wings to carry on

[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.

[best-of-inspirobot]

[tearlessrain]

this is in perfect iambic meter and sounds like the first line of a weird poem

[tearlessrain]

Rule #2

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you see one on the street,

For decorum is essential when a lobster you must greet.

You may comment on the weather, compliment his choice of hat,

But crustaceans like their space if one should stop them for a chat.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you’re strolling down the coast,

Simply nod and give a greeting, or a handshake at the most,

For a lobster’s first priority is formal social graces,

And one seemes over-familiar if a lobster one embraces.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you meet one in the sea,

For a lobster’s spines and chitin make it difficult, you see,

And he might become self-conscious if you bring that fact to light,

So don’t ever hug a lobster, simply put, it’s impolite.

[reddwoods]

they went off with this

[islesaviours]

@ruffboijuliaburnsides basedball

[ruffboi-mags]

hot damn they really did go off with this

[zeemczed]

[normalmammal]

I’m so pro abortion I feel insane hearing any other take on it

[normalmammal]

Even lefties I know will eventually concede to some situation where they think it’s right to force someone to carry a child against their will as if that’s not one of the most inhumane and cruel situations to put someone in regardless of any other factors

[wingstocarryon]

Ultimately it's a case of self defence.

[noxexistant]

thinking about the bed, 1892 by henri de toulouse-lautrec featured on the wikipedia page for “blanket”

[weird-ecologies]

Charles "I hate all my study organisms" Darwin

Happy Darwin Day to my fellow Biology nerds!

[tatooineknights]

Academy Award winner Marcia Lucas has died. While winning major awards for her work as an editor for Star Wars (alongside a team of editors, including Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew; some of her contributions outside of her work with George Lucas include Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, and New York, New York), she mostly disappeared from the public eye following her divorce and essentially retired.

While Marcia dispelled the belief that she singlehandedly saved Star Wars in the edit (and very passionately defended George's craftmanship and ideas, which she felt were undercredited, as well as the work of their team in general), there was a lot of work she specifically did and I thought it would be good to highlight just how much she did and give her credit where it is due. There is a lot that came from her that most don't know about. Most of those examples are from Howard Kazanjian's biography, A Producer's Life, published in 2021.

On some of the uncredited dialogue and story revisions for Star Wars:

On some of her work in Star Wars:

On having the iconic trench run on the Death Star as her biggest work while working on Star Wars:

On her uncredited work in The Empire Strikes Back:

On how her input changed the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

On her joining the Return of the Jedi crew, an emphasis in finding the right cut for actors, cutting together footage of Luke in ROTJ after she and George disagreed with the characterization the director had given to Mark Hamill and unable to reshoot footage:

On editing the climactic ending in the Throne Room in ROTJ:

[godlessondheimite]

[fluffmugger]

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

[pennie-dreadful]

“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”

[doctorbluesmanreturns]

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

[mikkeneko]

I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance

please try this on for size:

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

[three--rings]

My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument.  Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM.  The message is that it is BAD. 

My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.

[lyricwritesprose]

Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary.  And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to participate in this system.  If that means I go to Hell, so be it.  Going to Hell now.”

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.

[maklodes]

I somehow don’t remember ever reading Huckleberry Finn in school as a kid, so I read it more recently (although still a couple years ago) after already having seen a lot of the racism discourse around it.

The surprising thing, to me, was that no one was talking about the child abuse and neglect that was affecting Huck himself, and all of the commentary was about slavery and racism. The commentary I saw on Huckleberry Finn seemed to insinuate – if not directly state – that it was the story of a privileged white boy who generously condescended to empathize with Jim, the poor slave who wasn’t born with the innumerable advantages Huck’s white skin blessed him with.

Then I read the book, and I was reading a story about a boy with a physically abusive, neglectful, alcoholic father who reappears in his son’s life only to attempt to seize his windfall wealth in a brazen act of parental theft that would have shamed James Spears, and an aunt a guardian whose self-righteous controlling behavior and spiritual abuse make Huck wonder whether he isn’t better off with the aforementioned dad.

So I think the adverse circumstances that both Jim and Huck face – although in many ways different from each other – have parallels that allow them to empathize with each other in a manner that’s closer to parity than “Huck gazes down at the pathetic Jim from the peaks of Mt. Privilege and feels pity.”

(There are times when Huck acts kind of patronizing toward Jim, but correspondingly there are times when Jim does the same thing toward Huck. In both cases, they tend to be confidently wrong, with Huck citing half-learned, misremembered, garbled lessons from school, and Jim citing various superstitions.)

Crucially, it is personal empathy, and not any kind of principled abolitionist morality that is at play here. Huck and Jim are thieves and vagabonds. Rejection of slavery comes in the context of a broader rejection of social norms and morality – and not some kind of consistent high-minded anarchism, either, but stuff like “we’ve gotta steal to survive, but persimmons aren’t that great this time of year, so we won’t steal those, and we’ll count the fact that we don’t steal persimmons as points in our favor morally.”

A cynical part of me wonders whether that’s the really offensive part of Huckleberry Finn – the suggestion that maybe the ability to transcend and see past society’s arbitrariness and injustices isn’t the exclusive preserve of the respectable classes using all of the right Diversity Equity & Inclusion-workshop approved language, or the YA authors obsessed with imparting the Correct Moral Lessons to the Youth (hmmm… which Huckleberry Finn character do they remind me of?), but might lay with outcasts and runaways who use some offensive language and do desperate things to survive, but who experience society from an outsider’s perspective and form bonds of necessity – and, ultimately, empathy – with members of other widely despised segments of society.

Update: Crossed out “aunt,” because I misremembered and Miss Watson is not Huck Finn’s aunt.

[wingstocarryon]

I loved Huck Finn. I still remember the line about thunder like barrels rolling down the sky. Huck is a beautiful narrator because he's so wrong about why he's doomed, and his language is so uneducated, and through all that he's got a beautiful way with language and a good heart. It's a wonderful book. Much better than Tom Sawyer.

[glitchlight]

The Nasdaq were a collection of economic spirits venerated the middle to end United States imperial wealth cults. Economic spirits, referred to as "stocks" (/stɑks/) in the obscure dialect of French spoken in the United States, were categorized into one of several "exchanges" ( /ɛksˈt͡ʃeɪnd͡ʒ/) based upon perceived impact and power. The Nasdaq are believed to have been held in higher esteem than other contemporaneously worshipped exchanges in the Dao and the Nysse. Shamans of the imperial wealth cults ("brokers" /ˈbɹoʊkɚ/) were known to sacrifice offerings ("layoffs") to the Nasdaq in hopes of receiving material and spiritual rewards from the supreme deity of the United States, The Free Market. Brokers were often known to interpret omens of the day by questioning the effect of such omens on the stocks.

[lavenderprose]

You know, I am GENUINELY unsure that I understood the Pining While Fucking trope before Heated Rivalry. I'm convinced that it's 80% of the absolute crack cocaine infused into Hollanov. The other 20% is the rivalry and the language barrier and the forbidden eroticism of it all but mostly it's the pining. A fucking masterclass of the trope. Rachel Reid really sat down to write the sequel to her coffee shop AU and cooked the literary equivalent of crystal meth.

[wingstocarryon]

If you like this trope, I have to recommend Sex Worker AUs. They often invovle this. U WILL LIKE

[higgsbison]

happy glorious 25th of may

[puppygirllaika]

Could you personally navigate a cross-country road trip, door to door, without your electronics (phone/computer/tablet/etc)?

Yes

No

Voting ended onMay 29

[codecicle-archive]

queer people on this site really make me feel like a confused straight guy at pride. the discourse here could kill a man

[codecicle-archive]

"why polyamorous people aren't valid" "mspec lesbians AREN'T okay actually" "aroallos are freaks" "he/him dni. cis men dni" "this post is for non-men only" yessss and the one with long hair goes in the girl box, then the one with short hair goes in the boy box!!

[codecicle-archive]

maybe I'm just a boring he/him white guy but inventing about 7 trillion terms to define "man" and "woman" so you can reinforce gender essentialism isn't very "love is love" of you. maybe i just don't have a sexuality but picking and choosing what sexualities are normal and which ones are "weird and predatory" sounds like we're all a bunch of republicans on fox news. if you attend your local pride parade and look REAAALLLYYY closely, you'll notice you can't actually tell if someone's gay or not from their appearance, and there's no way to know if they're "invading queer spaces". maybe it's just me, but when i attended my local gaybar last night for the drag show, they didn't ask for my gay-card with a peer reviewed diagnosis of faggot stamped on it. they just let me in the building. i live a life of bliss and luxury in not caring about any queer discourse ever, and just going "WHATEVER MAKES YOU HAPPY :-)" while booting up the latest cod game. and it seems much more fun than whatever the fuck you people are on about

[codecicle-archive]

muting my notifs for this post but i need to acknowledge this first. My favorite tags fr 🙏

[dracula1992soundtrack]

being online is so scary aren't you guys worried about the world wide spider

[redfagdiver]

It took 36 years for someone to make this joke and by god it was worth the wait

[anexperimentallife]

Also applies to "AI" "artists" and "musicians."

[blignick]

🇹🇷 Incredible friendship in Turkey: cat visits store every day to cuddle with cashier😘😺🫂

[probuccalfat]

stop inventing shit to be insecure about oh my god

[probuccalfat]

like i’m actually so sick of it i’m two days from pulling my hair out and screaming in the walmart parking lot about how fake the constructs of our society are like you don’t have to do any of this shit you can have a fine and content life doing shit the way you want to do it oh my GOD you don’t need to have glass skin or have a 6 figure salary or try to find a house in the city or have a baby or try to get a promotion or whatever the hell else people told you makes for a happy life you can work at the library or pool forever if it makes you happy you can be single forever if it makes you happy have whatever the fuck kind of skin or hair or clothes you like having on your body have whatever the fuck kind of body you want this shit is MADE UP!!!!!!!!!!! YOU ARE ALLOWED TO BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU HAVE AND NOT CONTINUALLY STRIVE FOR MORE AND MORE!!!!!!!!!