StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.
The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."
The Useless Web
Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)
Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."
Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."
use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.
use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).
use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.
get rid of bloatware
use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite
use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.
use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.
use storygraph instead of goodreads.
use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions
use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.
use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp
make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge
use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google
use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)
use flashpoint to play archived online flash games
find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books
burn your music onto cds
use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe
use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes
use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail
remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X
remove bloatware on samsung X
use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta
use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.
feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3
Old Lady Party at the Cafe, Tuesday night 10 pm-4 am, dress up as your favorite 65+ diva, costume contest with prizes, local band will be present in Bob Dylan Drag
this is not a drag on fanfiction but if you find yourself consistently saying “wow fic is better than most published stuff!! and it’s free!!” it might be a sign that your brain is ready for and craving more complicated literature than the books you are used to gravitating towards
I’ve read fanfics that are better than some published novels. I’ve read published novels that are better than some fanfics. I’ve read books that do some things I like better and some things I like worse, and ditto with fanfics. This post is blatantly not saying “stop reading fanfic” or “fanfic is bad,” it’s saying “there is a much bigger world of literature out there than the books you are comparing your fanfics to and you will probably enjoy those more complicated novels better than the novels you are currently reading.”
#they really said “you can’t use wiki as an academic source-use our garbage AI that’s even less reliable”#and you can’t even opt out of it
no but you can FORCE it away. use ublock origin and copy paste the blacklist i made into the filters to be able to remove the bullshit AI overview that google forces. it also removes youtube's forced ads (at least until they fix it)
you can also use the ublacklist extension and use this blacklist of AI image generation websites to curate your google image results
there are ALWAYS ways around stuff. it's just a matter of looking into it and asking around
Worldcat is my bestie and my one true love!! Not only does it tell you what library a book is at, but it also price compares different used book sites against each other for easy view! It's how I got Tarot For the Master for $10!!
Oh, and since I have your attention: z-library (books and textbooks) and sci-hub (gatekept scientific journal articles.) I just ripped a textbook for class off z-library and snatched a required reading from sci-hub. Life is good and education should be accessible at every stage and station of life.
And it’s called SearXNG. It’s a metasearch engine, so it takes information from whatever providers you select and presents it to you as Google might but without ads or tracking, and you can pick which sources it searches, so you could only search Wikipedia and scihub and worldcat and whatnot by default
the distortion of "there is potential profit we did not earn" as "there is money we lost" is fascinating and disgusting to me. "megamediaconglomerate lost $1,000,000,000 to piracy this year" is a flat out lie. it is not true. they did not have a billion dollars, that they now do not have. they felt entitled to one billion dollars, that they did not have, and still do not have. it's an infuriating perversion of the truth
StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.
The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."
The Useless Web
Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)
Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."
Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."
The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.
Sometimes, oftentimes, all the time, people will ask me, “Why did you do that to yourself?” when I tell them how proudly and valiantly I have weathered the storms of abuse and bigotry in my life. I tell them how I sat in a room or on a train or in a call and butt my fucking head against some brick-for-brains, a whole group of them if that’s what the day called for, and stood my ground as stubborn as a moose. The people I regale with these tales, so proud of my willpower and grit, look at me every time with so much sorrow and ask me, “Why did you do that to yourself?” and I feel that gentlest, smallest implication there. That I am hurting myself. That I am doing wrong to myself. That I am a glutton for the pain, suggesting out of sincerest concern that perhaps, just maybe, I hate myself. It makes my heart so… heavy. And so hauntingly alone. Some days it almost feels as wrong as the people who call me a freak, because of just how damn lonely it can feel. I know they beg me to run because they love me. I understand why, I’m not a fool. No one wants to see harm come to a loved one. No one wants to watch a loved one stand beneath the sun-blotting, sky-sickening rain of slings and arrows, not even bearing the hardest shield nor the finest armour.
But even just my skin is enough for their most nuclear words. Everything these bigots say just washes off me like the rain. Never have I hid from lightning, nor found my spirit cowed by rolling thunder. I know far too well that I am loved. I am loved by the sun and the moon and all the people within whose chests they dwell. When I am tired of being wet, I return to my warm and waiting home so I can dry myself at the hearth that she and I made together. That is my privilege. I am privileged because I have somewhere safe I can go, somewhere I am loved and somewhere I am warm. It’s not much, but it’s enough to let me heal and rest. Still I am told I should never go where rain decides to fall. Where angels fear to tread. I am looked at in horror, and pity, and confusion, like surely I am mad, or worse, self-loathingly sane. “I would’ve just left,” they always say. Always thinking that surely I must’ve sought the rain. That vile downpour simply cannot bear to watch me live in peace. It cannot even suffer knowing I dare to partake openly in the world it has so carefully beaten bloody and scared.
I learned young that there are no ends to the earth that cruelty won’t follow you to. To be vulnerable a moment, as if I’m ever not in all these writings, when I was bullied, I was often bullied in what I’d consider a shockingly trans way, in retrospect. I was a lonely kid. Easy to pick on and tease. Isolate. Calling me names and using their words to get as far under my skin as they could just to watch me explode. It often made me wish my bullies were the kind who would try to beat me up, but a bully knows not to fight you in a way they know they can’t win. Worse, the smart ones know to bully you in a way that looks just enough like it isn’t breaking any rules. As many of you will surmise, yes of course I got in trouble for beating their asses to the ground once I had enough. That constant, dogged hounding, always trying to make me lose my temper because it was funny. The same way some ghoulish bigot thinks he can ‘trigger’ me and show everyone what an angry freak I am. My teachers, my parents, my adults and gods would tell me, “You just have to ignore them. You need to learn to just walk away.” Where? Where can I go where they won’t follow? Where do their feet refuse to fall, where is the line they’re too scared to cross? I searched that recess yard for years, teacher. All I learned was that even if there were no end to the horizon and infinity were real, even if the town were big enough for all eight billion of us and kept stretching on and on into forever, they would stop at nothing just to follow me a little longer. I’m not asking for a homeland to fight for or an eden of my own. I am telling you, they would not even let me have the rubble or the camps if they thought I could find the briefest reprieve from them there. They would take the wasteland from me if that’s where I ran to to hide and live in isolation, just trying to carve myself a peaceful life and for what, what is my sin? I am asking to live, and worse yet, because I am human, I dared to try to do so unalone.
I have been threatened in front of my mother as we rode the train together. I remember how I shouted back at the man how I just wanted to be left alone, to be left in peace, how I didn’t deserve this, any of this. I remember the way every passenger looked at me then looked away, because they couldn’t bear to have their own peace disturbed. I remember the one teenage girl that started to lay into him too once I yelled loud enough to the rest of the car what this man was doing, bless her rage. But I also remember the way my mother’s hand gripped my arm. I remember the fear in her eyes. I remember the pleading look, don’t fight this, don’t let him hurt my baby, don’t put yourself in this danger. She thought I would die that day if I decided to defend myself too audaciously and for me, it was just another Tuesday. I looked at this man and I knew he was easily a weight class or two above me. He looked so deeply unwell in his vile rambling. Of course I could die if that’s what he wanted. If I were all alone on that train, maybe I never would’ve stepped off or maybe it would still be just another Tuesday. I chose to become a woman knowing of the men I could meet in the woods. I made this choice knowing both what it would cost me and the risks I’d face by choosing this life. Never once have I regretted it. But I still can’t shake the look I saw in mom’s eyes. How that paralyzing animal fear rose up in her that she was going to watch her daughter die in front of her. How lonely I felt, looking back at her. Shouldn’t it make you so angry that you start shouting too?Where would I even run, mother? I don’t want to run. Don’t I deserve the train too? Don’t I deserve the bathroom and the computer and the workplace? Don’t I deserve my pound of flesh or at least a little peace? If no one else on that train was going to shout and fight for me unless I did, why shouldn’t I make a scene? Don’t I deserve to be fought for? I want more than courtroom justice. I want more than pride parades. I want more than basic fucking decency. I want to be fought for. If I’m the only one that’s willing to pick that fight then I’ll gladly do it for my sake alone. That’s the very least I deserve.
Sometimes I’ll sit for over two hours arguing, yelling at people on discord about how fucking stupid and illiterate they are. I don’t seek these people out, I just have the audacity to use a mic as a woman and the gall to have an androgynous voice. I don’t leave my online games and I don’t mute people after I report them, not unless they’re especially tiring and noisy or I myself am exhausted that day. I’d rather fight and tear into them or even just piss them off as hard as I can til I teach them that they’re the ones that are going to have to learn to shut the fuck up. That they can’t say whatever they want without someone biting back, hard. I know what a stubborn woman I am. No, I won’t laugh it off and jokingly call myself a fool. It is simply me and I take that very seriously. What if there’s someone like me watching in the wings, wondering if it’ll be safe to come out? Watching like I used to, if it was a safe place where others like me felt okay being seen in. I’ll give you a tip: there always is. Call it a sick kind of fun, call it heroic, call it unstrategic, but it’s who I am to live this loud and headstrong. I’ve made the world better for it, by inches or less probably, but even just those small victories give me the confidence and willpower to reach for the greater ones. But when I tell friends how I made things better in the end or at least how I neither bent nor broke while I made a fool of them all… I’ll admit, I can still sorta tell how they never really get it. I don’t blame others for not wanting to expose themselves to the shit that’s on my shoes. In case the above paragraphs weren’t clear, it’s not like it’s fun. But it does get… lonely. It’s easy to say “I would’ve just left,” or “You need to learn to just walk away,” when you’re not angry enough at the world. It’s easy to say that as long as you don’t think about how lonely it feels to have to do that again and again and again while everyone around you gets to do what you can’t. It’s easy to say that if you don’t want to get to do the same things men can do or feel the same safety when you choose to speak in the same public spaces. Isn’t it?
But I wish to go where I please. I wish to live, just like you, in sunlight, on crowded streets, in online forums and public facing workplaces. I wish to live in these places with a pride and love for myself so deep it crushes all my doubts under the pressure. I am willing to fight for that small and profound social privilege I once had as a young man but I do not bereave others who find my way too harsh, too direct and forceful. It’s ugly and it’s messy and damn can it ever be a burden on the soul wondering if you’re doing and saying all the right things, riding the razor’s edge of high running emotion and calm, coherent rhetoric. But I’m also privileged enough to live somewhere I’m loved, somewhere I have a home and close community that has accepted me even after all the wrong I’ve done in my life. I have somewhere I can go when I’m tired. If I want to go somewhere new, I know I’ll have to stay hyper vigilant. If I don’t want to be called sir I’ll have to put on makeup and not dress too butch. I’ll need to steel my heart against any flaw I hear in my voice. I know the sheer energy it takes just to be strong and how exhausting it is to feel safe. But I know I can do at least a little good with this strong heart of mine, not just for others but for myself. I deserve to be fought for too. I deserve to be fought for and I am strong enough to fight so I will fight until it’s safe enough for you and me and all those we love to rest at last in the peace we deserve. When I am tired I will rest and heal and dance and sing and rise again unbroken. I am loved and love in kind; it makes me gentle and nurtures my hope. My deepest scars were always healed by love. Oh, what an ugly, rare thing it can sometimes be to find your strength hiding in the callouses of your heart. But oh, what an honour I feel to use it for the sake of those I love.
Suffice it to say, I have never feared what may fall upon my head from on high. And they are not the rain. They are men. Bigots. They are not calamity, they are not disaster and there is nothing natural about the way they think the world ought to be. If I were to run, the storm won’t follow but men always will. If they both fell upon me, the rain would heal my nature but the men would burn it all, just another harvest for their vile machine gods or a light chuckle for their circuses of ridicule and humiliation. There is no amount of space they will ever be satisfied with taking. You can walk away and walk away and walk away and one day there will be nowhere left to go and when you face them again, you will have forgotten the rage you have to grip with two hands just to say, “No, this is where I belong, you are the one that is going to leave,” because rage is a muscle that must be exercised. Learned and learned from, but never feared. If you learn how to use it, it will protect you. It will save you from the fear that holds your hands and the darkness aching in your deepest regrets. The first weapon you ever held in your newborn fists, now yours to form against those who would dare to come for you and the people you hold dear. The first step, and the only step, is to just keep trying, no matter how many times you’ve failed before. To try and speak up, to challenge the wicked whenever you can and even if it never gets easier, even if it doesn’t do much, know that you still changed my world for the better. For people like me, just seeing that someone else tried for me is enough to keep me going. We’ll rage for love and we’ll rage for pride. That is enough. There is no victory too small to matter when you fight to make your world a kinder, softer place.
So you can tell me how you would’ve just left or how you’d never do that to yourself but don’t you dare dishonour my wish to live. Tell me how you could never do what I have no choice but to do every time I merely wish to exist unalone, but pity not my beautiful, angry life. Fight for me, fight by my side or love me from afar from wherever it is safe, but don’t you dare call me a fool. I know what privilege means and I gave that up gladly to live as a woman. Now I’m going to take it back, by wrathful pride and righteous love because that is what we all deserve.
One day, we will go where we please and feel as safe as our fathers. One day, we will live without needing to fight our way out of the creeping dark just to touch the smallest daylight anymore. One day, the callous of strength will fade and hope will find its long sought rest in peaceful tranquility.
pixelskylines
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
dededos
titsay
gummygunk
romaincrisis
janainaart
blakekathryn
