Rephrase.

"I don't like any of these extremists on the right or the left! I just think we need the basic common sense middle ground stuff. Like, the government ought to be providing everyone healthcare, that's just basic. Every other developed country in the world can do it, why not us? We're Americans, we're supposed to be world leaders. And why are we letting rich people accumulate so much money they can buy our entire government? We need sensible tax rates like we had in the 1950's. We don't need the government interfering in family medical decisions or what gender people want to be, talk about your activist governments! What's next, they wanna micromanage us like they did in the 1800's? Send women to jail for wearing pants? Come on, let trans people go to the goddamn bathroom, what's wrong with people? And I don't understand why we need a freaking secret police force to terrorize people whose visas expired. Why don't we just let anyone immigrate and get a green card if they can pass a background check, that way they get paid minimum wages like Americans do and corporations can't pay them super cheaply to get out of fair wages? It'd be better for all Americans that way. You wanna enforce customs at the border, sure, we don't want smuggling, but the way ICE currently is, half the people who work there get a hardon when they think about terrorizing immigrants. In my opinion the whole department's gotta go and we go back to the way things used to be. "

Like... you use the short version of those opinions, people have been taught "these are extreme opinions!" But you express the exact same information a different way and people go, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Kind of like "defund the police" is scary but if you say, "let's take some of the funds we're currently allocating to the police, and give them to specialists who're good at dealing with mentally ill and desperate people, so those people get the right kind of help and don't get shot. You know, if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail... and the police have guns, so every problem looks like a thing to shoot. Let's keep them targeted on what they're good at and give the work you don't need a gun for to people who don't need a gun to do it," people think that's perfectly reasonable. "Fund non-violent alternatives to police for non-violent issues like welfare checks" is another way you can phrase it, which is shorter.

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!

A friend has once again brought it to my attention that it is unusual to have an intact chronological memory of life prior to age 12 and you know what’s weird to ME is that the rest of yall forgot how to sing the clean-up song

Other shit:

Yes I’ve talked about this before and yes I’m going to talk about it again because every single person on earth should be fully and viscerally aware that being a kid feels like every description I’ve ever read of recovering from a stroke and we all grow up and forget and talk about childhood like it was magic.

Yeah some of it was fun and all but don’t you remember FALLING DOWN CONSTANTLY? You don’t remember needing help putting a shirt on cause you got your arm stuck and couldn’t get out and panicked so bad you started crying? You DON’T remember being just CONSTANTLY STICKY? Ohhh my good, pissing yourself. Pissing yourself was the worst. Christ alive, and being put in the playpen with a weird kid

Why were you falling into the toilet?

I WAS LIKE TWO FEET TALL

Just in time for Valentine’s Day... 💔 

Ready to break up with Google?

So are we!

We’ve rounded up a bunch of privacy-centric alternatives for everything Google.

Check out the full list over on the blog!

- The Ellipsus Team xo

Fun fact, on top of being staunchly against genAI, ellipsus literally has an Export To AO3 button. I do the majority of my writing in LibreOffice, but I've been moving all my GDocs over to ellipsus for a bit and I really love the interface. If you're looking for an alternative to GDocs, this is The One.

I hate Nintendo Switch Online. I hate the lack of optimization. I hate the expensive subscription service. I hate the lack of games. I hate the limited time releases. I hate that it's never gonna have the level of content that the Wii virtual console had. I hate what capitalism has done to gaming.

This collection includes: All the GBA, GB and GBC games currently available on the Switch!!

+ And a few extra bonus!! Mostly from the same series'seses

Download here for free!!: https://www.mediafire.com/file/pzycxh6zu9b8drf/GBA_Online_PC.rar (405 MB Uncompressed)

They're all ready to be played in HD on PC. Just drag and drop the files on the included program

Target audience right here!! The joy of gaming and sharing it with others is the reason i post and i made this blog. Enjoy the Kirbyses very much, and do remember to support the official release whenever possible

fuck it, i'm curious. reblog and tag with the first fictional death to ever rewrite your brain chemistry and/or make you cry like a baby. mine was ares from the underland chronicles (who, for context, was a giant bat.) to this day i will weep if i think too hard about it. okay, go.

Adam Sandlers death in the movie Click was the first time i really understood that people in real life die. and i remember praying to Jesus asking him to please let Adam Sandler into heaven if he ever died in real life

haha vegeta are we talking horses

The scariest shit I see always comes from people who are quite confident that, being very loving, they could not be doing anything abusive.

THIS. THIS A THOUSAND TIMES. YOU CAN LOVE SOMEONE AND STILL ABUSE THEM. PEOPLE WHO ABUSE THEIR LOVED ONES DON'T AUTOMATICALLY STOP LOVING THEM. THEY HURT PEOPLE THEY LOVE. SOMETIMES IT'S BECAUSE THEY LOVE PEOPLE BUT THEIR MEAN OR SELFISH OR WHATEVER. SOMETIMES IT'S BECAUSE THEY LOVE PEOPLE BUT IT'S A TOXIC LOVE WHERE THEY OBJECTIFY OR ACT OVERLY POSSESSIVE OVER SOMEONE ELSE. THAT ALSO APPLIES TO PARENTS AND PEOPLE WHO AREN'T JUST ROMANTIC INTERESTS BTW. YOU CAN LOVE SOMEONE AND STILL ABUSE AND HURT THEM.

This is why most people don't understand my relationship with my stepfather because yeah he was emotionally and sexually abusive to me but he would take me out for ice cream after we washed his car and go to yard sales together and he paid for me to learn how to scuba dive and he helped me with the closing costs to my house when it was taking too long to liquidate the assests. The lows were so low, but the highs were so high. And I could tell he wasn't like that on purpose. He himself was badly abused. I don't excuse or condone his behavior but I do understand it. There was love there and there still is.

He's an incredibly flawed individual, but he's still one of my dads and despite all the hurt he caused, I still love him. I make sure neither I or my children are left in a position where we are vulnerable with him, though. I'm forgiving, not stupid.

What's the first question that really pops into peoples' minds about Ea-Nasir? I'm trying to write this history down, but I'm struggling.

After looking through the evidence, both, but moreso the second.

Ea-Nasir's tablet is dated to 1750 BC, which is coincidentally aligns to the death of Hammurabi. For context, he lived at the end of the Isin-Larsa Period, a time in Babylonia's history where it was a collection of warring city-states. Ur and Larsa were the most powerful of these, since they were farthest south and controlled most of the trade coming up the Persian Gulf. (Isin, near where Hammurabi was from, was in the North and had lost power about 200 years before.)

Right after Hammurabi's death, all the city-states he'd conquered, including Larsa and Ur, decided that they didn't give two squats what the people in the North thought, and started a rebellion.

The tablets in Ea-Nasir's house have been translated. It's very difficult to find them, but the book is called Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period, Leemans 1960, and he makes a series of interpretations that still align with our understanding of the culture today:

Where is Dilmun? Good question! Archaeologists spent the next 40 years figuring it out! At this point, they're fairly certain it's in present-day Qatar. The city was used as a midpoint port to bring in copper from Magan and Meluhha (current-day UAE/Oman and India respectively.)

The reason we know this, is because Oman is an old, old copper-producing region. It's an ophiolite (rock from the seafloor that's been uplifted to the surface) that contained a spreading center (think Mid-Atlantic ridge) which forms deposits of copper and other metals as sulfides from the black smoker vents (copper-iron sulfur, lead sulfur, zinc sulfur, etc.)

To produce copper, you have to remove the iron and the sulfur. To remove the iron, you add "flux", which essentially bonds iron to silica, because it likes silica more than copper does. And to remove the sulfur, you add oxygen, which burns off the sulfur as gaseous SO2.

The copper is heavier than the iron and silica, and sinks to the bottom of the furnace. The iron and silica, slag, flow out the side. The resulting ingot looks like the bowl below. And a lot of times, holes remained from gas getting trapped at the bottom.

They measured copper by weight though, so this wasn't too much of a problem. However, if there weren't enough flux, or the fire wasn't hot enough, iron would also get trapped in the copper ingot, making "black copper"; if a merchant wanted the 97% pure copper that could be made using this process, a lot of iron would definitely be considered 'bad copper'.

Switching back to the culture!

Around 1800 BC, the same time as this was going on, the culture of Oman underwent a noticeable decline. Many of their coastal mines stopped producing copper and people moved inland. They also stopped making bronze with tin. This is notable, because tin was scarce in the Bronze Age and insinuates they might've been left out of the trade route. At the very least, they had stopped being Mesopotamia's primary supplier and started doing their best to keep up with the times.

(At this point, I'll point a finger to Cyprus, which was firing up its smelters at the same time. Cyprus is very interesting, but it pertains less to Ea-Nasir, so I'll just wave enthusiastically at their oxhide ingot copper and tin trade domination.)

So we can't know if Ea-Nasir wasn't a chronic scammer, but I think all the evidence outlines a different story.

Ur, a powerful city-state rebelling against a conqueror within Ea-Nasir's lifetime. Ea-Nasir, selling large amounts of copper to the government, and smaller sales to private merchants who complained about being given scraps; a man who was still traveling to trade copper in a state that had lost their monopoly on the copper trade and was possibly producing some less-than-ideal quality.

He mostly sounds like a person with strong ties to his city and culture. Maybe not the best copper merchant, but certainly a passionate one.

References below the cut:

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

Everyone say thank you american indigenous people for cultivating corn, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, cacao, pumpkin, squash, and anything i missed. Makes life more meaningful globally

pokèmonize yourself!!!!

also smth smth reblog and tell me what you got im very curious

Ghost, fairy fox

Literally the only thing that could make this better is replacing fairy with something like dark or psychic

https://stopproject2025comic.org/

This is amazing !!!

The most popular browsers in different countries in 2012 and 2022.

by @theworldmaps_

Nope! When Chrome first came to popularity, people switched over to it cause it was “faster” (turns out, it just eats through your device’s CPU) but since then Firefox has upped its game in a major way. Chrome just doesn’t measure up anymore. Plus, nowadays Chrome is just a data harvester designed to show hyper targeted ads - so even if Firefox ain’t for you, it’s still worth ditching Google for a different browser.

Legit though I switched to Firefox and it’s so so so much better

i’m gonna keep reblogging this ad infinitum so yall might as well convert now

I converted my entire work office to Firefox.

when i finally bit the bullet it was super easy and took literally 2 minutes

Firefox is amazing! I've been using it for years because I know a lot of tech-savvy people who recommended it to me when I was a teenager. I go to the youtube site on Firefox with uBlock and not only do i not get ads, I can sleep the screen and the video will keep playing without having to shell out money to do either of those things. Firefox is literally better for everything but some government websites.

Art by Sina (@sin.xline on Instagram)

Support Sina on Ko-Fi

This artist has a LOT of good small comics like this on Instagram, worth checking out if you have the app! Maybe drop Sina a tip if you enjoy the work :)

Not to derail the message, but that bun has a great commercial body. Good bun for showing and breeding. Can't tell without a proper side pose, but the top pose looks phenomenal.

If u want to write a story about a character that’s just you but hotter with a dark twisted backstory and magical powers and a pet falcon or something, I think u should just go ahead and do that. Who’s gonna stop you? The government?? Fuck the police.

What if someone barges in, points at said character and scream, “Mary Sue!”

Tell them to come back with a warrant

This post came across my dash again and now I am having an absolute blast with self insert hotter me that gets the girls and guys everywhere.

This is the Way

#everyday i remember i can write whateveer i want#and then get too embarrassed to do it😕#one day.. 

need a permission slip? have a permission slip

Dante did a self insert catholic fanfiction and it was labeled as a classic. Not only should you write that Mary Sue, but maybe one day English classes will be analyzing it because it's now required reading.