a bad name for a blog

Dramatically picks you up from my inbox and hoists you overhead:

What I love about the series: Murderbot funny. Jokes? Funny. Pain? Funny. Me actively suffering as I cry about 2.0? Funny. Murderbot actively suffering as it malfunctions about 2.0? Funny. Murderbot reeling in pain after giving Miki the silent treatment right up until it was too late to take it back? I am dying. This shit is a comedy of errors pain.

Tangent: yes, this is mandatory: Typo'd "Murderboy" above, which simply could not stand, for obvious reasons, but then immediately typo'd "Murderbuoy" which alkgjadlakjsdlk is a PEAK au just waiting to happen:

I could have become a mass murderer after I severed my tether line, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company undersea cables. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of shanties, sing-outs, work chants, bosun's pipe solos, fiddle and drum ensembles, and sea songs consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

ANYWAY. Yeah, ngl, Mensah's the best bc she's also funny. I am a very very simple man. I love both the TV acting, when she's being a bit of an ASSHOLE, and the book where she's shooting dry looks as a primary form of communication.

Like off the top of my head, TV:

when she and Bharadwaj start to get into it posturing about whose degrees are more useful at that moment

the look on her face when she's leaning with her head on the bulkhead while Leebeebee is chatting about prehensile penises SecUnit

any time she leans in with that cute smile and coerces Murderbot with a very parental-type "thank you!" (this one in particular just takes me the fuck. out.)

obviously everything that happens while they're crashlanded after the beacon explosion

I'm literally sitting here cackling as I put this text and GIFs together. She's so funny and such a little shit in the show to the point where... I genuinely don't know if I would have loved her as much without the show, y'know? Like I love her in the books, yes, but I got into Murderbot through the show, so by the time she shows up in ASR, I was already like:

She could have probably coasted entirely on just the good feelings established in me by the show, but she then turned out to also be great, in a slightly different way, in the books!

One of the amazing parts of FT that doesn't get talked about a lot (that I've seen) is specifically the sight of Mensah just chilling while, you know, things aren't a disaster. Yes, she still has all that trauma she hasn't dealt with, and yes, there's a murder investigation for like the first time ever in the history of the station, but a) she's actively hiding the trauma (apparently, super convincingly, judging by Indah etc. not treating her with kid gloves), and b) she lets the murder be mostly Indah's problem.

So that whole bit with the eyebrow pointing, etc. isn't like... some special behavior she's doing to play off Murderbot, what with it also being a little shit, that's just fucking... Mensah. Idk I can't explain it very well, but. That's the leader of the planet. She's kind but she's also so done. She's done. Stop. Shut up. This could have been an email. <- If that phrase exists in the Murderbot universe, Mensah's the one who coined it.

Paired with her thoughts in Home, the way she's not tolerating its stupid little joke requisitions, but is genuinely amused and bantering with SecUnit about it all... Mensah's just really really dry, and Murderbot is really really dry, and together they are sparklingly desiccant. ✨ I enjoy.

Okay, this is getting long and I am le tired, so I'm out of juice to talk about tropes at length. Generally, I like it when Murderbot is on her couch or her desk. In her office. (In Farai's little tourist aircraft where hostiles can't see it until it opens the hatch and says "Surprise." This is the same as it lying on the couch in Mensah's office. You understand.) Hanging around the family house, probably sitting in a bush with a child attached to its back for whatever child reasons. Until it stands up. Menacingly. Because who are you and why are you here. (Child still on its back.)

I'm looking forward to Martha Wells saying psych and writing ten more little Murderbot sillies. 😌 I'm looking forward to Murderbot (and the Mensahcule) keeping Janity and Tula and also finding itself another Leonide (also adopted by the Mensahcule, but like... as the family token affronted wet cat, not a child). <- This is something that is both reasonable to want and possible to achieve. <- Me when I'm lying to myself.

Also reposting this because it's great and I'm going to use it forever

So, hi, I am the weirdo that is absolutely obsessed with Murderbot. But I am also a weirdo who is obsessed with James Cameron's Avatar franchise.

What do those two things have in common, you may ask? Well, that's obvious.

Big Corporations

So of course my idea is a crossover between Avatar and TMBD. What else would it be?? Here's another question though, would MB be able to pilot an avatar? It has neural tissue, and an avatar is just basically a genetic copy of your DNA spliced with Na'vi DNA. Same brain, different body. But MB also has inorganic parts in its head that allow it to have multiple inputs and run risk and threat assessment. So would it even be possible, or would MB just sit there and watch as the big blue cat-like humanoids do science?

If MB could pilot an avatar, how would it react to being fully organic in a non-human body? Would it even be fully organic or would it need a special kind of construct avatar? Imagine there were construct avatars working for the RDA as protection from hostile fauna on Pandora. Wouldn't that be insane?

Look, I dunno if I will ever write this, and I can't draw a Na'vi for the life of me, so y'all can do what you want with this ramble of a rant. If you decide to do art or write a fic about this idea, tag me.

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.

You don't even need a pihole for it anymore. You can throw "dns.adguard-dns.com" into your android phone under Network (or Connections) > Private DNS > Private DNS Provider Hostname in your Settings app. You can also set your router up to use it via the IPs:

94.140.14.14

94.140.14.15

Link to to source for that:

That will depend on your router, just search "How to set up custom DNS for (router name & model)". You can usually find that info on a sticker on the router itself. The model name is often nonsense like CM1000.

For switching to Linux:

If you're worried about software not working, and the software isn't something with work-related requirements attached, you can usually find alternatives. Alternativeto.net is a good place to start with that.

If you're a gamer, protondb.com will let you see how well your specific game runs on Linux. Ranks are from:

Borked - Does Not Work At All, or works so poorly that you cannot play the game at all

Bronze - Sort of works, but with glitches that don't exist on Windows that affect gameplay

Silver - Works, but requires tinkering, and has glitches that don't affect gameplay, or requires heavy tinkering to get running

Gold - Works, requires mild tinkering (usually just selecting another proton version from the drop down)

Platinum - Works out of the box

Native - Is made for Linux

Other common alternatives:

Spotify: I've heard good things about Tidal, but haven't personally used it (I use a cloud storage service and local files for music)

Google drive: Nextcloud. You can find free servers on their website

Google office: OnlyOffice has a desktop/mobile app, and most of the features

Gmail: Free providers aren't common, but disroot is one of them. They also offer quite a few services. Personally I use mailbox.org, but they do cost $36 a year minimum

Google search: Disroot has a searx instance, startpage.com exists, and you'd be surprised at how far you can get by setting your default search engine to Wikipedia. Marginalia's also good, but selective about what they index (mostly indieweb stuff)

I, admittedly, run almost everything through Emacs nowadays, so there may be better alternatives now.

Sitting down at the table, I remembered the scars on my arm. The universal signifier of "This Kid Needs Help." Maybe his kindness was only out of pity. He saw those and assumed there was some great misery and wanted to offer me some relief. It's generally good to be kind to people who are hurting. But I wasn't hurting that bad.

The thing is, there is some great misery. People generally aren't doing that great. There is a great misery within me and within him and within everyone, and some people notice the pain, some people express it, others don't. But we all suffer from something.

It doesn't matter if someone seems to deserve some relief. Everyone needs it. Everyone is suffering constantly. Some more than others, but still. This Kid Needs Help applies to everyone.

Thirty minutes later, I went to get a second pastry, intending to pay and leave a tip this time. It was the same cashier. As he reached to grab it for me, I saw scars on his arm.

The humans: "the fuck? How much do you weigh?"

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it's just... Social media. That's it. Social media and news sites. And I'm tired of social media and I'm tired of the news.

You're right that the internet is smaller than it used to be, but there's still some cool stuff left in the corners. I'd recommend checking checking out Neocities if you haven't--it's an independent web hosting platform like Geocities of the old web, and there are hundreds of interesting and active pages discoverable both through their search function and through web buttons (links attached to small pictures with the title of a website) within the websites themselves. Here are three examples of web buttons you may find in link pages:

Most Neocities websites have link pages or button collections with anywhere from tens to hundreds of these. Don't be afraid to explore!

If you're looking for something more like a search engine, I can point you towards Marginalia. It's not a particularly smart engine, but it's perfectly usable if you've ever been taught to use search engines back when they were mostly run through keywords instead of full sentence comprehension. There's also an "about" and "tips" section on the front page with more information. The algorithm of Marginalia can be filtered by the user to allow, disallow, or require JavaScript depending on your needs, plus there are filters designed specifically to prioritize web 1.0 sites or mostly text-based ones. It is possible to search for modern websites with it, but it can return websites from just about any decade (since the invention of the web, obviously) so long as they contain the information you're looking for. For example, here are some random interesting sites I've found using Marginalia:

Native Languages of the Americas: Native American Cultures

BASIC HTML COMPETENCY IS THE NEW PUNK FOLK EXPLOSION!

Earthbound Text Labs by Bill Eager

The possibilities for discovery are truly endless.

Now you might want to know about directories. These make browsing for websites easier, but require you to read through and judge which ones to visit, as there aren't algorithms ranking the sites besides the whim of whoever coded the directory. Some of them have themes, others don't. Here are two that I've used:

Yesterlinks Directory

Ichigo Directory

Directories can be harder to come by just by surfing the net, but they aren't impossible to find. Many personal websites have their own directories of interesting sites hidden within them.

Webrings are similar to directories, but are actually more community-based. You have to register your website to be a part of a webring, usually by sending an email to whoever runs it and meeting some kind of entry criteria. For example, my personal website used to be a part of a webring called Sweet Dreams, which was for websites that heavily utilize color palettes and images of cute things, particularly sweets. Webrings will give you access to a widget upon entry that allow visitors and other members to browse between the registered websites in a massive ring, ergo, where the term gets its name. Webrings can have any theme or criteria for entry. If you can make a website about it, you can find a webring for it.

Now, you might be wondering about social media alternatives. I can't offer much, but I can nudge you towards the idea of forums. Here's one I found that could really use some traffic. I also browse a bit on MelonLand forum, which is actually closed right now--it's currently closed on Mondays--but on any other day of the week, you can find a fun community there dedicated to web revival. You can find it through MelonLand's main page. I'd also recommend checking out SpaceHey, which is a MySpace clone that's customizable and easy to use.

Like it’s a series of personal diaries about a person learning how to person and find themselves/people to call friends and family.

Not every oppressed persons story has to be about dismantling the system that fucked them over. It can be them working the system to get what they want. It can be them finding people willing to help them move more freely within dangerous spaces. It can be them having their own harmful biases challenged. It can be them learning to trust others despite it all. It can be them realizing their suffering doesn’t make them a good person and sometimes they just aren’t. And if they want to be that shit takes effort. Especially in a universe where violence is always one of the first options and the rich are destroying literal planets for greed.

And Murderbot is not happily owned by Mensah. It says this repeatedly through the series. I don’t know why critics say that it is. Mensah is just 1000% more preferable compared to the company or any corporate. I see critics laser in on the inequality bots and constructs face but no one mentions how indentured humans have it just as bad or worse.

Pls. Yes tmbd is set in a capitalistic hellscape of exploitative labor and abuse. But that doesn’t mean the main narrative has to be about rebellion and the exploration of how to dismantle those systems. It can be about people doing their best within their current restraints.

"why"

Anyways, I do not think people who don't want to reblog things should.

What I think is that knowledge and understanding is important. This post is aimed at people that genuinely don't understand or know. Noone else. I'm not telling you to reblog things if you don't want to. I'm explaining something to people who might really just not know the benefits of reblogguing things.

Benefits of reblogging (besides the algorithm):

- Archive: There's a risk to using "likes" as an archive. When people delete a post or their blogs, their posts WILL be deleted from your likes. Things on your likes depend on the blog you liked it from (not necessarily OP, but if it has a "readmore", which always links to OP, then consider the post lost either way). An effective way to archive that depends solely on you? A reblog. It will stay on your blog regardless of OP or whoever you reblogued it from, for as long as you keep it there.

- Encouragement: Are you here because of fandom? To see writings and fanart? If the answer is yes and you want to encourage the people who make the things you like, then reblogging is a great way to do it. It's a way to give back, and it's free.

- Ecosystem: It's just a healthy way to keep your fandom alive. You will often see artists feeling dicouraged, who delete or stop sharing their work because they only get likes. If people out there have the right not to reblog because they don't feel like it, then artists have the right to be discouraged by that sort of reception.

Reasons you might not want to reblog, and explanations:

- "Noone will see it": Factually wrong. Not everyone, but lots of people check the blogs of people who leave only likes/follow. Otherwise noone would know those blogs exist and noone would be raising a stink about it, would they? They might not follow back, but just going to your blog (because they saw you on their notifs) will already put before their eyes anything that is on it, if only for a minute. Like reblogs. So, somebody would see them.

-"I don't have any followers": If you don't want any followers, that's fair, you are doing what you should by keeping a blank blog then. If you want followers, reblogguing is a good way to do it. Often people will come across a blog that maybe doesn't post anything, but reblogs lots of things they like, and just follow. You've curated your reblogs in a way that someone decided to follow.

- "It doesn't fit the theme of my blog": Fair. I don't vibe with the posts that tell people to reblog things regardless. If you want to reblog things outside of your main blog's theme, you can make a secondary blog and reblog it there (you can make that blog a different theme too!). And if you don't want to reblog anything outside the one theme then you don't have to.

-"I don't want to spam": You don't have to! You can reblog things once a day, once a week, once a month, it's fine either way. Whether you reblog 1 thing or 200. Queueing things will automatically schedule them one hour apart I believe. But you can edit that manually by going to your queue tab, to however often you deem good.

-"I don't know what to comment": Then don't! You do not have to. A blank reblog is always preferable to none.

-"I don't want to reblog reblog bait/political stuff.": Then don't. That's far from the only thing on this hellsite. You don't have to if you don't want to.

-"I leave my likes public": Most people who go to your blog will not see them. Leaving them public or private is all the same.

-"I don't want to tag things.": Then don't. You do not have to, there's a reason this is one of the few sites that don't force you to tag anything you post. (It would be good practice to say you don't tag things in your bio though)

And finally: