reblog to tell a 14 year old that these are the very, very hard years and they’re not wrong to feel the way they do.
I had a fifteen minute long crying session yesternight over the fact that all I was 10 years ago, at the ripe old age of 14, is lost and lonely, and now, at 24, I am neither and that filled me with so much gratitude
reblog to tell a teenager that these aren’t actually the best years of your life and that things can and will get better when you have independance and maybe are away from your situation right now.
Sorry about the rant I’m just SO sick of this “we have to be on all the time never look away if you aren’t upset about politics and traumatizing yourself watching people die on Twitter you’re wrong and complicit and evil” like I know things are fucked and we need to stay angry but we can do that while also taking a minute to crack open a cold one with the boys or have gay sex or get tipsy at the line dance, we HAVE to have joy to remember why the fuck we’re refusing to give up in the first place. Fight like hell for your loved ones and then also go home with them to smoke weed and drink sweet tea and make biscuits covered in honey and butter please, please don’t deprive yourself of joy, you’re allowed to be happy BEFORE the work is done. You’re allowed to be happy.
The lady I used to live with was adamant that there be a party at any opportunity. They weren’t always big, but if there was an occasion in the slightest, there was something done to celebrate it. Sometimes she literally would just say, “this deserves a Diet Coke!” And she would pass me a can from her stash in the closet.
It’s important context that she had a very hard life into adulthood. Very poor family. Abusive father. Mentally ill mother. She often had to miss school as a teenager because she had to go find her mother, who would wander off for days into the woods. She also made sure her other siblings were fed, clothed, and at school while she herself was missing out on them.
I once asked her why she did so much celebrating.
She told me that people can choose to celebrate the small stuff if they want to, or not, but life was hard enough and the celebrations, no matter how small, made the other hard things easier. “If two people lead hard lives, and one of them celebrates and the other doesn’t, which do you think will survive longer? Get more done? Make it farther?”
Your despondence and self-flagellation doesn’t help anyone. Your passion and drive do. So you need to do things that ignite your passions and keep them ignited. Recognize that there is pain and awful suffering in the world. Do what you can to change that. Then do what you need to do to make sure you can keep doing it.
gonna take a hot shower and put on a big t shirt and my undies and i’m gonna sit on the floor and color at my coffee table like im 6 years old again and then i’ll feel better
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.
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!
I love the random replacements for clichés writers insert in science fiction shows. like when a 21st-century human would say “stop pacing you’ll wear a hole in the floor” but in a space show the alien/future human says “you’re oscillating like a Betelgeusian night badger” or some shit. like fuck yeah he is. amazing drive-by worldbuilding. I’m gonna spend the next half hour wondering why the Betelgeusian night badger evolved to do that
eddie figures out his feelings post-texas and then he’s talking to hen about it and he’s like “well i can’t make a move Now. i’m his landlord. that’s like an abuse of power or something right?”
and she’s like “eddie you two sleep in the Same Bed”
eddie, later: buck do you consider me your landlord? in like a power dynamic way?
buck, with pupils the size of a small country: mmmh. do you want me to?
shrek 5’s teaser animation isnt bad you’re just nostalgic for movies made in 2001
“OMG why is there TIKTOK??? IN THE SHREK UNIVERSE?” <- person who has never seen shrek before
shrek has always been full of pop culture references. you just think it’s cringe now because you’re 20+ years older. now shut up and enjoy shrek’s lesbian daughter voiced by zendaya and pinocchio making thirst trap edits of shrek twerking on tiktok
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