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

Share the knowledge

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.

Level 1: browser extensions

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.

Level 2: leaving enshittified services

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.

Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery

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.

Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery

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.

Level 5: automated media piracy

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.

Level 6: fucking with Android

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.

Level 7: fucking with Windows

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.

Level 8: switching to Linux

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!

💚 Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll closes, so check back for results! Until then, please don't mention the song title in reblogs! (Guesses about everything else are fine and encouraged though; have fun!) 💚

Song 299 is: EYESIGHT LOVE by D.J. Xaneiro

(CW Eyestrain and flashing lights) If you've ever had to go in for an eye examination, you might remember being told to look at a tiiiiny image of a small house in the distance, or an air balloon floating far away. Then the MV might be familiar to you! EYESIGHT LOVE is a short electro drug song with a strong focus on eyesight and not very much on love, rather using vision as a focal point for how we interact with the world, and when we can no longer fully trust it. 74.8 of all voters enjoyed the song!

Got the go ahead to post these, I drew this for the @sonicshadowzine

You can tell it's a bit old by now but I still really like what I did with it, maybe I'll redo it someday to compare haha

I need someone who's really autistic about linux and hates windows to infodump to me about windows alternatives for someone who uses their computer mainly for gaming and drawing on clip stuido paint, preferably before october 14, when the pre-11 versions will stop being supported

For info on Linux, feel free to scroll down! I wanted to ramble a little bit about Windows as well. I don't hate Windows, rather I hate what has been done to it. Growing up using it was fine, but Microsoft continued to enshittify and enshittify it to a point where I couldn't look away anymore. For me, it started with a decrease in customization options from older versions to now, continued with randomly taking away the ability to drag-and-drop files into the File Explorer's address bar before returning it, and ended with the Recall feature. That was my final straw, even if that feature wasn't available on all hardware. Due to the closed-source nature of the OS and the software distributed by Microsoft, it's been difficult for me to find concrete proof of some claims you can hear on the internet, like MS Word sending all your work back to MS to be used as training data for their AI models. Still, I find it harder to trust closed-source software now, and I think the fact that alot of these services are now connected to Microsoft accounts when they do not need to be is very concerning.

Some further reading:

If switching to Linux does not end up being a viable option for you, there are are of course ways to improve your experience on Windows, including trying out the Long-term service channel (LTSC) version of Windows 10 which is missing some of the "bloatware" of the regular home edition, as well as blocking traffic to / from domains that are used for telemetry, ads, and tracking (e.g. Hagezi's DNS blocklist, Pi-hole). I admit, I'm not very knowledgable in these methods, but am looking to try configuring a Pi-hole in the future. As much as I wish everyone would be open to trying alternative and open-source operating systems, some people need it for work, personal usage or simply do not want to. You can't force that kind of change on someone, and that's fine. Now, on to the fun stuff!

Linux!!

Overview

Linux is less the name of one singular operating system, and more the name of the kernel used by a wide variety of "Linux distributions". These distributions are separate operating systems with their own philosophies, default configurations, and package (software) repositories. These OS's are generally considered more privacy-friendly because you can find the source code for the kernels, software etc. and look through it yourself to confirm if there's anything suspicious going on.

Linked here is an overview of popular distributions. Most of the time, Linux Mint is recommended to new users, as it offers a "out of the box" experience. It has a windows-like desktop environment (Cinnamon by default, Xfce4 and MATE as other options) which should make make the switch a little less jarring.

Software

Alot of software is available using package managers, which are CLI programs to query the distros package repository (but GUI frontends also exist). Popular programs like Firefox, Steam, Git or VLC can usually be found in these repos. In the case of Linux Mint, you can install software using APT in the terminal, or the Software Manager if you prefer a GUI. The Software Manager also has access to Flathub, which offers software in the form of Flatpak packages. These are not connected to the regular package repositories and include all the necessary files in one executable. If you're getting portable software from the internet, it'll probably be an AppImage file, which I would describe as the Linux equivalent of the .exe-file.

Now, some programs you're using on Windows will probably not be available on Linux. I've done a quick search, and it seems that Clip Studio Paint is not available on Linux at the moment, which could cause some issues. There are compatibility layers like Wine which allow you to run Windows software, but this doesn't always work perfectly, and I would advise you to look around the internet for information on CSP and Wine working together. I would recommend Krita as an alternative drawing program if you are willing to try a different one.

I assume you use a graphic tablet for making artwork. Make sure to check if the manufacturer offers drivers for Linux on their website (e.g., XP-Pen does). If not, the OpenTabletDriver project might be able to assist you. They have a list of supported tablets here. The list includes many models from Wacom, Huion, Gaomon, XP-Pen, and other brands.

Gaming

I only properly switched to Linux about half a year ago, so I wasn't there for the developments in the gaming sphere, but from what I hear gaming on Linux used to be rough. It has gotten better though - Most Windows can be run using compatibility layers like Wine or Steam's Proton. Out of the games I've played on my current laptop setup or on my Steam Deck, all of them have worked without much issue. You might have to mess around with controller configurations if you use those though. My advice is: Be prepared to do a little fiddling if you're trying to do more specific things, like installing old Windows games or using mod managers such as Nexus mods. A good source for checking if games run well on Linux is ProtonDB.

I do need to mention, though: Many online multiplayer games use something called kernel-level anti-cheat software, which allows those games to check the player's computer for stuff like cheats. Linux systems do not allow that kind of anti-cheat by default because of privacy concerns. There are other kinds of anti-cheat which can work on Linux, but this depends on the developer. The website "Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?" offers a nice tabular view of supported games.

That's probably enough info for now :P I hope it's alteast a little helpful! If there was any wrong info in here, please correct me.

This is exactly what I was hoping to find, thank you so much

rb to tell prev they're being so brave right now and pat their head a little please

whoa whoa whoa, are you enjoying yourself right now? rookie mistake. you're supposed to be afraid and angry... yeah no all the time. how else will you prove you care about all the problems?

rb to tell prev they're being so brave right now and pat their head a little please

hello and welcome to my incredibly serious arknights feature proposal: doctor dress up game character customization

i am still proposing this @ hypergryph if you're out there

sonk

[image description: a scribbly drawing of sonic the hedgehog. he has stopped mid-run and is looking behind himself with a surprised expression. end id]

my tarot-inspired piece from a while ago for @sonicshadowzine ! was thinking about super shadow/dark sonic... the flavour 🦔✨

this answer on a “what’s the most embarrassing thing you did as a kid” reddit thread has been haunting me since i read it

“HOW WAS YOUR DAY RAT BASTARD?”