Hi, this blog is mostly for my personal amusement. Reblog anime, games, manga, pop culture media in general and anything that makes me smile. Serious stuff sometimes. Follow or not, up to you!
I’ve just managed to use the first link to get free premium and wrote a step by step guide for one of my friends, so I thought I’d share it here in case anyone was confused!
1) delete spotify (make sure you write down your log in details)
2) follow the first link on this post and download the latest version
3) if it doesn’t let you a notification should pop up, click advanced settings or something like that, then click something like install anyway. Alternatively you may need to download it and then open it from your files app.
4) anyway open it
5) then to be sure it works I went to settings searched for spotify and force stopped it, opened it again, force stopped it, then opened it again
Very funny that when Arknights first came out people made Kiryu and Majima jokes out of Texas and Lappland and 3 years later when they finally get an event Hypergryph is like “No it unironically is like that in every way” and to make sure there’s no room for misunderstanding, Lappland drives a truck into a building and employs a special Lappland Everywhere system throughout Il Siracusano
It’s not even just in surface level similarities, I’m absolutely not joking when I say Lappland is Majima. For how brutal Lappland is in this event, to the point of frightening hardened enforcers from how easily she can butcher them, you never see her harm any civilian or outsider like the mafiosos do. She’s actually quite polite and amiable, turning up the violence only on those who only speak in violence, and even randomly showing up to save Texas’ friends from getting caught in turf wars.
When questioned about why Texas’ enemy keeps helping Texas, Lappland answers that it’s because she wants Texas to see for herself that the Underworld is inescapable, that even if Texas believes in good and even if she’s strong enough to physically win every battle, she cannot create change, and cannot run away to a gentler life. Lappland reasons that if she helps Texas in every step of the way, Texas still won’t escape, and that despair will prove Lappland was right.
Because Lappland actually feels the same. She hates the mafia and the power struggles and the terror they sow on regular people, and her behavior as the mad dog Lappland is her own form of rebellion: if she’s over the top to the point where they fear her, to the point where they expect her to be uncontainable and act more as a force of nature they can point rather than as a soldier they can order around, then she has that little bit of freedom.
So when Lappland sees Texas turn her back on the underworld and simply fight her way out with her unbeatable strength, it’s agony to her. Lappland needs to see Texas get dragged back in repeatedly and feel like there’s no escape, because Lappland herself chose to act like there was no escape. If Texas manages to fight hard enough to escape the underworld, or even scarier, to enact real change, then that would mean Lappland, her equal, could also have done so, if she only tried harder.
The only difference between them was the strength of their will and ideals.
Still amazes me that this game has one of the best gangster stories just tucked away as a sideplot to the whole “we gotta cure the world from supercancer” main plot, not even a B or C plot but a deep deep sidecharacter thing. Some genuinely good storytelling in Arknights, it’s a shame a lot of it is bogged down by obtuse writing.
I also like how the tone can change between chapters for these sidestories as well. For example Under Tides is a pretty good take on the Eldrich Horror genre with lots of mystery elements that still never really get cleared up and the human will vs a collective conciousness beyond human understanding while it’s sequel (Stultifera Navis) is more of a resident evil style thriller.
Anywho, not to deviate too much, Lappland and Texas story is also only really like one part of this whole thing. Penance coming to terms with how she sees justice and wants justice to be like, Vigil’s struggles to change society for the better… To name just a few more. could sit here all day dissecting just Il Siracusano.
To anyone reading this and not playing this game, please do. Somewhere there is a story in there for you in any genre you like and it’s not just cute anime girls… There’s some good anime guys here too.
As a public service announcement, someone scraped every single text file on GameFAQS in March 2020 for archival purposes, and you can find it on archive.org with the title “Gamespot TXT GameFAQs - Full Archive.” You can download the whole thing (it’s about 2 gigs) if you want to spite Wikia’s attempts to make themselves the gatekeepers of all fan knowledge.
hey netizens! i’m not sure how many people are aware, but youtube’s been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can’t be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate
BUT, if you’re a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard (under My Filters) to get rid of it!
I really can’t believe I’ve been on this hell site for 8 years
Impart me in your wisdom of ancient times
one time there was a tumblr user with the url “pizza” and she would just comment on any text post about pizza saying “omg that’s me” and then we found out she had an entire tag dedicated to saying the n word
One time somebody paid $750 for the url ‘hi’ and got deleted in less than a year for promoting weight loss scams
There’s always been something deeply wrong with this place.
The next time you’ve got a friend over, set an example and put your phone on the table, visibly there but not too far away, to let them know that you’re intentionally present, not distracted, your attention is undivided and you want to be fully focused on being right there to spend time with them. Don’t mention it or draw attention to this, you’re not doing this to be preachy or wanting praise, you just want to be a good friend and you value your friend’s time. Ideally, your friend will either notice this or even pick it up without conscious notice, and set their own phone aside on the table as well.
Then, when your friend takes a minute to go to the bathroom, grab your phone and take a photo of your friend’s phone sitting on your table. Do not touch it, and put your own phone back exactly where it was immediately once you’ve got the picture. Carry on with whatever you two were doing.
Once your time is up and your friend has left for home, wait for a good 15 minutes or so, for them to either get back home or be well on their way there. Text your friend, “hey, you forgot your phone”, and send them the photo you took of their phone on your table. Set a stopwatch running from the moment your friend sees the message.
Measure how many seconds it takes for your friend to process this and tell you to go fuck yourself.
fighting games are like. being really good at rock paper scissors versus people who don’t know the rules. and also you have to play the piano, at the same time
bro i did mega-rock. so you have to do paper (within 17 60th’s of a second) (the input for paper is beethoven’s moonlight sonata) (there is no buffering between inputs so the tempo has to be correct)
this is why you gotta learn safejumps and autotimed meaties then it doesnt matter if they dont know the rules ✌
autotimed meat? you guys have automatic cock? what kinda gay shit going on in fighting games?
>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.
>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.
>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.
>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.
>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.
>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.
>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.
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>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!
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>Lemmings problem now solved.
>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.
>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.
>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.
>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.
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>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.
>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.
fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals. protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.
the state is less omniscient and significantly more incompetent than you’d think. overextend their resources at every possible opportunity. make them cry wolf repeatedly. run their data analysis agents fucking ragged. and strike. attack.
YES
i’m a postgrad statistics researcher and i can tell you that the state honestly has NO IDEA what to do with the data it collects, it has an obsession with big data but it’s almost impossible to work with in practice. the traditional statistical approaches that are used can’t be scaled up, the adapted approaches are substantially weakened, and the machine learning approaches have the same problems and often tell them nothing. data scientists are only just coming around to these issues too, most still just push on with it anyway - incompetence is the word.
above all this though, like you say, the biggest issue for the state is at the point of data collection. they will NEVER get anything useful if they’re collecting shitty messy data. they will eventually figure out that the real solution is working how to collect accurate and meaningful data, we should make it as difficult as possible for them to do that
This makes me think that we need WAAAY more apps that generate junk data
Apps that generate junk data? tell me moooore.
Ooh I know this one!
Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money
TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)
WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string “FuckOff”. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I can’t seem to find it
Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so that’s good enough for me
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