hello world

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I tried to pirate a game and did so wrong.

The thing about hackers, scammers, fraudsters-- is that they cast a very wide net knowing they'll get a few suckers caught in it. Let's say 10,000 people get an email saying "YOÜVE W0N!🤩 CLiCK N⁰W!?!" 9,997 of them delete it. For the three people who get sucked in, it's life ruining.

They rely on the fact that, at some point, they are going to get you while you're not thinking clearly. Maybe you're sick. Or tired. Or work is stressful. Or you just had a fight with someone and you're mad. Your kid is going through something, your dog is at the vet, your car broke down, you got fired. Or you're in the middle of planning a big event, or you're so super excited for a convention-- and something comes across your desk. Maybe it's an email, or a phone call, a link, a text, a file. But for whatever reason you're not thinking 100% clearly and you don't question it, you trust for a minute and that's all that they need. You are now one of those three caught in the net.

And now you're actually on their list of suckers! They will return to you over and over and over and over again for more, because hey! You fell for it once. They're counting on that your grandma who answered a scam call and provided her credit card number once WILL be scammable again. Maybe not right away, maybe not the same way, but they'll get her. (And more often than not, they're right.)

I think most people are inclined to want to trust one another. Or sometimes we're curious. Or we think, "Wow, I didn't know it would be this easy!" not stopping to ask WHY it's so easy to get something good for free.

I work at a financial institution and I help people all the time who have been hacked and lost hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are always terrified- will I get my money back? Am I safe?- but they are also consistently ashamed and embarrassed. They feel guilty for having trusted and for not having stopped to think for a second longer. They verbally berate themselves. "I'm so stupid. How could I have fallen for it?"

Currently I'm only out about $300, which I'm being told I'll get back. That number could go up-- I'm still working on securing everything. Do you know how many passwords I had stored in my browser? 192. I have no idea how many of those had a valid card attached, but so far one account was plenty to steal a couple hundred bucks from me. And I do feel stupid, and embarrassed, ashamed, humiliated. Scared. The hacker messaged everyone I had recently messaged on discord as well as every channel in every server to @/everyone with instructions to download their Spyware. Every single person I talk to knows I fell for something dumb.

It's embarrassing, it's upsetting, and I dont even know the full scope of what more is going to happen. I had tax documents on my computer-- how much of my identity is now in their hands? I've locked my credit and placed fraud alerts everywhere, but how safe am I? Who else is at risk now because of me? What other files do they have from me?

In this case, I happen to know that a number of people did what I did. I've seen a number of threads from others who ALSO tried to download tomodachi life from github. (For the record, this was not the floralith link.) I was excited, I was in a hurry. I thought, "this is so quick and easy and now I can play!" I didnt question why in the hell it would EVER be so easy. I haven't had a virus on my computer since I was a young teen, and then I went and installed a bunch of Trojans whilst going "la la la." Incredibly stupid stuff.

i almost did this exact same thing in january of this year. i'd just applied for SSA disability and a day or two after i got an legitimate looking email saying they needed additional documents. i check my email first thing in the morning so i was physically tired and stressed in every way possible and in pain from still being post-surgical and i was scared of screwing up this process.

i downloaded the attached file. the only thing that saved me was my computer asking if i was sure i wanted to run this program.

what program? i thought this was a pdf?

no. turns out the icon was a pdf but the file type was something i wasn't familiar with.

i went back to the email and sure enough the sender was some stupid gibberish.

i dodged a bullet by an unspeakably slim margin. it terrifies me how legit the email had looked, it was properly formatted with correct spelling and grammar and had all the right logos and headers and it went to my focused inbox. this was not designed to filter people out. it terrifies me how they even knew i'd just applied and to try this.

i've had friends who've lost thousands to scams that got them at the wrong time.

Hold the Win key and then press I, that's uppercase "i", the vowel, to open one of the settings menus. In one search bar search for extension, or the equivalent in your language, and one of the options that eventually comes up is "hide known file extensions". Do not allow this. Using a custom icon to pretend to be a different generic icon is how this particular one works.

I asked all 7 of these people before I bought it if they were interested, and they all said yes.

especially assuming your friends are adults and therefore suffering from all of the everything stemming from Real Life (tm).

that said, having myself held 3 random sets for a chaos draft that never happened for like 2 or 3 years, yeah, i feel that. sorry for your loss.

They are adults, I live with them, and this is an ongoing issue where they refuse to shift D&D nights for basically anything. It's not just a grievance with this stupid draft, but that's all way more personal drama than I want to sift through on this vent post. Suffice to say, I have been in their position and accommodated their plans/events/life situation, and this hasn't been reciprocated, especially and specifically for their two tabletop nights a week, and it's frustrating.

pretty dang old art. .but I just realized i wanna it to be here lol

My first advice to an hypothetical prospective Claire player is to remember all the embalmed tokens are misprinted. The ability doesn't remove itself, so the tokens should have it. She lets you make another after they die. (this also theoretically matters for any Muraganda Petroglyphs players, should any exist) This isn't directly useful for Battle of Wits, but if you run any of the token doublers it can help.

If going for Battle, I think I'd recommend artifact combo. Too many infinites with Krark-Clan Ironworks, won't (shouldn't?) be fully colourless but a large part can be, which is good for your mana base.

Normally these loops are done for storm count and/or mana, but in this case they will be to trigger Mirrorworks, Esoteric Duplicator and the multiple variants of Sai, Master Thopterist.

My favourite is the fact that Scrap Trawler doesn't say "another" card, so an artifact dying can return itself if it costed more than itself. That sounds like nonsense, but Sculpting Steel.

Myr Retriever/Junk Diver/Workshop Assistant also loop forever if you have at least 1 artifact discount, or Scrap Trawler+Sol Ring.

The 3 Modules from KLD make a loop that will give you arbitrarily many 1/1s, twice that many +1/+1 counters, and as much energy if you need it.

Cogwork Assembler and Chrome Dome can copy any artifact you want. There's a few that give you enough mana that this goes infinite, most notably Powerstone Shard, but given Ironworks even Thran Dynamo and Gilded Lotus break even with the TMT one. And Wurmcoil Engine will turn a profit. And of course, any source of infinite mana means infinite whatevers.

The four Stations from 5DN also make a loop that fills your graveyard with dead tokens, but part of the output there is damage so you may fairly be accused of playing with your food at that point.

As for returning your deck, Elixir of Immortality is the obvious choice. Remember that you can sacrifice it in response to its own ability, but you can't sacrifice it to make mana to pay for itself.

There's also a variety of instants and sorceries that reshuffle, though usually not themselves so if you're having any you probably need more. This is a tokens deck anyways, so I'd be cautious about adding them. Redundancy is good, but you may be better off adding enough artifact search to depend only on the Elixir.

They also keep making artifacts with the activated ability to put 1 card from a graveyard to the bottom of the deck. They're not very good, more intended as anti-reanimator, but if the plan is to hit infinite then may as well, probably.

I asked all 7 of these people before I bought it if they were interested, and they all said yes.

especially assuming your friends are adults and therefore suffering from all of the everything stemming from Real Life (tm).

that said, having myself held 3 random sets for a chaos draft that never happened for like 2 or 3 years, yeah, i feel that. sorry for your loss.

They are adults, I live with them, and this is an ongoing issue where they refuse to shift D&D nights for basically anything. It's not just a grievance with this stupid draft, but that's all way more personal drama than I want to sift through on this vent post. Suffice to say, I have been in their position and accommodated their plans/events/life situation, and this hasn't been reciprocated, especially and specifically for their two tabletop nights a week, and it's frustrating.