of course he's got white hair and angst

Icey (they/them) ♑ INTP-T who let me be an adult?

[stolen-stardust]

we truly are living in A Timeline

[tainbocuailnge]

forget everything anyone has ever told you on the matter the truest marker of adulthood is starting to hear the siren call of high quality kitchenware

[tainbocuailnge]

to be clear you SHOULD buy that cast iron pan and you SHOULD buy that knife set and you SHOULD buy that fancy rice cooker and you SHOULD buy that novelty mug. high quality kitchenware is always worth it you’re literally gonna be using that almost every day

[nudityandnerdery]

This seems like a good post to include this link on:

Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose

One buyout firm quietly collected Pyrex, Corelle, Instant Pot, and Oneida. Farberware is a name on a 200-year lease. And the pans still wort

Talking about popular kitchenware companies undergoing enshittification, and gives you a list of brands towards the end that are more reliable.

[gallusrostromegalus]

re: the warrior cats name wheels and your tags

i cannot emphasize enough that warrior cats is, functionally, game of thrones for children

with all of the violence, politicking, and poor writing decisions that implies

whatever level of brutality that RP had was probably on par with the actual series

Hmm... The RP wasn't as heavy on the GOT-Style Politicking, and it didn't have much interpersonal violence (the cat colony was a very cooperative group for reasons that will become obvious in a minute) buuuut I think it might have been worse because the RP was a different Genre of Horror: Being A Small Mammal In The Wild. Disease. Predators. Hurricanes and other natural disasters. Urbanization and Pollution. The threat of starvation vs. the risk of the hunt. The balance of how much you were doing for the colony vs. how much it benefited you.

It wasn't a forum-type freeform RP, it was more of a chatgroup-based TTRPG where everyone played multiple characters and there was a lot of interpersonal RP, but there were very much encounters/combats/puzzles that were governed with the rules of a game called Mouseguard, which is very much from the school of early D&D where you'd show up with a binder full of characters you'd rolled up, because you were expecting most of them to die. Some sessions could involve multiple generations of cats.

The Game Master of that RPG was a former Hackmaster player of mine, and when she was busy with grad school, it was convenient for her to have me come in and play an antagonist for her players, instead of making her play ALL the NPCs. Some of the Antagonists I played were:

A female cougar that systematically hunted the colony to drive them to extreme paranoia so they'd fragment and be easier for her to hunt as her pregnancy progressed and she became less mobile/her cubs demanded more from her body. She was based on real-life events where a female cougar destroyed a large and controversial local cat colony over the course of a winter. The party did not defeat her, they had to leave and re-settle outside of her territory.

A Rabid Bat, and the subsequent Rabies Outbreak, with me taking over Player Characters as they succumbed to the disease. I remember a deliciously tragic post by the player who was the medicine cat. They decided their PC was so devastated by the outbreak that they consciously decided to go insane and join the rest of the rabid despite not actually being infected.

A Great-Horned Owl that should have been a fairly moderate encounter for the colony but somehow ended up killing like 80% of the PCs before they finally got it? RIP Horohoro, you were a wonderfully stupid menace to play.

A Team of human Trap-Neuter-Release volunteers, which got really existential and traumatic really fast. We kind of agreed halfway through that this was actually too depressing and moved onto my next, less tragic and Much funnier antagonist:

A Horse With A Phobia Of Cats. Cats had a 20% chance of encountering The Horse if they crossed a specific meadow, which they had to cross All The Time, because the only two sources of water and the fucking moonpool were in the meadow. It presented a severe logistical nightmare with a countdown- the cats had to figure out how to deal with the horse before the next half-moon or risk getting cut off from the starclan, and every day they didn't deal with the horse they had to roll for complications for dehydration. It took them five deaths and 26 days to figure out they could just Open The Gate.

Assisted in playing some natural disasters including a Hurricaine (and resulting flooding) , an 8.0 earthquake (and resulting tsunami), and a wildfire (and resulting famine).

Just A Fucking Alligator, who the players weren't actually supposed to fight, it was just there to prevent them from crossing a river at a convenient place on the map that the DM didn't want them to use, but Getting a 12AM Text from a friend asking me "Hey, wanna be an alligator?" When I was zooted on cold meds was really fun if somewhat disappointing in that I wanted to be magically transformed into The Objectively Best Reptile.

An Escaped Serval, who was actually perfectly friendly towards the PCs but *massively* disrupted the social and political dynamics of the colony because he was just so extremely fuckable. He got murdered in an ides-of-march style uprising by the male cats who felt they had been cucked, which lead to a full-on civil war event.

An Outbreak of Rabbit Papilloma Virus that had mutated to effect cats as well. Don't google that after dark. That arc lead to a shitload of political fuckery and the ascension of the new clanleader: Stageye, who became a very bitter believer in Nominative Determinism.

Since the Players enjoyed the Mountain Lion Psychological Horror so much (and everyone was playing too many characters and wanted a die-off event), I returned as another systemic colony-killer: A pack of similarly magical and hyperintelligent Feral Dogs. The Ash River Cemetery Pack were some of the best antagonists I've every played. I'm trying to find my RP notes but I remember Streetmeat, Third-Rail Racer, Overhead-Underhand, Two-Buck Luck, Darkstar, and Magenta, son of Tangerine (the medicine dogs were all named after different shades of red/purple/orange, AKA colors dogs normally can't see). I should draw them sometime. IIRC, the cats killed at least three of the eight dogs but ended up having to cede a lot of their territory to them and make an alliance with a previous rival colony to survive the winter.

Garfield, Eldritch Entity (Joke session modeled on a Simpson's Halloween Episode)

Like I said, I'm not very familiar with Canon Warrior Cats Lore, but my god is it fun to come in and play A Fucking Problem while everyone applauds you for being Such A Devastating Fucking Problem.

[oneconfusedfeesh]

Yeah, a lot of those sound pretty par for the course for Warriors, actually. A few fun tidbits from warriors canon:

Cats disembowel 'on-screen'

There actually was a cougar menacing the cats

for a while everyone thought one of the clan's leaders had rabies. Turns out he was possessed by his wife's dead stalker(I stopped reading before this happened)

Cat heaven and cat hell decided to duke it out and dragged the living cats into it

One noteable character got her face ripped off by dogs

A cat learned how to control dogs

fire

The second series was about the cats having to move because humans had decided they needed to bulldoze the forest they started in

disease outbreaks. So many disease outbreaks.

Assassinations

TNR's been alluded to

The very first main character joined the clan cats for the sake of his fireballs(IYKYK)

One of the cats travels to the past and meets a possibly eldritch cat being

Sometimes a bird snatches a cat and they just have to deal with it

Also kitty bigotry. So much kitty bigotry.

This series was for middle schoolers by the way.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Oh ok so Warrior Cats is to Gen Z what Animorphs was to millennials, EXCELLENT.

I'm honestly genuinely pleased at the level of gritty realism about the horrors of being an outdoor cat because that's the sort of thing that embeds itself in a young person's mind and makes them never let their own cats out.

Actually the RP might have been nicer than the books because the Trashcan (it was trashcan after all) was getting hit with mass death so often they literally could not afford to do Cat Bigotry, and had plenty of external threats to hate on.

I'm not sure what the timescale of WC is because I am curious about the relative death tolls of each.

There were about 12 players playing an average of 5 characters at any time, but I was called in when the average got over 8 PCs per player, so like, I'd start with a colony of 100-120 PCs and was expected to bring that number down to like, 20. Each antagonist arc I did played out over one week to three months in-game, and I think I calculated the average death rate to be a little over 21 cats per week across all of them. The Horse had the highest kill rate at 26 cats in 3 days (I was on dental surgery drugs last night and couldn't do math), but the Dogs had the highest total kill count, taking a colony of 150 cats down to 8 over the span of three months, with one session spanning one month in-game and running through 100 total/3 entire generations of cats.

My antagonists weren't meant to be defeated, they were meant to be dealt with- by leaving the area, coming to a truce, changing the way the colony operates etc. The Game Master's antagonists were meant to be killed or dealt with without as serious a death toll, but sometimes the dice would decide otherwise, which was part of the fun. She made some great ones like:

Trashclan was looking for a new home when they found this beautiful woodland area and abandoned factory thing full of slow, dim-witted prey and absolutely no humans for miles and miles. Paradise, really, except for the ghost cats that looked like rotting corpses that seemed absolutely determined to not let them settle in the area, causing disasters, possessing PCs and general terrorism. Trashclan tried to hold their ground against what they thought were cats that had been banished to cat hell, until one of the medicine cats managed to commune with one of the ghosts to ask what their fucking problem was. Best in-game use of the "This is not a place of honor" warning ever.

The game was taking place in a post-apocalyptic New Jersey. Like, far enough after the apocalypse that there were cities and civilization again, but there very much had been a major apocalypse.

The Moonpool develops a Carbon Monoxide leak from vegetation rotting under the mud.

Just straight-up Growltiger from Andrew Lloyd Webber's CATS. Years before the movie, so look up the stage musical.

Also the Great Rumpus Cat from the same musical

She used a lot of the characters from CATS as NPCs. And the lore as the basis for the afterlife lore of the American warrior cats. So rather than going to the star place, Trashclan believed they would go to the Heavyside Lair.

An Alien Invasion Force lands and the cats save Earth when they eat the 6-inch tall would-be colonizers. There were a lot of them and they had laser guns, but there were a lot of very hungry cats too. Some of the PCs developed alien mutations from eating too many aliens tho.

Not an antagonist per se, but the GM and two of the players got very, very deep into the science of feline inbreeding so they could have a realistic incest mechanic and I think one of them ended up publishing a scientific paper about it because they had done all that research, they might as well get that grant money.

Godzilla, who actually turned out to be a major boon for Trashclan because he laid waste to the city with the TNR volunteers and opened up a bunch of new territory for them. He was grated godhood and ascended to part of their panthe(r)on.

I should get in touch with her again.

[gallusrostromegalus]

1.

PROFOUNDLY DISAPPOINTED WITH THIS SERIES NOW.

2. Guess who might be playing a next generation of the Ash River Pack?

:)

It's me

:)

Rebecca (not her real name) has apparently been continuously running this RP since 2006, and my last participation in it was in 2016. Becca manages this by having an in-game clock where players need to finish encounters/make decisions/accomplish goals by an IRL date so ten years have also passed in the Trashclan RP.

As it stands, there is some Three Houses bullshit going on where the MASSIVE Trashclan (15 players and over 200 PCs!!) is threatening to split into three smaller clans, which would make sense in-game, but none of the players actually want to do that because it's a huge logistical hassle.

So when I texted Becca earlier today, she was DELIGHTED to hear from me because "They've had it too good for too long."

:D

She's setting up a proposal for a Decimation Event, and I'm skimming the timeline channel to catch up, but there's a very real possibility that I'll get to cry havoc and release the dogs of war upon an RP server again.

Oh no. There is ONE player character left who remembers the Ash River Massacre.

Oh No. She's in dubious standing with all three factions.

OH NO. Trashclan hasn't actually *seen* a dog in over 3 years because of their magically shielded location. The majority of the current population doesn't even know what a dog looks like.

OH NOOOOO

The vote is tomorrow but I'm making up lore and rolling horrible dogs now I can feel the evil growing within me again >:D

[sunshinemoonrx]

HUH?

Most cop thing I've ever read. what the fuck are you talking about. The posts you're looking for might be on this website but we won't show them to you???

[sunshinemoonrx]

I'm sure all my settings are set to "yes show me mature content no don't filter anything" what are you TALKING ABOUT

[sunshinemoonrx]

the posts are ON THE WEBSITE. I can't search dirty words?? am I five??? is this club penguin??? when I get you

[noticesghosts]

What the hell

[noticesghosts]

What is going on

[error-404-fuck-not-found]

just so you know, if you completely ignore the search feature on the website and just type "tumblr.com/search/term" into the address bar, it bypasses all of this. broken-ass website

[phantomrose96]

When you meet Edward Elric he gives off the impression that he's the short-tempered hot-headed "violence is the answer to all life's questions" kind of protagonist, and it's in fact incredible character craft that he's actually the character who ends the series with a negative-3 kill count.

[phantomrose96]

people killed: 0

direct orders of "you really really need to kill this guy" ignored: 1

ongoing murders being committed by Ed's own friends/colleagues that Ed got in the way of to specifically stop that murder from happening: 2

[phantomrose96]

God's worst soldier Edward Elric. Showed up as the youngest member of the Amestrian army, took millions of dollars from them, never followed a single order, helped dismantle their fascist regime, left with a lower kill count than he arrived with, then fucked off to go be a house-husband. Character of all time.

[aka-blaa]

You know, when you said "negative-3 kill count," I, who haven't seen the anime, thought, "He resurrected 3 people?????" But I'm seeing here on the wiki that apparently resurrection in this anime is a terrible idea.

[phantomrose96]

Official addition to this post.

[motziedapul]

Everyone's making adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein that are more gay and trans, I want to make an audio drama that's an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo but more gay and trans

But that already exists and it was an anime that was released 21 years ago

If you want a Count of Monte Cristo story where a kiss was involved in the climax between The Count and Albert de Morcerf and their one trans woman character gets away safe and happy with a flourishing modeling career AND it's widely considered one of the best, if not the best onscreen adaptation of the novel, watch Gankutsuou

[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.

[shamebats]

Emos & scene kids got this close to abolishing gender for real. I try not to think about it too much.

[shamebats]

The idea of a popular teenage subculture where girl & boys pretty much all dress the same feels impossible now but for a while it was reality and it was beautiful.

[movementnudge]

Movement nudge, hand mobility! 🙌

X

[ruffboi-mags]

1) do this even if you're under 40. seriously. I definitely should have been doing something like this for years and I only turned 40 a month and a half ago

2) if you're like me just now trying this going "oh god i've only done 15 and i think my hands are cramping" start lower than 30 and increase by 5 once whatever number you're doing no longer makes your hand cramp up. I can manage about 15 per exercise at the moment.

[creations-by-chaosfay]

If you're hypermobile, be especially gentle.

[storytellering]

Just a DT V portrait to return to my roots

[recoil-operated-deactivated2021]

Only People Who Can See RED Really Well Can Read These Words

Will you be seeing red after taking this quiz?

I can only read “dogs” and only see anything in one other. I see nothing in any other.

[bunjywunjy]

8/10 but fuck, OW.

[stevolteon]

8/10 also!

[veliseraptor]

i am terminally A Sucker for characters who have a towering and generally earned ego about their own ability and absolutely no self-worth about themselves as a person at all. intoxicating combo.

[juliaaaaaar]

V

[yesornopolls]

do you have any friends that are 4x your age or more?

Do you have any friends that are 4x your age or more?

Yes

No

Voting ended onJul 21

[girl-blorbo-polls]

If you were handcuffed to your girl blorbo with magical unbreakable handcuffs for 24h, would you be okay with this?

I trust her, I’ll be fine

I trust her, but it’ll be a stressful 24h

It depends on what kind of day we’re having

This is gonna suck…

Other/nuance

Voting ended onJul 19

[prokopetz]

You know, when I've remarked that a lot of the responses to my posts feel like people are just plucking out keywords they think they recognise based on the shape of them and replying to what they imagine the post says based on that, the possibility never occurred to me that this is actually how many American schools are currently teaching kids to read.

[prokopetz]

Like, my assumption this whole time has been that when folks go "I misunderstood this post that says [thing] as saying [unrelated thing] because I mistook [word] for [completely different word that happens to start with the same letter]", that was a bit. What do you mean they're teaching kids a reading method that's tailored to produce this exact error?

[buggyhuman]

Three cueing. Once you learn about it, a whole lot of very frustrating online discourse with US Americans makes so much sense 😭

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have

[woodsfae]

If you were taught to read with the three cueing method, and now struggle to read fluently, you can still learn to read properly!

-> Phonics For Adults <-

If you're a teenager, you can still use this resource.

[tpwrtrmnky]

"For mature audiences" not as in "legally allowed to see a boob" but "can see a fictional character do a bad thing and not immediately go on a crusade against the author"