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Reblogged deelgathor
I'm pretty sure that any two sufficiently good-looking gen Z kids could make it on TikTok by making videos that are 100% word-for-word re-enactments of Monty Python skits, and the whole audience who has never heard of the flying circus in their lives would lose it over such fresh and original material.
don't give them any ideas
somebody's gotta
Reblogged big-tiddy-goth-ghoulfriend
genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital
Share the knowledge
Okay, here we go! I'm gonna try and put this in order from least to most technical knowledge required. I'm not responsible if you accidentally create SkyNet etc.
Level 1: browser extensions
This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.
Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.
Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).
uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.
Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.
FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.
Level 2: leaving enshittified services
The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.
Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.
Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery
DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.
Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.
Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.
With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.
Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery
Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.
To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.
Level 5: automated media piracy
The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.
The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.
Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.
Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.
Level 6: fucking with Android
Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.
Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.
Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.
You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.
Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.
Level 7: fucking with Windows
This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.
Level 8: switching to Linux
I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.
And that, friends, is a comprehensive approach to banishing the demons of capitalism from your home!
In an odd way I need to thank the person I argued with once (and then blocked) who was convinced that Caesar's Legion from Fallout: New Vegas is meant to be a direct 1:1 equivalent to the Viet Cong, because every time I remember how dumb that is it pushes me to investigate the story and themes of the game deeper and with more nuance out of pure spite.
Reblogged deelgathor
Reblogged deelgathor
Literal definition of spyware:
Also From Microsoft’s own FAQ: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. 🤡
KillKillKillKillKillKillKillKillKillKillKill
There's a way to remove it~
Go into the power shell
then paste in:
reg add HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot /v "TurnOffWindowsCopilot" /t REG_DWORD /f /d 1
like this
Then restart. Also here is how to turn off the awful search suggestions:
incase anyone didnt know there's some great free software to handle disabling windows bloatware without needing to mess with the command line
these are a mandatory part of every windows install for me. been using them for years and it's such a lifesaver
Because this has mostly been talked about with Windows 11, heads-up that this installed itself on every Windows 10 computer in our house with this week's update.
Reblogged deelgathor
something you don't learn until you get really far into the making and tinkering life is that there's no such thing as "glue" really. there are so many kinds of substances that stick other substances together and they are all very different and if you just go look at the adhesives aisle in the hardware store the packaging never actually tells you anything useful. it's like "this is SUPER T-REX POWER GLUE" and the fine print says "good for use on wood metal and plastic". okay. but WHICH PLASTICS MY GOOD BITCH,
because SURPRISE, there's no such thing as "plastic" either. every kind of wood is basically the same on a chemical level, but the only thing every plastic has in common is "some of its molecules are long" and that is NOT a quality that determines how things stick together.
I just ordered some stuff I hope will permanently stick a circuit board to a steel sheet and withstand temperatures up to 150 degrees. by the way circuit boards are made of epoxy-bound woven glass cloth which is cool as hell but what the fuck do you glue that with? can any of the 12 kinds of adhesives I currently own do that? no of course not. if I want to stick two pieces of acrylic together so hard they become watertight to a depth of 3000 metres I have some shit that does that, but it does literally nothing else.
anyway. once you start learning how many kinds of sticking things together there are, the people at 3M start to seem like witches and I don't know if they're the kind we can trust with that level of arcane knowledge
Can I introduce you to one of the most useful sites from the early web? It’s thistothat.com and it tells you what kind of adhesives work to stick different types of substances together. It looks like it was designed in 1999 with some ads slapped over the top, because it was designed in 1999…. But like most things from the early web, it does what’s on the label: tells you how to stick this to that.
Arcane knowledge my ass, the internet used to be useful about shit.
Reblogged deelgathor
you're welcome
Reblogged slimegirl-pseudopod
Watched Jacob Geller's excellent new video "Indiana Jones and the Objective Existence of God" and someone in the comments said that it reminded them of their first DnD character, an atheist in a world objectively impacted by the gods.
I think it depends on your definition of atheism. If you take atheist to mean someone who goes "That god you worship isn't real" then yeah, that's pretty strange when they objectively are real. Also saying "Your god doesn't have these powers" when they do is strange.
But saying "Yes, this person you worship as a god is real and has these powers, but that doesn't mean they are a god deserving of worship" seems like a perfectly reasonable position to hold in a lot of fantasy settings (excluding stuff like Faerûn's wall of the faithless)
“I don't hold with paddlin' with the occult," said Granny firmly. "Once you start paddlin' with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you're believing in gods. And then you're in trouble." "But all them things exist," said Nanny Ogg. "That's no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages 'em.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
Reblogged magicalgirlmindcrank
Fuck the person you reblog this from, reblog to give YOURSELF bigger tits!
Reblogged magicalgirlmindcrank
Fuck the person you reblog this from, reblog to give YOURSELF bigger tits!
Reblogged magicalgirlmindcrank
Fuck the person you reblog this from, reblog to give YOURSELF bigger tits!
Reblogged magicalgirlmindcrank
Fuck the person you reblog this from, reblog to give YOURSELF bigger tits!
Reblogged
Cool, black border Infinity Elemental
You know, it's not actually a strong card, and if you're not able to remove or block any 7-drop creature without haste or any kind of evasion, you're probably dead anyway, but I do wish they had saved this gimmick for, like, a big demon or god or something.
It's like, oh, this is the creature we're giving those numbers to? This thing. Mustache cactus
But doing exactly 10,000 damage is Jumbo Cactaur's whole thing though?
Like that is straight out of the source material
Yeah, I understand this crossover set has source material.
But there is also Magic: the Gathering material around it that it is now interacting with
In many Final Fantasy games, even 1st level attacks can do 10 to 20 damage. Should, say, the 1-mana drops in this set be 20/30?
On a mechanical level it's basically just Phage the Untouchable in a silly hat.
But from a flavor perspective that silly hat is really offputting.