sumactic

Latest Posts by sumactic

kitty car 🐱

ok im going to #seriouspost for a second here. I don't think Harry Potter is a manifesto. I think it was a flawed passion project that millennials latched onto because of the fantasy of sticking it to their mean teachers and arbitrarily categorizing themselves (hogwarts houses; it's the thinking millennial's astrology). I think the fact that the series got popular when and how it did was very much a product of its time.

I don't think Harry Potter is the biggest symbol of JKR's bigotry. I think the most flagrant sign of that was how she responded to critics. I watched her become radicalized in real time. I watched how she doubled down on her racism when she was called out for the ways she promoted her tragically mid fantastic beasts movies. I watched her chase marginalized teenagers with a double digit follower count off of twitter for daring to criticize her thought process, and no one with any kind of power standing against her because she was the one who was paying them. This isn't to say Harry Potter is without flaws. This is to say she really didn't give a shit about that. Getting rich and powerful is a hell of a drug, and she had enough sycophants that she had no reason to care about what her critics were saying.

She was convinced that she was a martyr; a voice for the unheard; a leader for the ages, so of course her detractors were the bad guys. And I think we should take this to heart. We should see this as an example of how easy it is to get radicalized; if you think of yourself as a paragon of virtue, you are going to think that whatever you see as good and right is an objective fact. Most people don't know this, but the majority of terfs start out as trans allies. You are not immune to propaganda! You are not immune to falling into dangerous ideologies!!!

This is why the most important thing you can do as an activist is to listen. Do NOT think you're above being wrong; do NOT develop a god complex; do NOT form an identity out of being right all the time. Involve yourselves in the groups you claim to speak for. Listen to trans women; share resources that help trans women; familiarize yourself with the diversity of experiences that trans people have and the struggles they face.

No, none of you are as bad as JKR because you don't have her money or her power. You will likely never have the capacity for harm she does. But check yourselves. Do not affirm yourselves into thinking you always have the moral high ground. Watch yourselves; humble yourselves; check yourselves for signs of cult behavior and internalized prejudice. You are always learning. You will always be learning. Do not allow yourselves to get a power trip from brushing off marginalized voices.

Yup returning to necromancy, I’m so back. And you’re so back, and you’re so back, and you’re so back, and you’re

DEI does not mean lower standards.

You are thinking of white privilege.

Malwarebytes

All Gmail users at risk from clever replay attack

All Google accounts could end up compromised by a clever replay attack on Gmail users abusing Google infrastructure.

Cybercriminals are abusing Google’s infrastructure, creating emails that appear to come from Google in order to persuade people into handing over their Google account credentials. This attack, first flagged by Nick Johnson, the lead developer of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a blockchain equivalent of the popular internet naming convention known as the Domain Name System (DNS). Nick received a very official looking security alert about a subpoena allegedly issued to Google by law enforcement to information contained in Nick’s Google account. A URL in the email pointed Nick to a sites.google.com page that looked like an exact copy of the official Google support portal.

As a computer savvy person, Nick spotted that the official site should have been hosted on accounts.google.com and not sites.google.com. The difference is that anyone with a Google account can create a website on sites.google.com. And that is exactly what the cybercriminals did. Attackers increasingly use Google Sites to host phishing pages because the domain appears trustworthy to most users and can bypass many security filters. One of those filters is DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), an email authentication protocol that allows the sending server to attach a digital signature to an email. If the target clicked either “Upload additional documents” or “View case”, they were redirected to an exact copy of the Google sign-in page designed to steal their login credentials. Your Google credentials are coveted prey, because they give access to core Google services like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Maps, Google Play, and YouTube, but also any third-party apps and services you have chosen to log in with your Google account. The signs to recognize this scam are the pages hosted at sites.google.com which should have been support.google.com and accounts.google.com and the sender address in the email header. Although it was signed by accounts.google.com, it was emailed by another address. If a person had all these accounts compromised in one go, this could easily lead to identity theft.

How to avoid scams like this

Don’t follow links in unsolicited emails or on unexpected websites.

Carefully look at the email headers when you receive an unexpected mail.

Verify the legitimacy of such emails through another, independent method.

Don’t use your Google account (or Facebook for that matter) to log in at other sites and services. Instead create an account on the service itself.

Technical details Analyzing the URL used in the attack on Nick, (https://sites.google.com[/]u/17918456/d/1W4M_jFajsC8YKeRJn6tt_b1Ja9Puh6_v/edit) where /u/17918456/ is a user or account identifier and /d/1W4M_jFajsC8YKeRJn6tt_b1Ja9Puh6_v/ identifies the exact page, the /edit part stands out like a sore thumb. DKIM-signed messages keep the signature during replays as long as the body remains unchanged. So if a malicious actor gets access to a previously legitimate DKIM-signed email, they can resend that exact message at any time, and it will still pass authentication. So, what the cybercriminals did was: Set up a Gmail account starting with me@ so the visible email would look as if it was addressed to “me.” Register an OAuth app and set the app name to match the phishing link Grant the OAuth app access to their Google account which triggers a legitimate security warning from no-reply@accounts.google.com This alert has a valid DKIM signature, with the content of the phishing email embedded in the body as the app name. Forward the message untouched which keeps the DKIM signature valid. Creating the application containing the entire text of the phishing message for its name, and preparing the landing page and fake login site may seem a lot of work. But once the criminals have completed the initial work, the procedure is easy enough to repeat once a page gets reported, which is not easy on sites.google.com. Nick submitted a bug report to Google about this. Google originally closed the report as ‘Working as Intended,’ but later Google got back to him and said it had reconsidered the matter and it will fix the OAuth bug.

Insider

OceanGate tried to scrub the internet clean of traces that it ever existed, taking down its Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages

OceanGate, the deep-sea exploration company that created the Titan submersible, has removed its Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn a

poor things, well we should definitely make this easier on them by never repeatedly mentioning their name and deeds on the "reblog things forever" website

21 & 32 for the writer's asks :3

hi ezra! thank you for the ask :3

21. What stops you from writing more in your free time?

you guys all know me too well.... i even have a tag on my blog talking about how i never write. im ngl i have a lot more free time than it seems but i spend a lot of it doing... tbh idek half the time. my motivation is quite the fickle creature and its pulled in a thousand different directions at any given moment. that is further compounded by the fact that i get really easily stuck when writing. i envy the people who can whip things out quickly, even just as a first draft. even when i tell myself to just write whatever i almost always end up getting bogged down in some sort of dilemma about word choice or filler action or something probably not actually as significant as im making it. also the projects im most invested in (and therefore actually have enough motivation to push myself to write) either are long works or require further development before i can really get to the meat of it and well. what can i say i have an instant gratification monkey in my brain that is extremely good at getting what it wants, and what it wants is very much not conducive to getting writing done.

32. A character you enjoy making suffer.

now this is a really interesting one. i very much have favorites. i like them for many reasons, but one of them is probably that they’re fun to put into situations. do those situations sometimes involve what the character would consider suffering? yeah. so i don’t really enjoy making a character suffer so much as i enjoy throwing them into a new environment and seeing how they react. im splitting this into two parts, one for oc and one for like. fic stuff because if you know me you know that no one can compete with my most beloved oc, evelyn. she’s very fun to put into situations because she reacts to things in a nonstandard way. shes not afraid to break things (unless she’s imposed a rule on herself to be a good tourist and not break things). she gets annoyed in an extremely entertaining manner at “minor inconveniences” (her definition may not match most people’s). I don’t think I can really do my love for her justice without breaking it out into an entirely separate post complete with a cut.

anyways, as for fic… well, pulling from one of my current fandoms, it might be a bit of a boring choice but I really do love putting fein in situations. Or at least, my conception of c!fein. I think part of what makes a character situationsable is how solid of a grasp I have on them, and he’s definitely one of the more solid ones. he also works really well with a concept I like to play with a lot—godhood. (now who saw that one coming?) and if my explorations of those concepts happen to not end in the most ideal way for our focus character? well sucks for them i guess, but it’s very fun for me. so yeah id say i put him through the wringer (mostly in my main ongoing). also he’s fun to knock down a few pegs. thinking about how there’s always a bigger fish.

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

He tried his best

the framing of generative ai as "theft" in popular discourse has really set us back so far like not only should we not consider copyright infringement theft we shouldn't even consider generative ai copyright infringement

5 and 24 for the ask game!

thank you for the ask!

5: What’s something you learned while researching a fic?

oh you know me so well.... theres a lot of things, often little throwaway details, that i look up (since a lot of the bigger thing tends to be original worldbuilding or things i already know) and theres been so many rabbit holes ive sent myself down while researching. a recent thing that just started with trying to find out when exactly IVs became widely used led to me reading up (a bit) on wwi-era military medicine and adding a few things to my reading list that ill get to.... someday. but for a more specific example, i found out about mushroom-based textiles while researching for a different piece. from what i can tell its mostly a mycelium-based leather, though it seems like theres also a thinner fabric being developed. theres actually quite a few things being used to try and make leather alternatives, such as pineapple leaves and winemaking byproducts. sustainable textiles are the things that google likes to turn up when you look up "unusual fabric materials," it seems

24. Which scene/theme was the inspiration for [insert fic]?

since you didn't specify which fic ill just pick my main ongoing fic/series/thing. (which i will resume work on once i have time! soon!) its hard to say what exactly inspired me to do it beyond my deep love for crossovers and also my oc universe. but as for the specific plot threads ive put in, a lot of my ocs deal with bigger picture or higher level stuff. political schemes and grand plots. so i wanted to take a look at what the more "normal" people were doing, as it has also been somewhat of a blindspot in my own worldbuilding/development for the oc universe. and its definitely worked, since in the process of setting up the necessary infrastructure for the plots i wanted to work with in this au, ive done a lot of work fleshing out (or straight up creating) some pretty significant components of the "modern day" universe. for the ongoing fic, i've always wanted to try my hand at a sort of multimedia fic ever since i read subject: a comprehensive report (fantastic, albeit unfinished fic), and this was further fueled by q.a.b. (and its sequel. read it btw. well-executed crack treated seriously and fantastic css). and the plot sort of evolved from there. a lot of the stuff about this particular subplot actually came about after i got the initial idea for this fic and it also led to me completely overhauling a character (who has yet to show up) and accidentally getting obsessed with them so. you never know where ur stuff will take you. its always been conceived of as a sort of mystery/spy thriller type story, though the idea that "you are always being watched" only really solidified after i got working on planning this out more

There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.

If you have achieved something, please remember to observe a mandatory period of basking in the warm glow of your achievement like a lizard on a stone, lest you teach your brain that effort is futile, actually, because it didn't get to enjoy its happy chemicals, so, naturally, nothing good ever comes of trying. (And no, avoiding punishment is not a reward!)

I recommend, like, 5% of basking time in relation to whatever time you invested into achieving the thing minimum. And if you can't make your own bask, friend-brought is fine (= tell your friends!).

AND DO YOU HAVE ANY MCSR FIC RECS. FORGOT TO ASK

thank you for the asks! i mostly do my mcsr stuff on my sideblog but since you’re here anon i do have a few (and i will get to the other ask in a bit) i hope you don't mind incomplete fics, because i have quite a few of those in here. anyways, in no particular order:

A Field Guide to Speedrunners by loanword. honestly you should go and read all of tri's stuff but this is the fic that got me. snappy writing style and a great grasp on characterization

Grave Digging by sumactic is an ongoing fic in their pjo au and i am so fascinated by what is going on with their nerdi and k4. good writing and a very interesting dynamic and i cant wait to see more

into this world in wonder from a starlight sky by confusedkestrel is a fun read and i love how they wrote the dynamic between poundy and fein. you should go read all of their mcsr fics tbh

coffee beans, fein-ly ground by igneousarchive and *megamind meme* no villains? by justpressX are two (unrelated) oneshots that i thought were fun.

[FILE: FALLEN ANGEL ET AL VS. SHOCKWAVE ET AL] by weareallstardustfallen is set in a superhero au and also makes use of mixed-media (or, text-based simulations of it), which i am always a big fan of

and now, time for a bit of hashtag self promo but my current ongoing series is outfished. its an au making use of my oc universe setting and can best be described as a modern-day fantasy with a focus on worldbuilding and intrigue. i also play around a bit with css formatting and in-universe documents if you're into that sort of thing.

there's a lot of good fics out there in the tag that i haven't listed here so when you have the time i would recommend just going through the entire tag. its not a terribly huge tag (though it is growing) so its a pretty manageable browse imo. (then again, my perception of reasonable may be a bit skewed. iykyk.)

With more and more Ao3 authors restricting their works to the archive (due to AI scraping), they're going to be losing guest interaction. And probably generally feeling down because. You know. AI is stealing their hard work.

So! Now is a great time to stop by your favorite authors/stories and drop them some comments! They really appreciate it!

waiter waiter 2 🥩🥗 please thank you

oh ok

honestly you all are so annoying because motherhood IS interesting but fandom people are simultaneously obsessed with deciding that every woman has motherly qualities and completely disinterested in actually exploring motherhood as a role that informs a character. I do think exploring a character being a mother can be wildly interesting if they are canonically one, but because of misogyny, people just view motherhood as a totally unremarkable naturalized state that all women must inhabit!

it’s kind of crazy how here on the so-called feminism website you literally can’t say something as simple as “dude is an inherently gendered term” without literally dozens upon dozens of people who consider themselves feminists showing up to say “idk i use it in a gender neutral way”. like idk how to tell you this but the fact that masculine words are considered default/neutral and feminine words are not is, in fact a reflection, of a patriarchal society.

Unusual but sympathetic paper:

Language Matters: What Not to Say to Patients with Long COVID, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Other Complex Chronic Disorders

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/22/2/275

i don't care if it's nazis, mormons, or a bunch of misguided autistic people. if anyone ever tries to tell you your soul is from another planet and you're actually part of the class of impressive people that secretly did everything cool in the world but is now extinct and lives on through your broken genome, you RUN. YOU WILL RUN AWAY. YOU WILL SPRINT FULL SPEED AWAY FROM THAT.

really hate to do it but i'm locking all my works for the foreseeable future. the capitalistic, callous scraping of free, lovingly human-made art for the purpose of training generative ai is indescribably immoral, and goes against all i stand for as a writer who writes for the sake of it.

what i make is mine. i did that. and no cheap, synthesized, blended-up and watered-down pathetic pale mimicry can ever come close to what i can and have achieved.

i really, really hate to do this. a reader once commented and told me that my work was the reason they went and applied for an ao3 account. that exchange of respect and appreciation could not have happened if my works were locked from the start. i am fortunate to have felt this love for my work, and am sorry that i now have to sequester it.

what generative ai spits out is not art. there is no passion in the slop it regurgitates, no intentionality behind word choice or frustration with tense. no love imbued from hours spent hunched over a desk editing, no joy derived from having driven your friends crazy with the snippets you strategically dropped to deal the most emotional damage.

fuck generative ai and its profit-driven, uncaring, fuck-you practices. every new post about the violation of artists purely for their efforts to make art accessible sickens me. the industry needs to be better, and the individuals behind each model need to be better; every non-consensually scraped training set you weigh is worth a million artists' souls.

also, fuck anyone who says to stop writing a certain way because the llm "style" of writing is to use em-dashes and other such "tells" – the models do that because REAL LIFE HUMAN WRITERS do that. i will continue to use the goddamn punctuation. it was created to be used. don't be afraid to use it.

Top surgery recovery has involved an onslaught of emotions that I'm still figuring out how to express, but this grief was not something I anticipated would be part of it.

molly

Untitled.

i made a comic in google slides for some ungodly reason

that said i still mostly do horsefoolery like this LMFAO

made another zine :3

how can ppl say cats are heartless tbh