Multifandom fic recs (Good Omens, Lucifer, Murderbot)

Mar16
  • Good Omens | Aziraphale/Crowley, Hastur, Michael, OCs | T | Shifting Heaven and Earth
    For most of history, since he narrowly avoiding Falling from Heaven with Lucifer, Crowley has been working for the Angelic Corruption Unit. This ended up being far more boring than he hoped it would be, but things change when he is assigned to go undercover on Earth.
    series:good omens,pairing:crowley_aziraphale,fic:chaptered,trope:trauma
  • The Murderbot Diaries | Murderbot, PresAux | G | Gratitude
    Somebody had made an animated children’s show. That featured a bot that was supposed to look like me. “That looks nothing like me. For one thing, I don’t have a flamethrower in my forehead.”
    series:murderbot diaries,genfic,fic:one-shot,metafic

ScamCoin investors are shocked to learn they trusted their money to notorious con artist Jonathan ScamCoin

Mar6

Title grabbed from The Onion’s lists of biggest crypto heists of all time.

As of this writing, Coinopsy has records of 2,403 “dead” cryptocurrencies, compared to a whopping 414 that are still kicking.

“In May, the Federal Trade Commission reported that consumers had lost more than $80 million on crypto scams between October 2020 and March 2021 — more than ten times the amount lost during the same period the previous year, $2 million of which was lost to scammers impersonating Elon Musk.”

Gaming company co-founder on why companies like Steam have stopped trying to work with crypto: “the vast majority of those transactions, for whatever reason, were fraudulent, where people were repudiating transactions or using illegal sources of funds and things like that. And that’s just out of control, right? You want that number, realistically, in a couple of percent, not half of all transactions turning out to be fraudulent transactions. Similarly, with the actors that are currently in this NFT space, they’re just not people you really are wanting to be doing business with. ”

Some crypto miners and traders “are attempting to take advantage of a controversial tax incentive in Republicans’ 2017 major tax legislation — specifically, by investing in “opportunity zones,” which were sold as a plan to buoy the poorest American neighborhoods but have evolved into a way for wealthy investors to funnel billions in untaxed profits into virtually any venture they choose.”

“As of Feb. 8 roughly 55% of Bitcoin investors were underwater, according to cryptocurrency investment firm 21Shares. That’s actually an improvement from several weeks ago, when Bitcoin was trading about $35,000. At that time, more than two out of every three Bitcoin investors were in the red.”

Crypto Critics’ Corner constantly has conversations about crypto so smart and technical and well-informed, I can barely keep up, and it’s an absolute pleasure to listen to. Recently a guest went “the value of Bitcoin is usually given in US$, but we should give it in Tether” and I was all…listen, I could not possibly have connected those dots myself, but know juuuust enough to grasp why it’s a Big Deal. I’m hanging on by my fingertips and it’s great.

Executive Assistant went to the vet last week

Mar3

Easiest and happiest vet visit he’s had!

First was 2 years ago, when Marshmallow Fluff was still staying at arm’s length from me — he stopped eating, but was still determined to hide and not be touched, I couldn’t get him in until he was physically too weak to put up a fight. Second was last year, bladder issues. He was happy to get picked up in general by then, but managed to scramble away the first time I tried to put him in the carrier.

This year he was in perfect health. They just can’t keep refilling his prescription food without an annual checkup.

Sleepy cat with paw on keyboard

Got him in the carrier first try, this year. He always comes out to investigate when I start doing yoga or stretches on the carpet, so I used that to lure him out of his napping spot. He got unusually tense when I scooped him up — he must’ve sensed something was amiss — but relaxed enough for me to dump him in.

I was prepared with the carrier braced between two chairs, turned so the open door faced straight up. (The enemy’s gate is down!)

…next year I’ll be even better prepared, and have a towel laid out underneath it.

Cat in carrier wrapped in blanket

I wrapped the carrier in a blanket for the trip, mostly to keep him calm, partly because it’s Cold outside.

Visits 1 and 2, he had to stay overnight for treatment, which was confusing and scary and got a “warning: will scratch people” note in his chart. Visit 3 was much shorter, I was right next to him 95% of the time, and he was…well, probably still confused and scared, but not threatened enough to fight about it.

Horrified cat looking over edge of carrier

Very unhappy, for sure. Did not authorize this. Wants to hide under his bed, but nobody will tell him which direction it’s in.

He weighs 15 pounds! (Last year it was 14. When he was originally picked up by Animal Control, from a household that was reported for neglect, he weighed 6. They had him on a special high-calorie diet to get his weight up before rating him healthy enough to put up for adoption.)

BCS is still a healthy neutral, so it’s not that he’s overweight. He’s just Big. If anything, I think he’s less well-rounded in the tummy than he was a year ago.

He was supposed to get a rabies shot while he was there, but they were all out of stock, with the delivery behind by several days. They said they were expecting the truck within the next few hours. I said, given how difficult all this is for the fluff, we’ll wait.

Unhappy cat hunched in open carrier

So I sat in the little room reading fic, and the fluff sat in his little carrier doing a disgruntled hunch, and we waited. A vet tech brought a bowl of water; he never got thirsty enough to drink it.

After the full few hours were up, the delivery truck arrived!…and the rabies shot refills were not on it. So we packed up and went home. Much to the cat’s relief.

He kept a safe distance from me for a few hours, but adjusted pretty quick after that.

Stern-looking cat with paw on keyboard

They said I could bring him back later, once the rabies shots were re-stocked, and they’d give the fluff his for free.

Part of me wants to spare him another Horrifying Ordeal so close to the last one. On the other hand, maybe it’ll reinforce the uplifting lesson of “hey look, you can stay calm and non-defensive and it’ll all work out fine, you get to go back home at the end.”

Works roundup, 2/28 (Femslash February webcomics and more)

Feb28

Leif & Thorn
Shall We Skate? (art | Leif, Thorn, Kale | worksafe)
What Was That For? (comic | Rowan/Archie | G)
Goth Gals Being Goth Pals (art | Hyacinth/Hazel | worksafe)
Magic in bottles (wallpaper | Ivy, Holly, Cedar, Bram | worksafe)
Woman in Black in Purple (art | WiB, her cat | worksafe)

Devil of Angel Classroom
The Angels, the Devils, and Me (art | Natsume, Amaranthe, classmates | worksafe)

Goddess of Paradise
You are the Goddess of Homina-homina (art | Goddess, aspects, priestess | worksafe)

The Sea In You
Bigger Than Before (art | Skylla/Corinth | worksafe)

This Week in But I’m A Cat Person:
Annotated redux of the chapter where Jany met the protagonists. Cautiously. She didn’t know they were the protagonists, after all.

This Week in Leif & Thorn:
Violet and the Neineikuras fall asleep! Rowan and Archie wake up! Evaluation goes down.

Dispatches from Balloonville

Feb22

Title inspired by my new favorite player in the NFT Space:

Screw it, I like the Balloonville people. So few in the Crypto Space will openly embrace the true meaning and spirit of “unregulated trustless marketplace that anyone can participate in.” Looking forward to their next project, “Bored Rug Club”, followed by the pixelated “CryptoScammers.”

Screenshot of balloon picrew characters
Who could have expected that this would pop??

More NFT rubbernecking:

“On February 9, 2021, an unidentified scammer used a phishing attack to steal dozens of NFTs from individual wallets. [..] In total, the scammer netted over 1100 Eth (~$3 million) from the attack. The phishing attack used a legitimate Opensea buy order.” So why call it “stealing” or “scamming”? It’s a valid blockchain transaction! Everything is fine.

“[NFT sales data] do not show the democratization of wealth thanks to a technological revolution. They show an acutely minuscule number of artists making a vast amount of wealth off a small number of sales while the majority of artists are being sold a dream of immense profit that is horrifically exaggerated. Hiding this information is manipulative, predatory, and harmful, and these NFT sites have a responsibility to surface all this information transparently. Not a single one has.”

“If you have access to a free trial of some chart-making software, you can even begin to make a corkboard map of this emerging web of ownership, business relationships, and incredibly bad art.“

Other blockchain-based definitely-legitimate-and-not-a-scam rubbernecking:

“Often used as a way to distribute free NFTs for giveaways and other promotional campaigns, there is nothing stopping someone from airdropping NFTs with abusive content—doxing, revenge porn, child sexual abuse imagery, threats, etc.—into someone’s wallet. […] And even if someone hides or burns an NFT of this sort, the transaction and its contents remain immutably on the blockchain for anyone to see.” A quick overview of blockchain-based abuses we should be worried about.

“The Football Supporters’ Association (FSA) has called for regulations of cryptocurrency-related platforms after one of sport’s biggest cryptocurrency-brands has gone into liquidation. The Times has reported that fan engagement platform, IQONIQ, has collapsed in Monaco, which has potentially left thousands of supporters in possession of Fan Tokens ‘worth almost nothing’.” Ah, the wonderful applications of crypto in sports.

“Two lists: falsehoods [about crypto and blockchain] that nobody who is interested in the world as it really is should ever repeat, at least not without heavy qualification; the second a list of truths and rules of thumb about cryptocurrency and blockchain that have been demonstrated repeatedly (often for many years) but escape notice far too often.”

Evangelists reinventing stuff that already exists:

“Why not compare Bitcoin to other networks? “Bitcoin is the Apple eWorld of money!” The original electronic walled garden, that turned out to be too expensive and not very interesting. Or compare it to other technologies — “Bitcoin is the Ford Pinto gas tank of money!” Which it frequently demonstrates.”

“I have been exploring Active Worlds for several days. It is a sort of internet archaeologist heaven, where player-created structures stretch out for what can seem like hundreds of virtual miles. There are many worlds to explore — all of which are anything but active — but this main one, AW, has been running since the mid 90s.” So we’ve had what they’re calling “the ~metaverse~” for almost 30 years now.

“Git was released in 2005 and was based on work going back to the late 1990s; Merkle trees were invented in 1979. The good bits of blockchain are not original, and the original bits of blockchain turn out not to be much good.”