Watch Your Step @dreamabyss - Tumblr Blog

go my sucres. i lovw sucre

( drawn over a photo of the blackeyepatch model )

uninstall adobe acrobat. it is malware. it has been malware. these aren't opinions: acrobat meets the definition of malware.

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

cheers

andmaybegayer

Firefox's built-in PDF.js viewer: does everything you could want from a basic viewer, fast enough search, and can now do annotations for filling in forms and such

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

LibreOffice Draw: I don't ever really like having to open this but if you have to edit a PDF in detail it does work, and doesn't just vomit up a bunch of polygons when you give it text to work with. Better as an authoring tool than an editor.

ralfmaximus

I like Sumatra PDF for reading & printing. It's fast, free, stable, and has been around forever.

importantcatpics

jetix

Pixie’s Parasol, 2015-04-15

#jelly mushrooms...

cedar-rayne

✧ sturgeon ✧

sneak peak of a new sculpture coming to my shop! this is the underglaze painting before the clear glaze is applied.

kaiserin-erzsebet

Quick question:

Can you read cursive?*

Yes

No

Sort of/Slowly/With effort

Depends heavily on the handwriting

extra option for whatever I didn't think of

Voting ended on6h

*to be clear, whether you can or do write it is a different question. If something is written in cursive, can you read it?

scrapironflotilla

Yes, but getting used to some of the more unique hands takes a bit of practice. And then sometimes they're just taking the piss

thedurvin

Back when I was doing transcription work there were some letters from a Civil War officer to his wife and there were a couple of words even the professionals were having trouble with, but finally I parsed them out: he was spelling things phonetically to show how his men were mispronouncing French words for different types of battlefield fortifications.

#so it depends in my case #I can read most types of cursive like most of the letters above but the short hand that doctors use is pretty much a no still

boringkate

Seeing game devs take a "the customer is always right" approach to feedback is so sad because like I get it from a PR perspective, but…

1) The customer is always wrong

2) Your customers are gamers, so they're twice as wrong

ot3

looking for animal references on image searches has always kind of sucked but it's much worse after AI image generation technology has begun to actually past muster, which is why i always just go straight to inaturalist. can't recommend this highly enough. you get to both find out about niche species you've never even heard of and also see some really good photographs like this one

x

birdsy-purplefishes

I KNEW I had seen this exact same image before! Good old "Organisms On or Near Appropriate Signs" project.

ot3

oh that's a fun project. haven't seen this before. some good ones in here.

toomanydesign

depsidase

theaceofwords

It's called the Global Justice Report, it is here. This is an actionable plan which can be sent to legislators and demanded of political parties. We could save the world within our lifetimes.

It has always been possible. It is still possible.

dontblamethewitches

look at this photo i took of my cat its really important

cadathecat

these need to be together

thundergrace

If you live in Detroit, it is strongly recommended that you don't breathe.

missanniewhimsy

As someone in WI, this whole region is awful so please be careful friends! (7/16/2026)

nyantara

Please put on your N95s. The same ones used for covid will filter particulate pollution. I lived in a city with yearly winter pollution levels like this. If you can pay for it, you might as well get an indoor air filter to sleep in.