fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals. protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.
the state is less omniscient and significantly more incompetent than you’d think. overextend their resources at every possible opportunity. make them cry wolf repeatedly. run their data analysis agents fucking ragged. and strike. attack.
YES
i’m a postgrad statistics researcher and i can tell you that the state honestly has NO IDEA what to do with the data it collects, it has an obsession with big data but it’s almost impossible to work with in practice. the traditional statistical approaches that are used can’t be scaled up, the adapted approaches are substantially weakened, and the machine learning approaches have the same problems and often tell them nothing. data scientists are only just coming around to these issues too, most still just push on with it anyway - incompetence is the word.
above all this though, like you say, the biggest issue for the state is at the point of data collection. they will NEVER get anything useful if they’re collecting shitty messy data. they will eventually figure out that the real solution is working how to collect accurate and meaningful data, we should make it as difficult as possible for them to do that
Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money
TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)
WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string “FuckOff”. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I can’t seem to find it
Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so that’s good enough for me
What is the most obscure thing that you would recommend to people?
Could be a movie, show, game, album, anything you want!
Have a nice day! :)
oh my god i'm so glad you reminded me there was something i really really really really wanted to post about
youtuber smallscaletales puts together elaborate terrarium dioramas (diorrariums?) and i adore this post-apocalyptic one in particular but all his videos are high quality art.
the setup itself is not only themed, but fantastic artwork of its own:
there's a cinematic approach and an element of storytelling to the progression of the terrarium which is super engaging and fun. it pairs perfectly with how close we get with them, turning them from some odd little bug on the screen to a straight up character in a narrative.
they even have little character cards with digitally painted art and there are lovely informative graphics that add an impressive level of polish to the whole experience.
putting: narration with a storyline, bgm, sound effects, graphic elements, video quality, and overall creativity, it's criminal that this guy only has 57k subs. PLEASE check out this video or his other works if you're even tangentially interested in terrarium/aquarium/critter stuff.
Currently playing Dollhive and I'm loving it so far... do you have anything else like it you would recommend?
I'm glad you're enjoying it! First of all, I do have another game out, STARMONSTER; it's an earlier project than Dollhive that shares a lot of DNA with it.
There are many things that have inspired Dollhive. For those I've stolen from most directly, try With Those We Love Alive, or howling dogs, or Cyberqueen, or Psycho Nymph Exile, all by Porpentine; or the writings of Arachnixe, or Else, or @digitalsymbiote.
Favourite caves of qud mods? I wanna dive in and fully mod my game
I don't have the energy to turn these into hyperlinks so you have to do the work of typing these names into the workshop and finding them, I apologize that I am not apologizing.
Hearthpyre and the Clever Girl Fork are obvious necessities. Starapple Valley and Regrowing Plants and Qud Fishing is on that list too for being able to make your own imprint on the world. With how the uh, story's themes go, I am even more feeling validated in my decision to spend most of the game building bases and farming and stuff.
Dynamic Background Color because I don't even remember what the game looks like without it anymore. I think I use the More Dots mod too.
Allography lets you add descriptions to things, including yourself, which is great.
1 Percent Loot Drops adds a ton of neat, very balanced items.
Cleaning Robots lets you have robots that clean fluids and I honestly just wish one in on EVERY settlement so they don't become giant messes after one visit. Indispensable mod.
Choose Your Fighter is good if you aren't a lunatic like me who just makes your own phenotypes and sprites and pets and dialogue for every character you play.
Jademouth is what I would argue to be the best, most diegetically natural town mod in the game. It adds very little to the world outside of itself, and adds a very much needed mid-game town with a fun quest and good characters. None of the writing feels out of place, it doesn't add encounters all over the map, it keeps to its own lane and does an great job of it.
Cryptogeology is an incredibly good quest which helps guide you to each town in the game naturally, has a ton of flavor, and a really decent reward. It feels like a natural part of the game.
Tealeaves adds a much-needed merchant to the Six Day Stilt who is also very well written and lets you get a chance at Newly Sentient Beings rep.
Issachari Evolved adds much needed variety to that faction.
Nightmare Treats gives you a lot more ways to reroll mutations, AND ways to gain mental stats. Eat them. It's safe. Nothing bad will happen.
Wired Child is a fun mid-late stage quest in Ezra that gets you a VERY nice weapon if you can manage it.
Return of the Arcwyrk. You need more enemies in your life. zzzap.
Knife Fights at Eddy's is mandatory, I'm sorry I don't make the rules.
A Specter is Haunting Qud adds some VERY nasty enemies and you deserve to be killed by them. Things should be scarier. Get scared. Basically Templar Hologram Wraith Knights but they're Eater ghosts. Fucked up! I won't tell you how to beat them figure it out yourself.
Village Finder because I hate the "go to each parasang and press + and then -" when looking for villages. Am I that dumb my character can't notice villages when walking through them.
Folk Scrap and Mundanity. Mandatory. Very flavorful.
Baboons of Babel adds much needed variety to baboon faction.
Judicators of Qud add a fun neat challenging robot who is kind of like if a leering stalker and a feral lah had a baby that wasn't the sum of its parts but something all its own.
Disjecta Membra's lore feels a little out of sync with 1.0, and it makes the game a giant mess. So basically, enemies can be infected, and when they die things get Interesting. It can cause huge problems and it's a fucking mess. It can make Call to Arms an unworkable disaster and Templar historical sites become unmanageable. I love it. I cannot play without it. It makes the game so much more challenging and stressful, especially in the early/midgame. The writing is fucking incredible even if its flavor doesn't line up exactly right anymore. Do not do this on your first playthrough but after your first playthrough install this and suffer with me forever. This might be my favorite new-content mod tbh.
Your Own Personal Relics is a neat adjustment to the Item Naming system which honestly I just wish-name things when I mod them to max anyway but it's neat.
Feline's Furnishings are good tiles.
Fluid Storage is great and the Klein Bottles are fantastic and putting 500 drams in their weightless moebius will never go wrong for you ever.
I think that should do you with the unimax's share of the mods I use!
Sidenote, Eule does a lot of mods that are Very Cool but also last time I used them they had a problem of all of them would spawn things in the jungle, so with all of them active every jungle screen would have like, their populations taken over by all the Argent Somethingorother and the Unseen Adversaries and the Arboreta Guys. None of them work with 1.0 anyway I don't think, and the mods ARE very high quality! But their spawn rates were extremely overpowering to the point where the jungle was basically just entirely made of those 3 factions and it was a Bit Much.
I'm also about to try out the Labyrinthine Trail and Xeototin Mechanical Somethingorother for the first time but I haven't done them yet so i have no comment.
Planning for a flight now consists of planning out how to document the legal violations the airline is inevitably going to commit.
Since I started using a wheelchair, I have had exactly one (1) flight where an airline didn’t break the law.
The question isn’t “Are airlines breaking the law?” They absolutely are, on almost every flight. The questions are “Does the wheelchair user know their rights?” (most don’t), and “Are they physically and mentally able to document the violations and report them to the DOT?” (most can’t).
[ID: @diffusedmuse “One question if you have a moment: do you confront airlines themselves or go straight to the DOT? For example, they often push me into signing a release of liability in case they wreck my wheelchair, which I’m fairly sure is illegal but I’m afraid to say anything and be denied my flight.”]
Under US law, it is definitely illegal for an airline to make you sign a release of liability for transporting your wheelchair. I would definitely advise you not sign any release of liability. The newest statistics show that airlines damage or lose 25 wheelchairs per day. (Source) You can’t afford for them to not fix or replace your wheelchair if they damage it.
Ҥ382.35 May carriers require passengers with a disability to sign waivers or releases?
“(b) You must not require passengers with a disability to sign waivers of liability for damage to or loss of wheelchairs or other assistive devices.”
(Source)
I always insist on having my wheelchair in the cabin, but if the flight has less than 100 seats they’re not required to have space in-cabin, and if you have a power chair it’s not going to fit in the in-cabin wheelchair closet. So I realize some people have to put their chairs in cargo.
Personally I’d pocket whatever release form they gave me, scan it in when I got home and include it in my DOT complaint. I bet the DOT would be very interested to see what release they’re trying to get you to sign.
I have on several occasions had airline employees threaten to not let me fly, try to maneuver me into agreeing to take a different flight, or insinuate that if I continue to insist they follow the law they won’t let me fly. This is illegal, and I let them know that I know that it is illegal.
Ҥ382.11 What is the general nondiscrimination requirement of this part?
“(4) You must not take any adverse action against an individual (e.g., refusing to provide transportation) because the individual asserts, on his or her own behalf or through or on behalf of others, rights protected by this part or the Air Carrier Access Act.”
(Source)
So yes, I confront the airline employees myself, although I realize not everyone is able to do so. I always have a copy of the law with me - I have a document where I put together the clauses that I know they’re going to violate, and I print out a couple copies before I fly. I also have the full ACAA on my phone. Only once has an airline employee ever looked at the law - they generally just flat out refuse to read it - but I have it with me so I can prove I know what the law says. That means that can’t say “that’s not in the law,” they can only say “I don’t care what the law says,” and that is not going to show in their favor when they have to justify their actions to the DOT.
I definitely also report the airline to the DOT after I get back from my trip. The DOT’s formal investigation process is to have the airline investigate themselves and report their findings back to the DOT. IME the airline always, every time, lies and claims they didn’t break any laws. They generally accidentally admit to breaking a couple laws, but for the majority it ends up being a he says/she says situation.
Personally, I want the airline to get fined for every clause of the ACAA they break when I fly, not just the ones they accidentally admit to because they are that ridiculously unfamiliar with the law they’re required by law to know. (The record so far is fourteen clauses broken on one flight.) So as of my last flight I now record every interaction I have with an airline employee. On that flight, the minute I realized they had found a new and ridiculous way to violate the ACAA, I set my phone to video and put it in a shallow outside pocket in my personal bag with the camera facing out. When I got home, I extracted the audio file from the video, made a transcript, and forwarded both the audio file and the transcript to the DOT along with my complaint. When the airline investigated themselves and lied about what they did, I then forwarded the audio file and transcript to them as well and proved that their employees lied. It was interesting watching them scramble to explain themselves.
The DOT takes a year to process complaints, so I haven’t heard back from the DOT on that one yet, but I’m particularly interested to see how this complaint turns out as it’s going to be impossible for them to squirrel out of any of their violations. I have proof.
After that last flight I bought myself an audio recorder (like the kind you use to record lectures in school) which I now have hanging from my personal bag. Some airlines prohibit photography and video in their contract of carriage, but I have yet to find one that prohibits audio recordings. Part of my prep for this trip has been testing that audio recorder to see what the range is and how well it records, so I know where on my bag to hang it to be sure it records everything that happens.
If you’re recording audio, keep that in mind when you’re dealing with airline employees. Ask for names or read out their name badge (”Jane Smith, right?”) and describe what’s happening if it’s not apparent from what they say. (”Wait, so you’re telling me I need to sign this release of liability form before you’ll transport my wheelchair? You do realize that’s illegal, right?”)
I have an audio recording of an airline employee on my last flight saying “I don’t care what the law says!” and my response which was “I don’t think the DOT is going to be very impressed with that.” I’m pretty sure they’re not. I can’t wait to see the DOT’s response to the airline.
This is absolutely amazing. And it’s great that OP outlines several different levels of protecting yourself against and documenting these illegal actions—because, yeah, not everyone can or wants to go All The Way. But to those who do? We salute you.
Anyway, know your rights when flying, y’all [same source as above, we just wanna highlight it].
For an update since this is all older, the DOT very recently (December 16th, 2024) finally finished up their final rule to protect chair users in a number of ways!
First and foremost, since 2022, there has been the Airline Passenger’s Bill of Rights. Which clearly outlines what rights airline passengers have. Furthermore, the new rule changes which come into effect mid January 2025, require notification, for a passenger whose chair has been mishandled to be allowed to pick their own vendor, requires training and increases fines for mishandled wheelchairs.
The Transportation Department has finalized a rule aimed at making travel safer and easier for passengers with disabilities.
This improvement has been a huge win for disability advocates and should hopefully lead to a major improvement in air travel for people in wheelchairs.
You will go to the official Revanced website on your mobile device. You will download Revanced. You will install the recommended YouTube APK. You will patch it with Revanced Manager. You will enjoy ad-free YouTube on your mobile device, plus other conveniences such as Sponsorblock and automatic tracking tag stripping. I haven't seen a YouTube ad in years, and I'll never be able to go back. Fuck the advertisers and long live open source.
Download ReVanced Manager to patch your favourite apps, right on your device.
I have gotten a lot of messages saying that they really love the presentation of CURSE/KISS/CUTE. Often the commenter in question can’t say what exactly it is about the formatting that they appreciate, but that it just reads well and looks good. Well!!! Allow me to bare my wealth of secret knowledge for you once and for all:
I sorta just did some research into book typography...?
Here’s something you should know about web development, alright: typography on the web is really, really bad. The tools we have at our disposal—HTML and CSS—are incredibly powerful, but they are set up to fight you every step of the way towards Good Typography. When you know what you’re looking for, you can fix all the common issues quickly and easily. But it’s not easy to know what to look for, because
problematic typography is overwhelmingly the norm on the web, and
good typography is invisible.
Here’s a screenshot from CURSE/KISS/CUTE episode 0:
Now, I don’t want this post to come across as prescriptive. It is not my intention to tell you, “This is what good typography looks like, so follow my lead exactly.” I made a lot of choices with the typography of my web novel: many of those choices would not make sense in other contexts. What I want to convey to you is what those choices are, so that you will know they’re available to be made.
I mentioned that the web “fights you” when it comes to good typography. What do I mean by that? Well, check this out:
This is how that passage of text renders “by default.” In other words, this is how a web browser would render that text without any input from me about what styles to apply. It kind of sucks ass! But it also looks pretty familiar, right? This is not that far off from how a lot of websites—even websites full of prose (looking at you, AO3)—render text.
I think the most illustrative thing to do here would be to walk you through my thought process and show you, step by step, what decisions I made to turn this unstyled text into the styled version you see in the novel.
So, first things first:
1. We have got to shrink that text column.
Computer monitors... are wide. They are wider than they are tall. They are so wide, and they have so many pixels. This means you can fit a lot of characters on them. If you wanted, you could just have a wall of characters from the left side of the screen all the way to the right side. Talk about efficient!!
You should never, ever, ever do this.
This is one choice that I actually will make a prescriptive statement about, because it’s supported by quite a lot of research: fairly narrow text columns are more legible. Specifically, research seems to support the idea that a width in the range of 50 to 70 characters per line is the most comfortable for people to read*. Every font is different, so it takes a little doing to turn that “characters” figure into a pixel measurement; I went with 512 CSS pixels for the maximum width of my text column:
Isn’t that just so much nicer to read already?
*A commenter reminds me that I’d be remiss not to point out that the research on column width legibility isn’t completely conclusive. You do want to limit the width of your text columns, but going over the 70 character-per-line recommendation isn’t necessarily the end of the world, and you might have good reasons to do so. I did not: as mentioned, one of my goals was to mimic book-style typography, and books by nature have fairly restrained column widths, on account of they’re books.
2. Picking a font.
I’m not going to give you the blow-by-blow on how I decided what font to use. The short story is that I asked some designers, and one of the recommendations I got was the free font Crimson Pro, which I took a liking to immediately:
It’s just an all-around attractive serif font, but one thing I really like about it for use in a novel is its highly-visible quotation marks. They’re just kinda jumbo! They’re real big! Easy to see! In a novel, those things aren’t just ornamentation. It makes a great deal of practical sense for them to stand out just a bit. It also has a fairly large x-height, unlike a lot of the more traditional options, which is good for legibility on a computer screen.
3. Adjusting the line-height
Web browsers default to a line-height of about 1.2em, which, as you can probably tell, is quite cramped. If you go and Google “optimal line height for legibility”, you’ll get a number of results right off the bat suggesting 1.5em. Sounds good! Let’s do that:
Well... hmm. That’s definitely an improvement, but between you and me, it actually looks a bit too spacey to my eyes. I wonder why?
I’ll cut to the chase: the 1.5em recommendation makes some assumptions about the font you’re using. In Arial, the letter “A” is about 0.6em tall; in Crimson Pro, it’s about 0.5em. That means that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to spacing your lines, because different fonts have different amounts of empty space baked in. How annoying!
Let me tell you something about the kind of nerd I am. When I had this realization, I grabbed some books off my shelf and pulled out a literal micrometer. I started measuring the line-heights against various font features to see if there were any patterns I could spot in professional typesetting. Here’s what I found:
Almost every book on my shelf spaces lines such that the distance between one baseline and the next is about three times the x-height. How cool is that? I clapped my hands like a seal when I put this together.
Adjusting the line-height to match what I observed in the wild gives us this:
It’s a subtle difference, but to my eyes it feels just right. It’s almost like magic!
4. Paragraph spacing...
Let’s address the elephant in the room. Probably the most controversial choice I made with CURSE/KISS/CUTE’s typography was to opt for book-style paragraph indentation rather than web-style paragraph spacing—like so:
I did this for a few reasons:
It’s what I’m used to. I’ve read a lot of books, and this is just the way that books are formatted. I think for something aspiring to the title of “novel”, there’s value in making it look the way a reader probably expects a novel to look.
A novel has a lot of paragraph breaks in it. A paragraph in, say, an encyclopedia entry might go on for half a page or more; whereas it is unusual for a paragraph in a modern work of narrative prose to run for more than a handful of sentences, especially in any scene with dialogue. Because paragraph breaks are so common, spacing between paragraphs in a novel results in a lot of wasted space. Also, subjectively speaking, the additional space seems to me to lend an undue amount of weight to paragraph breaks. I’m just starting a new thought; there’s no need for a 21-gun salute, you know?
Having said that, here are some good reasons you might decide not to do paragraph indentation anyway:
Doing it right requires a bit of extra legwork. Notice how the very first paragraph in the image above has no indentation. That’s because it’s the start of a new section, and the first paragraph in a section traditionally goes unindented. This is an easy detail to miss, and it can be difficult to wrangle CSS into doing it for you automatically.
Web users don’t expect it. For the first decade of the web’s existence, there was no good way to do paragraph indentation; by the time CSS rolled around and made it easy, paragraph spacing had already become the norm. And while CURSE/KISS/CUTE may be a novel, it is also, specifically, a web novel!
But it’s my house and I get to make the rules, so I went with indentation. Incidentally, there seems to be a dire lack of research into the question of whether indentation or spacing is more legible for readers—but the data that does exist appears inconclusive at best. So, the choice really does come down to vibes.
5. The tragedy of justification.
You’ll note that one way in which I did not make my web novel look like a paper novel is the text alignment. It’s un-justified: the right margin is ripsaw-ragged.
This is because it is not possible to justify text on the web.
Oh, you can try. Look right here: there’s a CSS property for it and everything. Just turn on “text-align: justify” and...
Nightmare! The interword spacing on that first line is almost as wide as the indentation!
Reader, I’m afraid that your web browser is simply too dumb. That’s not the browser’s fault: robust algorithms for justifying text without creating these distractingly huge gaps between words have existed for many decades, and modern computers are powerful enough to run them in real time with little performance impact. It’s just, uh—nobody has ever bothered to implement them into web browsers. It is the damnedest thing.
I tried, I really did. You can mitigate this problem a bit if you enable automatic hyphenation, but browsers are unfortunately also kind of dumb at hyphenating. Firefox, for example, will refuse to hyphenate any word containing a capital letter, so any sentence with a lot of proper nouns in it is a lost cause. I tried manually inserting soft hyphens with a text preprocessor I wrote myself, but still these overjustified lines plagued me: when the text column narrows, for example on a phone, even hyphens can’t save you. The line-breaking algorithm is simply too naïve to optimize for well-justified text, and that’s not something you can fix as a web developer.
As a result, my heavy-hearted recommendation is to never use text justification. It’s just too distracting.
6. And then some extra stuff just for me
I added drop-caps because it looks neat and I made the ellipses spacier because I think it looks good when it, uh, when they are spacier. I think that looks pretty good that’s just my opinion though.
Oh, this is very similar to the approach I took with the fiction on my own website. I went purely off my own intuition rather than seeking out the research and measuring the line spacing of my own book collection, though. I admire the dedication to readability!
One extra thing I added was the ability to tweak the format based on user preference. For example, as much as it makes me gnash my teeth to hear it, my own spouse prefers reading sans serif text, so I've added sans serif as an option. I've also added the dyslexie font as an option for folks who prefer reading with that. Indents vs line gaps between paragraph are configurable as well as full justification (if you can put up with bad browser algorithms for text justification).
Kind of wondering whether I can pre-compute with another tool where line breaks need to go for full justified text, maybe at two widths for both full size screens and mobile? I wonder if there's anything better and more automatable than TeX for that.
i likewise use this sort of css on my site for my stories and essays. i usually rely ems rather than pixels when setting margins -- instead of counting pixels, you can hit the recommended text width by setting width: 50em, regardless of font or font size. tho i personally tend to get more aggressive, since i like large fonts and thinner margins, so i usually go down to 40em
by a similar to token, you might be able to hit that three x-height tall line target by setting line-height: 3ex
there are other, nicher typographic niceties i've won from thought and research (i use :after selectors and content rules to render my <hr>s as three asterisks; i use small-caps to display <em>s nested inside other <em>s, because i'm not a fan of the convention where emphasis inside already italicized text is re-romanized, that always looked ugly to me)
regarding justification, it is possible to get knuth-plass justified text on the web via javascript, in fact there's one solution in form of a bookmarklet that you can use to apply the justification to any page, provided they put the relevant text inside <p> elements
what you'll discover if you try this trick on a page formatted with the above advice, though, is that this code somehow ignorant of text indent! so it's another dead end unless you want to go back to double spaced paragraphs, or dig into the code to figure out how to fix this
there's hope on the horizon, i guess -- there's css proposals like text-wrap: pretty that aren't supported by many browsers, but maybe in a few years someone will add knuth-plass justification to browsers
personally, i used to just create pdfs with latex and send them to people. i stopped doing that, but maybe i should go back to it...
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately another issue with the library used for that bookmarklet is that it hasn't been updated in 3 years and in fact can't handle font variants (like lining-nums). I'd have to patch the library and build it myself. I'm not super eager to add a whole typescript bundling dependency to my workflow, either...
I don't _want_ to reimplement that algorithm myself, though. I'd love to just use something off-the-shelf that is maintained and works.
Okay I just fixed it anyway, adding simple support for the text-indent property and working around the weird limitation with font-variant. Here's the patch in case someone wants to steal the fix for your own purposes or play the game of submitting it back to the original developer.
Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.
(Unfortunately) it really does look a lot better. I might have to update my site with this.
Hi, I can't figure out how to filter relationships! I've been at this for about 20 minutes, and I give up b/c I am impatient. So can I please have the filter id for steve rogers/tony stark :3.
Happy to help! I assume you’re looking to filter out Steve/Tony. I’ll show you step-by-step, complete with copious screenshots, so we’re going behind the cut (and of course, this method can be used with any filterable tag (using a bookmarklet for Additional Tags) that you want to filter out!)…
ISSUE 00 - BEAUTIFUL MORNING WITH YOU - 8 pages - A robot gets a call from another world...
ISSUE 01 - I'M SERIOUS, I'M SORRY - 21 pages - Now in the world of the gods, HB meets with a strange, egotistical bird...
B-SIDE
ISSUE 02 - HYBRID RAINBOW - 19 pages - A meat man tends the fields, only to notice a gigantic satellite in the skies above...
ISSUE 03 - SIBLING RIVALRY - 25 pages - A camping trip! Nothing eventful happens! Nevermind that HB is camping with two incredibly strong magical girls, and the mountain has a habit of dredging up people's pasts.
ISSUE 04 - SMALL GREEN BOY - 27 pages - In an attempt to find out what's happening to her friend, HB and her new pal ascend the mountain, only to run into the feds.
ISSUE 05 - THREE SUMMERS - 47 pages - It ends.
Genuinely, I don’t know how else to get the word out, but I feel like if your home-cooked dinners don’t taste right, you're missing either paprika, sugar, butter, or chicken bouillon.
The way demonization of MSG is still so normalized drives me up the fucking wall. Even among people who don't think it's literal poison or believe racist conspiracy theories about it, you often see people talking about how it's lazy bc it's a shortcut to make mediocre food taste better and like... That's literally just how seasoning food works. "Oh MSG just tricks your brain into thinking the food tastes better by artificially stimulating your umami tastebuds" THAT'S HOW SUGAR AND SALT WORK TOO.
#PSA if you are “allergic to MSG” but can still eat pizza you are actually allergic to something else#tomatoes and cheese both naturally contain high levels of glutamate and cheese in particular is salty#mushrooms are also glutamatey#you aee MUCH more likely to be allergic to something commonly used alongside msg#particularly if you have bad reactions to chinese food specifically#oyster sauce and soy sauce are MUCH more likely to trigger an allergy than msg#if it's a migraine trigger the high sodium in foods that usually contain added msg is a more likely culprit#OR that migraine prodrome is giving you a craving for msg. chocolate often gets blamed for triggering migraine#when actually the migraine triggered the craving - advises @thepioden
To be very clear about this: CPUs aren't magical devices that can operate forever. They generate heat. They wear out over time. This happens faster when they're operating near capacity. This is not just an attempt to inconvenience you; this is an attempt to damage your property.
For the "crime" of not wanting to be tracked/have ads pissed into your eyeballs 24/7.
Even if you've paid for the "privilege" of the latter.
Fuck Google, and I hope they get sued into oblivion over this.
i see everyone in the notes talking about newpipe but nobody's talking about youtube alternatives for desktop
IF YOU USE A DESKTOP PC OR LAPTOP, TRY INVIDIOUS
https://invidious.io/
it is a free, open-source alternative YouTube front-end. in addition to not having ads, it has other great QoL features like a download button. try one of the several instances on that link up there ^^^^
i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.
so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.
