Reblogged
Fact #1067: You're not unhirable for being trans. You're just as capable of a worker as any cis person is. Discrimination exists, but you must persists regardless.
Ossimoro
FREE PILLOW FIGHTS!
I love that most people once they realized what was happening just went full Berserk mode without a care
also the man dropping his walking cane to have an anime like elder master reveal
This wonderful human is bringing so much joy into the world. He’s reminding people they’re allowed to play. That they can be silly in public. That fun can come in unexpected places and at unexpected times. I wish I knew who he was. I’d donate so he could buy more pillows and bring more fun into the world - once it’s safe enough to.
Reblogged becausedragonage
Veilguard missed an opportunity to have a prologue that was dependent on your faction choice, like in Origins. Like they could've done it as when you meet Varric through your means. Like having to fight the 20 antam to free him as a crow or running through the elven ruins as a veil jumper.
I feel it would make more of connection to your faction and could lead to the choice between Treviso and Minrathous more devastating if you're a crow or shadow dragon.
Then the prologue would end with Rook leaving with Varric.
It would have been great, especially if you've never played Dragon Age and have no idea who half of the cameos are. It could make you feel more connected to Varric without having any prior knowledge.
Reblogged ivycrowned
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!
Reblogged star-anise
i was going to do a rant about this before seeing this tweet but imma just leave this here
This goes hand in hand with pushing for only queer people to play queer roles. Which in theory sounds like a good thing to push for authentic representation when so much of the past stuff was bad.
Except the actual real world outcome has become queer leftists abusively dog piling any actor they deem "inauthentic" leading to actors being forcefully outed against their will before they were ready in an attempt to make the abuse stop. Including children. People have been justifying psychologically tormenting literal children for not publicly disclosing (and being firm and set in) their gender and sexuality in order to work.
In many wants it's set back queer media and made people just as afraid of queer roles ruining their careers and their lives as they were when bigots were doing it. Which is not an improvement to the situation! It's really only giving cover to people who want none of this to exist.
We could have just praised the process we wanted to see. Personally I love seeing Jim Parsons take that big normative sitcom money and fucking off to make emotionally powerful queer films with it casting queer actors whenever he can. But praising that will always be more constructive than bullying Kit Connor. If Daniel Craig wants to spend the rest of his career making charming gay detective movies about helping marginalized woman get revenge on abusive rich assholes, then I don't care what his sexuality is because it's still pushing queer media far forward.
We could have positively addressed rainbow capitalism by supporting queer-owed business. We could have accepted that mainstreaming queer iconography at Target (much of it designed by queer people who got to pay their bills making it) would make space for people buying that small batch t-shirt at Pride. It's not like people only ever buy one t-shirt in their life.
A closeted-for-safety trans boy buying his first binder at Target could have created an opening for the next one to be from Shapeshifters. Instead he may never get the chance to know what it would feel feel like to take the first step because the wrong packaging could endanger him and the (fair) price mightbe unaffordable.
We can't built perils into doing better. We can't keep calling nigh-impossible next steps"the bare minimum" and tearing into them for every imperfection if we want people to do them at all. At minimum that's a burnout machine. At worst it gives bigots leverage to maker sure we have nothing. Kindness and enthuses support of what we want to see happen makes way more progress.
Unfortunately many leftists are still so stuck in the purity-sin-redemption mentality, even when they surface-level reject Christianity, that instead of growth and change everything keeps getting treated as blasphemy unless it's perfect. Even though perfection is impossible. So the whole well is primed to be poisoned by the people who genuinely hate us.
I am being so serious when I say that when you are first confronted with deradicalization and any huge challenge to the incorrect world view you've inadvertently made a huge part of your personality it will feel like the world is ending.
Our brains do not like this one bit.
Your kneejerk reaction will be to bury whatever you just saw, read, listened to (whatever) that made you Question because of how deeply, unsettlingly uncomfortable it makes you.
You have to have the strength to instead take a step back and find your rational side again and push through.
Not to push my own post, but this is really important. Aside from the difficulties of leaving an isolated support group of equally radicalized individuals without always having other people to fall back on (because radicalization tends to push other people away), this is probably the #1 difficulty of deradicalization.
Deradicalization is hard, immensely uncomfortable, vulnerable work. It's not just a simple matter of 'changing your mind'. All the more reason to celebrate those who make it through, in my opinion.
I’m gonna add my two cents to this:
You can be ‘wrong’ without being ‘bad’.
If you learned wrong, and centered wrongness in your understanding of the world, it will hurt to shift it once you learn ‘right’. There’s so much about you that hinges on your understanding of the world around you that when you realize some of it was ‘wrong’, the adjustment will hurt a lot. Even just emotionally, realizing you were wrong hurts sometimes. And understanding yourself once you realize some essential truth can also reveal some really dark and ugly truths about yourself.
It’s when you respond to your emotions and double down on the ‘wrong’ to prevent your sense of self from shifting that it becomes ‘bad’.
You can be wrong, but if you are not willing to see the wrong and fix it and instead you centralize your sense of self so thoroughly that you cannot be wrong, so everything else must be challenged? That’s when the wrong becomes bad.
This is an excellent addition that summed up the end result of not examining things and sitting with the discomfort and instead caving to it so well. This is how conspiracy theories, cults, and other radicalization thrives. You get to a point where it's all so entrenched into your personality and sense of self that you cannot be wrong anymore because the idea of being wrong is so uncomfortable. Fight it.
Reblogged assumptionprime
Reblogged kingkilling-and-stormlight
Reblog the writers’ fortune cookie for luck!
Guys I reblogged this and then wrote an 8000 word story I didn’t even have a solid plan for. Reblog this shit.
Reblogged radiantlyrey
Reblogged 7outerelements
Reblogged assumptionprime
god I could be so wealthy if I had no ethics. that's so fucking frustrating. I'm living paycheck to paycheck because I'm not grifting vulnerable idiots on TikTok. I feel like I have the ability to very easily scam people. I could make a killing with AI. but god. I have morals and ethics and so I get to be poor as shit. I hate this fucking world
I could have made a killing as a psychic, but noooo I have to feel bad about lying to people ugh
I think abt this all the time because the thing is, evil rich people truly believe that they’re geniuses who have discovered a way to make money that the rest of us dummies haven’t…but the truth is that they are just willing to do evil shit that everyone else would prefer to not to because we have standards
When I attended my graduate school job fair, Raytheon (unprompted, hearing me say my degree at the next table) offered me $230,000/yr to come work for them. That was their opening offer after hearing nothing more than my degree, in a city with a very low cost of living. The only catch was that the job was working on vision systems for missiles. (i.e. those 'targeted' missiles which kill a ton of civilians as collateral or intentional damage)
I ended up taking an $85,000/yr job as an optical research scientist at Corning instead.
It is an odd feeling, having a price put on your soul. I'd be a millionaire with a house by my mid-30s if I'd accepted that. And the offer is still open, in fact I'd have an even more generous one waiting for me with the skills I have now.
In all seriousness, if you have the right skillset, you can actually sell your soul. This very week. You will live in comfort and moderate luxury for all your days. Two of my family members did that work decades ago, until they couldn't stomach it any longer, and it set up the rest of their lives.
But I promise you, it's not worth it. It's been almost 50 years for one of them and it still haunts him. He says the worst part was the way they (him included) talked about human lives as things. Numbers on a spreadsheet, sterile corporate jargon in meetings. A lifetime later and you can still see it in his eyes when he talks about it.
You can't take it back, treating humans like things.
Reblogged becausedragonage
I know not everyone wants to read the books, but I think more people should read this passage from the masked empire specifically. Especially those who are struggling to understand modern elves being oppressed and the evanuris having been oppressors.
Reblogged
I'm all for hiring trans actresses to play cis characters, but like
- I'm way more into it if they're clocky with it. Like, my own tattoo is from the old Japanese movie Black Rose Manor, where a trans actress plays the main femme fatale. And she's so good but also at no point in the movie does transness or cisness come up. She has her broad shoulders on display, she has a deep voice, and for the whole movie she's just a woman. She's not trans, but she's also not "hi hello my name is XX chromosomes." She's just simultaneously visibly trans and also beautiful and also a woman.
- It feels sometimes like we are losing out on potential trans cinema with this attitude. Like I know trans actresses don't want to be typecast but like, we do need more trans movies! So my kinda silly solution is like, what about movies with cis women playing trans women and trans women playing cis women? Sophie Turner as a brooklyn transbian falling for new doll in town Sofia Boutella, meanwhile her funny cis work friend Hunter Schafer is microaggressing her while trying to be supportive.
hmmm well let’s think about that one for a second.
what if you did the exact same thing but replaced trans with another marginalized group, let’s say asian for example. so all the white characters are played by asian people who microaggress and the main character is an asian character played by a white girl acting asian.
that seems like it might be a bit problematic no?
Reblogged pirateprincessjess
Today I met happiness