#ducks

having depression makes your friends seem like the coolest most put together people on earth like wow... you got out of bed, had breakfast, went to work, AND spent some time on a hobby when you got home....? that's so impressive you're like superman or something. can i borrow your power.

I’m not depressed, but I am still in awe of how much my friends get out and do things. like, they go out and meet people and go to concerts and volunteer and do things spontaneously. My little brain could never; I do things the same way every week, plan out my weekends a week in advance, do my homework before i go home from school. The biggest thing I change about my schedule is baking a cake spontaneously at 2200.

Reblog to hug prev poster (they need a hug)

we need to have a way to post a pdf directly to tumblr. tumblr should have another post type called "pdf" so we can embed them easily. tumblr will never be the new pdf without this function.

i remember hearing about the college app essays as a kid and how much time people spend on them and so starting in 7th grade, I would practice writing proper essays, like 10-15 pages EACH. I did this like all the way through highschool because I figured that was what I would be expected to be able to write, and then I first looked over the commonapp questions and they’re like, a couple hundred words on the vaguest prompt that has ever prompted. like, i understand there are administrative reasons, but I was so godamned shocked because everyone had called them essays, which to me meant a complete piece of writing??, and ig i just ran with that assumption as a kid? I feel like that’s pretty reasonable, is it normal that people struggle so much to write a few pages? Is this an American thing?

my bf: hey hun The White Freak is here me: whuh The White Freak:

Great Egret

Whats he regretting so much?

Reblog if you think it’s okay to platonically say “I Love You” to your friends

Slams the reblog button so damn fast

(requested by anonymous)

everyone on replies is terrified of this fact but i just think it's so sweet and heartwarming. she's holding our hand and leading us somewhere secret and we're both giggling like kids. i love her

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!

/hj is the funniest earnest tonetag in the world even without the handjob joke because it's ostensibly meant to clarify tone for autistic people, but the tone it's clarifying is "unreadable level of ambiguous seriousness that requires social context beyond what text can convey /glhffgt"

I'm half joking, which either means that I'm presenting sincere beliefs flippantly to avoid backlash, that I'm completely lying about what someone like me would say, that I'm presenting a mix of true and false statements, or that I'm loaning out a socially acceptable opinion to nudge you back in line /hj

/good luck have fun faggot

Remembered the phrase "[someone] is turning in his grave", as a way of saying that someone who's now dead would so deeply disapprove of something that a living person is doing that their corpse would stir in unease.

Then I remembered an expression, "even a worm will turn", as a way of saying that no matter how downtrodden or lowly someone seems, they can nonetheless turn against their abusers and oppressors once they've had enough of it.

Then cross-contamination happened and the phrase "a worm is turning in his grave" emerged to me. I have no idea what that means.

“even a worm is turning in his grave” you have done something so fundamentally offensive that even a worm would disapprove beyond the grave.

alternatively, “a worm turning in his grave” could indicate the existential futility of a pursuit because worms live underground, and so they already spend their lives in the place where they will die. e.g “I hate my nine-to-five, I just feel like a worm turning in his grave.”

Remembered the phrase "[someone] is turning in his grave", as a way of saying that someone who's now dead would so deeply disapprove of something that a living person is doing that their corpse would stir in unease.

Then I remembered an expression, "even a worm will turn", as a way of saying that no matter how downtrodden or lowly someone seems, they can nonetheless turn against their abusers and oppressors once they've had enough of it.

Then cross-contamination happened and the phrase "a worm is turning in his grave" emerged to me. I have no idea what that means.

“even a worm is turning in his grave” you have done something so fundamentally offensive that even a worm would disapprove beyond the grave.