I delete most of my posts after a month or so to keep my blog manageable and to organize my reblogs. You have my permission to reblog whatever deleted post I made. It wouldn't be on the internet if I wasn't okay with it getting shared.
I have started my own website where I am organizing resources I've made over the years (and also compiling stuff like recipes and recommendations).
I am also now livestreaming a couple times a week, come hang out on Wednesday nights to get something done and Saturday mornings to look at computers and ask tech questions. All streams will involve rambling stories and Tiny Bastard.
Here are some of the major resources I've made and some of my sideblogs in case you're looking for something that I reblogged, plus my answers to the tech questions I get most frequently:
First of all, here's the death book.
Here's the guide on how to write a research paper.
Here's the de-Googling pamphlet.
Guide on how to talk to people (including helpful commentary from others!)
HERE'S THE LINK TO 2025 California Fire Resources.
I'm also uploading this stuff at archive.org now.
Want to learn how to draw? check @beginningdrawing !
Why I don't go to defcon anymore (tw: sexual assault/harassment)
Are you looking for a good price on computers? Check out @okay-computer.
@compusever - tech and internet stuff.
@how-to-do-activism - how-to's and information about activism and anarchy and stuff.
@depressionbootcamp - mental health and ADHD stuff.
@adultieradults - how-tos and advice that I've posted.
@but-i-eated-it - gluten-free recipes and cooking adventures.
@politicalmissdemeanor - political shit.
@fellow-ny - gender euphoria.
@punkpuns - a comic I used to make.
@pitmusic - my punk band.
@traum-fieber - my black metal band.
@blankie-wanky - cool blankets and fiber projects, mostly by other people.
@ms-demeanor-art-blog - my art stuff.
@ive-got-a-parasite - venom fanblog.
@yelling-about-college - documenting college life and college strategies; kind of a studyblr?
There are more but those are the ones that I want to share the most mixed in with the ones that people want to see the most.
2026 Specs for buying a computer
How to make a computer meaningfully faster
Basic computer shit:
Basics of encryption and safe internet traffic.
Protonmail for email
Cryptpad.fr to replace gdocs, LibreOffice if you want a free desktop office suite
Windows security is probably fine for your AV but if you want more or have a Mac use Sophos free edition (if you're using linux there is no helpful advice I can give you, you probably know more than I do about it)
Here's a good resource on piracy (not written by me)
Here's a great post of coding resources by @shinelikethunder
My preferred browser is Firefox with privacybadger, decentraleyes, https everywhere, multi-account containers, ublock origin, and auto tab discard (sleeps inactive tabs to save RAM). I also have the wayback machine extension because archiving is good. Duckduckgo is my default browser in firefox.
Bitwarden for password management (free version is great, but $10 a year also gets you 1GB of encrypted file attachments)
If I have to use a chromium browser for some reason I use Opera
If you need to check if your email or password data has been leaked, the site you can check on is haveibeenpwned.com
Instead of doomscrolling lately I have been reading my PDFs and it turns out if you do this you learn a whole bunch of stuff. I’m afraid I must recommend it
I'm really enjoying the cosmic horror reinterpretation of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It gets to a lot of the ambient horror of the film - what is terrifying is almost environmental, and the sense that the Sawyer family expresses something bigger and worse and more rotten to the USA than simply being cannibals.
The cosmic horror and the social commentary of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre fold together like two clasped hands. Much of the sense of cosmic horror and social commentary were probably accidental byproducts, but not wholly unintentional because there is no way to detach from either and there are some clear touchstones for both. And the extrapolation of these into more complex ideas is 100% attributing a degree of artistic intent which we know on record could not have existed. Too much of the movie was improvised in the moment due to low budget. Too much exists because everyone was physically and psychologically exhausted due to the miserable working conditions.
But it's such a good read on the final product. Everything from the seemingly undead grandpa to the blood symbol on the van to the sunspots for opening credits to the proto industrial score from Tobe Hooper fits so nicely into that theme, the rest of it falls into place. The heat, the nightime sequence, madness as the conclusion. It's wonderful, and when you understand the incomprehensibly vast monster is the USA itself, I think it's a way of making it understandable to a non-horror fan like it never has been before.
In many ways, the sun is almost as much a presence as any character. And when you look to the other attempts to approach the material after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, that sense of unknowable worship is very noticeably absent. Outside the hands of Tobe Hooper, we're left with people struggling to find a way into the material by the signifiers like cannibalism, the saw, or isolated rural communities. But none of them consider the real secret ingredient is that Tobe Hooper's movies are in awe of the environment, and his Sawyers are not just cannibals, but worshipers and mystics.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is almost infamous for its messy, grimy realism (in part because everyone was sweaty and couldn't take showers filming in the Texas heat), but those elements are like the costumes and casual nudity of The Wicker Man from 1973, set dressing to lend veracity to a story about something bigger.
It's one of those films that transformed horror films forever and never stopped being an influence on the genre, but for all that it remains difficult to convince both horror fans and non-fans that one of the reasons it has been so influential is because it was and still as a sincerely beautiful work of art.
“For New York City Pride in 1994 (Stonewall 25), Baker created a mile-long rainbow flag that was carried down First Avenue in Manhattan. During the parade, Baker used scissors to cut segments from the flag to be rushed to Fifth Avenue for an impromptu protest march in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the headquarters of New York City’s anti-gay Catholic archdiocese.
^“At the bottom of the image is the segment of the flag cut for the St. Patrick’s Cathedral protest. Photograph by Mick Hicks”
“Gilbert Baker wearing a white sequined dress (right) and other protestors triumphantly march the cut pieces of the mile-long flag past St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Photograph by Charles Beal”
A fun thing about computer skills is that as you have more of them, the number of computer problems you have doesn't go down.
This is because as a beginner, you have troubles because you don't have much knowledge.
But then you learn a bunch more, and now you've got the skills to do a bunch of stuff, so you run into a lot of problems because you're doing so much stuff, and only an expert could figure them out.
But then one day you are an expert. You can reprogram everything and build new hardware! You understand all the various layers of tech!
And your problems are now legendary. You are trying things no one else has ever tried. You Google them and get zero results, or at best one forum post from 1997. You discover bugs in the silicon of obscure processors. You crash your compiler. Your software gets cited in academic papers because you accidently discovered a new mathematical proof while trying to remote control a vibrator. You can't use the wifi on your main laptop because you wrote your own uefi implementation and Intel has a bug in their firmware that they haven't fixed yet, no matter how much you email them. You post on mastodon about your technical issue and the most common replies are names of psychiatric medications. You have written your own OS but there arent many programs for it because no one else understands how they have to write apps as a small federation of coroutine-based microservices. You ask for help and get Pagliacci'd, constantly.
But this is the natural of computer skills: as you know more, your problems don't get easier, they just get weirder.
