I'm only Tumbling ironically.

It’s been a while since I did one of these, and I’ve changed my mind on a couple points, so why not? TWOW spoilers below, natch.

In the East

Barristan and Victarion smash the slaver coalition (with a li’l help from those ever-treacherous sellswords), but neither get to savor their victory for long. Vic burns, either from without thanks to Rhaegal or within thanks to Dragonbinder. Barry returns to the city in triumph only to find that the Shavepate has wiped out his enemies root and branch, including Hizdahr and the child hostages. Furious and heartsick, the white knight goes for Skahaz’ throat, but is overwhelmed and killed by the Brazen Beasts.

Dany burns Khal Jhaqo and leads his riders to Vaes Dothrak, where the dosh khaleen declare her the Stallion (as she saw in the House of the Undying) and all the Dothraki are gathered into one gigantic khalasar at her back. All roads meet at Volantis: Dany and the Dothraki, Tyrion and the Second Sons, Moqorro and Benerro, Marwyn the Mage, etc. After overthrowing the Old Blood and being officially declared Azor Ahai Reborn, Dany consults her many advisors as to what to do next. Moqorro tells her to keep breaking chains, Marwyn passes along Aemon’s warning and urges her to fly north before it’s too late, but Tyrion plays his trump card, revealing Aegon’s existence and advising Dany to confront Illyrio about the “mummer’s dragon.” She burns the cheesemonger alive when he confesses that Aegon is not Rhaegar’s son but his, and turns Pentos over to the Tattered Prince.

Somewhere in all this, Tyrion becomes a dragonrider (possibly with Bran’s help, echoing Tyrion’s gift of a saddle in AGOT). 

In Braavos, the Faceless Men kick Arya to the curb and try to eliminate her after learning she killed Raff. She runs away…and slap bang into Justin Massey and Jeyne Poole. Hearing the latter referred to as “Arya Stark” leads the true Arya to give up all other identities for good. She returns to Westeros with them; her TWOW storyline ends with her reuniting with Nymeria. 

In the South

Jon Connington takes Storm’s End and then defeats Mace Tyrell, thanks in large part to the Golden Company’s “friends in the Reach” (I suspect Randyll Tarly may literally stab Mace in the back). Arianne calls Dorne’s spears north to join them. 

Meanwhile, in King’s Landing, both Cersei and Margaery win their trials, leading to the former sending Robert Strong to kill the latter. The city erupts as Aegon’s army arrives; Nym and Tyene kill Tommen and Myrcella, and the High Sparrow throws open the city gates to his new king. Cersei evades capture thanks to Qyburn and Robert Strong, and flees below the Red Keep to arrange a wildfire explosion. Aegon sits the Iron Throne, and Arianne is Queen.

In the Riverlands, Lady Stoneheart frees Edmure and kills Jeyne Westerling and her mother in the Prologue. She then launches the Second Red Wedding at Riverrun, massacring the guests at the Daven-Frey wedding while forcing Jaime and Brienne to bear witness. Our POVs escape towards King’s Landing as the Riverlands rise up once more. Jaime is horrified to find Cersei about to pull an Aerys and kills her, fulfilling the valonqar prophecy. The “jade holocaust” is averted…until Dany arrives, attacks Team Aegon with dragonfire, and in so doing, sets off the wildfire. (My guess is that this happens in the book’s penultimate chapter from Arianne’s POV, with the Wall coming down in the final chapter; TWOW ends with eruptions of Fire and Ice.) 

In the Vale, Sweetrobin succumbs to sweetsleep during the tourney, and Littlefinger frames Lyn Corbray. In the chaos, the Mad Mouse tries to make off with Sansa; he fails and is executed along with Ser Lyn, but Sansa’s identity is revealed in the process. She marries Harry, they are declared King and Queen of the North and Vale, the knights of the Vale muster at Gulltown, and they all set sail for White Harbor.

In Dorne, Darkstar retreats to Starfall, but the main branch of the Daynes refuse to help him, and he’s killed by his pursuers; Areo Hotah then kills Balon Swann on Doran’s orders. We learn some crucial R+L=J information from the Daynes, and Dawn is brought into play. 

In the Reach, Euron annihilates both the Redwyne fleet and his own in a massive blood sacrifice. Damphair’s final moments are spent watching something huge and hideous rise from the depths in response, realizing that Euron was right all along: the humanoid god Aeron rebuilt his life around was a projection, and the real deal is a monster. Meanwhile, Sam buries himself in books as Marwyn advised, but keeps being distracted by all the weird goings-on in Oldtown. He eventually ascends the Hightower and finds Leyton and Malora very receptive to his stories about the Others; they take an immense interest in the horn Sam’s been carrying around, and he leaves it with them. Then the Crow’s Eye arrives with his “black and bloody tide,” kraken tentacles tearing down the city’s defenses so Euron’s reanimated followers can invade. Euron himself kills Leyton and Malora, and as Sam and Sarella flee Oldtown one step ahead of the Ironborn wights, they hear him blow the Horn of Winter from atop the Hightower. 

In the North

Stannis defeats Hosteen Frey at the Battle of Ice; with the help of the Karhold men formerly in service to Arnolf, he then feigns his death. Ramsay buys it, sending the Pink Letter to Jon before killing Roose and Walda out of anger at the latter’s pregnancy. Stannis then takes Winterfell with Bran’s help, loosing Ramsay’s dogs on him while Theon watches. The younger Greyjoys (assuming they both survive all this) eventually return home thanks to Dagmer Cleftjaw. 

On Skagos, Davos finds Osha and Rickon, and convinces them to return to the mainland with him (helped along by Shaggy immediately falling in love with the onion knight, a la Brown Ben and the dragons). They wind up in White Harbor, staring down Sansa and her army. 

Bran continues his wizard training, learning about the Children’s earth magic as well as greensight, and has visions related to R+L=J, the Others, Euron’s apocalypse, etc. When the Others attack via the cave’s “back door,” Bran and Meera escape into the tunnels, while Jojen, Bloodraven, the remaining Children, and poor Hodor are killed. 

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 the user to drag select multiple hyperlinks and 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.

today the miami dolphins punter accidentally kicked a ball directly into his teammate’s ass

hey we are all really small do you want to sleep in a pile

while I’m at it …. possible ways they could reveal it

1. a scene with old steve interacting w sam and bucky immediately followed by a shot of Vormir that gradually zooms in on a man (steve) dancing alone on the cliff w a blank expression

2. old steve makes a huge mistake and answers a question or does something that we the audience know is 1000% ooc to the extreme but no one else notices

-falcon & the winter soldier proceeds as normal. there’s no hints that’s something wrong. the Very last scene of the series is the dramatic reveal (to the audience only) that old steve is not steve rogers

-this is not immediately touched upon again. there is no easy fix or instant solution. rather, in the shows & movies, there seems to be something off. events and characters exist that shouldn’t & others disappear. reality is beginning to decay.

-wanda & vision is a result of this: they are forced into an alternative reality (the 50s)

-loki (who travels interdimensionally) begins to notice the signs and the danger the ENTIRE multiverse is in, and alternates between causing mischief and trying to bandage the holes in reality back together

after, still beat up from whateveer mega-battle, they go to Waffle House