Great Googly Moogly it's all Gone to Shit!

Lost and Found

I've been really nostalgic for Steven Universe lately, and I have so much love and appreciation for the show I grew up with, so I thought I should make something nice to sort of give back, y'know? Anyways, I hope you enjoy. <3

masterpiece

it's fucking me up how tv shows, movies, and even video games can't be "niche" content anymore

like nothing can be underrated anymore. it HAS to be a success. cartoons have to either be spongebob level successes with immediate marketing or they're shelved a season or two in.

Movies have such inflated budgets that they NEED to break a billion in the box office just to make back what they cost. Anything less than a blockbuster smash is turned into a tax write-off.

a single triple A video game can destroy an entire studio if it doesn't meet expectations, which are already lofty enough as it is.

and everything has to appeal to the widest demographic possible, which can mean sterilizing anything creative about the work so it becomes as palatable as possible.

idk im just sad about this

i don’t know how anyones first response to seeing the rampant transphobia in the uk isn’t abject heartbreak for all the trans people that live here

so many people’s views around transphobia in the uk start and end at “haha terf island”, and never stop for 5 minutes and think how god awful it is for trans people to be stuck here

hey we wanna re-think this at all or

The crotch of the pants too.

(Source)

The affected voters — those whose paperwork was mishandled and whose voter files lacked their SSN and driver's license — have until FIRDAY, APRIL 18th to contact their local board of elections and attempt to cure their ballot. If you voted in North Carolina last November, you can check whether your vote has been challenged at "The Griffin List" website: link.

This won't affect most of you, but it's so very, VERY important to me.

There's an apple orchard in Indiana that is a staple of my childhood. It's been there for a very long time. It's family owned and has wonderful activities for families to do. It's got apples and pumpkins and corn and potatoes and fudge and all sorts of delicious fresh farm foods.

They get a lot of out of state visitors and and the locals frequently send their out of state relatives fresh produce throughout the year. I visited it in second grade as a field trip to pick apples and sell them to the students at school, because my teacher wanted us to learn how bank loans worked. I visited this place with my fiance when we first started dating, my best friend has worked here for 9 years now. It's a beloved place for all the locals and plenty who are not locals, too.

There is a developer that is trying to "progress" the land by developing the land next to the farm. This will damage the farm in many ways. The construction itself can ruin the aesthetics and the quiet peace of the orchard, and prevent people from bringing their small children. The buildings can prevent sunlight and natural water flow. Depending on what they're wanting to build there, it could also stop the whole "family fun vibe" that the farm has always made its mission statement. If this construction is allowed to go through, it could very well kill the orchard and the family business in just a few short years.

I am not against progress or developing land, but I adore this orchard from the bottom of my heart, and I would love to have your help saving it.

If you want to help us save this family farm, please sign the petition! Tell your friends! We want to preserve our childhood for our future children. We want this farm to last forever. We want the jobs to keep. We want keep eating the fresh food.

Please, please, please.

And thank you, from the bottom of my heart. From the bottom of every Hoosier heart. We implore you. Save Tuttles!

GUYS THIS IS HUGE. 

THIS IS ACTUALLY REALLY HUGE. IN A VERY GOOD WAY. 

SUPPORT EVIDENCE-BASED ADDICTION TREATMENT NOT RELIGIOUS AUTHORITARIAN ORGANIZATIONS

“While many people say AA has been instrumental in their recovery from addiction, scientists have long questioned the overall effectiveness of the program, and say choice in treatment plans is key to recovery.”

THISTHISTHISTHISTHISTHISTHIS

Can't even boycott the last of us, can't even boycott captain america, SOME OF YOU CAN'T EVEN QUIT HARRY POTTER. And then you refuse to read some classic from a guy who's not even around to do any harm because "all the classics were written by white heterosexual men" WHICH IS NOT EVEN TRUE

to be perfectly clear I'm not saying you have to read classics at all. you do your thing y'know. but you cannot seriously use the bigotry excuse for ancient authors who are not even around and then give neil druckmann your money religiously every week for actively believing and spreading through his words and creation (and possibly even his money) ideals that are harmful and widespread in the present day.

for like a decade I kept getting the advice of "don't ruminate" but also "sit with your emotions" and I was like What The Fuck Does That Even Mean. until someone finally explained it in a way that makes sense:

so there's the emotional part of your brain ("I'm embarrased") and then there's the storytelling part ("all my friends hate me and I'm a piece of shit"). when people say "don't ruminate" what they mean is don't feed the storytelling part

you tend to the emotion ("I'm feeling x. why am I feeling that? how do I move forward given that information? what's something nice I can do for myself right now to cope with this?") but you treat the storytelling part like a little goblin that's trying to be as unhelpful to this whole process as possible. this doesn't shut the storytelling goblin up completely, but it keeps it from causing so much chaos and over time it stops talking so damn much

it's basically like if you were trying to comfort a friend. you'd validate their emotions, but you wouldn't sit there and let them call themself a piece of shit. do that for yourself

sharing this in case someone else is also like Why Didn't Someone Just Say That

throwback to 4 years ago when Rooney outed my younger sibling to me

stay close to me

in honor of 4chan exploding, I want to remind you all that they used to do “raids” on Tumblr.

they tried to flood the popular tags with gore and porn. this was when Homestuck was at its peak, so they were a target too. (side note: tags barely functioned at all at this point so trying to make them useless was like throwing a molotov into an already burning building but try telling that to 4channers)

but the Homestuck fandom was ready and countered by flooding the tag with weirder, more explicit Homestuck porn and gore.

to the point that the trolls themselves got weirded out, fucked off, and never attempted a “raid” again.

everyone moved on but I stayed there because that is one of the funniest fucking things to happen on this website.

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!

Children please stop calling the slightest hint of sexual desire “gooning” I’m going to strangle all of you

🫵stop directly contributing to the growing anti sex sentiment

Have u considered that sexual activity is a natural part of the human experience rather than some invading wild animal which must be staved off and hidden in shame?

Source: genitals are a part of the human body

Also, I'm not usually a linguistic prescriptivist, but…

This fella picking up Popeye is a goon.

Or more commonly…these guys in the back? Goons.

We gotta give goons back their word