcraft, I apparently Ascended to the ethereal plain to become the goddamn NEO of their corporate-nightmare Matrix and beholden only to fuckin God. And all because I had the ability to wield the almighty, awesome power of a

     non     breaking      space.

so, you got the steam port of sonic adventure 2, and you noticed its a completely broken mess. yeah, i did too. i spent around an hour yesterday troubleshooting, and ive compiled some bugs and solutions in case it could help anyone. all of this is only tested for windows 10 with an xbox one controller and an NVIDIA graphics card

i'll start by saying the pathing to navigate to the sa2 folder because youll need to be in the folder to change a few things. the pathing for me is

This PC > C:// > Program Files (x86) > Steam > SteamApps > Common > Sonic Adventure 2

this may change if youve changed where your steam games install, but this should be the default. ill just be referring to this as "the sa2 folder" from now on

navigate to the sa2 folder. right click "sonic2app" (you may also want to do this for "Launcher"). click "Troubleshoot Compatibility", then "Try Recommended Settings", this should set the game to windows 7 compatibility. test it, and if it stops crashing, save the settings

this is something that ive found can only be toggled through the launcher rather than ingame, under the menu Player

while in the sa2 folder, navigate to Resource > gd_PC folder. right click and hover New, and make a new folder inside gd_PC, and rename the folder as SAVEDATA. relaunch the game and you should be able to save now

(note: i do not know how to fix this on any graphics card that isnt NVIDIA)

(EDIT: the SA2 modloader features a FPS lock, so this could also be a valid option)

open the nvidia control panel (i can access it via right clicking on my desktop, and it comes up under the dropdown)

navigate to Program Settings, and under Add, navigate to "sonic2app" (location listed above). to tweak any settings under this, i had to set "Select the preferred graphics driver for this program:" to be "High-performance NVIDIA processor"

under "Specify the specifics for this program:", scroll to Vertical sync and toggle it to on. Max frame rate can also be toggled under the same window, i toggled mine to 60fps

this fix is also under the nvidia control panel. change the toggle for power management mode, i have it set to prefer maximum performance but maybe try adaptive. default seems to be optimal power

other issues ive had have been mod related. so if anyone has any questions about those or other issues, do feel free to ask and i am willing to assist