#So I do these massive polls on Discord in art servers so I can ask around which I should start playing around with

[marvellovelacevt]

now announcing...

my first ever subathon!!!

join me next week on September 12th @ 12PM pacific time as i have a bunch of fun activities and games lined up!

plus, look at all these fun, cool incentives...

1 Sub - I draw a new emote: Exactly what it says on the tin! I will stop what I'm doing and draw a new emote, perhaps even with input from you guys on what it could be!

5 Subs - Subscribers-only Anime Watch Party: I host a watch party in my Discord server for my subscribers! A poll with a selection of anime to watch will go up in the Discord if we reach this incentive.

10 Subs - Phasmophobia with friends: I love horror games. However, Phasmophobia reduces me into a sniveling little mess, so I'll bring on some friends to come and help me hunt these ghosts!

20 Subs - Poorly Explained Hyperfixation Video Essay: I will poorly explain one of my hyperfixations in the form of a video essay to put on my YouTube channel. Which hyperfixation? You'll just have to wait and see!

40 Subs - Endurance Karaoke: I'll do a karaoke stream where I sing until my voice gives out or I make too much of a fool of myself. Whichever happens first!

50 Subs - Identity V with viewers: I've noticed a trend of viewers in my chat coming in during my Identity V streams asking to play with me. So why not make it an incentive? If we reach this goal, I'll host a rotating open collab with my viewers during an Identity V stream so they can come and play with me! just don't hate me if i do badly, okay?

60 Subs - Phasmophobia Solo: I play Phasmophobia..... alone. Expect me to be a massive coward!

80 Subs - "Getting Over It" Endurance Stream: Some of you might remember back before my redesign when I played Getting Over It and never finished it... Let's change that. I won't stop playing until I beat Getting Over It if we reach this goal!

100 Subs - Phasmophobia Solo with Inverted Controls: Huh? Seriously? This is getting kind of silly, isn't it? If we reach this goal, I'll play Phasmophobia all by myself... With inverted controls.

150 Subs - Live2D Halfbody Model Giveaway: If we reach this lofty goal, I'll draw a ready-to-rig Live2D Halfbody Model for someone! Note: This only includes the art. I will not be rigging it for you as I cannot rig models to save my life.

#vtuber uprising #vtubers of tumblr #vtubers on tumblr #envtuber #subathon #en vtuber #indie vtuber #nonbinary vtuber #queer vtuber #queer vtuber visibility #subathon incentives #vtuberen #english vtuber #vtuber #subathon announcement #stream announcement #marvellovelace

[autistic-trans]

Updates on the Jester game project!

I’ve finished the designs of three characters, and I’m still working on some new ones too

I’ve already posted Myster’s concepts in my last post, so I won’t post anymore from there haha

She doesn’t have a name yet, but I went in with the idea of a baby who may be a bastard, and she’s the youngest character so far. (I really like some of these sketches cause they’re super bouncy and fun)

She’s really helped me settle on the kind of species I’d like in the game, cause she’s the first Troll! (Not the Homestuck kind.) (I sadly didn’t realize I made a Troll Clown until it was too late)

This is 4/5 of all the sketches I did! She took the least amoute of time to design, and really she’s just gonna be an NPC (who’s optional to have in a party), so her design being simple is a-okay

I was at first going to have her with long hair, cause it gave a really nice silhouette, but I hate furries with human hair. Even though I ended up still giving her a hair-do, I kinda justified it cause she’s a poodle.

With characters I’m in the middle of designing, we have this guy here who’s apart of the same species as Myster is! His design is based on a reference I already really liked, so I kinda just changed parts I hated until I ended up with a really cool design. Also.... I made him a cat, cause I like cats. :pensive:

And now, here’s the coolest pose I’ve ever drawn. (I bet the reference is super obvious now lol)

With his character, I’m thinking he’s a kinda mischievous mirror to Shelle in a way. He’s active, and kinda rash. I think the face he’s giving gives off the impression he’s evil or something, but all the bad guys so far are kinda “I used to be bad, but now I’m your best friend” later on in the story haha (Though, after having two animal-like humans both be bad guys, I should really add in another who’s a furry or somethin’)

Right now, I’m stuck on the colours. I added this really cool makeup in one of my colour polls, so now I'm putting it into all colour ideas for the character. Everyone keeps saying number 3 (from left to right) is the best, but I like number 2 the most! Saaad. :c

Anyways, that’s all I got with characters. However, I do have some things I never posted!

I’m still unsure about the world, but I did a couple sketch ideas a while back. My ideas for the world are a lot different now, but I like these c:

I made walking animations for Shelle! These are just the unique frames, she has a back and a right sprite as well.

I’ve also been working on talk sprites for the characters!

This Shelle sprite is pretty unfinished lol

I’ve finished NPC Dog Girl’s sprite, and she’s basically how the sprites are gonna end up looking! (Maybe with less artifacts tho)

Speaking of Shelle, I’m thinking about if I want to have her, or a player avatar that the player can customize. 

Shelle’s pros: She’s a more active character, knows the rest of the cast better, cute c:

Custom Character pros: ....I like Fire Emblem and how they did the avatar, cause it was so cool..... Also I buy video games just because you can make your own furry.

I wanna add some stuff like Fire Emblem, where if you talk to a character enough, they become your friend (and you can be gay)

Also, I’ve started collecting the worst colour palletes from my colour polls, and put them all into one Colour Au of pain

Look upon my kingdom, in awe. uwu

#Jester Project #it me art #gamedev #furry time my dude #I like to base my colour schemes off of other character's #So I do these massive polls on Discord in art servers so I can ask around which I should start playing around with #If you can guess which characters I reference you get a cookie :3 #Okay... not really. #Obviously the bad colour scheme version of Myster is just Nights. #Shelle's colour scheme is based off of a character from Chrono Cross! I haven't played it but I love their clowns #I sure do like rambling huh

[monstersandmaw]

ORCTOBERFEST HAS OFFICIALLY BEGUN ON MONSTERS & MAW!

I’m super excited to share the first of my stories! Starting off with a plus size female reader who has very low self-esteem and some serious body image issues due to her size, and a sweetheart orc who helps her realise that she can do anything she sets her mind to, and that it’s ok to ask for help.  

Prompt: 'Ring' Wordcount: 4330

---

Chunky preview:

Never again, you thought as you typed ‘self-defence classes’ into your search engine at four am, still wearing your sweaty pyjamas, the nightmare still fresh in your mind. Never a-fucking-gain.  

The nicest looking gym you found was in town, and only a short walk from your apartment. You’d have been lying if you said you weren’t practically shitting bricks about joining up and starting a martial arts class, but enough was enough. You weren’t about to become a vigilante or anything, hunting the streets at night for men who preyed on and mugged people who were short and ‘somewhat chunky’ to put it mildly. You just weren’t about to be taken by surprise again.  

Ever.  

With your heart in your mouth, you walked up the street, super aware of how your body felt, of every curve and wobble, but you bit that back and focused on why you were there.  

Behind the reception desk in the simple foyer of the old warehouse gym sat a creature that looked possibly like a half-gargoyle, half-orc, but they smiled warmly enough up at you. You squinted, having left your glasses at home, and thought that the name tag read ‘Sibylla’. She had smoky grey skin, beautiful purple eyes, and a short muzzle. With features as intimidating as hers, she was the last person you’d expect to be on the front desk, but she asked in a husky, rich voice how she could help you, and you found yourself warming to her almost immediately.

“Hi,” you said, feeling utterly stupid as your face flushed a violent crimson. “Um… I saw on your website that you do self-defence classes…?” You trailed off rather pathetically before rallying again and adding, “And I’m kind of thinking about maybe doing some personal trainer stuff to get fitter and shift some weight...?”

“Sure,” she smiled, her massive canines clicking down in front of the long tusks in her lower jaw as she spoke. She had two short, black horns that curved up out of her forehead and over the top of her head. “Are you a member of the gym already?”

You shook your head. If I were, do you think I’d look like this? you thought.  

“Well,” she said. “We have a number of options then – oh, hi Liam!” she chirped as someone entered the foyer behind you from the street outside.  

You glanced nervously over your shoulder, trying not to twitch like a frightened doe in an open pasture, and when you saw the person she waved at, your heart stopped beating and then galloped wildly in your chest. The orc who had stepped into the reception area through the glass doors from the street was, in a word, gorgeous.  

He had shoulder-length, black hair, which was unusually short for an orc, half tied back off his face, and he was relatively slim too, for an orc. Beside anyone else, he would have looked like a demigod. His sculpted arms and chest were shown off by the skin-tight, black compression t-shirt he wore, and he stood at just over six feet, again remarkably short, but only short for an orc. His skin was a pale, sage green, and his eyes a warm brown. His small-ish tusks bore no metal cuffs, and there were no beads in his hair, though his ears were studded with silver and his black top was so tight that you could plainly see he had both nipples pierced.  

You felt the absolute and instant desire for the ground to swallow you whole, no matter of it had to open up a hole the size of Manhattan to achieve that. He was beautiful, and there you were with your big tummy and your fat ass, standing in front of the reception desk like an absolute fucking chump. You did not belong here.  

“Sorry,” Sibylla smiled, turning back to you. “So yeah, the options…”

“No, you know what? That’s ok. I…” you stammered.  

“You signing up?” the orc named Liam asked, coming up behind you. “Anything you’re looking forward to doing in particular?”

“Barely managing to lumber fifty yards and then spending the next two days aching and not even able to move even that far?” you muttered in disgust.  

The orc laughed, but not unkindly. “Everyone’s gotta start somewhere,” he said sweetly. “We’ll have you doing the things you really want in good time, I promise. We’ll take care of you here.”

Something about the way he said it made tears spring to your eyes, and you felt your face crumple, turning away from him to hide your embarrassment.  

“Hey now,” he said, gently bringing his hand to your shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not you,” you sniffled. “Look, thank you for your time,” you said to Sibylla. “I’m sorry I wasted it.” And you turned and fled the gym, not stopping to catch the looks Sibylla and the orc exchanged.  

Anger and disappointment at yourself flooded through you and tears still stung your eyes. Every time it was like this. Every time you set your mind to some new challenge, you backed out.  

You’d not made it ten paces down the road before you heard jogging feet, and a large figure loomed into your field of vision. It was the orc, Liam.  

“You that desperate for new customers?” you shot sarcastically at him as he drew to a halt slightly in front of you and just off to one side.  

He deflated a little, holding up his hands. God, they were nice hands. “No, I just… I’m sorry if I upset you. Whether or not you join the gym, I just didn’t want to part like that…”

“Oh,” you said, rather lamely.  

“Listen,” he said, running his palms nervously down his thighs, “Would you at least let me give you a tour of the place…? See what it’s like before you make a decision?”

You took a deep breath, teetering on the edge of a choice. You knew you should. What was it you’d said to yourself at four o’clock that very morning? Never again.

“O-Ok...” you nodded. “Thank you.”

He beamed at you, tusks gleaming in the bright sunlight, and his dark eyes glittering. 

Read the whole thing, and gain exclusive access to monthly stories, the Orctoberfest with more orcs than you can shake a WoW game at, WIP snippets, polls, character bios, and our private Discord server right now!

#orctober #orc #exophilia #orc boyfriend #monster boyfriend #monster x reader #orctoberfest #patreon #SO MANY ORCS

[thetrumpdebacle]

‘Why pay a newspaper?’

McNamee details how smartphones “turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible. And it left Facebook and Google with a prohibitive advantage over traditional media.” 

He rhetorically asks, “Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?”

In addition to battling declining ad revenues, the American press found itself competing in a free-for-all information landscape. When WikiLeaks took its trove of hacked Democratic emails and published them in a searchable online database, outlets covered the fresh material. The U.S. intelligence community said Kremlin-backed hackers stole those emails, meaning the press indirectly became an unwitting tool of Russian election-meddling after WikiLeaks laundered them into the public sphere.

The starkest example occurred in October 2016, during the run-up to the U.S. election, as WikiLeaks strategically leaked Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s stolen emails.

Content based on the curated emails — created by mainstream news outlets as well as agenda-driven pages arising out of thin air — rocketed around Facebook, which had become the world’s most prolific provider of news. (From July 2015 until June 2017, Facebook consistently drove more traffic to publishers than Google.)

The Podesta leaks and the resulting coverage made WikiLeaks a top topic on Facebook and Instagram. The impact was particularly striking among older men, a demographic that votes at a rate around 70 percent. After the election, Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel noted the mainstream media’s role.

Tough for the press to admit, but in 10 years we’ll generally agree that it got played by foreign agents who wanted to sabotage Clinton.

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) November 14, 2016

‘Only the people we want to see it, see it’

It wasn’t only the Russian government that leveraged Facebook during the U.S. election. The Trump campaign executed a massive paid media strategy that involved paying nearly $6 million to Cambridge Analytica, a micro-targeting firm created by enigmatic billionaire Robert Mercer, and spent roughly $70 million on Facebook. And unlike Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the Trump team eagerly embraced the opportunity to work alongside embeds from Facebook, Twitter, and Google to optimize engagement. 

After Trump’s victory, Cambridge Analytica claimed to be “instrumental in identifying supporters, persuading undecided voters, and driving turnout to the polls.” The Trump campaign attempted to distance itself from the firm after reports that Cambridge Analytica’s CEO had reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an attempt to obtain hacked emails from Clinton’s private server (though it’s unclear whether the WikiLeaks founder possessed them).

Social media ad platforms changed the game for political campaigns seeking to deliver messages to specific groups of voters. Facebook has even published success stories of how U.S. politicians swayed the vote using its ad platform.

Creating effective ad campaigns on Facebook has become something of a dark art. At one point, the Trump campaign created an anti-Clinton animation based on a 1996 remark she made about some African-American gang members being “super-predators.” The primary goal was to depress Clinton’s vote total by delivering the content to certain African-American voters through Facebook’s advertising system of nonpublic “dark” posts.

Brad Parscale, the digital media director for Trump 2016, told Bloomberg Businessweek that dark posts allowed for a situation where “only the people we want to see it, see it.” 

‘Trolls and bots impersonating Americans’

In July 2017, McNamee and former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris met with two members of Congress. They explained to the lawmakers how Russia had attempted to use social media to influence the American electorate.

“We theorized that the Russians had identified a set of users susceptible to its message, used Facebook’s advertising tools to identify users with similar profiles, and used ads to persuade those people to join groups dedicated to controversial issues,” McNamee writes. “Facebook’s algorithms would have favored Trump’s crude message and the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories that thrilled his supporters, with the likely consequence that Trump and his backers paid less than Clinton for Facebook advertising per person reached.”

Social media researcher Jonathan Albright defined the effect as “cultural hacking,” telling the New York Times that the Russians “are using systems that were already set up by these platforms to increase engagement. They’re feeding outrage — and it’s easy to do, because outrage and emotion is how people share.” 

McNamee further notes that “once users were in groups, the Russians could have used fake American troll accounts and computerized ‘bots’ to share incendiary messages and organize events. Trolls and bots impersonating Americans would have created the illusion of greater support for radical ideas than actually existed. Real users ‘like’ posts shared by trolls and bots and share them on their own news feeds, so that small investments in advertising and memes posted to Facebook groups would reach tens of millions of people.”

Up to 126 million users on Facebook alone

One Kremlin-linked troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, published 80,000 posts and spent about $100,000 on 3,000 ads to deliver divisive content to an estimated 29 million Facebook users between January 2015 and August 2017. Overall, Albright’s research suggested, Facebook posts by 470 pages publicly linked to Russia’s effort were shared hundreds of millions (and potentially billions) of times. 

Whether the Russian influence operation on Facebook had an effect on American voting choices is still up for debate. What’s clear, however, is that a U.S. adversary successfully manipulated the platform in an attempt to pollute the minds of many voting-eligible Americans.

Some Russian-backed pages even attempted to organize dozens of politically charged events, a few of which were attended by Americans. In May 2016, Russian trolls managed to create dueling anti-Islam and pro-Islam protests at a religious center in Houston.

Evidence of Russian meddling on Facebook. (Image: U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee)

  “The objective of influence is to create behavior change,” former FBI agent Clint Watts told  the Daily Beast. “The simplest behavior is to have someone disseminate propaganda that  Russia  created and seeded. The second part of behavior influence is when you can get people to physically do something.” 

In the end, the Times reported, the biggest social media companies estimated that “Russian agents intending to sow discord among American citizens disseminated inflammatory posts that reached 126 million users on Facebook [and another 20 million on Instagram], published more than 131,000 messages on Twitter and uploaded over 1,000 videos to Google’s YouTube service.”  

‘They will be manipulated again’

McNamee concludes that “Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms were manipulated by the Russians to shift outcomes in Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, and unless major changes are made, they will be manipulated again.”

His suggestions for action include social media companies directly reaching out to users exposed to Kremlin-generated content (using a tactic taken from deprogramming cult members); congressional testimony by the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Twitter; aggressively banning digital bots that impersonate humans; increased transparency from platforms; prevention of commercial exploitation of consumer data; and further regulations related to antitrust law being applied to Facebook and Google.

McNamee acknowledges that societal problems arising from social media are daunting but says “that’s no excuse for inaction. There’s far too much at stake.”

Read the entire 6,700-word essay at Washington Monthly 

via The Trump Debacle

#IFTTT #The Trump Debacle