Bean

Hi! Welcome to my blog! I'm 24, my pronouns are they/he. This is a multifandom blog, but it's mostly MCYT content at the moment. I do also love my gay cartoons and pop punk music. Link to pronouns and terms in pinned post. DMs and askbox are open for new friends!

[awkwardgaybean]

@AwkwardGayBean • Pronouns.page

Usage examples of personal pronouns and gender neutral language.

[illyadolatry]

just like. for the crowd.

here's the sexual content guidelines saying nudity is ok

here's the bit from the termination email telling you you can make a new account as long as it doesn't break the same rule

here's the guidelines for what counts as explicit (not mature, aka grounds for content deletion)

here's the section telling us that you will always be able to respond to content getting flagged as explicit (lie)

here's the section where it says you will be notified when your accunt gets terminated, and that the appeals are reviewed by humans (both lies)

and by the way, posting a single thing against ToS isn't supposed to be grounds for deletion,

[pastperfectcontinuous]

bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”

[ritavonbees]

I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:

something needs to change here

this is urgent

I don’t know how to do it

death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it’s a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don’t have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that’s likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.

you don’t really want to die per se but it’s also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it’s urgent. you don’t know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.

this is the wisdom of bell hooks: daily rituals of meaning and resistance and solidarity are part of slowly building a future where you can make the change you really need. and only alive people can do that. every step you take towards change and power is another step away from death.

[special-lucky-chosen-one]

I fucking hate it here

[some-sort-of-ecologist]

For those of you with android devices, you can use the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) standalone app control program to get rid of all the bloatware, data mining, and AI crap - no coding needed!

[d-e-w-p]

save

[clatterbane]

There are also Android-based alternatives like GrapheneOS and LineageOS, which are pretty easy to install. These are unfortunately available for a more limited range of devices (Graphene is ironically Pixel only, while Lineage supports more), but it's very worth checking out whether one of them might work for your phone.

GrapheneOS: the private and secure mobile OS

GrapheneOS is a security and privacy focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility.

LineageOS Android Distribution

Typing this from Graphene now, in fact. But, both of those take the Android Open Source Project, without all the bloatware--and largely de-Google the whole thing. They give you much more control over privacy and what the apps you choose to install can do and access on your phone.

I know Graphene sandboxes everything, including the optionally installed Google Play Services which a lot of apps unfortunately require to run. (Lineage uses an alternative to Play Services instead.) So, you can install what would normally be unacceptably intrusive apps and just lock them away from pulling any funny shit with your data, or phoning home. Including the couple of Google things I do still keep around.

I also prefer running much more transparent, privacy-respecting open source apps where possible. Besides the transparency, I'd rather avoid the shitty tech corps entirely where I can. There are pretty good alternatives available for a lot of the usual suspects.

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

An alternative app store:

F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy

[clatterbane]

Also just going to leave this here.

ReVanced

Continuing the legacy of Vanced.

GitHub - ReVanced/revanced-manager: 💊 Application to use ReVanced on Android

💊 Application to use ReVanced on Android . Contribute to ReVanced/revanced-manager development by creating an account on GitHub.

This lets you pretty easily patch some of the worst offender corporate apps to make them behave better.

[cassassinated]

I miss the days when, no matter how slow your internet was, if you paused any video and let it buffer long enough, you could watch it uninterrupted

[mythicalwashrag]

[useful-info-haver]

If you use Firefox, you can go to the about:config page, search for "media.mediasource.enabled" and double click on it to set it to false. After you restart Firefox, all youtube videos will load entirely even when paused! This also affects other streaming websites :)

[nyxgoddessofcandles]

There's more to do actually, now

go to About:config find media.mediasource.enabled and toggle it to false find media.cache_readahead_limit and change it to 9999 find media.cache_resume_threshold and change it to 9999

additionally if you'd prefer mp4 to webm

also in about:config, find: media.encoder.webm.enabled media.mediasource.webm.audio.enabled media.mediasource.webm.enabled media.webm.enabled and toggle them all to false

note! this will limit video to 1080p

and use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-webp/ to kill WebP Fuck Google

[vortex-vt]

We jailbreaking browsers now lmao

[a-mel0n]

reblog if you’ve had an online friendship that’s lasted more than 2 years

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

reblog if you would never let ai write fanfics for you

[therizinosaurus--cheloniformis]

Happy 20th Anniversary of Neil Banging Out The Tunes!!!!!

More rarer images of Neil, my beloved:

20 years.

I find it so beautiful that this little rat's life has been remembered with love for 20 years and will be hopefully for decades to come. Truly a marvel of the internet.

<3 love you Neil!!!!

[lemon-bread-slice]

i have zero faith in them, and it seems like Mumbo doesn't either </3

img desc below cause it's crunchy af

The 'Severity of mania/depression vs time graph' meme labelled with "bros... WE'RE BACK, IT'S SO OVER, WE'RE SO BACK". Arrows point from 4 hermitcraft thumbnails to those points on the graph's line.

Starting in the middle of the y-axis is Skizz's video, "The C-Squad Training Course!"

At a small peak is Beef's video, "The WINNING Team!"

At a large valley is Mumbo's video, "we're cooked"

Finally, at a large peak is Ren's video, "IT'S IN THE BAG!"

end id

[pancho-pinto]

Lemon don't forget the copium

[lemon-bread-slice]

i have zero faith in them, and it seems like Mumbo doesn't either </3

img desc below cause it's crunchy af

The 'Severity of mania/depression vs time graph' meme labelled with "bros... WE'RE BACK, IT'S SO OVER, WE'RE SO BACK". Arrows point from 4 hermitcraft thumbnails to those points on the graph's line.

Starting in the middle of the y-axis is Skizz's video, "The C-Squad Training Course!"

At a small peak is Beef's video, "The WINNING Team!"

At a large valley is Mumbo's video, "we're cooked"

Finally, at a large peak is Ren's video, "IT'S IN THE BAG!"

end id

[pancho-pinto]

Lemon don't forget the copium

[diabolical-blue]

How to set your default search engine to a dedicated no-AI domain (on Firefox)

I was initially disappointed when switching from Google to DuckDuckGo since it seemed the latter is just as filled with unavoidable AI slop, if not seemingly more so. (Since I previously had a Firefox extension to block all "AI overview" results from Google, which of course didn't work on DuckDuckGo, meaning I was now seeing even more stupid AI search results after the switch than before.)

Then I stumbled across this Bluesky post about DuckDuckGo's dedicated AI-free domain, noai.duckduckgo.com. I'd already switched my default search engine on Firefox to DuckDuckGo, but that post got me wondering if it was possible to replace my default search engine with THIS version of DuckDuckGo instead. Turns out, you can! On both desktop and mobile! So I wrote out a tutorial below if anyone wants to follow the same process.

Note: This no-AI domain might not catch everything, but it does eliminate a lot of the AI slop, which is a win in my book. According to the screenshot in the post: "The system relies on curated blocklists, including uBlockOrigin's Huge AI Blocklist, to detect and suppress Al-generated imagery." While this seems to indicate the site only blocks AI images, I haven't seen any "AI overview" text search results either since I started using it. Double win.

----------------------------

Desktop instructions

1. In Firefox, open a new tab and look on the left side of the search bar. Click on the dropdown menu with "This time search with..." at the top and all the alternate search engines in the list below. I've already added NoAI DuckDuckGo, so you won't see that option yet; instead, click Search Settings at the very bottom.

2. (Alternatively, go straight to Firefox Search Settings by entering this in your web address bar: about:preferences#search)

3. Again, you won't find NoAI DuckDuckGo in the "Default Search Engine" box at the top...yet. You will have to add it first. Scroll all the way to the bottom where you will find the "Search Shortcuts" menu, and click "Add".

4. This is what I typed to add NoAI DuckDuckGo to my search engine list, which is the prerequisite step to making it the default search engine.

(Typed out below if you want to just copy and paste)

Search engine name: NoAI DuckDuckGo

URL with %s in place of search term: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/search?q=%s

Keyword (optional): @ noaiddg [remove space]

5. Now scroll to the top of the Search Settings page, where you will now be able to select "NoAI DuckDuckGo" from the dropdown menu of default search engine options!

6. Open a new tab and type in a search term to test. I searched "drawing references." It's still using the default DuckDuckGo logo on the left, but as you can see, the search info appearing below the search term is already pointing to the custom NoAI search engine we set.

7. And voila, it did indeed pull from noai.duckduckgo.com as the default search engine, not regular DuckDuckGo.

(I believe the "AI images: hide" toggle is in the basic DuckDuckGo search engine as well, but in the NoAI version, it's toggled off by default.)

----------------------------

Mobile instructions

The process is even easier on mobile, especially if you copy and paste!

1. Go to the Firefox app, tap on the hamburger menu on the bottom right, and open "Settings"

2. Under "General," tap on "Search" (again, if you haven't manually added NoAI DuckDuckGo, you won't see that option yet)

3. Scroll down to "Alternative Search Engines" and tap "Add Search Engine"

4. Add the same info as you would for the desktop version, BUT look at the link carefully after you paste it, as on mine it added a random extra "25" at the end that I had to delete. Make sure the %s at the very end of the link stays intact, as it won't accept the search engine without it.

Again, here's the URL to copy and paste (make sure you get the whole link with %s at the end):

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/search?q=%s

5. Now scroll back up to "Default Search Engine," and you should see "NoAI DuckDuckGo" (or whatever you named yours when you added it) as an option you can select from the dropdown menu!

6. Again, you can test it in a new tab if you want, and it should pull your search results from the NoAI version of DuckDuckGo instead of the regular version.

----------------------------

This tutorial was just for Firefox and the screenshots are both from Apple devices, but I'm guessing it's also possible to set a custom default search engine on other devices and browsers using a similar process.

Another thing to note: Even if you're signed in to the same Firefox account across multiple devices, and you keep them synced to use the same bookmarks and passwords etc., you will still have to set the default search engine individually on each device. The same thing applies to that other post going around about shutting off chatbots in Firefox using the about:config menu. You'll have to repeat the process on every device you use Firefox on.

[a-mel0n]

reblog if you’ve had an online friendship that’s lasted more than 2 years

[midnightssea]

[midnightssea]

btw “actual feminism” is trans inclusive and op of this tweet agrees :)

[s1xseasonsandamov1e]

becoming the oppressor is not liberation!!!!!

[evviejo]

✨️ask game✨️

random emoji-based questions to sate your curiosity. this is NOT a tag game. reblog to have people send you asks with emojis to answer

personal

👁 eye colour

🇪🇺 nationality

🏳️‍🌈 sexuality

🏳️‍⚧️ gender identity

🛐 religion

faves

☕️ hot drink

🧃 cold drink

🍜 dish

🍉 fruit

🥦 veggie

🎉 holiday

🎲 game

🏐 sport

🐈‍⬛ animal

🌻 flower

🌦 weather

🌍 place

🚙 means of transport

fandom faves

😇 blorbo

😈 meow meow

👥️ otp

📺 tv show

🎬 movie

📚 book

🎶 musical artist

[were--ralph]

[X]

we live in the worst times

[greater-than-the-sword]

My exact thoughts. Couldn't leave this in the tags.

[cesarescabinet]

To send a message, write a complaint and boycott the company behind Burger King and the other franchises it owns.

This includes Popeyes and Tim Hortons.

[soundlessdragon]

My kids are still quite young (under school age), and I've been careful to try to make sure they only have kind role models. This has resulted in typical mean language being absent from their vocabulary, such as "you're stupid/ugly/I hate you", but they've started inventing their own ways to be mean lol, such as "you're not my brother anymore, you're a stranger to me now", and hearing that out of a toddler's mouth is so cutting lol

[soundlessdragon]

My favorite tags so far

[gator-crusador]

This is a great case-in-point about why designating certain words forbidden is an ineffective strategy. Words don’t dictate thoughts and feelings; they express them. The thoughts and feelings remain, even if the mode of expression is taken away, and a new mode of expression for the thought will be found.

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

[Image IDs: Tumblr tags. dandelion-de-deus #kejfhdggsf #the children are reinventing biblical curses

the-song-not-sung-in-vein: #i too was forbidden from using the s-word #<- previous tags #yeah me too #so instead I go in trouble for calling my sister an 'idiotic lily-livered traitor' when she ditched me in the middle of a nerf gun war #'twasn't pretty. #children are wonderful

galaxyTheDragonShifter: #the children yearn for Shakespearean insults #/j /End ID]

[newsmutproject]

Studies show that approaching youth with a bystander-intervention model is actually a lot more effective for reducing sexual assault, and it is also more enthusiastically received than programs that bill themselves as anti-rape.

We can tell youth that they are basically “rapists waiting to happen” (anti-rape initiative), or we can tell them that we know they would intervene if they saw harm happening to someone and we want to help empower them to do that (bystander intervention). The kids jump in with both feet for the latter! It was amazing to see children (and young boys in particular) excited to do this work and engage their creativity with it. Also, studies show that not only do they go on to intervene, but they also do not go on to sexually assault people themselves. Bystander intervention also takes the onus off the person being targeted to deter rape and empowers the collective to do something about it. It answers the question in the room when giggling boys are carrying an unconscious young woman up the stairs at a house party, and people are not sure how to respond and are waiting for “someone” to say or do something.

Richard M. Wright, “Rehearsing Consent Culture: Revolutionary Playtime” in the anthology Ask: Building Consent Culture edited by Kitty Stryker

[beatrice-otter]

This is also, btw, how the US drastically reduced drunk driving in the US. Telling people they shouldn’t drive when intoxicated made absolutely zero difference. A slogan-and-ad-campaign for “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk!” changed drinking culture. Going after the bystanders is quite often the most effective thing to do in any social change.

[ghostofhallownest]

#empower people to make the changes they want to see#don’t feed their fear that they are one wrong decision away from being the evil they despise (tags via @rum-and-shattered-dreams)