[catmask]

by the way. it never is too late to decide you want to be happy. the woman who helped me get hormones didnt start hers until she was 70, and i met her at 73, beautiful and smiling - and told me that the last three years of her life had been her favorite. your favorites might be ahead of you too. why not hang around and find out?

[folly-of-alexandria]

J.K. Rowling posting Upskirt shots of trans women makes clear what we've always known.

Rowling believes that she has a right to commit sexual violence against women she believes don't deserve rights or safety.

Her response to receiving criticism on posting said upskirt was to essentially argue that the trans woman had it coming and as was basically asking for it because of what she was wearing.

There is no daylight between Rowling and the average shitheel rapist.

[thecryptkeeper]

[gunsandfireandshit]

[mousidy]

so can I just say there's a reason I wasn't going on and on for paragraphs underneath transfem voices project submissions about how "monstrous" and "demonic" submitters' abusers were, or how their experiences were "horror movie material"

first of all, TVP was not about centering my feelings about transfems' abusers or what they went through. going on about how disgusted and enraged I felt underneath submissions would have actively detracted from the voices I was trying to center. TVP was not about my voice

second, abusers are not a subhuman class of people. they are often very ordinary people that exist in our lives. even my worst abuser did not abuse me because he was a subhuman monster or a demon. he abused me because he had systemic power over me, and that power went unchecked by any of the people or systems that could have protected me. he was thoroughly, mundanely human

the world is full of TME people who abuse transfems in ways that range from minor to major. I do not believe this means the world is full of subhuman monsters and demons. I believe that it means there are systems and norms that facilitate and enable this abuse. this isn't "rot," it's systems working as designed

[mousidy]

[charl0ttan]

spongebob no doubt had to work very hard to attain a worldview that caters to such boundless joy as his, even being able to appreciate his job as a fry cook and his grouchy neighbor, but he eventually made it and now every day is a paradise. and im sure he's still learning how to live because it means so much to him

[kremlin]

uninstall adobe acrobat. it is malware. it has been malware. these aren't opinions: acrobat meets the definition of malware.

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

cheers

[andmaybegayer]

Firefox's built-in PDF.js viewer: does everything you could want from a basic viewer, fast enough search, and can now do annotations for filling in forms and such

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

LibreOffice Draw: I don't ever really like having to open this but if you have to edit a PDF in detail it does work, and doesn't just vomit up a bunch of polygons when you give it text to work with. Better as an authoring tool than an editor.

[tvtimaeus]

I don't think I'm ever going to be able to afford to live

[football-in-tuxedos]

We talk a lot about how like, fandom in general has extremely piss poor reading comprehension, but I'm not gonna lie, the case I've seen in Amazing Digital Circus is frankly fascinating.

Like, I'm not the biggest fan of TADC, I thought it was fine, but it wasn't what I would call subtle about its themes. TADC exists very firmly in the Millennial Adult Animated series subtype, which means it looks like a kids show, while being about adult emotions, and also states its ideas extremely clearly. There's a bunch of these (BoJack Horseman and Rick & Morty are the big ones in my estimations). They are extremely direct and very blunt, which is in my mind just a neutral statement. Directness is neither positive nor negative

So here comes this show, which spends a huge chunk of its runtime explaining how basically all of the characters are damaged and need to accept themselves to heal, and then spends a MASSIVE chunk of its double length final episode detailing how its biggest piece of shit character became the way she is via a mix of self loathing and fear of her own identity, culminating with her begging the main character not to love her, literally indicating that she believes her own actions have made her irredeemable, AND THEN the whole show emotionally climaxes with said main character embracing her, choosing to love her anyway...

And a bunch of y'all seem to be champing at the bit to find new ways to punish her. Honestly y'all fascinate me.

[tvtimaeus]

The most important thing you learn in your 20s is that having a social life is not important and will not get you health insurance and benefits

[homunculus-argument]

A free-range group therapy called "get herded, idiot", where you and everyone in your group is set loose to run around on an open field while a highly trained shepherd dog tries to keep you all in one group. I am not sure what benefit this would have for anyone involved.

[sacred-portal]

[tredlocity]

there’s a twitter account where this guy thinks every tweet is directed at him and it’s great

[famicom]

this is how everyone on this website acts

[bluwubewwy]

Thats not true i dont think i act like this

[galaxycepheus]

If your system doesn't account for the fact that Parents Are Going To Be Abusive/Neglectful/Insufficient then it objectively sucks I'm sorry I don't make the rules

[galaxycepheus]

Monitored bank accounts for those under 18. Requiring parental consent for medical procedures. Parental controls on personal devices. "We won't teach this at school because parents are supposed to address it at home." Anything that puts all of the child's power onto the parents' hand, anything that assumes parents are going to inherently do enough of a good job no one else needs to interfer, every single one of these IS going to be used by controlling, neglectful or unprepared parents and already are, and if the system did not account for that very real, tangible, dangerous tendency, then it's not worth fucking anything. You shouldn't make things "for the youth"/with children in mind if you are going to overlook this painfully common aspect of their lives u_u

[wizardposting666]

When those GPS trackers for cars were released, specifically advertised for parents to put in their child's car, I saw the ad on TV and said out loud, "God... I wonder how many abusive parents and spouses are gonna use that to keep their victims from escaping."

My dad was sat next to me and his eyes got big as saucers. He was so quiet when he replied solemnly, "I didn't even think about that... jesus christ, that's dark..." and I had to tell him I had friends who were probably gonna end up in that situation with their conservative parents. He was so removed from the notion of using that device for cruelty that he didn't even CONSIDER it! That's how easily people can be bought in by inventions/legislation advertised under the guise of "keeping the kids safe". My own father, who is a beautiful and gentle man with a good head on his shoulders, was ready to advocate for a tracking device, because it was sold as a device to "protect children".

Children need more protections from abusers, yes, but the biggest protection they could possibly have is AUTONOMY. GIVE CHILDREN AUTONOMY.

[paroxysmaljune]

i think if you make shirt merch and your big design is always on the back of the shirt you should try again

[ryan-sometimes]

I wonder how it feels to be a therapist or psychiatrist in 2026 and watch the despair of young patients and realize it’s not attributed to mental illness but a rational response to the state of the capitalist hellscape world we live in

[closet-keys]

I think at bare minimum all medical professionals need to make sure they are treating patients with more kindness and respect than grifters. if you go to a doctor and they treat you like shit, humiliate you, and send you home without any information on your body or access to treatment, then health-grifters' offers will start to feel more tempting by simply giving the most basic performance of taking you seriously and caring about your well-being. grifters should be condemned for manipulating and exploiting sick people, and doctors also play a role in whether grifts thrive or are successfully identified and rejected. genuine baseline human respect, and beginning a relationship with a patient by earning (rather than demanding) trust, goes a long way.