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men’s sports have nothing on women’s sports

and this particular guy... cry harder (imagine if women's sports had the funding, visibility and accessibility men's sports are gifted):

also, noteworthy addition from @stuckinnet

You are posted out by the Hollywood sign tonight, sitting under the frame where the W used to be. It got burnt to a crisp during last week’s big superhero fight. A hero died right where you’re sitting. The whole area’s been closed down until Hero Force can coordinate a recovery effort. Usually it’d be done by now but no one’s willing to touch it until the ash has been completely blown away.

It’s a rule that the world must stand still when a hero dies.

“How much?”

The voice comes from behind you. The lights that illuminate the Hollywood sign are down to hide as much of the scorch marks as possible. You wouldn’t be able to see anything even if you did turn around, so you don’t.

You put some chapstick on, the glide of the balm against your wind chapped lips grounding.

“I said,” the Hero says, voice tightening, “How. Much.”

There’s the sound of gravel crunching now. They’re wearing heavy boots and the scent of fresh blood grows stronger the closer they get. Their breathing is smooth and even which means it’s not their blood.

You put the cap back on your chapstick and tuck it into your leather jacket’s inner pocket. “I don’t take money.”

“Then what do you take?” The Hero rounds the Y and comes into your line of sight. The dark hides most of their features, but you can make out a glittering gold mask and the dull shine of drying blood on their chest plate. Their breathing may be even, but their stance isn’t. They sway in place, back and forth, back and forth. Their arms wrap around their stomach. “I’ve got land. A house. You can have it.”

A flail-axe?

The Garden of Death

there are many young merfolk out there, so i felt the desire to create a badass elder for mermay :) she’s as much derived from as she is dedicated to the vuvalini of MMFR– i also sincerely hope she brings joy to my mutuals older than me who always delight and inspire me, and to all older women in fandom, really, who i continuously thought of while working on her

Please do not interfere with nature!

For the last few years we have received quite a few calls from people that scared a hawk or snake away from what it was eating.

These calls always go something like, “I save a ___ from a hawk that was trying to eat it”, which means these people know what they stopped. These people then want us to save what the hawk was trying to eat. We’ve gotten in anything from a turtle with three legs already removed by the hawk, to small song birds to bunnies and the outcome is almost always the same….death, though more slowly and painfully than it would have been had people not interfered.

I want to remind you all, when a hawk captures its prey, it typically crushes it at least to a point. A snake will do the same. This means that the internal injuries are typically such that nobody could possibly save the animal. The most humane thing would have been to leave hawk or snake to its meal and NOT interfere.

Also, hawks are only successful in about 1 in 10 hunts. Meaning you don’t know how long that hawk or that hawk’s babies have been without food and now will go without food even longer.

Hawks have to eat and feed their young as well. It isn’t really fair for a human to decide what a proper meal may be.

We realize this may not be the most pleasant thing for you to watch, so we suggest you turn away. Chasing them away from a meal only does two things; 1. whatever they were trying to eat will now suffer until it dies, when dying would have been much faster had it been left, and 2. it leaves the hawk without a meal, meaning it is going to now go kill something that it wouldn’t have if the person hadn’t interfered.

Please, respect nature and let her do what she is supposed to do!

How to get around internet censorship and maintain internet privacy

This will be an extremely long post 😅

Priorities

Download the Tor Browser

This will hopefully help you access the internet regardless of Russian government bans. It’s a little slow, but better than nothing. It hides your IP address from the internet, so it’s kind of like using a VPN. A very basic summary of how Tor works: your internet traffic is routed through several “nodes”. The Entry Node, can see your IP address but has no idea what data you’re sending, and this goes through several middle nodes, until it reaches the Exit Node. The Exit Node can see what data you’re sending, but it can’t see your IP address so it doesn’t know WHO sent it. That’s why it’s a good idea to do nothing identifying when using the Tor Browser, like writing personal information. Here’s a blog post with more detailed information about the Tor Browser.

Get a VPN

VPNs are often used to get around government internet restrictions. Russia will probably not be able to do much about it. However, not all VPNs are created equal. Nearly all of the free VPNs are a scam that turn around and sell your data, so free VPNs are not secure. The only exception to this is ProtonVPN which has a free tier, but it’s very slow. Basically the only good VPN is one you pay for. When choosing a VPN, be aware of where the company is based, because if a VPN company is based in the USA, it will have to comply USA privacy laws. So choose a VPN based in a country that has good privacy laws. A great one is Mullvad VPN, which is based in Sweden. But for the purposes of Russia, just making sure your VPN is not Russian or in a country sympathetic to Russia is probably good enough.

Alternative Front-Ends A frontend is the the part of a website which the user interacts with directly. To browse the contents of websites, you usually have to visit them. However, many people have made alternative privacy-respecting frontends to popular websites that allow you to see the site’s content without actually visiting the website. This helps avoid tracking, data-collection, and even countries’ attempts to ban websites. Twitter is banned in Russia right now, but using all an alternative frontend to Twitter works (according to my Russian friend).

Google Translate

Lingva Translate / Instances

SimplyTranslate / Instances

some instances allow you to choose to translate with several other services (such as DeepL)

Imgur

Rimgo / Instances

Instagram

Bibliogram / Instances

Medium

Scribe / Instance

Reddit

Libreddit / Instances

Teddit / Instances

TikTok

ProxiTok / Instance

Twitter

Nitter / Instances

Wikipedia

Wikiless / Instances

YouTube

Invidious / Instances

Piped / Instances

YouTube Music

Beatbump / Instance

If anyone knows of one of these for Tumblr please let me know. I found this site called Tumgir but it looks sketchy and unlike the rest of the ones I listed, it’s not open-source. So visit with caution, but I’m mentioning it because it might be better than nothing.

There are also these browser extensions that automatically redirect site links to the available alternatives:

Mozilla Firefox

LibRedirect - Redirects YouTube, YT Music, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Imgur, Reddit, Wikipedia, Medium, etc.

Google Chrome

Privacy Redirect - Redirects Google Maps, Google Search, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Youtube.

iPhone (iOS 15+) Safari

Privacy Redirect - Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Google Translate, Google maps, Google Search, Medium

Android

UntrackMe - Google Maps, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube

Messaging / Communication

Matrix is a federated and decentralized End-to-End Encrypted (E2EE) messaging with many platforms, the most popular of which is Element. It’s like Discord, but worse. It’s getting better over time though! You can even use a a throwaway email to sign-up.

If you’re Russian you likely already know about Telegram, but MAKE SURE you’re aware that only Secret Chats are End-to-End Encrypted. So don’t say anything that would get you in trouble outside of a Secret Chat.

End Notes