THIS IS JUST MY BOOKMARKS NOT A BLOG

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.

Hell, I was 'helping mommy/daddy cook' by cracking eggs and stirring things and flattening dough balls etc at the age of Three.

If your parents didn't begin teaching you these skills as soon as you had the gross motor functions to perform them, they were being negligent.

It also meant, because we now lived in earthquake territory, that there was a possibility that we might end up at some point caring for ourselves in an emergency like a major earthquake for a day or two if they struggled to get back from work due to infrastructure damage (like bridges).

We'd been taught from a very early age to cook - helping as soon as we were able to improve motor skills as @moniquill says above - and could both pretty confidently prepare a few things.

Due to the new situation, my mom spent a Saturday in the kitchen with us, working through how to make 4 things from pantry/fridge staples (no ingredients that wouldn't generally be kept on hand) that we would definitely be willing to eat to ensure we wouldn't starve if that happened.

And my dad spent time teaching my brother to safely use the camp stove if we lost gas/power in that circumstance (he would do the same with me a few years later, but at 7 I was both a bit young and a bit of a fire bug).

They did these things, both teach us growing up and teaching us more in this specific circumstance because cooking is 1) a survival skill and 2) a teachable skill with numerous levels of knowledge (starting at 'toddler, move this spoon around this bowl') making it great as children grow.

Teach your kids to steer a car.

If you EVER go to the lake or go camping or into any area where other people are scarce enough not to be in sight at all times, and they physically can apply full force to the pedals and turn the wheel fully. teach them to steer a car.

I don't mean drive in traffic. That is way too much, and everyone would die. I mean being able to put on the hazard lights, stop, start, and steer. Not to be too action movie, but they need to be able to go for help down a two lane road in an emergency until they see another car. Like if you're at the lake or camping and the adults are injured.

If you can find a safe space to do this where the cops won't come for you, do it.

Also, teach your kids how to get to familiar places you go often, without a phone. I'm serious. They may have to help a friend or family member navigate by sight. They need to know arterial roads and landmarks as soon as they can, and the nearest major intersection or landmark to your house. Make it a game. But TEACH THEM.

Teach them your full names and address the minute they are old enough to retain this information. I was HORRIFIED in 2nd grade how many kids didn't know their addresses, or their own parents' ACTUAL NAMES.

Hell, I was 'helping mommy/daddy cook' by cracking eggs and stirring things and flattening dough balls etc at the age of Three.

If your parents didn't begin teaching you these skills as soon as you had the gross motor functions to perform them, they were being negligent.

It also meant, because we now lived in earthquake territory, that there was a possibility that we might end up at some point caring for ourselves in an emergency like a major earthquake for a day or two if they struggled to get back from work due to infrastructure damage (like bridges).

We'd been taught from a very early age to cook - helping as soon as we were able to improve motor skills as @moniquill says above - and could both pretty confidently prepare a few things.

Due to the new situation, my mom spent a Saturday in the kitchen with us, working through how to make 4 things from pantry/fridge staples (no ingredients that wouldn't generally be kept on hand) that we would definitely be willing to eat to ensure we wouldn't starve if that happened.

And my dad spent time teaching my brother to safely use the camp stove if we lost gas/power in that circumstance (he would do the same with me a few years later, but at 7 I was both a bit young and a bit of a fire bug).

They did these things, both teach us growing up and teaching us more in this specific circumstance because cooking is 1) a survival skill and 2) a teachable skill with numerous levels of knowledge (starting at 'toddler, move this spoon around this bowl') making it great as children grow.

Teach your kids to steer a car.

If you EVER go to the lake or go camping or into any area where other people are scarce enough not to be in sight at all times, and they physically can apply full force to the pedals and turn the wheel fully. teach them to steer a car.

I don't mean drive in traffic. That is way too much, and everyone would die. I mean being able to put on the hazard lights, stop, start, and steer. Not to be too action movie, but they need to be able to go for help down a two lane road in an emergency until they see another car. Like if you're at the lake or camping and the adults are injured.

If you can find a safe space to do this where the cops won't come for you, do it.

Also, teach your kids how to get to familiar places you go often, without a phone. I'm serious. They may have to help a friend or family member navigate by sight. They need to know arterial roads and landmarks as soon as they can, and the nearest major intersection or landmark to your house. Make it a game. But TEACH THEM.

Teach them your full names and address the minute they are old enough to retain this information. I was HORRIFIED in 2nd grade how many kids didn't know their addresses, or their own parents' ACTUAL NAMES.

Warning to anyone using Linktree.

From the 5th July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.

Carrd.co. Free alt with paid features.

Bento.app Currently free, integrated with bluesky

Everlink.tools Closest to Linktree, has some paid features.

"Miss" means an unmarried woman. "Mrs." means a married woman. (both of these have origins in the word "mistress" as in "mistress of the house".)

I've had people (usually children) ask me at work if I'm a missus or a miss. I have replied that I am a miz, full stop. And when they pressed for which one I was REALLY, I have replied, "Why? Are you going to treat me differently depending on whether there's a ring somewhere?"

That's what Ms. is for. That is its linguistic function. It says, "This is an adult woman," and nothing else. Nothing else is necessary, and in my case, nothing else is desired.

I also use miz for other women unless and until they express a preference for something else because I don't magically know everyone else's marital status when I meet them. That's a courtesy—I'm declining to assume marital status and allowing them to decide whether they wish to declare it.

hey don't worry? completely unrelated giant dump of heartwarming PHM doodles ok??

The first puzzle piece is that Xena was a syndicated show at the tail end of syndication's total dominance of a distribution model. For those too young to remember a time when ongoing plots and prestige dramas weren't the norm, syndication is big part of why older television shows almost entirely kept plots contained to one or two episodes rather than having them span seasons. See, when a show is syndicated, it is licensed out to individual television stations/affiliates to be aired as reruns. The individual station chooses when to air them and in what order, and whether to just skip episodes they don't like in favor of the ones most likely to draw eyeballs, etc etc. The more a show is licensed, the more money you make on it, so there is an incentive to make each episode standalone to make them appealing to each station by enabling them to toss on whatever episodes they like without it being a problem for the casual viewer. Also, before streaming, easy access to dvds and episode recording, and the like, a show could not assume that even its fans would have necessarily have seen every episode. "Catching up" was not an easy thing, and reserved for the most dedicated, doing shit like physically mailing bootleg tapes! Therefore, shows needed to have a consistent formula that didn't lock out the person who couldn't watch last week for whatever reason. Characters remained within more of a status quo. Xena is a "monster of the week" style show, like X-Files. I mention X-Files intentionally, because it was one of the first to really break that no-ongoing-plots structure, and that shift affected its contemporaries, like Xena, who also started to follow suit.

That alone doesn't account for Xena being so primed to explore those themes, of course. Even staying within the same fictional universe, Hercules (which Xena is a spin-off of) and Young Hercules don't even come close to Xena's complexity on the subject. But that's because Xena's premise is perfectly positioned to interact with those practical constraints for this outcome in a way those shows aren't. The status quo that syndication demands remain mostly in intact is that 1) Xena was evil and really good at it, 2) she is trying to do good in the world now as penance but can never undo what she has done. Every episode is about Xena trying to save people while dealing with the consequences of her actions as a warlord. The fact that she was evil cannot be changed or diluted nor can the fact that she must continue trying to redeem herself, otherwise the show is over or is unrecognizable to the casual viewer. But this is also an action show, sometimes cartoonishly so, so she must also be fighting consistently! The core spectacle is violence and the core story is why violence is often evil. There is an inherent tension there that the writers either needed to interrogate earnestly or ignore, and they chose the honest, interesting route. They gave Xena a costar who is innocent and principled but loves Xena, and had her always asking why and trying to understand how Xena could be that person, while being put under similar pressures herself. They had Xena continue to use the tools she has, including violence, for good ends, and wrestled with the answers as to why that was ok, why the violence she did then and the violence she did now were different—and sometimes decided they weren't. They showed Xena struggling with falling back into those old habits because they are seductive and easy.

If someone asked "are there so many episodes of Xena where you find out someone tried to get her to change her ways many years ago and failed because that is a really great standalone premise, or because violence as a tool and power and vengeance as motivators are corruptive and hard to stop using once you start," the answer is yes. The show is cyclical because violence is. But also because it is syndicated.