Ashlesha Ascendant

if you've followed me for a while, you've probably seen me mention Underside, my dark cape TTRPG inspired by deconstructive superhero stories like Worm, Astro City, Watchmen, and the first season of Gen V.

it's a project i've spent a lot of time on, trying to build a system that tells the kind of superhero stories i like; the shit that treats them as a subculture with a body count, that digs into the dissociative tension of the secret identity, that asks what it means to feel so completely ejected from regular society that you can only go out in a mask and costume.

for a while now, a playtest edition of Underside has been available on my patreon; now, as it's slowly become more and more complete over the course of a year, i'm putting the most recent one up on itch.io

i want to be clear: while this playtest edition is enough to play a full campaign and contains all the mechanics that are going to be in the finished book, it's still a playtest. there's no fancy layout and an entire section (guidance for the Administrator, the game's GM-equivalent role) hasn't been written yet. but for a while, every time i talk about Underside i get the question: "where can i get my hands on it?". so here's an answer to that question; right now, while it's still in beta--if you want to support the project and help me get it over the finish line, or you just can't wait until it's out For Real, you can get it here.

MY ULTIMATE CREATION

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.