Regarding reblogs of art (thinking about this post):

Speaking for myself, as someone who posts about the Disability Community, and who has a fair number of disabled people among my mutuals and followers, I try not to clutter up those good people's dashboards with image posts without descriptions (though I will, occasionally -- but I try to keep those posts a small fraction of the ones on this blog).

I am physically disabled, myself. And I'm often typing with one hand while I'm holding myself (more or less) upright with the other. At the end of the day, I'm often tired, headachy, and needing to get to ready for bed on a schedule, because I need someone else's help to actually get into bed.

Therefore, I end up scrolling past ~99% of art I absolutely love because I don't have the time or energy to describe what I'm seeing.

I will be much more likely to reblog your art (and images of text for your political P.S.A.s) if you add your Own Image Descriptions to the images you post.

Please and Thank you.

Original posters skipping the alt text on uploaded images is a widespread accessibility problem and the worst offender is Tumblr itself. Multiple times I have asked Tumblr to provide alt descriptions on their own images and prioritize art for Tumblr radar that already comes with a description from the artist. I think if more people made these requests on undescribed official Tumblr posts and in surveys from Tumblr, they would be harder to ignore.

I also notice comments are turned off, but the submission info post for Tumblr Radar is rebloggable. Commentary asking for alt descriptions to be added to the requirements can be included in a reblog. Here is my reblog. Your own reasons will be convincing, but anyone is also welcome to copy my own wording or edit it as you see fit.

Died and came back right, now everyone loves me and all my luck is good.

Wait, my curse was supposed to guarantee you'd lose a part of yourself in the event of a resurrection. No, no, no, this is all wrong!

Died and came back after I lost the part of myself that loses.

Is that you, Public Universal Friend?

I just saw an ad for streaming TV which, in part, showed a clip of Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor futzing around with the control panel of the TARDIS captioned "Star Trek: The Original Series".

@heroofthreefaces ... Hee!

Once at alt.drwho.creative in a post about crossovers I noted that Merlin's and Arthur's stories were different story cycles until ... oh, what was his name, begins with G ... Gildas, and I posited that one day there'll be someone posting on social media going, "Did you know that the Doctor wasn't always Captain Kirk's wizard?", and I guess here we've taken the first step on that road

Okay. How much longer before the Celestial Toymaker and Q merge in the audience's imagination?

When I was a kid I thought "brawtoo" was a verb meaning "to finance through voluntary donations." You see, I watched a lot of PBS growing up and the opening and closing credits on PBS shows always remind you that the preceeding/following program was brawtoo'd by viewers like you.

For those outside the U.S. and/or those who don't know PBS (The Public Broadcasting Service) the actual opening and closing message was "[This Program] was brought to you By Viewers Like You."

(Thank You).

My main problem with the "Free Thinker / 'Skeptic" atheist movement (from what I've seen of it)

Is that they are usually White, Cishet, Normate, English-Speaking, American, Men, who were raised Christian (in other words, the most privileged cohort in America today), who realized Christianity they were raised in is Wrong. ...And considering the state of much of American Christianity today, that's not, in itself, an unreasonable conclusion.

The problem is, they then jump to the conclusion that all religion is wrong, and all people who espouse any Faith at all must be unintelligent and/or morally corrupt. They claim (and likely sincerely believe) to have grown past Christianity. But they seem to have bought into the Christian propaganda of being the Only True religion.

So here's my advice: if you're questioning your faith, and you think you might be atheist, conduct some thought experiments with yourself, and imagine the universe being inhabited with different sorts of deities. Do some research on what people throughout history have believed. Like putting on a different set of glasses, to put the world in a new focus. Make up your own deities, while you're at it (It doesn't matter if you're a religion of one).

You may still end up deciding no gods are "actually" real. But at least you'll have a broader idea of what it is you don't believe in.

Speaking more specifically about my own beliefs:

I (sometimes) like to say: "I'm atheist because my belief system has a pantheon count of zero."

Strictly speaking, I'm an agnostic, because I acknowledge that whether or not gods exist is impossible for mortal, human, minds to answer one way or the other, just by the nature of the question. Personally, I think it's highly unlikely for any deity to be literally real.

But even if gods do exist, I've made the conscious worship zero of them, and to focus my attention on my fellow mortals.

If any deity has rules that will punish me for that decision (*cough* the God as constructed/believed in by American Evangelical Christians, for example), they don't deserve my worship. And I will actively oppose them -- especially when that worship is used as an excuse to harm my fellow earthlings.

But that doesn't mean that all religions are oppressive, or wrong, and for a lot of people, believing in a god they can pray to can be good for their mental health.

Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato

For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!

I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.

There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼‍♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼

It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:

And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:

These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.

And it’s such a shame too, cause this was probably the most impotrant scientific effort in human history, it bought us the time to do everything else we do, to go from just trying to get enough calories every day to everything we do now, it game people the freedom to do other things with their lives, human society would not have existed as it is today without this

We need to appreciate our ancient food scientists

With the caveat that this is obviously only true before The Famine, the nutrient density of potatoes made Irish peasants substantially healthier than those in other European countries whose staple food was bread! Thank you ancient Andean food scientists, for keeping my ancestors alive through a time of oppression and poverty.

Cooking, too. Cooking is food science that no other animal engages in. Cooking food makes all those calories easy to digest and use, and also gave us an excuse to gather in the kitchen while we wait for the food to cook, tell our stories, share our knowledge, make each other laugh with jokes some of us will never live down.

Dreamwidth and privacy, Dreamwidth and apps

I got an ask about Dreamwidth that has since completely vanished from my inbox and my activity feed, but it had some important questions that I wanted to answer, so I'm going to try and address them anyway:

"How's Dreamwidth on privacy? Do they data mine?"

They only take as much information as they are legally obligated to and/or is needed to make the site actually function. You are the only one who gets to decide how much of that you share with the public, or how little.

Dreamwidth makes the money it needs to run the site entirely through its userbase. They do not sell our data and do not want to.

"Do they have a mobile app too?"

No, and they probably never will. I know this is a disappointment for a lot of Tumblr users, but it's one of the primary ways that Dreamwidth can ensure that it's free to use for all users, and that we can post as much NSFW stuff there as we want.

That said, the Dreamwidth team has done everything they can to make the site friendly to mobile browsing! IIRC there are even some layouts that are particularly friendly to mobile browsing. Install Firefox/Mozilla on your phone, or a clone of it you particularly like, and log in through that, and you should be able to use the site just as well as you could from a desktop computer.

I have a Dreamwidth account.

Unfortunately, I seem to only have the attention span for one blogging/social platform at a time. And at the moment, that happens to be Tumblr -- primarily because there are more people here.

If more people (especially the mutuals I've gathered around me) joined, and posted to, Dreamwidth, I'd very likely move back there.

I just saw an ad for streaming TV which, in part, showed a clip of Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor futzing around with the control panel of the TARDIS captioned "Star Trek: The Original Series".

@heroofthreefaces ... Hee!

ah, yeah. so, Newbies, if someone appears to be active because new posts of theirs keep popping up on your dash, but they aren't responding to asks/replies/etc., that's probably the queue feature. Some blogs fill it up with posts and set it to portion out posts automatically. It keeps the blog alive while you're offline, and it's also a good way to not clog your followers' feeds if you happen to have a ton of posts to share.

Also, and I'm very sorry, but: answering asks is a lot more demanding than reblogging, or making a shitpost, or a quick shower thought, or an image, or fandom post. I only ever even try to tackle those when I have a few spare spoons. I'm sorry that's rare. But I want to put more thought and effort into actually communicating back to a human being, than when I'm just throwing my stream of consciousness into the void.

Following on from that latter thought:

If you want to ask a question, or share a thought about a something I've said in a post, it's easier for me to see it (and respond) if you click "Reblog" and add your comment to the end of the discussion (as I am doing now) than if you send me an ask, and I have to go back and find the post I think you're probably responding to.

By the way, I'll be putting this post in my queue. I currently have my queue set up to post 6 times a day between midnight and midnight (my time), which means when this gets published, it'll be several hours before dawn. And I will be in bed (I hope to be sleeping).

As protests start ramping up and violence escalates please remember:

DO NOT PUT MILK IN YOUR EYES FOR PEPPER SPRAY OR TEAR GAS.

It can and will cause infection due to bacteria. Flush with water, distilled if possible, and never EVER wear contact lenses to protests where there may be police retaliation.

Please reblog. It may save someone's sight.

I'm going to either find or make my own post about this but I'm a street medic, I was trained by the Black Rose organization medical branch during Occupy and have since done my own research with papers written for and by the cops and military about treating chemical agent exposure. this is correct, please do not use milk. I'm not sure about distilled water because I haven't seen it used in any papers or ok the ground, but my suspicion is that while it is probably not harmful, the osmotic qualities of distilled water may hurt or cause contact damage to the mucus membranes of the eyes. in addition, riot control chemicals are mostly designed to be water-activated and plain water will make the exposure sites hurt worse with minimal benefit besides flushing out any particles that aren't glued on with the oil medium they use for these agents.

in at least one study, the research on tear gas and pepper spray exposure showed that plain water was so painful that most cops who volunteered to be test subjects for treatment trials refused to use it, opting instead to just wait until they could shower or for the chemicals to degrade on their own. this is a pretty important indicator of both cops being mega pussies, and that plain water isn't very effective at treating riot control chemical injuries.

the substance that tested best in multiple trials was sterile buffered saline solution. in other words, the same stuff that comes in the squirt bottles for cleaning your contact lenses. this is a useful tool to carry into a protest because the squirt bottle makes it easy to direct the flow of water over the surface of the eyeball. trials also showed that putting this solution into your eyes prior to exposure cut down on discomfort quite a bit. in practice, this looks like putting in some clean eye drops from the drug store before you are exposed to riot weapons.

remember, if you are injured in a protest, call "medic!" out loud and street medics will find you. this has been standard protest practice for decades.

onions and milk and vinegar should not go in your eyes. I've seen all three recommended for tear gas treatment and I do not think they are a good idea or that they will work. stick to sterile saline or LAW (liquid antacid + water).

consider carrying an osha-approved eyewash bottle for easier application

also, please wear a helmet and buy a gas mask

I was gunna put this in the tags but it’s a lot. When i first started going through the process of getting a diagnosis, i was labelled with ODD. I immediately took issue with this, it seemed like an unfair diagnosis based entirely on the session the psychiatrist had with my parents (which mostly consisted of “my child is being really difficult on purpose”), and Hoo Boy when i tell you ODD immediately strips you of your ability to call out anyone on anything, that would be an understatement. I couldn’t even disagree or bring up my concerns about the validity of MY OWN DIAGNOSIS without it being labelled as oppositional defiance. Whenever i displayed any negative emotion the “treatments” did so much more harm than good. When you label someone as ‘defiant’ (ugh), when that word is put on their medical record, that person is never allowed to complain about anything again. Knowing that POC are disproportionately affected with this diagnosis makes me feel sick, i can only imagine what’s being swept under the rug as someone just being “defiant to authority”, not even just in the medical field but as justification for police brutality and mass incarceration. When i say medical racism kills people, this is what i mean.

this is so fucking important. reblog.

[Image description: a Tweet from Lauren Melissa (@aspienelle), dated 6/6/20: White children are more likely to be diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder and ADHD than black children. Black Children are over-diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder. What does this tell us about how the education and medical systems view POC? #BlackDisabledLivesMatter. Description ends]

Love how we've reached a point of capitalism saturation where I'm actually less likely to believe an expert if they say something I've also heard on TV

tl;dr - a tv ad made me want to arbitrarily argue with an experienced professional because they said the same thing as in the ad.

Context: last month I had a dental cleaning and the hygienist was trying to encourage me to floss more (because dear readers I regret to say that there has been no point in my life when I've been a reliable flosser...) and she said that one of the things that can happen if you don't is that bacterial buildup around the corners and edges can get bad enough to cause your gums to bleed when brushing and stuff. And I had to IMMEDIATELY clamp down on my extreme-skepticism/argue-back response because I'd heard basically the exact same claim made in a toothpaste ad a few days earlier.

Maybe if the saturation of advertising is so great that it causes people to actively resist the message being advertised, maybe just maybe you've gone just a skosh too far

*Nods in agreement*

When your world is saturated with messages that you know are being "generated" for profit (not just from corporations directly, but also from "social media influencers" who take sponsorships in order to make a living), then it's easy to jump to the conclusion that anybody who says anything about anything is doing it for a profit motive.

So You've Finally Switched to Firefox: a Brief Guide to a Some Very Useful Add-Ons.

This post is inspired by two things, the first being the announcement by Google that the long delayed Manifest V3 which will kill robust adblocking will finally roll out in June 2024, and the second, a post written by @sexhaver in response to a question as to what adblockers and extensions they use. It's a very good post with some A+ information, worth checking out.

I love Firefox, I love the degree of customization it offers me as a user. I love how it just works. I love the built in security features like DNS over HTTPS, and I love just how many excellent add-ons are available. It is a better browser than Chrome in every respect, and of the many Chromium based browsers out there, only Vivaldi comes close.

There are probably many people out there who are considering switching over to Firefox but are maybe putting it off because they've got Chrome set up the way they like it with the extensions they want, and doing all that again for Firefox seems like a chore. The Firefox Add-on directory is less expansive than the Chrome Web Store (which in recent years has become overrun with garbage extensions that range from useless to active malware), but there is still a lot of stuff to sift through. That's where this short guide comes in.

I'm presently running 33 add-ons for Firefox and have a number of others installed but disabled. I've used many others. These are my picks, the ones that I consider essential, useful, or in some cases just fun.

Adblocking/Privacy/Security:

uBlock Origin: The single best adblocker available. If you're a power user there are custom lists and scripts you can find to augment it.

Privacy Badger: Not strictly necessary if you're also running uBlock, but it does catch a few trackers uBlock doesn't and replaces potentially useful trackers like comment boxes with click-to-activate placeholders.

Decentraleyes: A supplementary tool meant to run alongside uBlock, prevents certain sites from breaking when tracker requests are denied by serving local bundled files as replacement.

NoScript: The nuclear option for blocking trackers, ads, and even individual elements. Operates from a "trust no one" standpoint, you will need to manually enable elements yourself. Not recommended for casual users, but a fantastic tool for the power user.

Webmail Ad Blocker: The first of many webmail related add-ons from Jason Saward I will be recommending. Removes all advertising from webmail services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Popup Blocker (Strict): Strictly blocks ALL pop up/new tab/new window requests from all website by default unless you manually allow it.

SponsorBlock: Not a fan of listening to your favourite YouTuber read advertisements for shitty products like Raycons or BetterHelp? This skips them automatically.

AdNauseam: I don't use this one but some people prefer it. Rather than straight up blocking ads and trackers, it obfuscates data by injecting noise into the tracker surveillance infrastructure. It clicks EVERY ad, making your data profile incomprehensible.

User-Agent Switcher: Allows you to spoof websites attempting to gather information by altering your browser profile. Want to browse mobile sites on desktop? This allows you to do it.

Bitwarden: Bitwarden has been my choice of password manager since LastPass sold out and made their free tier useless. If you're not using a password manager, why not? All of my passwords look like this: $NHhaduC*q3VhuhD&scICLKjvM4rZK5^c7ID%q5HVJ3@gny I don't know a single one of them and I use a passphrase as a master password supplemented by two-factor-authentication. Everything is filled in automatically. It is the only way to live.

Proton Pass: An open source free password manager from the creators of Proton Mail. I've been considering moving over to it from Bitwarden myself.

Webmail/Google Drive:

Checker Plus for Gmail: Provides desktop notifications for Gmail accounts, supports managing multiple accounts, allows you to check your mail, read, mark as read or delete e-mails at a glance in a pop-up window. An absolutely fabulous add-on from Jason Saward.

Checker Plus for Google Drive: Does for your Google Drive what Checker Plus for Gmail does for your Gmail.

Checker Plus for Google Calendar: The same as the above two only this time for your Google Calendar.

Firefox Relay: An add-on that allows you to generate aliases that forward to your real e-mail address.

Accessibility:

Dark Reader: Gives every page on the internet a customizable Dark Mode for easier reading and eye protection.

Read Aloud: A text to speech add-on that reads pages with the press of a button.

Zoom Page WE: Provides the ability to zoom in on pages in multiple ways: text zoom, full page zoom, auto-fit etc.

Mobile Dyslexic: Not one I use, but I know people who swear by it. Replaces all fonts with a dyslexia friendly type face.

Utility:

ClearURLs: Automatically removes tracking data from URLs.

History Cleaner: Automatically deletes browser history older than a set number of days.

Feedbro RSS Feed Reader: A full standalone reader in your browser, take control of your feed and start using RSS feeds again.

Video Download Helper: A great tool for downloading video files from websites.

Snap Link Plus: Fan of Wikipedia binge holes? Snap Link allows to drag select multiple hyperlink and automatically open all of them in new tabs.

Copy PlainText: Copy any text without formatting.

EPUBReader: Read .epub files from within a browser window.

Tab Stash: A no mess, no fuss way to organize groups of tabs as bookmarks. I use it as a temporary bookmark tool, saving sessions or groups of tabs into "to read" folders.

Tampermonkey/Violentmonkey: Managers for installing and running custom user scripts. Find user scripts on OpenUserJS or Greasy Fork, there's an entire galaxy out there of ingenious and weird custom user scripts out there, go discover it.

Browsing & Searching:

Speed Dial 2: A new tab add-on that gives you easy access to your favourite sites.

Unpaywall: Whenever you come across a scholarly article behind a paywall, this add-on will search through all the free databases for an accessible and non-paywalled version of the text.

Web Archives: Come across a dead page? This add-on gives you a quick way to search for cached versions of the page on the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, Archive.is and others.

Bypass Paywalls: Automatically bypasses the paywalls of major websites like those for the New York Times, New Yorker, the Financial Times, Wired, etc.

Simple Translate: Simple one-click translation of web pages powered by Google Translate.

Search by Image: Reverse search any image via several different search engines: Google Image, TinEye, Yandex, Bing, etc.

Website Specific:

PocketTube: Do you subscribe to too many YouTube channels? Would you like a way to organize them? This is your answer.

Enhancer for Youtube: Provides a suite of options that make using YouTube more pleasant: volume boost, theatre mode, forced quality settings, playback speed and mouse wheel volume control.

Augmented Steam: Improves the experience of using Steam in a browser, see price histories of games, take notes on your wishlist, make wish listed games and new DLC for games you own appear more visible, etc.

Return YouTube Dislikes: Does exactly what it says on the package.

BlueBlocker: Hate seeing the absolute dimmest individuals on the planet have their replies catapulted to the top of the feed because they're desperate to suck off daddy Elon sloppy style? This is for you, it automatically blocks all Blue Checks on Twitter. I've used it to block a cumulative 34,000 Blue Checks.

Batchcamp: Allows for batch downloading on Bandcamp.

XKit Rewritten: If you're on Tumblr and you're not using whichever version of XKit is currently available, I honestly don't know what to say to you. This newest version isn't as fully featured as the old XKit of the golden age, but it's been rewritten from the ground up for speed and utility.

Social Fixer for Facebook: I once accidentally visited Facebook without this add-on enabled and was immediately greeted by the worst, mind annihilating content slop I had ever had the misfortune to come across. Videos titled "he wanted her to get lip fillers and she said no so he had bees sting her lips", and AI photos of broccoli Jesus with 6000 comments all saying "wow". Once I turned it on it was just stuff my dad had posted and updates from the Radio War Nerd group.

BetterTTV: Makes Twitch slightly more bearable.

Well I think that's everything. You don't have to install everything here, or even half of it, but there you go, it's a start.

Addendum!

I forgot to add, Firefox has skins and themes! And many of them are good! And of the many small creators making themes and skins for Firefox, my favourite is MaDonna an 85 year old great grandmother who's just making browser skins for fun. She's made thousands of them. I'm using one of her creations at this very moment, Dark Polygon.

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #16

April 26-May 3 2024