The Gentle Librarian

Early 40s, taken, he/they, nonbinary (amab/masc-presenting), bi, polyam, probably some demisexual mixed in here too. PUT YOUR AGE OR RANGE IN A BIO OR YOU'RE GONNA GET BLOCKED.

[gentlelibrarian]

The Ever-Changing Pinned Post

Old friends: You're not hallucinating! This is a new account on a different email since the old account was cursed. I'm letting everyone find me because I don't want to assume any of my old mutuals are still interested in being connected to me (a feeling that feels more and more valid as time goes on...😔).

New followers: If you add me and don't interact with a single bit of content (OC or reblogs, basically anything on here) then we're probably not going to be mutuals. I'm not a "follow for follow" type of person, I'm not chasing clout or follower count; I'm interested in vibing with genuine folks who actually seem interested in me and what I'm about. There are other tips on how to pass the vibe check but that's honestly the easiest one to pass.

I have seen too much anger and hatred in my short life, so I want to spend the rest of it striving for balance and peace. I'll never be perfect but I can *always* be better, so I'm here to learn and grow and share. "As our capacity for compassion grows, it widens the field of the sorrow which we feel as our own."

Though I’m trying to be less guarded about my personal details, there’s only so much that I’ll ever post here.  If you really want to know anything about me, messaging or asking is probably the most direct way of finding that info out. It doesn't mean I have to answer lol.

At this time, I am only following accounts that follow me first.  It definitely means I’ll miss out on some wonderful connections, but hopefully it means I won’t bother anyone.

I am an amab nonbinary person, but since I'm still largely masc-presenting, I assume I'll still be perceived as a man (especially since I'm only out to a few people IRL); it won't hurt my feelings, hence my inclusion of he/him along with they/them as preferred pronouns. However, I fully expect certain members of the LGBTQ+ community to view me as some sort of "male intruder" which I do take full offense to, as my nonbinary identifier is genuine.

I don’t send outbound messages because I don’t want to be a bother to anyone.  However, if you want to chat, feel free to send me a message!

I'm actively polyam/ENM so now's your chance to shoot your shot in the DMs! 😉 Fair warning, though: we can be flirty but I'm only interested in local connections for serious relationships.

If you have a blank blog or your age isn't in your bio or pinned post, I'll block you. "18+" is not an age.

If you are bigoted in any way, shape, or form (including but not limited to white supremacists/N*zis/Tr*mp supporters/TERFs/radfems, etc), I'll block you.

If I get a weird vibe from you, I’ll block you.

[modern-politics111]

[disregardandfelicity]

sounds very similar to a radio story i heard in 2014 ago about credit card debt. the debt got sold to a collection company and a couple received a court summons. they knew they had taken on debt, but they were confused about who this new company was and where specifically the number they were supposed to owe came from.

they show up in court and just ask the lawyer for the collection company: can you prove where this number comes from? Do you have a contract showing that you purchased our debt? probably luckily for them, a reporter researching a book on the topic showed up and asked the same questions.

10 minutes later they get in front of the judge and the collection company drops the whole case and theyre free to go. story is below, it has a transcript in the link too

Prologue - This American Life

Ira talks to reporter Jake Halpern about a scene he saw take place in a Georgia courtroom where a couple uttered some magic words that seeme

[evolutionsbedingt]

https://twitter.com/BrianManookian/status/1674963884703088642

Link to the twitter thread for accessibility!

[bitchesgetriches]

Alert citizen of Bitch Nation @sobekcrocodile brought this to our attention and we're sharing, but with a caveat:

WE HAVE NOT YET LOOKED INTO THIS.

... but holy shit it's worth pursuing if you're drowning in debt and these are your circumstances. I'll definitely be adding this to the Big List of Future BGR Topics. Here's more of our advice on debt:

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about How to Pay off Debt

Our Final Word on Student Loan Forgiveness 

[kiris-poprock]

This only works with private student loans NOT FEDERAL!!!! The government has the right to transfer your student loans between contracted servicer's per your MPN

[walk-up-songs]

Bought my uncle a burger and milkshake in exchange for letting me disrupt the holiest day of the week, NFL Sunday Football, so I could install a Pi-hole and free the household of ads...the thing abt the specific boomers I live with is they told me not to trust people on the Internet but they do not understand the algorithm or online advertising and think that Facebook has their best interests at heart. And every time I have tried to explain to them that no, blorbo from my dashboard is not selling my kidneys on the dark web but Google from your capitalism is definitely selling your web searches to every advertising company on the planet, they think I am paranoid. How could their personal friend Mark Zuckerberg want anything bad to happen to them etc. I am fighting battles I did not know existed!!!

[walk-up-songs]

Update I have had Pi-Hole successfully installed for two (2) hours and have since learned that 40% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. FORTY FUCKING PERCENT. We live in hell. This is the greatest gift I have ever given my family that they will not understand or acknowledge or feel any gratitude for.

[walk-up-songs]

Update #2: it was rising all night but the number it finally settled on was...60%. 60% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. I can't tell if this high number is bc I live in Silicon Valley and probably am subject to the Algorithmic Internet in ways people outside of Silicon Valley are not or it is normal to have 2/3rds of your web traffic be ads, but it did make me set up a recurring donation of the EFF lmfao.

[walk-up-songs]

Okay I have had multiple people ask, so here are the useful websites that me and Beryl used to muddle our way through:

Using Pi-hole and Raspberry Pi (on the Raspberry Pi website, really good overview of what Pi-hole does)

Tumblr-archived Twitter thread about one household's experience with Pi-hole (this is what sold me on it. Also the tweets were published in 2022 and Pi-hole is actively being developed, so I think some of the teething problems he mentioned might have cleared up or are at least being addressed.)

Pi-hole website (gives broad strokes of the software and imho is not actually that helpful, however this proves that I am not making shit up)

Pi-hole documentation (read prerequisites carefully, you do NOT need the newest model of Raspberry Pi to run this thing!! You don't even need a Raspberry Pi at all, you can run it on a bunch of Linux systems however I'm very stupid when it comes to Linux and when my options are install and learn a whole ass new OS or spend $$ on a Raspberry Pi and hook it up to my TV with a wired mouse and keyboard I will unfortunately be spending money)

Privacy International's guide to setting up Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi (bro this one saved our asses)

You guys can ask me questions if you want but I guarantee I will not know the answers bc I don't know shit about fuck, I just followed the directions and reaped the rewards. It did take us 2 hours to set up bc I'm bad at following directions (and it's kind of complicated if you've been out of the software game for a while like I have), and you do have to be sososo brave about fucking around with your internet provider's configuration. So make sure you eat before you do it!! However it has been so worth it for me so far, given that now all my devices at home are running faster and I'm not seeing any ads while web browsing. We will see what complaints my family comes up with, but I love it so far.

Also!! if you've never heard of Raspberry Pi, which I realize are not all of my followers are lost in the Silicon Valley sauce so you might not have, here's is their website and their page for using Raspberry Pi at home.

(And here is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that fights for digital privacy, free speech, and innovation, if you, like me, were presented with cold hard data about your personal internet usage and suddenly realized that our internet is fully a dystopia. haha.)

[acquitarte]

After a few months with pi-hole, I recently switched to AdGuard Home. It was recommended/is co-promoted in a pi-hole discord server, and it seems to be blocking a bit more successfully/consistently for me than the pi-hole did.

I also use Blokada on my phone when I'm not home and have the Windscribe browser extension which includes 10GB of free VPN traffic and has uBlock integrated into it. (AdGuard does technically make things that do this but I like those better; ymmv).

It all takes some setup and tinkering, but I highly, highly recommend taking steps to clear out some of the internet garbage and protect your info.

[looknorf]

[foone]

That's a good case. I've got one of those in my office

[sixstringeddestruction]

What drive letter does the 3rd floppy drive get?

[foone]

I can give you four answers to this question. The short answer, the long answer, the historical answer, the actual answer, and the mythbusters recreate-the-myth answer.

short answer:

probably C:, if not D:, but could be anything up to Z:

long answer:

It depends entirely on which version of DOS this machine uses.

Originally DOS assigned all floppy drives first, then hard drives, then network drives. So a system with three floppy drives and one hard drive would get floppy drives A:, B:, C:, hard drive D:

DOS 5.0 (from 1991) changed it, and it now does the first two floppy drives, then the primary partition of hard drives, then all the extra partitions of hard drives, THEN floppy drives from 3 and up.

So a single hard drive machine (assuming it's not partitioned into multiple drives) with three floppy drives, will have floppy drives A:, B:, and D:, with hard drive C:.

historical answer:

It originally worked this way because DOS copied how CP/M did it, and CP/M just assigned the letters A-Z to all drives, without treating hard drives specially (especially because you probably didn't have a hard drive back then)

actual answer:

The floppy drive is A:. This machine only has one floppy drive.

This case has blanking plates for the 3.5" floppy drive bays that look like fake 3.5" floppy drives. I don't know why it does this, it's very weird and confusing, and in this picture they've installed neither of the possible 3.5" floppy drives, so both of those are fake, and only the 5.25" drive is real.

mythbusters recreate-the-myth answer:

I went into 86box and set up an IBM XT with three floppy drives, and installed DOS 3.3 and then DOS 5.0 on it:

Here in DOS 3.3, you can see that our floppy drives got numbered A:, B:, and C:, and the hard drive is D:

But when that same hardware is upgraded to DOS 5.00, the hard drive is C:, and the floppies are A:, B:, and D:

[maybeasunflower]

Did Windows think CD drives were special floppy disk drives then?

[foone]

Early CD-ROM drives were even weirder: they were a kind of network share. You loaded two drivers, a vendor-specific device driver in CONFIG.SYS, and then MSCDEX (or equivalent) in AUTOEXEC.BAT.

This used the same drive-redirection mechanism introduced in DOS 3 for network shares, just instead of a TSR turning drive access into network communication, the MSCDEX/Driver combo would turn it into a CD-ROM drive access.

Prior to Windows 95, Windows didn't have any special CD-ROM handling, it just used the DOS drivers that were already loaded. Windows 95 had native CD-ROM drivers, so this wasn't needed.

[helenekuragina]

you cannot make a post about how men put women in certain boxes without someone going "but what if i love the box? what if i've decided that it's comfortable in the box? are you gonna tell me i'm not ALLOWED to like the box? not very feminist of you to police a woman's decisions... maybe you'd be less ugly and miserable if you stopped talking about the box LMFAO #Girlboss #MyBox<3"

[helenekuragina]

#and its like. 'what if ive decided its comfortable to be in the box' it is always going to be more comfortable to be in the box #they will reward you for staying in the box and punish you for trying to leave it #that doesnt mean the box is like. a good place to be — @butchfaith

[sea-salted-wolverine]

Sometimes you step out of the box, and you're free of the box, and you're out of the box, and you realize you are fairly box shaped. So you sit down, and you do a lot of introspection about whether or not you were always box shaped, or if you grew into the shape of the box after being forced into the box for so long, and whether or not there are stunted parts of you, that might grow, now that you're out of the box, or if you should just maybe wear the box around as a fashion accessory that conveniently makes life so much easier while living among those who expect you to be in the box, and in the middle of your naval gazing someone always shows up to try and put you back in the box.

And you realize that regardless of whether or not you actually fit in the box, it's dark in there.

[1st-1]

[this-is-trans-joy]

I’m trying to look for synonyms of sneer and i’m fucking dying

yeah that looks normal… yeah these are all— um. hold on. hang on.

what

[the-ravens-king]

[floridaboiler]

[luulapants]

Might fuck around and paper my town with these. Feel free to join me.

[c4bl3fl4m3]

Would you be willing to post the files for these so we can have the best quality copy for printing purposes?

[luulapants]

Here's a folder with the files! I couldn't get the last one to PDF correctly with the image, so it's still text.

[boopjuice]

Just a reminder from me (a military brat) and my parents (both military from military families): The most definitive way to know a recruiter is lying to you is to listen closely to what they're saying. If you hear sounds, they're lying.

[depsidase]

[old-arcadia]

Norwich Cathedral, Norfolk, England (by mira66)

[os-dimension]

[cherryhatter-deactivated2015072]

KICK THE CAN!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.

[visibun]

the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now

[drtanner]

And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!

[52stations]

one of the best things for me in adulthood was realising just how many other human beings are mentally ill, weird, stupid, embarassing. like truly truly we all say idiotic things and make mistakes and i dont have to punish myself and crawl into a hole and die over being imperfect. Read one comments section and you'll understand that there are more lunatics than you could ever imagine

[berdyayeva]

Am I allowed to post this

[oeing-oeing-clay]

wow dude jts so awesome that your car is loud as fuck and smells worse when it drives past. thags fucking epic man. i really like how it hurts to listen to you drive past and it scares people. thats awesome man. i really like your car that makes a loud as fuck fart sound. fucking epic dude

[greenvelvetchaise]

not just mutuals but someone i’d eat a sandwich in the park with