[leaf-fanatic]

Hello and welcome, I am leaf-fanatic.

I post about current events, disability rights, and other similar topics. As a heads-up, I do not tag anything, and some posts may be stressful or triggering.

I have a ton of fandom related sideblogs, so if you're wondering why I followed you/liked your post that's probably why.

[go-learn-esperanto]

Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.

They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.

Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.

You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.

This article specifically notes:

For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.

Microsoft admits Windows 11 has a GDID tracker with no off switch, first documented publicly in an FBI hacker complaint

GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.

Other important quotes:

What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.

Two things back that up:

There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.

Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.

[wizardarchetypes]

(guy who isnt beating the ocd voice) i know! maybe if i spend all night ruminating on something i feel guilty about until i’ve considered it from every possible angle and made myself physically ill, then i can finally forgive myself and i’ll feel better! 99% of morally abhorrent people stop self punishing right before they’re Absolved

[wizardarchetypes]

hi this tag is making me insane. OCD treatment and recovery are notoriously difficult because you have to give up all of your comforts and accommodations you've created, to actually lay the beast bare. i often say "the only way out of OCD is through" but i think this tag is far more evocative of what it actually feels like to find the strength within you to face recovery.

[helenvaughans]

[librarycards]

people on here who have been on 10-15+ years like myself...i don't know how they claim that there were never any Black bloggers on here, or that it was always such a white website. trudy gradientlair was on here. thisiswhiteprivilege was on here. there was a feminist citation project sara ahmed was involved in on here. there was someone on here whose username was wretchedoftheearth and that was how i learned who fanon was when i was 12, by googling those words. tumblr was the only place i knew i could go to get accurate & compassionate info about what happened to trayvon martin, when everyone around me irl was rabidly racist. the amount of reportage and scholarship that happened on here before the first big wave of bans was so huge and so much has been lost. where were you when it was happening??? why weren't you paying attention??

[dumbtrannybitch]

it's cause they never engaged with non white bloggers so they never noticed them disappearing. they got the tumblr they wanted, and those of us who aren't liberal/conservative fandom bloggers were robbed of our black and brown friends, and worst of all black and brown bloggers were robbed of a dpace that once was a legitimate vector for talking about black issues. at least some members of staff know what they are doing, it's like the war on drugs in this website the way they crush black people on this website.

[nyokoko]

I literally published an essay several years ago about how a lot of people stole the intellectual work that Black feminist bloggers on here published regularly to build this website and its reputation as we know it. White people love them some revisionist history.

The reason Tumblr became the bastion of intellectual discourse that it was known for--the reason the term "social justice warrior" even EXISTS as a derogatory descriptor--is because of the work of the Black bloggers who migrated to this site from 2009-2014 from LJ and Jezebel's forums. Myself included.

[marthajefferson]

Anniversary of APOLLO 11 MOON LANDING

On July 20, 1969, 109 hours and 42 minutes after launch, Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin entered the lunar lander ‘Eagle’, made a final check, and the Eagle undocked from the lunar orbiter ‘Columbia’, where the third member of the crew Michael Collins, stayed in orbit around the moon. Partially manually piloted by Armstrong, the Eagle landed 0 degrees, 41 minutes, 15 seconds north moon latitude and 23 degrees, 26 minutes east moon longitude. Armstrong stepped out, and Aldrin followed 20 minutes later: human beings stepped on the moon for the first time. The two men spent 21 hours and 26 minutes on its surface. One of the astounding aspects of the mission was the seeming simplicity of the technology used to get man to the moon. According to Oliver Gassmann, professor of Technology Management, the mobile phone in your pocket has one million times more memory than the Apollo 11’s computer. Same about the procesor: the latest phones typically have more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” –Neil Armstrong

(gifs from the documentary Chasing The Moon, 2019)

[transgeoffrickly-deactivated202]

every time someone talks about someone "faking disability to live on welfare" or anything to that effect i think about how my mom worked in law and directly knew of a case of a guy who had terminal brain cancer with an estimated few months to live and got rejected the first time he applied for disability income. like, he was 100% going to die and that wasn't disabled enough to not have to jump through a million hoops and get lawyers involved. non-disabled people "living off of welfare" is such a non issue because i cannot bring myself to care about the like, 3 people who maybe successfully do it compared to the thousands of people rejected who need aid

[autismandstuff]

Honestly, probably the best social tip I could ever give you guys is literally just ask. Need to make a doctor's appointment but don't know how? Call the doctor's office and ask. Don't know the meaning of what someone said? Ask them. Don't understand the instructions you were given? Ask them to repeat or clarify. This has literally never failed me, no one's gotten angry, no one's refused to answer.

Even in situations where you think it might not work, I once accidentally missed a deadline to accept a job offer, so I called and asked if they could reset it and they did. Just today I called a doctor and asked how to schedule an appointment, the lady told me how, and then I did it. Didn't know if someone was being sarcastic or not, so I asked and they told me. Just ask.

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

Like we have commodified human connection to a degree where if you go beyond smalltalk you're oversharing and if you talk too deeply about your life you're traumadumping and if you get visibly upset you're manipulative and if you care too much you're codependent and if you want to talk about anything heavy you're expected to go hire a therapist because your friends shouldn't have to deal with that stuff and yet we're all sitting around wondering why so many people are lonely...

[covid-safer-hotties]

Vivian's third reply is really important. Meeting people where they are can be hard, but this is a good example of it.

[mynnthia]

seeing news about the fallout remaster announcement feels like cruel irony to me

microsoft games are a bds boycott target, and because both bethesda + obsidian are owned by microsoft, this includes the games published by them.

microsoft is gonna further profit from a new virtual playground of ~post-apocalyptic bombed out towns in the desert~ while contributing to creating bombed out apocalyptic conditions in gazan towns, by collaborating with israel on so many fronts that bds calls microsoft the most complicit company in palestinian genocide.

and nostalgia-baited fans will still buy it bc playing pretend in a virtual world thats a knockoff of what real life people are currently facing – a virtual world funded by that very suffering of those real life people – is more important to them than simply playing a different game

[mynnthia]

anyway, to make this rant productive – if you have the means to send donations to palestine, heres some community initiatives:

Mona’s community aid initiative – verified by el-shab-hussein

The Sameer Project – has a british partner org, so UK folks can donate with gift aid here with no transfer fees

Revive Gaza Farmlands – has a canadian partner org, so canadians can donate via direct bank transfers with no transfer fee

Crips for eSims for Gaza – canda-based, so canadian e-transfers saves on transaction fees

[auramgold]

a lot of people assume psychosis hallucinations are super intense all-consuming horror movie shit like the memes about the hat man or always horrible debilitating things that make you dangerous to be around

but in my experience 95% of my hallucinations are getting spooked by very clearly hearing someone knocking on my door or calling my name from another room or hearing footsteps walking behind me which are "just" my brain recreating the horror of an abusive childhood

i *have* gotten the "bugs crawling all over me" hallucination once or twice though and yeah that one is exactly as terrible horrible as it sounds AUGH

[auramgold]

(not trying to put you on blast specifically, you're just a good example to jump off of)

media and pop culture hypes up psychosis a lot as The Worst That Can Happen out of sanism, so even when you try and filter that cultural bias out you still assume it's based on something

when, no, psychosis is actually very simple: it's just hyperactive pattern matching. it's your brain's signal-to-noise ratio being off balance, it's seeing images in random static. it's not always this special uniquely big thing, it's in fact quite mundane a lot of the time.

no one is immune to psychosis, it's not purely the realm of the insane. anyone is one bad night of sleep or one bad case of food poisoning or one bad fever away from being just like me on my worst days.

and this, indeed, is why solidarity with the insane is so important: you, yes you too, are just one bad day from joining us, and no perceptions of being a "temporarily embarrassed sane person" will save you from the oppression of the psychiatric institution.

[what-a-bastard]

Accepting identities I don't understand is actually extremely easy because I just go "this isn't about me" and move on with my life unbothered by someone else's identity, it's truly that simple.

[eevee-on-keyboard]

i heard someone say once, “you don’t need to speak French to acknowledge that it’s a language that exists”. and i feel like more ppl need to keep that in mind when they come across something they don’t understand.

[purplepints]

Oldest human footprint discovered, made 153,000 years ago in South Africa.

Oldest human footprint in North America, made 21,000 years ago in New Mexico, USA.

Oldest human footprint on the Moon, made July 20, 1969 on the Sea of Tranquility, Earth's moon.

[zarohk]

Happy 57th Moon Day!

[racketghost]

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).

[racketghost]

[tags via : @heavenly-havoc]

[covid-safer-hotties]

[covid-safer-hotties]

[toytulini]

Noah Lyles competed in the Olympic 200 with COVID and finished 3rd. What we know about his illness

Noah Lyles said he tested positive for COVID-19 two days before he finished third in the 200-meter final at the Paris Olympics on Thursday n

[covid-safer-hotties]

[covid-safer-hotties]

[bebsi-cola]

ableism really feels like the lowest common denominator across all groups regardless of their politics. right wingers will call their opponents the r word, their opponents will call them "brain dead" bc they want to use the r word but they have to reskin the term for optics. anyone on any political or social stance can somehow maintain that stance while being ableist. like homophobes and transphobes can be ableist. lgbtq people can be ableist. both racists and anti-racists can be ableist. even self proclaimed anti-fascists can be ableist despite a hatred of disabled people making up a chunk of the basis of fascist ideology. actually no matter what someone says, if they make their point by being ableist they've failed at confronting the universal myth that some people are inherently superior to other people. they just disagree over which group should be the one considered inferior