Illustrated by Jill Barklem

i've come to peace with that i'm hot shit and i know it but im also the most insecure person alive

Today's phrase is "惑わず憂えず（madowazu ureezu）."

【Vocabulary & Grammar】

1.惑わず (まどわず, madowazu):

This comes from the verb 惑う (まどう), which means "to be perplexed," "to be confused," or "to hesitate."

It is a classical auxiliary verb used to express negation, meaning "not."

Together, 惑わず means "without being perplexed" or "not being confused."

2.憂えず (うれえず, ureezu):

This comes from the verb 憂える (うれえる), which means "to worry" or "to feel sorrow." Like 惑わず, the ず auxiliary negates the verb, giving the meaning "without worrying" or "not worrying."

Both parts, 惑わず and 憂えず, are in the classical Japanese form where actions or states are negated using ず. This negative form can be seen in many traditional phrases, often paired for rhythmic and rhetorical effect.

The phrase 惑わず憂えず can be interpreted as "Neither be perplexed nor worried." It encourages a calm and steady mindset, free from confusion or anxiety.

Those who have a deep understanding of things are not easily swayed by their surroundings. This is because they make judgments based on their own knowledge and conscience. It’s admirable to strive to become someone who has a strong sense of self.

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本日の一言は、「惑わず憂えず」です。 物事をよく理解している人は、周りに流されません。 自分の知識と良心で判断するからです。 自分しっかりとを持った人になりたいですね。

@frawgs

simply not a force to be fucked with

it's been a long week... pass the yaoi!

youtube needs to implement some sort of 'do not recommend channel + kill yourself for recommending me this' button

if you published A Modest Proposal on tumblr you would get about a 45 minute grace period before people started helpfully informing you in the notes that cannibalism is a real thing that does happen sometimes and also if you think about it poor people are effectively being eaten by the rich, especially children, so even though op was joking it's actually a serious issue

my issue with the argument that "disliking ai art is inherently reactionary" is that it acts like pro-ai art people are somehow less reactionary on their views on art, when like the majority of defense's of ai art as like a higher form art are indistinguishable from the arguments people use to defend the art of like. hitler

like the logic is that hitler was actually a great artist, entirely hinges on the belief that "objectively good art" is just art that looks detailed if you've never drawn before, which like why ai artists who want to prove their actual artists will just make a pretty looking building or lady, cause it's all about aesthetics i guess

like i'm not saying your a nazi if you like ai art, i just think it's silly when people act like anti-ai artist's are just hysterical luddites, and that ai artists are the ONLY people who actually care about art, when 99 percent of ai artists on twitter only care about art that's "beautiful" on an extremely superficial level.

Jacob Geller dissected the intersection of Fascism and modern art in 2020, sadly before the AI art boom, and goes into better detail than I can about how abstraction is a threat to fascist ideals. I also want to draw attention to possibly my favorite commentary on modernism.

Comic by Ad Reinhardt, an abstract painter, who's made multiple comics about art and perception.

AI slop only bring repetition and lack of original idea to the table. it's an advanced form of stolen art collage. It seeks only to trace and multiply without provoking. It's the anthesis of art.

The way I explained it to my young cousin was like this:

Back before cameras, paintings were just recording reality, and that's why painters tried to be as realistic as they could, and only paint things that could exist in the world around them--objects, and people, and animals. Sometimes they did paint things from their imagination, but only to illustrate stories, like stories from their religion.

Then, cameras came along, and painters were free to paint things cameras couldn't see--things like the artist's feelings, or ideas, or thoughts, or lots of things. Some artists tried to see if they could paint from every angle at once, and we call that Cubism. Some artists tried to paint very quickly, as quickly as they could, so they could capture one single moment of the daylight, or their impression of a moment, with all the feelings light gives, and that's why we call them Impressionists. Some artists were more interested in the process of painting, like Mr Rothko; or in finding the most intense versions of a colour, like Mr Klein. Some were more interested in the spaces between things, like Mr Mondrian. But art, after cameras, could suddenly SAY something, say something by itself! And art, as it turns out, has a lot to say!

"I can do that too! I can do that!" You can, little friend! We all can!

My little cousin didn't get mad looking at modern art; she was excited, and asked her parents if she could have fancy grown-up paints, because she didn't know Art could be something she could do, could be something about expressing her feelings and ideas. This is a child who can't yet write very well, and not nearly as fast or as well as she speaks, so you have to understand something clicked for her, that she could express the complex human things inside herself with colour and shapes and images, instead of struggling to learn how to spell "melancholy" or "excited" or conjugate verbs to a degree that could encompass it.

Because words take TIME to master as an art form--I should know, I've been practising using them to express MY ideas and feelings artistically for 36-and-a-half years! Paint, however, doesn't require such mastery in order to begin expressing the artist; certainly it helps to know skills, but it isn't as required as it is with words. You can just scream and yell with paint, you can experiment more purely with images than with sounds, which after all are regimented into languages before we can begin to use them at all, let alone for the art words make.

And honestly, why are whole-ass adults not understanding that "I could make that!" should be exciting, should inspire you to go and make that! Why are you so mad? "I could make that!" Yes you can! And you get to! And you're an adult, you don't have to ask your parents to buy you paint and canvas and brushes, you can go and do that yourself and be expressing your own feelings this very afternoon! Nothing is stopping you! You don't NEED that plagiarism machine, you can do better art yourself! And nobody else in the whole world, now or in the past or in the future, is EVER going to be able to make the art YOU can make, the art YOU have inside you! So go make it!

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!

Switching between these every day

What is tragic, truly tragic, outside of Laura finding the gruesome way her beloved was killed, is that Carmilla chose her tomb to hide instead of fleeing.

She could have done it, flee from the ancient ruins of her family name, escape from the men and institutions coming to eliminate her. Carmilla could have transformed into a cat to escape, then simply wait on the gardens and the windows for the perfect moment to meet with Laura again, she could have done anything... But she didn't. Carmilla knowingly chose to hide inside her constant resting place even she knew the enraged general and the baron where going after her.

The doylist explanation is that Carmilla as the vampire has to die for the sake of the moral of the narrative, because of what she represents in the eyes of society. It tells that Carmilla needs to be killed by the rightful because she is a lesbian monster bathed in sin who can't love... However, what does it say that in her hurry, in her agony, in her last moments, Carmilla simply chose to wait inside her tomb.

Who knows what Carmilla thought in those last moments, but knowing that mama is not coming to save her, that the girl who she embraced and dreamed to share a lovers death is miles away, and that her awaited end is not going to be peaceful but instead violent... It was probably her own version of hell.

Three small watercolour on khadi paper. Platinum pen and watercolour. A tree and moss in North Wales and two paintings of the Hokokuji shrine in Kamakura

Some of you guys have never burned a CD and it shows

Some of you guys don't even realise I don't mean setting a CD on fire

can you paypal me one ancient rusting coin