tell me what to do with my life

30 years old. Well, shit. 🇻🇪

[theconcealedweapon]

[dragon-in-a-fez]

when a government bans young people from using social media, and then categorises messenger apps like Signal and WhatsApp as "social media", they are pushing those young people toward using text messages, a fundamentally insecure form of communication. texts are not encrypted in transit and can be read by both the sender's mobile carrier and the recipient's. that also means they can be leaked in data breaches, subpoenaed, or just handed over willingly to law enforcement at the carriers' discretion.

hmm. I wonder why governments might want this

[torstherapy]

[tinsnip]

Per @spoonstrek

[abortionado]

They’re calling me every slur under the sun over on twitter for this post

[cilceon]

Would you sell liquor to this baby

Yes

No

I don’t think life begins at contraception but I’d still sell liquor to baby

Voting ended onAug 6, 2025

Wait hold on rb canceled that’s the wrong word wait no stop

[byjove]

When the average heterosexual family man complains about his family not respecting him, it is almost always because there is absolutely nothing about him to respect and he has made no effort to connect with any of them and he considers the slightest pushback or lack of affection a sign of ‘disrespect’. When the average heterosexual family woman complains about her family not respecting her, it’s usually because her 14 year old son keeps calling her a bitch and throwing things at her while her husband laughs. The difference is so fucking stark.

[hugintheraven]

It’s because respect has multiple meanings.

[byjove]

When the average heterosexual family man complains about his family not respecting him, it is almost always because there is absolutely nothing about him to respect and he has made no effort to connect with any of them and he considers the slightest pushback or lack of affection a sign of ‘disrespect’. When the average heterosexual family woman complains about her family not respecting her, it’s usually because her 14 year old son keeps calling her a bitch and throwing things at her while her husband laughs. The difference is so fucking stark.

[genuinegameurge]

[rebeccasteventaylor]

My workplace recently had a thing about ‘do you know how many days we lose to stress related sick days? Here are some ways to manage stress’ and it’s things like ‘keep a gratitude journal’

But I don’t know - when I started work, many decades ago, it was expected you’d start at 9, finish at 5. You’d get your lunch break. You are expected to give about 70% of yourself the majority of your time. The last hour of each day and Friday afternoon were quiet times. There was time in the day to hang out with your coworkers for ten minutes talking about anything, not just work.

Now you’re expected to come in early and leave late and work through lunch. Give 100% all the time, more if you can push it. Don’t take leave. Work every second of every day as hard as you can push yourself. Do not waste time in the kitchen just chatting. Why aren’t you working harder?

And perhaps we’re burning out and take massive amounts of stress leave not because we’re not keeping a gratitude journal but because we are all being pushed to breaking point consistently, day after day, until we snap.

The older days weren’t perfect. But there was an understanding that work wasn’t life, and we could relax a little at work and still get paid enough to live. Now we are expected to give everything we’ve got, then give more, and not get paid enough to do something as simple as get a coffee after work. Even our hobbies are supposed to be monetised.

I blame Reagan and Thatcher but also blame every business leader since then who thought that pattern of work was in any way sustainable.

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

[ralfmaximus]

The note inside a bullet.

B-17 bomber is riddled with German anti-aircraft fire but miraculously survives. Later they discover the explosive shells were all inert; sabotaged by Nazi slaves working in armament factories.

Inside one empty shell is a written note: it's all we can do for you now.

[gothlovingoth]

The most important part of all this is that these small acts of bravery and noncompliance cannot be known as long as the enemy still stands, and might never be known. Just because it doesn’t seem like anyone is doing anything doesn’t mean it’s true. The best malicious compliance or subtle sabotage is the one that’s never detected, but makes ravages nonetheless.

[weshallbekind]

A critical part of any resistance is

Do not post your crimes

Do not brag. Do not look for brownie points. Do not publicly recruit. Keep your mouth shut.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Most classic Derin character is an academic that just fucking sucks at their job.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

The difference between Andy Weir's work and mine is that Weir writes about the kinds of scientists who help change the world, and I write about the kinds of scientists who are good at convincing grant committees that they can help change the world and who wrongly believe the committees' faith in them to be accurate.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#aspirational vs familiarity

Working in science was normal for me it didn't leave me with any petty resentments or peeves

[estro-boi]

we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason

[estro-boi]

torrents work like this

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

please learn to torrent

[macleod]

How to Use Torrents (with Pictures) - wikiHow

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bitorrent or utorrent.

[expressions-of-nature]

Sagres, Portugal by Luca Severin

[blumineck]

Archery x flower arranging

This was actually really fun!

Anyway, don’t forget I’m still raising money to test a bunch of things in a suit of armour:

The Bluminarmour Project

Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.

[powersimon]

The carrier of carriers. A tribute to Terry Pratchett

[txttletale]

or to be a little less pithy, groundedness means a sense of internal consistency, the idea that events and traits of a story or world are grounded in a coherent set of logics.

while realism means--exactly that, adherence to the specific logics of actual reality and its physics, logistics, etc.

there is of course nothing wrong with wanting realism in a story, but 99% of the people who say they do really want groundedness. like the vast majority of dumb arguments about asoiaf/got are its fans saying "its realistic" when they mean "its grounded" and people ridiculing them because it is in fact not very realistic (and not just because of the overt fantasy elements)

[prokopetz]

In my experience, another big part of the problem with talking about "realism" in fictional milieux is the product of a specific Type of Guy employing the term as a sort of semantic bait and switch, sometimes without consciously realising that this is what they're doing.

There's a particular recurring discussion of "realism" in media that goes something like this: "okay, but realistically the heroes would always win because they'd just shoot the villain while they're monologuing" – while refusing to acknowledge the obvious follow-up question: "wait, but if monologuing reliably gets you shot, where do all the monologuing villains come from?"

i.e., what we're really discussing is not a milieu which has adhered to some notional model of "realism" ab initio, but one which was apparently governed by the conventional tropes of its genre right up until the moment the character the person framing the scenario wants to win walks into the room, whereupon "realism" asserts itself.

Heck, there were folks doing this song and dance in the notes of the post this one is following up on, trotting out hypotheticals like "in a realistic fantasy setting the twelve-year-old chosen one would always lose because experience trumps skill and the power of friendship isn't real", implicitly taking it as given that in a milieu where this is true, people would still be handing out magic swords to twelve-year-olds.

It's basically treating those silly "How [Media] Really Should Have Ended" YouTube videos as a legitimate critical lens, and in circles where this song and dance is common, it leads to a lot of people reflexively shutting down the moment they hear the word "realism" because they assume (often quite reasonably!) that oh great, it's That Guy again.

[kosmogrl]

big day for girls that had to come to terms with the fact that love will never fix your life or everything that’s fucked up in your head

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Call me crazy but if we had to choose between living in a world where teenagers smoke weed and tag a wall every now and then and one where they're all isolated online getting hatred drip fed into their ears until they snap and shoot up a school, I know which one I'd prefer.

[phaeton-flier]

Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.

[phaeton-flier]

The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there

[theaudientvoid]

[centrally-unplanned]

Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.

And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.

[theabigailthorn]

love the idea of bears being the chosen species actually. having a near death experience and glimpsing heaven and realising it's just full of bears, no humans at all, humans not ensouled actually, humans an accidental byproduct of God's plan for bears