Since I’ve been opening up a little bit about npd on here, I want to give a shout out to the essay Narcissus and the Daffodils - I highly recommend reading it if you want to learn more about npd from the perspective of, like, what’s actually going on in pwnpd’s heads
ALTGoodnight.
[ID from ALT: A detailed illustration of outdoor foliage at night, consisting of wild plants, grass and a few small delicate flowers. The viewer is placed at ground level where you can see the details up close. The drawing is rendered in calming blue monochrome tones with soft lighting illuminating the foreground of the image. The bottom right corner of the image has the artist's username signed "@evenlyevi" /End ID]
genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital
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Okay, here we go! I'm gonna try and put this in order from least to most technical knowledge required. I'm not responsible if you accidentally create SkyNet etc.
This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.
Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.
Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).
uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.
Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.
FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.
The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.
Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.
DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.
Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.
Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.
With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.
Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.
To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.
The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.
The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.
Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.
Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.
Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.
Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.
Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.
You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.
Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.
This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.
I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.
And that, friends, is a comprehensive approach to banishing the demons of capitalism from your home!
No one gets nemesis and hate-based relationships like V. E. Schwab. Nobody.
It's about the intimacy. It's about the knowing one another even if you don't like one another. It's about how respect doesn't necessarily soften into affection or friendliness. Or conversely, how the deeper the friendship, the more twisted the hate once it's corrupted. It's about your reflection being the most like you but also your polar opposite. It's about having someone who fits the negative space in your life like you fit theirs.
to no one's surprise least of all myself Victor Vale (of the villains series) is my new favorite guy he's got it all: aspd, and a disconcerting affect, and aspd, and pain manipulation powers, and aspd, and asexuality, and i love him so much
Timespinner may badly underutilise its time manipulation gimmick, but I do appreciate the protagonist's consistent habit of always using the most technically correct term for whatever act of mayhem she's about to commit, leading to her variously threatening others with "patricide", "regicide", and "deicide".
Thinking about a boy I knew in primary school. I barely remember my childhood so I can't know either way, but in retrospect I have a suspicion he may have been trying to bully me and I never picked up on it because I was just like, oh, the kind of relationship he wants from me is one where we're mean to each other? Neat, I can do that
I had such a hatecrush on him. We were the two clever kids in class and sometimes got taken away for extra lessons, so we had the whole academic rivalry thing (primary school edition) going on, plus the whole primary school gender wars thing. I spent a lot of time coming up with elaborate plans to outwit him with all the cunning a 10 year old could muster (there was a hole in the wall in my driveway where I left secret notes for my best friend, and I was going to hint the location to him in a “wow I hope you don’t find this” way, but then on any days it would be feasible for him to check I would replace any secret notes with a note insulting him instead. Don’t think I ever got chance to follow through on that plan).
In retrospect I can tell he was also an equal person, and unfortunately that feeling doesn’t seem to ever go away (for me at least), and I still have weird dreams about him every few months despite not talking to him regularly since.
No idea how he felt about me but it was probably, uh. Not that. I had fun though
Thinking about a boy I knew in primary school. I barely remember my childhood so I can’t know either way, but in retrospect I have a suspicion he may have been trying to bully me and I never picked up on it because I was just like, oh, the kind of relationship he wants from me is one where we’re mean to each other? Neat, I can do that
we all go on about the intimacy of the single-day childhood friendships struck up with strangers at the shore or the playground or what have you and yeah you’ve gotta love it. but I think we’re missing something compelling in the phenomenon that is. the opposite of that.
one time at summer camp I was on a bus with a bunch of other kids and this girl I’d barely talked to plonked down next to me, folded her hands, and launched into the tale of how she was the greatest beekeeper her town had ever seen. by sheer coincidence I happened to be in the middle of a massive honeybee biology hyperfixation, so I could tell she was bullshitting, however through some combination of social awkwardness and curiosity I didn’t manage to call her out on it. I just kept yes-anding and she kept escalating until she was trying to convince me that she was breeding mutant neon superbees in her backyard and could sell them to me if I could raise the cash. (we were 11.) and to this day I’m 100% certain that not only did she know I knew, she knew that I knew that she knew I knew, but neither of us would break, so we just locked eyes and played it out til the bus got where it was going. I don’t even think she had an endgame, I think she was just in it for the experience. our groups split after that bus ride and I never saw her again. scam apiculturist 11 year old if you’re still out there I’ll never forget you or your bees
If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading
ALTI did a quick google search to confirm, and it turns out Catherine Murphy(who took this video) is the president of Townsville Bat and Wildlife Rescue, which is a charity/not-for-profit org registered with the Australian government.
So i think it's pretty safe to say she knows what she's doing.
Here is a news article that interviews Catherine. Apparently Townsville had a heatwave and the baby bat was trying to get a sip to drink when she fell in. The bat was kept for monitoring before being released again.
Glad the animal video is cute,
Now can we talk about *Townsville?* Like that's a places name for realsies?
