Affirmations for a dissident:
It really is happening and that's bad.
It isn't wrong to like things.
Existence is resistance.
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Noah Kahan
Xuebing Du
Today's Document
Sade Olutola
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

ellievsbear
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pixel skylines
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Jar Jar Binks Fan Club
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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
tumblr dot com
occasionally subtle
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
One Nice Bug Per Day
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@eclecticcheffairy
Affirmations for a dissident:
It really is happening and that's bad.
It isn't wrong to like things.
Existence is resistance.
this is from the 2000’s btw
Looks like @staff mistakenly censored this comic, which is an ironic and very funny thing to happen
Here it is again. You might want to save it just in case an accident like that happens again
EDIT: HMM. LOOKS LIKE OP WAS BANNED TOO. WHAT A FUNNY. IRONIC. ACCIDENT
This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…
Listen, this is serious.
Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!
It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.
Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.
So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?
Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.
Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.
Reblogging so you know which sites to totally avoid
Another inside tip from academia: Those papers in really expensive journals that are effectively inaccessible to anyone not in a university network? Depending on the discipline it’s very likely that same paper is on a “preprint” server somewhere, with no access restrictions.
Like if you want to read basically any physics, math, or CS paper, arXiv.org will have you covered, because everyone uploads their papers there before submitting to a journal (and generally updates it after peer review). I know all of my papers are on there. This is such common practice that journals have it baked into their licensing agreements that authors retain the right to upload their work to these places.
So the next time you get hit with that paywall, you may not even need sci-hub, just click the arxiv link on google scholar instead.
if for some reason none of this works, the old “send a email nicely asking for the paper to the author” is always a good trick. remember most scientists hate the commercialisation of scientific knowledge
Don’t mind me, just gotta share this with my bf so that he knows what websites to avoid
Many authors of papers are on ResearchGate! You can ask for papers there, if they don’t just post a copy to download. If they’re associated with a college, you can usually find their email addresses in the department directory, also.
Always reblog.
Iain Macnab - The Sleeping Beauty (ca. 1950-1967)
they should invent something that reduces the amount of pain you are experiencing.
"Oh yeah, we have an outdoor Corgi, he just gets so bored cooped up inside all day. He knows to stay off the road. Don't worry, he's way too smart for coyotes and the neighbor's know to look out when they drive past."
"Us? Oh, of *course* our Dachshund sleeps inside- we just let him out in the morning and make sure he comes back for dinner. He just does his own thing, no worries."
"Um, you know it's not humane to keep a chihuahua confined to an apartment? They're dogs, they're natural predators. They need to experience hunting behaviors or they get depressed. No we don't leash ours, he absolutely hates it, we just let him come and go whenever."
Yall get how fucking stupid that sounds, right? So stop letting your goddamn cats get eaten and attacked and infected and hit by cars
A toddler would probably love full unattended access to the neighborhood too, but we don't do that either, do we
It's 2026, "keep your damn pet in a house or in your view" should not be controversial
The absolute contempt for these locks is palpable.
One thing I really like about Beverly Engel's book It Wasn't Your Fault, which is about PTSD-induced toxic shame, is that quite a bit of it deals with people who haven't broken The Cycle of Abuse (TM) and have gone on to hurt others. That's a really underserved and vulnerable patient population, and statistically, it's also MASSIVE. I don't think I've read a single other self-help type book on PTSD and self-loathing that confronts the possibility that you're exactly as bad as you think you are.
I felt better that it so much as mentioned that children can react to abuse with ungovernable rage. Everybody likes the image of PTSD patients as internalizing everything and becoming doormats, which does happen, and often, but it's not the only narrative. Personally I've always hated my abusers and have always wanted everyone who so much as breathed wrong in my direction from ages 0 to 18 to burn eternally in hell. I *never* thought any of it was my fault and ever since I was a toddler I was willing to make it everybody else's problem, and it's really relieving to read a clinical perspective that acknowledges that abuse victims can act that way too.
It's wild to me that its such a neglected subset of abuse victims. Its really common. When I still lived with my parents and was still subjected to my father every fucking day I would lash out terribly at my mother, to the point when i went to visit them for years afterwards she was afraid I would lash out again. We've worked it out, I'm a much better person when I'm not regularly subjected to mental and emotional abuse, but like, its just so common.
I think it must be, at least partially, because, people hate the imperfect victim. Its easy for so many people to sympathize with someone who never lashed out. Less so for people to sympathize with people who are angry and lash out. Even though its a perfectly sensible reaction to being hurt over and over. I'm sure most people would like to think they would simply never.
I don't think this is the whole reason, but, I think it plays into it.
Similarly, there’s a narrative of, you cannot experience grief over having fucked up. That if you are hurting because you caused harm, because you were the cause of harm, that you’re not allowed to grieve, because you “earned your sorrow. You deserve to bottle it up and to hurt for the bad things you have done,”
Which is punitive logic. It’s copthink. Which is bad.
important
In fact, you can actually give yourself trauma over fucking up too badly and doing, witnessing, or failing to prevent something evil that goes against your morals; for instance, if you steal your mother's life savings due to drug addiction, kill a civilian during a military operation (please do not join the military), or became abusive because you didn't have the tools and skills yet to handle BPD. In the field of psychology this is called "moral injury" or "perpetrator trauma."
Being an adult will have you unironically craving a vegetable
every time i start to feel cringe for being too deep in the hyperfixation i remember the intense depression i have waded through and have to remind myself that enjoyment is fleeting (so grab it with both hands), and life is for loving (so hold that love close), and if anyone thinks i’m cringe they must not be having a very good time (and i hope they can find a good time soon).
[tags via : @heavenly-havoc]
on another note i know i’ve ranted about this before but im mad about it again
true crime has done irreparable fucking damage to middle class white women
every time i see some middle class white mom of two saying “girlies! you need to get a visible tattoo because then a rando won’t try to snatch you in broad daylight in the middle of the walmart checkout to put you into sex trafficking!” i get pissed off because you are NOT the primary target of trafficking! poor children of colour in underdeveloped countries, indigenous women, sex workers, these are the people in danger!
true crime podcasts always talk about the rare instance a middle class white woman is taken and so these true crime girlies only ever hear about it happening to women like them and start thinking they’re the main target, but if there were a true crime podcast for every poor non-white child who has been trafficked there wouldn’t be enough data centres in the entire world to hold them all! the fact that white women are the focus of these things is because society only gives a shit about white women, and turns a blind eye when women of colour are the ones being victimized!
i’m not saying that middle class white women are completely safe in society, far from it. but the fact that these podcasts prioritize stories of white women is because of white supremacy, and comes with the underlying sentiment of “these stories matter because they happened to the group of people it’s not supposed to happen to”, and the way white women are eating it up and making themselves the centre of the issue is a huge fucking problem
it’s an extension of why the reaction to palestine was so different from the reaction to ukraine
it all boils down to “it’s fine when it happens to them (poor people, sex workers, people of colour, trans people) because they’re the people it’s supposed to happen to, so when it happens to people it isn’t (middle class white women, white ukrainians) that makes it actually matter!”
it’s fucking white supremacy all the way down!
here in canada there’s a major city where there is very likely a serial killer who targets indigenous women. there was good evidence that several bodies of indigenous women were in the city’s landfills. so what happened? it became a huge multi-year argument that spiralled into the conservatives actively campaigning on refusing to search the landfill because it was “too expensive”
thankfully they lost the election and the NDP government did search the landfill and have recovered a body (quickly and way under expected costs i might add) but the fact that sticks in my craw is that if those victims were white women there never would have been a debate. period. they would have searched the landfills without any fucking hesitation. but because those women were indigenous it became a fucking three ring circus
this shit would NEVER have been put on FUCKING BILLBOARDS if those women were white! and it’s all part of the same system of white supremacy that leads to true crime podcasts only discussing white victims, which then feeds into white women acting like the main targets
it’s all the same fucking shit
horror games and horror movies are also complicit in this btw
so true
Official Wednesday post
It's Tuesday
Happy "Not Only Is It Not Friday, It's Not Even Thursday, Official Wednesday, It's Tuesday" Monday, everyone
milcl (man i love copyright law)
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or sincere but either way mickey mouse isn't going to fuck you.
milrwjamudcacaltdartsfhtlaodwarbopagkbaapm (man i love remembering when jstor and mit used draconian copyright and computer access laws to drive a researcher to suicide for his totally legal access of documents written and researched by other people and gate kept by an academic publishing monopoly)
No actually the core of my argument here is that data scraping is good actually and information wants to be free and it's more important that we guarantee protection for the right to access and use and transform information than it is to strengthen copyright for any reason.
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
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.
I've 100% replaced free acrobat with the firefox built-in and it works wonderfully for general office use and research/reading/viewing. It doesn't have robust redaction capabilities, but if you need to fill and sign and highlight a form it's actually much more intuitive than acrobat reader.
Flavours of unreliable narrator:
Lying to the reader
Lying to themselves
Simply misinformed
Not paying attention
Has weird priorities
Assumed you knew
Hates you personally
Bad at communicating
Easily sidetracked
Will believe anything
Has weird prejudices
Just kind of dumb