Latinrune

fantasy readers: this is fucking awesome. this rocks. youre so good at this man

nonwhite fantasy authors: so the knight is a black woman, and there are no orcs,

This shit is dystopian as fuck

The terms of service everyone is freaking out about are more or less unchanged from what they were prior to the sale. The highlighted section in the pictures here is "Information You Provide" - which is to say, it is detailing how TikTok handles information that YOU PUBLISH on their app. If you post a video where you say something like "as a biracial New Yorker..." or "as a queer person," then you have personally and voluntarily published that information about yourself, and TikTok will store it alongside the rest of the data they have on you.

TikTok was already collecting all of that information, it was already selling all of that information to the highest bidder, and so are all of its competitors. If you're on Instagram, they are also tracking and selling that information, if you use any of Google's apps, it's the same deal. Hell, if you have installed a third party weather app or an app that identifies bird calls or a ticket app for your local public transport, or a period tracker or a news app or calendar or music player or literally any free-to-play mobile game, there's a better-than-average chance that they are collecting and selling that kind of data about you.

The major change now that TikTok has been purchased is not how much information it is extracting from you. The volume remains largely unchanged, ByteDance is a market leader in that regard. If the US government wanted to use TikTok data to identify dissenters, they could almost certainly simply purchase that data from ByteDance and feed it to Palantir the same as they do data from Meta and Google.

The greater worry about the US TikTok app is that the new government affiliated ownership will implement speech-control and heavy-handed algorithmic censorship on the US side of the app, since the gov't push to acquire the app seems to have been prompted in no small part by a panic that the app was used to disseminate information about the Gaza genocide in a way the US government couldn't easily control or interfere with.

It's also a sale that was heavily pushed for by Meta and Google, who have been extremely keen to both neuter TikTok as a competitor in the social video space, AND acquire their technical information and content serving algorithms to optimize their own products to be more competitive. Which, by the way, this is also relevant information: ONLY the US version of the app is now controlled by US billionaire interests, the global version used by everyone else in the world remains under the control of ByteDance, and by extension the Chinese government.

To be clear, I'm not recommending that anyone should be on TikTok, and I am not saying that the amount of identifying private data that these apps collect from you isn't fucking horrifying and invasive and dangerous.

I'm saying that people flying into a panic over supposedly "new" dystopian terms of service are either jumping at shadows, or else are rather cynically trying to farm engagement by playing on people's fears to prompt sharing and reposting. Panicking doesn't help anyone, and spreading misinformation doesn't help either.

Yes, everyone should be especially wary of the US branch of TikTok after the sale, but they didn't hide their nefarious doomsday plot in a ToS update like cartoon villains. They bought the app in part because it was already doing all the nefarious invasive data-collection we're afraid of, but it was under the ownership of a foreign authoritarian regime, and they wanted to cut out the middle-man.

If you want to start protecting your privacy online, deleting as much social media as possible from all of your devices is a very good place to start, but just panic-deleting TikTok is not going to make you any safer. At best it'll create a false sense of security while fourteen other apps on your phone harvest all the same data for all the same data-brokers. Yelling at other people for still being on the app won't help either, that is mostly just a way to draw a false demarcation line that you can feel better about being on the "right" side of.

So in my peeking around on the internet for people's thoughts on echo, a surprisingly common sentiment I've seen from multiple places from reddit to YouTube is, bafflingly, that echo pulls its punches too much and relies heavily on the town making everyone crazy, and haunted, and I find this an insane but also somewhat interesting way of analyzing not only echo, but also stories as a whole. It's so blatantly literalist in nature that I genuinely find it hard to imagine what it is like to consume and feel impacted by fiction.

Like when Leo succumbs to the hysteria are we supposed to actually think he's just being manipulated by evil forces and that deep down he's just a cute beautiful sunshine puppy who didn't do anything wrong and should be taken with a grain of salt?

When Chase is possessed by Sam are we genuinely supposed to think that all his actions aren't his own and therefore he can't be held accountable for anything he's done?

When Carl and Jenna are possessed by the spirits of their ancestors are we supposed to believe that this all the interpersonal conflict of these century-old men, and that it speaks nothing to the way their relationship is now in present time?

When Jenna tries to flood the whole town using the dam are we supposed to take this as indubitable proof that deep down she's a blood thirsty killer who has no problems killing a whole town worth of people?

Hell, even looking past the obvious examples what about ones like how Chase is somehow able to take Flynn in a fight, a guy who is about a foot taller than him, or how he's able to get away with killing his childhood friend in public around the rest of his friend group and gets away with it.

Well the reasonable answer is that obviously, we aren't supposed to take these hyper-literal interpretations as what is actually what is happening in the story, but rather as figurative concessions to the themes and ideas of the story.

Like with the assumption you interpret echo in the same way as me, being a story that seeks to explore trauma and its recursive effects on people, all of the above actions make fairly logical sense as figurative things.

Leo isn't just getting worse from the town being haunted, the town is symbolic for trauma and the way he lives in the shackles of it without actually coming to terms with what happened, and trying to grow and leave it behind. That's why in both his good end and bad end he won't leave the town because he's not over the past yet.

Chase isn't just possessed by a guy and therefore that's why he does all his actions, it's thematic to how a common way people deal with trauma is dissociating from reality, feeling unreal, feeling like all your choices are made by someone else, and additionally represents how his guilt ways over him and is the deciding factor in everything he does.

In Carl's route it isn't just the conflict between John Begay and James Hendricks, it's that and how that generational trauma comes between them in the modern day.

In Jenna's route her contemplating destroying the whole isn't her being secretly evil, it shows how she wants to act like her past doesn't matter to her anymore and doesn't affect her now, but ends up growing into a better person from coming to terms with the fact it still deeply impacts her.

I had the honor of being invited to participate in the 2026 Homestuck fan calendar !! The theme is act 1 - 5 and it looks absolutely FANTASTIC.

Pre-Orders for the physical calendar are open until November 16th! Or you can get a free, digital version.

Most of us will have encountered someone who, when criticised for behaving badly, appeals to their own vulnerability as a way of letting themselves off the hook. No matter what they do or the harm they cause, it’s never fair to criticise them, because there’s always some reason – often framed through therapy jargon or the language of social justice – why it isn’t their fault. Childishness grants them a perpetual innocence; they are constitutionally incapable of being in the wrong.

Like what is this? How do you write this and not flinch at how obviously your square peg isn't fitting the circle you created? You think a recent culture of baby adults is why your acquaintance uses shallow psych/academic terms to absolve themselves of accountability? Yeah, I do know people just like this. I also know people much older than me who are constitutionally incapable of wrongness, who don't use therapy or sj talk to make themselves look weak and pathetic after they've fucked someone over. This is a recurring type of guy, not created by Disney+, existing long before any of us and will continue existing when we're gone.

Heinz ketchup tweeted "adulting sucks." Someone made a post saying you're valid if you're unproductive. There's a grown adult in your circle who always has an excuse for why their abuse doesn't count. Alan Moore expressed a hyperbolic, negative opinion about cape movies. Again. Did you know Hitler was a Disney adult (links to top 10 listicle that states he was a huge movie and opera fan, with his he drawing of Disney characters almost a throwaway line)? Pepes. We're still worried about Pepes, right? Abusers can infantalize their victims. Conservatives can infantalize AND adultify - very tricky! A lot of people don't understand a mental disorder. Somebody out there isn't ashamed to carry a plushie around. You understand right? All of these things are connected. They're all signs. Things are dire.

Even if infantilisation is being pushed upon us, even if the helplessness we feel has a tangible basis in reality, even if adulting really does suck, we can still choose to see ourselves as capable of changing our own lives and the world around us.

The harms are undeniable,” says Cohen. “Bottom line: it’s a way of learning to love your oppressor.

I love how at no point does this sloppily slapped together article establish what, precisely, harm is caused by "people lip syncing with pouted lips and furrowed brows to audio tracks of toddlers" but comfortably concludes that these largely insignificant, quotidian interests are proof you've given up on life and the world.

Bounce light is something I didn't cover but I adore it!

Gamut Mask

(image via )

James Gurney is an absolute master and gives really good clarity on colour techniques. Yes, it is traditional paint focused, but the principles are the same. Yes it is informed by the environmental colour but as a painting technique it is achieved this way!

While it's not super important to know about the mathematical side of blend modes, I think it's worth knowing at least enough about how each of the categories of blend modes works and why they do what they do; if for no other reason than having a starting point when you start experimenting with them in your work.

An overview of the basic blend modes and how they work from Genevieve's Design Studio: Accessible with minimal color knowledge; practical and illustration focused. https://youtu.be/kMc87hQrJd0?si=TWCB365pKSfWS8p0. (16 minutes) This creator also has a ton of free resources you can download, including a Blend Modes cheatsheet, but fair warning: you have to create an account to get them!

It is tremendously convenient to have a streaming service with a consistent account that follows you across devices, I know, but the streaming model has been absolutely terrible for actual working musicians, and it continues to get worse year over year as services enshittify and push harder and harder to replace all those annoying expensive human artists who you have to pay royalties (even if they only ever pay a pittance) with generative AI music that can be shat out infinitely and crowd out the real art.

If you pick your favourite musician and play all of their music continuously on a loop as your ONLY music listening for an entire year on Spotify, you would probably STILL put more money directly in that artist's pocket if you pirated their entire discography and sent them five bucks on Venmo.

If at all possible, buy your music directly from the artists you love. Apple or Amazon ain't much better than Spotify ethically, but a direct sale on those platforms at least ACTUALLY puts some money in the artists' pockets, and if you can buy from them more directly through their websites or something like Bandcamp, so much the better.

It can be annoying to have to maintain a file library on your own devices, rather than relying on the streaming services to organize and make everything available for you, but there are a lot of free music library apps out there you can use to make it easier, and which can often also synchronize your playlists and music libraries across your devices. I personally use MusicBee for music and podcasts, and I'm very happy with it, but there are lots of other options.