A REAL PERSON

He/they | Adult | Art blog is boxopher. I have no idea what I am doing ever.

[goldenaltar]

concept: no astrophage au where eridians and humans still make first contact but like, properly. a whole diplomatic mission meeting in the middle of space to save travel time. stratt is humanity's greatest representation. the eridian equivalent is equally as scary and secretly soft. it's all very star trek.

but rocky and grace put the whole diplomacy thing in jeopardy by being too best buddy with it. like they're both really low level members of the mission. some engineer necessary for ship maintenance, and an obligatory molecular biologist they brought along in case they found more alien cells out in space. and these two guys like, somehow keep ending up hanging out essentially "at the back of the classroom." consistently left out of the actually important negotiations, and well, they're bored!

grace steals some laptops and starts jury-rigging his own personal translator for rocky, despite the fact that the official translation software is way quicker to learn and much more nuanced. rocky starts learning english, simplifies his eridian, and immediately starts mocking grace for needing the software. they start blabbing to each other about all the weird quirks of their respective cultures and advanced science their planets can do. the whole time they are ribbing each other about culture stuff. grace eats in front of rocky. rocky forces grace to sleep in a corridor somewhere so he can keep watch.

then stratt and the eridian leader find out and it's like

stratt: you. you've been meeting in private with a member of the eridian deligation?

grace: ... yyyes.

stratt: and you shared with them classified scientific documents?

grace: i... maybe gave him. a laptop. he's so smart! what was i supposed to do?

stratt: HIM? you've assigned male pronouns to a genderless species?

grace: he said he likes to match!

stratt: do you even know the name of this eridian?!

grace: i call him rocky :)

stratt: 😰

then on rocky's side of things it's like

eridian leader: sorry did you say you called the human after one of its digestive noises?

rocky: yeah :)

eridian leader: and. you've been telling it about how to make xenonite. one of our most vital trading resources.

rocky: yes yes, grace is very ignorant about basic chemistry 🙄

eridian leader: right. and you watch it sleep. despite the fact that all the human beings we have spoken to have described this as a cultural violation?

rocky: well he didn't like it at first but he came around!!

anyway both sides of the delegation are sweating profusely (metaphorically speaking) until they see rocky and grace in action and are like ohh! they're both freaks. we are not to blame for this. these two are just really bad at navigating cultural norms.

cut to grace curled up with rocky while he sleeps like a baby.

[goldenaltar]

#smash cut to stratt and the eridian watching in utter horror as like #grace and rocky bicker HARD about something while using grace's duct-tape translator software #and grace is chowing down on ramen the whole time (massive eridian cultural violation) #and rocky is just utterly mocking grace in a way that would probably destroy the mission if it were to anyone else #grace and rocky in the situation like hell yeah normal every day workings this is how life is #stratt and the leader watching like. sure. i guess. this is our lives now #altho i think stratt's opinion would be less worry and more like #ah yes my molecular biologist who made venus out of plywood and duct tape #and who is making a translator software out of ramen and duct tape #im so glad i brought him along #between the two of us it was always going to be him who'd charm the eridian delegation via @poppyboppydoppy

i want to develop the leader character more so i'm jumping off these tags because i love them. i'm going to base the leader off clarity-of-song a.k.a. clara from my own fic. a linguistics expert and diplomat!

i think that stratt and clarity-of-song would end up basically in a crisis meeting regarding their rogue mission members and it would go something like this.

stratt: it's recently been brought to my attention that a member of my crew has been. informally meeting with a member of your crew outside of the strictly regimented and pre-arranged diplomatic crew-wide meetings that we're all here to complete and which took three years to negotiate.

clarity-of-song, working really really really hard not to use nervous tones because the fancy translation software can pick up on it: yes! we have also recently become aware of this. please be assured this crew member is a low level engineer without the clearance required to make decisions on behalf of the eridian diplomacy thrum.

stratt: yes, of course. we would also like to confirm that our rogue crewmember is a low-level microbiologist here strictly to provide support in understanding microbial alien life, and therefore also has no clearance to make decisions on behalf of the human diplomacy committee.

clarity-of-song, accidentally letting out a relief tone: yes! good. exactly. no one is to blame.

stratt: no one is to blame :)

clarity-of-song:

stratt:

clarity-of-song: so. your scientist. is he from a human culture where sleep-watching is more normalised? we were relieved to hear that he took no offense to rocky's faux-pas, but we were under the impression that this is considered highly offensive to humans.

stratt: oh, no, it's definitely not normal under modern human cultures outside of actively dangerous situations.

clarity-of-song: [desperately holding back three separate tones of WHY and FRUSTRATION and KILLING-ROCKY-INTENT]

stratt: however, in my time with doctor grace, i have learned that ... he is one to ... go with the flow. so long as the flow does not inconvenience him.

clarity-of-song: ah. in my time with engineer rocky, i have learned that they are very forceful with their opinions. this might explain some things.

rocky, who is present for this meeting but was sworn to absolute silent respect: use my human pronouns please!!!

clarity-of-song, using the full blown killing intent tone: i will not be doing that.

grace, also present: wait but isn't that like, transphobic? i had this one student, noah, who-

stratt: doctor grace.

grace: right! promised to not say anything. shutting up now. as requested. you're the boss.

stratt and clarity-of-song: [mutual, silent understanding that they should be thanking their lucky stars these two freaks found each other instead of anybody else.]

[what-even-is-thiss]

Yeah I saw the lovecraftian horrors and didn’t succumb to madness. What- no I’m not a cultist, James. For Christ’s sake. What you’re forgetting my friend is that HP Lovecraft wasn’t a flexible man. His brain simply wasn’t stretchy enough to take it all in. I however, have short term memory issues. Flexibility is the name of the game when you can’t remember if you ate lunch or not. What’s the size of the universe? Big. You knew that already, James. Come on now. You don’t need to witness the terrifying ocean at the base of the entirety of reality itself to know that. Pass the brandy.

[what-even-is-thiss]

You must imagine the character I’ve created here wearing a suit and a monocle, by the way.

[thesilvertophat]

During a Eldritch Horrors based tabletop RPG my character was a young dandy who wasn't particularly interested in all this monster mystery stuff but his father (my brother's character) was a researcher who WAS very into it, so Bertie went along to make sure the old man didn't get into too much trouble. It was your average Eldritch Horrors RPG in that you don't make your characters with the expectation that they will survive for very long, both the game itself and the genre are very intent on turning your characters inside out, driving them insane, and blowing them up in no particular order.

The thing was, everything in this nightmare hellscape just seemed to keep coming up Bertie because the man was too stupid to realize what genre he was in. Every time he had to roll for a sanity check whenever he saw something crazy, the dice treated him so well that he just... didn't get it. Gee that sure is a funny costume. There's something wrong with that dog. These mean guys in stupid hats are trying to hurt that young lady, we can't have that! I had not built him this way, his intelligence stats weren't even that bad, random chance just made it so that this man was living a scooby doo adventure while everyone else was being consumed by The Horrors. The final straw was at the end of an adventure when Bertie escaped from the cultist headquarters by breaking out through the mansion's front window on a motorcycle with a hot rescued sacrificial maiden clinging to his back and leading the cultists on a merry chase through the hedge maze while the other adventurers escaped. His sanity score? HIGHER than when the adventure had begun. He had found the whole experience quite thrilling and felt very good about life in general! Bertie retired from adventuring to marry the maiden he rescued and care for his aging father and delight and bemuse his friends at the gentleman's club with stories of his 'wacky' adventures. I didn't want to risk breaking his ridiculous lucky streak.

[fabiansociety]

he’s going to have a dickens of a time explaining how he met his new wife to aunt agatha

[nemospecific]

“Bertie, you’re talking nonsense. Again. Still, you’re married, so the details don’t matter. No, I don’t care, no one cares, don’t ruin dinner by trying to explain. There’s a good boy.”

[feefal]

Gold, Silver, and Bronze!🥇🥈🥉

Now as sisters and with a complex sibling dynamic.

[effseedee]

"You might be wondering how I got into this situation. Well, I fucking love punching."

[izbnart]

Disco Elysium animation 🕺

[pengosolvent]

Edit: the title for this comic is “Puzzle Rat” this one’s a few days late due to having a lot of doctors appointments sorry it’s  just 9 pages, and about some rats… it’s more symbolic than anything really

(it’s completely unrelated to any of my songs that have to do with “puzzleboy”) Patreon: www.patreon.com/PengoSolvent

[daggersoliloquy]

hey don't cry. on december 3, 1926, agatha christie went missing for eleven days and because the uk police didn't know what to do they recruited sir arthur conan doyle, creator of master detective sherlock holmes, but all he did was conduct a séance to try and contact her distressed spirit

[ironwoman359]

Her “disappearance” was also greatly exaggerated, she was under a lot of stress from the public and had just caught her first husband cheating on her, so she fucked off to a spa treatment hotel and checked in with a fake name as a “patient” claiming to not remember anything about her past. She kept up the illusion of mystery for most of her life, claiming to not know anything about what happened during that time, but in her twilight years she alluded to the fact that “of course I just ran away for a bit, wouldn’t you want to do the same?”

[zootycoon-archive]

i got these knockoff boots online and instead of the brand name on the tag they have the name of an apparently nonexistent martin scorsese movie??? what the fuck

[loseremo]

[syzygy-yzygy]

THE ORIGINAL? ON MY DASH

[this-too-too-sullied-flesh]

this post led to a series of events that had martin scorsese himself reacting to his alleged movie goncharov and it has less than 400k notes almost 3 years later?

[dragon-in-a-fez]

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

[bigmann-mclargehuge]

Share the knowledge

[dragon-in-a-fez]

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!

[klymilark]

Something I want to add:

You don't even need a pihole for it anymore. You can throw "dns.adguard-dns.com" into your android phone under Network (or Connections) > Private DNS > Private DNS Provider Hostname in your Settings app. You can also set your router up to use it via the IPs:

94.140.14.14

94.140.14.15

Link to to source for that:

AdGuard DNS — ad-blocking DNS server

Create your ad-blocking DNS server that will protect your personal data, prevent tracking and allow you to control access to specific conten

That will depend on your router, just search "How to set up custom DNS for (router name & model)". You can usually find that info on a sticker on the router itself. The model name is often nonsense like CM1000.

For switching to Linux:

If you're worried about software not working, and the software isn't something with work-related requirements attached, you can usually find alternatives. Alternativeto.net is a good place to start with that.

AlternativeTo - Crowdsourced software recommendations

AlternativeTo lets you find apps and software for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android, Android Tablets, Web Apps, Online, Windows Tab

If you're a gamer, protondb.com will let you see how well your specific game runs on Linux. Ranks are from:

Borked - Does Not Work At All, or works so poorly that you cannot play the game at all

Bronze - Sort of works, but with glitches that don't exist on Windows that affect gameplay

Silver - Works, but requires tinkering, and has glitches that don't affect gameplay, or requires heavy tinkering to get running

Gold - Works, requires mild tinkering (usually just selecting another proton version from the drop down)

Platinum - Works out of the box

Native - Is made for Linux

Other common alternatives:

Spotify: I've heard good things about Tidal, but haven't personally used it (I use a cloud storage service and local files for music)

Google drive: Nextcloud. You can find free servers on their website

Google office: OnlyOffice has a desktop/mobile app, and most of the features

Gmail: Free providers aren't common, but disroot is one of them. They also offer quite a few services. Personally I use mailbox.org, but they do cost $36 a year minimum

Google search: Disroot has a searx instance, startpage.com exists, and you'd be surprised at how far you can get by setting your default search engine to Wikipedia. Marginalia's also good, but selective about what they index (mostly indieweb stuff)

I, admittedly, run almost everything through Emacs nowadays, so there may be better alternatives now.

(Directed generally) Also remember that in most cases the problems are Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. If you find a small project that isn't perfect, remember that those five companies are probably worse in every way imaginable. Look for an alternative, but for the love of whatever you hold dear, Google is *not* a better alternative.

[murderhealion]

hilarious to me that murderbot canonically takes the tumblr route whenever thinking of an alias. basically just, new feed ID? yeah, let's go with Random Blorbo. & it does this EVERY DAMN TIME

[knightesscordelia]

There are four categories of people you will meet: Underlings, superiors, rivals, and love interests. One of my underlings has been attempting to convince me of the existence of a fifth category, "friend", which appears to have no purpose. I suspect it is a ploy to get out of performing her duties.

[anais-sinclair-official]

If you have enough passion in your heart, superiors, rivals, and even some underlings can also be love interests.

[drcuriouslxix]

an underling love interest isn't a person they are a Toy

[estrogeon]

[katelyn-danger]

Quadrants

Quadrants are the four different types of romance recognized by trolls, first explained through exposition here. As humans are socialised to

Those unaware of history are doomed to repeat it.

[gayfertilitygoddess]

Carl: Dr. Grace isn’t dead. Stratt told me he went to another planet where he can run and play with other scientists and she wouldn’t lie about that

[solnish]

thinking about baby eva being a huge science nerd, unburdened by the weight of the world

[gummybearattacktheworldofdespair]

[nepharim-tree]

I trust your knowledge evil wizard

[woodsywarbler]

I can't be an astronaut, I'm even afraid of elevators :(

[sketchupnfries]

Did some more Project Hail Mary AU sketches, since I wanted to sketch another Treasure Planet AU sketch, and I realized I didn't do a Titan A.E. drawing

[c3rvida3]

I think Joan of Arc's fursona would be a dog called Joan of Bark, but my partner thinks it would be a phoenix, which seems insensitive to me, but neither of us are furries, so I guess we don't really get a say either way.

[swiftrunnerfelidae]

I promise I’m not trying to be pretentious here. Jeanne d’Arc’s last name is d’Arc.  An overly-literal translator insisted it stood for “of Arc”, and that’s why we know her as Joan of Arc.  At the time, she was more commonly known as “Jeanne la Pucelle”, meaning “Joan the Maiden” or “Joan the Virgin”.

anyways since her main attack strategy was “hit them until they stop moving” I think she’d be a gorilla.

[c3rvida3]

*taking notes* What else do you know about this beautiful world?