Nerdy Dragon Studios

Where I enthusiastically over-analyze my current object of interest, and occasionally link my deviantART

[decompose1]

ohhhh shit. target is recalling their up & up baby wipes (fragrance free & fresh cucumber scented) because they're contaminated with Burkholderia cepacia complex and Burkholderia gladioli, multiple people are reporting discoloration & infections. i just got a call about it cuz i had purchased those but i've already gone through them 😅 so no refund for me. but im fine. if you have these they're saying you need to immediately stop using them and bring them back to target for a full refund. this bacteria can cause life threatening infections in children/infants and people with compromises immune systems (ESPECIALLY cystic fibrosis!!) and i know lots of other chronically ill people follow me!!!!

[decompose1]

Hold on i should've been more specific.

First: THIS RECALL IS NOT STATE SPECIFIC. IT IS NATIONWIDE.

here are the specific products and dates:

FDA page on this:

Target Recalls Up & Up Fragrance Free and Fresh Cucumber Scented Baby Wipes Due to Potential Microbial Contamination

Target is voluntarily recalling Up & Up Fragrance Free and Up & Up Fresh Cucumber Scented Baby Wipes following customer complaints of produc

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[genderkoolaid]

Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.

[brainscrems]

Also, please keep in mind, this is 100%, without a doubt, wholly unconsitituonal. They will try to enforce it regardless, but that does not make it legal. Do not treat this as law because it is not.

[mindareadsoots]

Haley’s also smarter than any of these knuckle heads.

[kintatsu]

This amounts to 1632.86 gp for four party members, 1632.85 gp for one member (who, presumably, got a larger rock to make up for the copper piece), and 3265.71 gp for Haley

[aropride]

please god let chatgpt die out like nfts did. With a fast and graceless fall into irrelevancy

[bladespark]

Like to charge, reblog to cast.

[atwotonedbird]

This spell has a very low hit ratio, so we need a lot of us to do it.

[bumblebeebats]

Why is it that every time I google something like "Are olives poisonous to cats" the top results are always like "Fun fact: Cats are carnivores! This means that they eat meat. There is no reason to include olives in a cat's diet. You should feed your cat cat food, which is dry or wet food especially designed for cats. You can purchase this at a store." like is there a single person alive on the planet who's googled "Are blueberry muffins safe for cats" because they're planning on switching their cat to a muffin-only diet??? No, I'm asking because the little bastard somehow popped open the packet while I was putting away the groceries and dragged one under the couch before I could react and now I need to know if I should call the after-hours vet. "Cats should not eat spaghetti." NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!!!! "Try to keep human food away from cats." i live in a studio apartment with a completely silent and permanently hungry apex predator who has the intelligence of a toddler and the desperate Machiavellian cunning of a creature who spent his formative months on the streets. He can already open doors and he is this 👌 close to learning how to open the microwave. He is stronger than me and covered in knives. So im gonna do my best but for the moment i just need you to tell me whether this yoghurt is going to kill my son y/n

[spectralhauntings]

I've been using the pet poison hotline's poison list cause it has a search function. It also tells you whether something is mildly, moderately, or severely toxic which can be very handy! It doesn't contain like everything but it might be a good place to start, it also includes plants for fellow houseplant lovers <3

Explore Pet Poison Helpline®s vast knowledge on poisons by reviewing our pet poison list. Explore our top 10 poison and holiday poison lists

[littlemousling]

For plants specifically, there’s also a wildly detailed set of posts and listings about toxicity on the old, wonderful, Plants Are the Strangest People blog

[inmyperfectworld]

Another natural hair appreciation post. 🤎✨ I just LOVE our hair so much.

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[justalurkr]

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[sergeifyodorov]

I don't read as much fic as I used to but one "tell" for non Canadians writing us, besides the etransfer, is the units you use to describe us measuring something. I hate to tell you this but The Chart is real and it's completely subconscious. Please abide

[demotu-writes]

ETA the chart (or at least a version of it):

ETA2: we do use inches/miles in poetic ways ("he was lost in thought/miles away" or "his lips were a bare inch away").

Also, the length of a dick is in inches for SURE.

[labradorduck]

snow is cm then feet then metres depending on the depth

[bundibird]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. We need a "This is absolutely NOT mature content" feedback button on posts. You can report a post as missing a community label. We should also be able to report posts as having a comminity label when they dont fucking need one.

[kintatsu]

@staff

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Gonna binge all of RWBY (most of my knowledge is from my partner, he’s compared me to ruby and neo(crazy side) lol)

Should be fun

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

….im fucked, they’re cute and I can see the ship angle here

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

This is a VERY memeable image, if it was used in the early days, that’s great, the meme potential is there but if it wasn’t…shall we?

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

On volume 3 chapter 4 as of this current post, been fine so far!

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Please tell me someone has recreated this

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

…..the light doesn’t leave her eyes but her focus does goddamn….

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

I-….

Fuck

No…

First penny, now….and that’s how silver eyes…I just…

So many damn emotions rn, mainly sad

What the fuck.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Im at vol 4 ch 2, and I gotta say, they do an effective job of making me hate him in a small amount of time.

I want him exploded by his own dust immediately :)

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

“I guess you lost some brain cells along with that arm”

TOO SOON SIR, TOO SOON

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

They gave the faunus, remnants Australia(menagerie) as an apology “gift”?!

What the fuck.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

….

Oh he’s going to be greaaaatly dead in my mind :)

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Cat dad bonding time :3

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Oh how horrifying

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

It’s staring at me with a fucking smile-

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Heheheh

Fucker got LAUNCHED

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Me watching volume 5 chapter 2: oh this Sienna Khan girl seems cool, they mentioned her once, I wonder what-

….

Welp.

Fuck.

Cool design, finally meet her.

And she’s now dead.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

AHAHAHA THEIR FACES

jaune looks horrified that ozpin could have done that at anytime

Nora looks unimpressed

Ruby looks scared and excited all at once

Ren is questioning everything

Lmao love it

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

You think this is a moment of mercury and emerald both going “okay, what did we actually get ourselves into?”

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

So im watching the volume 6 adam short before starting the next season and-

HOLY SHIT BLOOD-

OH

OH FUCK?

Okay also adam has been…interesting, but learning where and why he is how he is.

Fascinating stuff.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Oh…oh goddamn

Well…what an interesting turn of events.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Volume 6 chapter 2

WHAT

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Oh my….

So this is how it started…

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

“You shall live for as long as this earth turns”

HUH?!

YOU FOOLS

A HUMANOID CREATION WAS NEVER MEANT TO LIVE THAT LONG WITHOUT REINCARNATION, WITHOUT PRECAUTIONS

SHE’LL

she’ll….

She will go mad…

She’ll go mad you fools…

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

And thus she is no longer the girl who was just wanted her husband back…

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

qwq noooo man noooo

…i-it’s okay little ones

…I will tell another tale of you

You will not be lost

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

“Okay, what did we get ourselves into?” Part 2 electric boogaloo

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

“In honor of Pyrrha nikos”

“One of the many students who fought valiantly at the fall of beacon”

Another lost soul to lead in another world…I hope to do your character justice….rest your soul, it’s okay…I am sure jaune will find himself.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Adam taurus, you went out as I expected you to.

Talking too much, projecting, and worst of all, letting your insecurities coming through projection leading to underestimation.

Maybe in another life, you could have led well.

But your desire for battle was too great.

In that you remind me of sam from metal gear: revengance in a way.

You at least still had a cause you followed for a time.

Before rage became all that you are.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Eeee penny is back!

Penny is real adorable :3

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Protecc

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

What the fuck.

What the fuck.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Oh.

Oh god.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

A singular word….and that’s all it takes to strike fear into all.

“No”

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Holy shit. Holy shit.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

…fascinating.

Ya know.

It makes sense now that I think on it, “Cinder”-ella

But…the difference

Im currently paused on this scene but it probably will explain alot

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

….

Im seeing red suddenly.

And it is not toward cinder currently.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

…death was too good for her, cinder.

Ahem

Apologies…bad memories.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Dear god.

This is it.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Oh…how horrifying

Not helping the fact is the…silver eye….god.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

…goodness cinder…

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

ambrosius is quite the character

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

“Do hugs always make you feel this warm inside?”

“Yes”

“Wowwwww”

QWQ DJDHSHSHS

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

My…god…

And jaune and rwby and neo…

They all…fell into the void…

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Huh….wild place.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

So before i slumber, so far volume 9 has made me feel like i threw hallucination inducing gummies at my dear characters before they entered the void

The never after feels so….surreal.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

YES SCHNEE YES, YOU DEFINE THE NAME

YES BLAKE YES, YOU HAVE LEARNED SO WELL

YES YANG YES, YOU GOT THIS!

Oh….oh precious ruby…I…

How….Curious of timing

Seems it’s finally starting to catch to ruby though…figured it would, can only go for so long before it hits like a truck

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Fascinating.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Awww it is canon

Cute

Feels like a ad break from the trauma though lmao

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Awww it’s adorable

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Oh you are freaky

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Kind”

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Aw qwq

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Holy shit….

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

“Maybe that girl is enough”

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

What a lovely battle

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

“She’ll find herself, one way or another”

Beautiful

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

“But balance is not two forces locked in never ending battle, balance is an ecosystem, an organism, a living breathing thing, thus balance cannot be restored with wars or calculations”

“True balance finds it’s own equilibrium, it only requires love, and to see things grow to the end”

Heh

Glad to know I heard that right.

Makes the lost ones writing easier on my head.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

“This is what I sounded like?”

Y e p

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Wow. What an ending to end on.

Watching extra stuff now.

[elizabeth-mitchells]

i just realized it was both of them putting rumi's hood on her hsjfhdgjhfg

[the-seas-song]

(OP's tags)

[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.

[load-of-junk]

What is Up with that Tower

As per the poll has shown, many have wanted to know what is going on with HUNTR/X's tower. I have briefly considered their penthouse being their dorm, however, that got thrown out the window when you think about why the hell an apartment complex – even luxurious ones, would put up their tenants' logo on the side of their building? For (1), that thing's expensive to maintain, (2) that just feels like a violation of privacy and (3) that's a bright neon sign advertising to sasaengs to come and sneak into the building to stalk the girls or cause disruptions.

Also this humongous closet that is full of outfits that are definitely performance outfits and not regular clothes.

Idols don't normally get to keep or take home their performance outfits because (1) Those are technically company property not theirs, and (2) Normally, a single comeback can have as many as 5-7 varieties of outfits unique to their comeback, their MV outfits may also be used for their live stages. Idol groups rarely ever use the same set of outfits for more than an era because each era is supposed to be unique in their concept and their performance outfits have to reflect that unless their company doesn't have the money for several outfits.

So let's go with the tower being the company building!

[Note: This whole thing is entirely my headcanon and is in no way, shape, or form, canonical at all to what we know about it so far. I would not be surprised if this is disproven and thrown in the trash when the sequel arrives]

This tower is based off of the Lotte World Tower – a mix-use skyscraper based in Olympic road, Sincheon neighborhood (also known as Jamsil 4 & 6 neighborhoods), Songpa District, Seoul, owned by Lotte Corpooration (yes, as in the confectionery brand that made Pepero, Milkis, and Koala March). The tower is approximately 555 meters tall with 123 floors, but apparently the Huntr/x tower is somehow taller?.

I decided to torture myself and measured the tower myself. How? Well, first I had to get a measurable shot of the tower because we don't actually get to see the tower's full size. This shot of the girls is the best I could get.

Then as the giraffe of the group, I picked Mira to be the measuring tool to make it slightly more bearable for me, so now I had to find Mira's height. Using this shot of them in the train where Mira is standing next to the door (with a little behind thus making her a little smaller in mind). The door is like 190-200cm tall from what I remember using my height and measured Mira's height against it, and added 7 milimeters to just give her a little boost but keep in mind that 170cm is the real number.

As anyone with the ability to count can tell, that is nowhere near as tall as Lotte World Tower. In fact that is only 65.71% of Lotte Tower's height. Of course, there is a very large possibility that I miscounted somewhere and the fact that animation is rarely one to one when it comes to proportion so let's just discard the 5 days I spent calculating all this and just say the Huntr/x tower is 575 meters tall and had 127 floors [Lotte's height per floor = 555/123 = 4.51m per floor; Huntr/x tower's number of floors = 555/4.51 = 127.49 = 127 floors]

Also here's the width of the building

[Note: This is very rough calculations and I am possibly entirely wrong, but I did not spend nearly a week calculating all this just to throw all that in the trash]

Now, while the Huntr/x tower being bigger than Lotte World Tower is impressive, I would say it is Very Excessive for an entertainment company. For scale, these are the heaquarters of the Big 4 (SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and HYBE), literally nowhere near Lotte World Tower level of tall

As for why that is, it's because most entertainment companies commonly have:

Recording Studios

Practice Rooms

Gym

Dressing Rooms

Wardrobe Storage

Office spaces for management and production

Meeting rooms

Multi-purpose rooms

Cafeteria

Cafes (For fans to visit and eat in)

Parking

Of course, all companies are unique and might have more than what I listed but as you can see, while that is a lot, that is not nearly enough to justify having the 6th tallest building in the world.

But I have an idea [Note: This is the part that gets very headcanon-y so beware]:

In an older post of mine, I proposed that Celine could've started and owned Huntr/x's company after regaining her footing and reputation in the industry as both a songwriter/producer and an artist. If she did, what if the reason the company has this giant ass tower as their headquarter is because almost all their company's divisions is in that thing?

When it comes to the growth of an entertainment, they usually start out as either one thing:

[A] Label – the entity that produces the creative output (songs, MVs, etc.).

[B] Agency – the entity that recruits and manages the talents.

[C] Company – the parental entity that handles business and finances, providing funding and infrastructure.

[D] A 3-in-1 company that fulfills all three roles.

An entertainment (by entertainment, in this case, it's music) company often started as either one of A, B, or C, then when they start, but as they grow, they would often evolve into an 3-in-1 company.

If they started out or became a 3-in-1, when they grow even larger, they'll diverge into divisions. What are divisions in kpop companies? Divisions are createdd primarily made to divide and distribute the workload of the company that the parent company might not be able to handle on its own without potentially deluding the quality. (I have examples of what divisions can look like for the girls' company but I'm not gonna talk about it unless someone asks)

What if for the tower, not only is it the base of the company but the office of all of its divisions?

Land is incredibly expensive in Seoul especially in Gangnam, Seocho, and Songpa (where the tower is located) it's like around ₩18M–₩32M per m² now so presumably, the rationale is that they'll save more money if the company only buys one plot of land rather than multiple land for multiple buildings around Seoul. Will that actually save them money? If we're looking at this in a realistic financial sense, not really — the land by itself is a massive investment, add to that 6-7 years of construction construction and then the constant maintenance, mechanicals and utilities expenses, but again, there is literally no good logical reason for this tower to exist beyond to replace Lotte World Tower and be the girls' super awesome dorm.

And even if they allocated the spaces for the divisions, the penthouse and the mechanicals, 127 floors is still a lot so what else can be allocated to that space? They could put out some of the spaces as offices for rent. Land is expensive and a fixed asset which means a large investment for mid-tier or smaller companies looking to set base in Songpa that they might not be able to see through if they don't make enough revenue to recover the cost spent on the land + construction + infrastructure, so hypothetically, it would be much cheaper for these companies to rent an office space instead because they get the space for the benefit of being able to have their address in Jamsil but not at the fulll price of the total initial costs the land owner (in this case, the girls' company) spent while the company who does own the building would get a monthly payment, helping them pay off the likely debt they obtained having this tower built.

Other idols and singers in the company could also be living in the tower, mainly because it's a bit uhh iffy if only the girls live in the tower by which I mean, it would smell a bit too much like nepotism and favoritism on Celine's part if the girls get a 42m penthouse all to themselves while the company's other artists go home to regular (even if it's a bit upscale) apartment complexes which could realistically get Celine and the company accusations and backlash from fans of their other artists regardless of Huntr/x being the company's golden goose. But then again, this is the universe where kpop fans are much kinder so, no one could also care that much to complain about that.

So here's my general idea for what's in there [Warning: Very headcanon-y]:

Starting at the bottom, we have podium 1, besides anchoring the tower. one could probably function as the atrium [note: I forgot the actual word for it so this is just a placeholder term] where people can come in, maybe there's like cafes and merch stores for fans to visit (yes, that's a thing) and the other as a possible parking garage but only because I think adding an additional underground floor is going to add to construction cost which is probably already astronomical at this point, let's just save the underground floor for utilities and infrastructure like power generators, emergency generators, water tanks, server rooms, etc.

Podium 2 could possibly be an extended roof for podium 1 and that's likely the case but I think it being a multi-purpose hall where things like auditions, conferences, and press release by the company can be held here but that's just my opinion.

I already explained what the rest are so that's that. The only thing I could say is that man, their company cafeteria has got to be a fancy buffet style if the company is already this extra about their building.

That's it, it's up to you on how you would structure the tower in the specifics because I am not going through the torture of making a floor plan for each floor. Am I crazy enough to try to? Haha yeah, but haha no. Just no.

Also, I kind of like to think these floors below belong to Mira and Zoey because I think they deserve their own balconies too. Also the one below them might be Celine's. IDK, you decide.

Again, this is all just speculation on my part so you can agree or disagree or modify this if you want.

[theweirdwideweb]

Dudes healthcare is so fake. My ADHD meds are $940 without insurance. But they gave me a website of "coupons" which straight up looks like a scam website, and I got it today for $60! Just a coupon from a random website and it was $900 cheaper. America, I am confusion!! America explain!!

[theweirdwideweb]

For all my uninsured judys out there it's for Walgreens only: walgreens.rxsense.com

[theweirdwideweb]

[handsmotif]

as a pharmacy technician i can share with you some websites that give you those "coupons" for your meds!

goodrx is the most well known one, but if i'm trying to find the cheapest price for a patient i compare it to scriptcycle, and use whichever is offering the best price. you just type in the medication (PLEASE make sure you're getting the right drug, dosage, and quantity) and your zip code and they will spit out some offers for you

some pharmacies may have their own discount card to compare to as well!

if you are getting a name brand medication, you can also look at the manufacturer's website to see if they offer any evouchers for you to use too

good luck out there 👍

[bitchesgetriches]

How to Pay Hospital Bills When You’re Flat Broke

[rayneydayss]

another one is singlecare.com, brought my duloxetine from $240 a month to $20

and there are coupons for hrt on there as well :) different options for different pharmacies

[hereissomething]

dollarfor.org saved my broke ass, it can save urs too

[thulium]

[rudavoidish]

Y'all if you're American please email your politicians and senators against the parents decide act. I'm fucking begging because we're reaching a tipping point.

[hetrosjistin]

Call or Write Congress About H.R. 8250: Parents Decide Act - GovTrack.us

Quick and easy link to both find your congressmen/women and giving you a quick and easy way to copy / paste the message into it. You want to oppose. It's an act that will demand that all major OS makers integrate a direct forced age verification control into all OS.

[rudavoidish]

I received a comment on this that I figured would be very helpful- it's a template for communicating with your representatives. Be sure to use it for reference

Dear Representative [Name],

I am writing to express my strong opposition to H.R. 8250 (The "Parents Decide Act"). As your constituent and a concerned citizen, I believe this bill introduces unprecedented risks to digital privacy and security.

Specifically, I am alarmed by:

SEC. 2(a)(1)(B): Requiring age verification to even use an operating system creates a mandatory "hardware lockout" that ends anonymous computing and forces users to hand over sensitive identification data to major corporations just to power on their devices.

SEC. 2(a)(3): Mandating that OS providers create a system for all app developers to access verification data is a massive security vulnerability. This effectively creates a centralized API of user identities accessible to thousands of third-party developers, many of whom may lack adequate data protection.

This bill does not protect children; it creates a centralized surveillance infrastructure at the OS level. I urge you to protect the privacy of your constituents and vote NO on H.R. 8250.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]

[Your Zip Code]

[willowtree1527]

This is a hell that us down under in Australia are already living in, and it’s not even effective at what it claims to do in protecting children.

Given that, in the wake of this mandatory identification policy, my country seems to be moving to hand over its citizens biometric data, like fingerprints, Face ID files, and identification documents, over to the USA and to ICE to maintain the visa free travel (ESTA) we have, I strongly urge any US resident to send these emails, or make calls.

But if you can’t do that, the most powerful thing you can do is spread the word. Tell your friends, family, coworkers, anyone who can help.

My reach will likely be small, and so I don’t know if this will mean very much in the grand scheme of things, but I cannot stand to see this tracking happen to another population as it did to mine.

And if you think it won’t affect you, it will. All anonymity goes out the window when your accounts can be linked via your personal ID

I wish you all luck in preventing this act from going through.