The darker the night, the brighter the stars.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

Jack Swift, comrade of Red Harlow (protagonist of Red Dead Revolver (2004, PS2), first game of the Red Dead series, although mostly disconnected from the following games...)

Jack Swift does not have* a Ryu Number.

(bonus below)

so HERE'S HOW YOU DOWNLOAD YOUTUBE VIDEOS WITH VLC!! VLC FREAKIN RULES!!

get your youtube link

open vlc, go to media > open network stream

paste your url in the box and PRESS PLAY!

wait for the video to open then go to tools > codec information

copy the entire file location (click the box, then ctrl-a to select all, then ctrl-c to copy)

paste into your browser of choice (i use firefox)

right click video and press "save video as", choose your file format if you want

DONE! NO VIRUSES OR SKETCHY STUFF!

the quality might be a little crummy but if you don't mind that, then shabam! video on your computer! then you can email it to yourself and have it on your phone too if you want! if you need a guide with pictures wikihow has you covered my friends

YOU NEED TO UPDATE YOUR YOUTUBE.LUAC FILE FOR THIS TO WORK!!!

Go to here https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/master/share/lua/playlist/youtube.lua

Navigate to C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\playlist (or whatever equivalent there is on Mac; if you have a Mac just fish around in the program files you're bound to find it somewhere)

Open youtube.luac with a text editor like Notepad

Delete whatever's in there and replace it with ALL of the stuff with the github file.

Save the file, restart VLC, and then it should work.

PLEASE REBLOG THIS ADDITION FOR THE LOVE OF CRUMBCAKE THIS IS RIDICULOUSLY IMPORTANT

Mind you, I’m of the opinion that people should be dragged into the twentieth century, kicking and screaming if necessary. But… here’s the thing.

Until relatively recently, most of this stuff wasn’t mandatory. Cash is becoming increasingly expensive to use, and it wasn’t that long ago that you could just hand your card to the clerk. And it doesn’t help that what started out as “swipe your card” is now a five step process where you have to decline a store discount card, a donation to a shady charity, and a new loan on your house.

And the thing is, these older people are scared. Because they’re vividly aware that the world they know how to operate in is going away. The added benefits– which really aren’t as many as you think– of doing it the new way weren’t worth the effort of learning a completely new way of doing things before– and now they’re faced with the reality that the old way just isn’t there.

I don’t think a lot of younger people truly understand how much the process of getting and spending money has changed. When I was in my early twenties, I went for two years without a bank account at all. My job would write me a check, I’d endorse it, and they’d give it to me in cash.

I was able to pay my rent and phone bill with money orders, and my internet service was tacked onto my phone bill. As far as buying things online… that…. that wasn’t a thing. If you wanted to buy something online, you were still going to be mailing someone a check or money order.

And while the new way of doing things is more convenient, it’s not actually better. Don’t get me wrong, data breaches and identity theft happened before 1997, but… they weren’t a goddamn industry. I did not ONCE during the twentieth century walk into a place of business only to learn that the credit card machine wasn’t working anymore. And it really does not help that movies and tv shows actually make the problem sound somehow worse than the cyberpunk dystopian hellscape we’re currently in.

And you laugh, but this is going to happen to you. 25 years ago, nobody NEEDED the internet at home. For anything. Oh, there were things that could be accessed with the internet, but as a general rule it wasn’t anything you couldn’t get elsewhere. Sixteen years ago (as of this writing), the first iPhone had not yet been released, and there really wasn’t such a thing as the “mobile internet.”

Think about that. The people born the day before the first modern smartphone hit the market have not yet graduated high school.

But sooner or later a technology is going to come out that you’re not going to need. Maybe you appreciate it, maybe you think it’s pointless. It provides a new way to do X, but you already have a way to do X, and either don’t have the money or just plain don’t see the need to have the new shiny, since you can still do X perfectly fine, the way you’ve always done it.

And then ten or fifteen years later, you’ll discover that you no longer can do X, because the only way to do X is with a technology that has been absent for the first 40 years of your life, and optional for the last ten or fifteen, but suddenly you just can’t. Not without buying this new technology that you don’t know how to use and don’t want.

Here’s a real-world example that’s absolutely fucking the over-sixty crowd: Two Factor Authentication.

When it first rolled out, it was only in high-security operations, and consisted of an electronic keycode generator– the little keyfob. Then they added the ability to send codes over text. Then they developed smartphone apps.

Now, the thing is– each one of those options require its own technological infrastructure. And when 65% of the client base is using the app, and and 30% is using text, the 5% that’s using the little keyfob generators are now an unreasonable expense. You’re maintaining the infrastructure to work with the keyfobs and a business relationship with the manufacturers of those keyfobs, not mention the manpower required to add the keyfobs to individual accounts. So you drop the keyfobs. A few years later, only 5% of the people using text messages for 2FA, because smartphones have really caught on, and once again– you’re spending a huge chunk of your budget on the servers that generate the 2FA codes, the capacity to send the codes, and a per-code cost. (Admittedly, usually broken up across a batch of thousands, but still.) So you drop that capability.

Now, a lot of 60-70 year olds have never owned smartphones, and are being declared “unavoidable collateral damage” by companies that use 2FA, because the cost of supporting such customers is more than the profit they generate. To make it worse, the apps themselves are, by necessity, getting more advanced, and in some cases older phones won’t run them.

And that’s a change dictated by security, market, and cost factors. That’s not even getting into things like… well, have you noticed a lot of companies are trying to get you to order and pay with the app? It has nothing to do with YOUR convenience, and everything about how McDonald’s wants to spend less money on cashiers. There’s a lot of technology out there that’s “for your convenience” but really it’s “for our profit”, and “for your protection” but what they’re protecting you from is saving money or spending it somewhere else.

I mean, hell… you don’t even have to leave [tumblr] to see Millennials complaining about how physical copies are going away and you can’t OWN things anymore, whether it’s music, software, or movies. Or how we used to have a cable provider, then it was a cable provider and Netflix, now it’s fifteen streaming services and a cable provider.

I can’t tell you what it is– though as Gen X, I will probably start complaining about it before you do– but some major component of how you interact with the world is going just go away. And maybe it will just be the steady march of progress, or it may be the forward offensive of capitalism. Maybe you WILL be keeping up with the technology, but the company that makes the technology goes out of business and you have to learn something new. Maybe the company that makes the technology gets bought by another company for the sole purpose of shutting down the easier, better technology instead of the one that is more difficult and makes the new owner more money.

But I assure you, you will find yourself saying “It doesn’t need to be this complicated. I could do this LAST MONTH. I have been able to do this since before you were born, and there is absolutely no reason I should not be able to do this now.”

This problem will be complicated by the fact that the first time it happens, it will turn out to be totally possible, it’s just that this particular clerk doesn’t know how. The second time it happens, it will be hidden behind a menu option that maybe makes sense once it’s in front of you, but neither you or the clerk feels like they should have been expected to figure that out intuitively. There will probably be more than one case where the problem is, in fact, the little shit behind the counter doesn’t want to admit they they might be wrong, or just doesn’t want to spend forty-nine seconds to find out/do it the hard way because they could spend that time talking to the cashier in the next line. And then one day there will be a hardware upgrade, a policy change, or the last guy in the store who knew how to do it accidentally was talking about going to Communion and management just heard “union” and now he’s not allowed within 500 feet of the store or any of its employees.

(Although I did not know it at the time, when I left my first help desk job, I was the last person who knew how to use the cockamamie Rube-Goldberg system that was used for…. well, in modern terms, dial-up VPN. They didn’t know it at the time, either, and because the damage was done, there was absolutely nothing they could do to help the guy who HAD to use the legacy platform, and if it weren’t for the facts that he remembered my name, I was listed in the phone book, I remembered HIM as a caller who was always easy to work with, I had the time, I had the patience, I had the kindness, and most importantly, I am a goddamn robot who was able to sit down on the floor and pull up all the configuration screens for an app I had not even seen in three months in my head like a fucking terminator HUD, he would have blown a I-shit-you-not EIGHT FIGURE SALE. To this day I’m mad that extortion didn’t even cross my mind.)

#they plan to close down the bank in my grandma’s town and expect the ppl living there#of which a majority are elderly people. to just do online banking instead. offices that you could show up at without an appointment#want appointments made through an app or website now too or else they won’t help you at all.#at some point all of us will experience a New Thing in technology we consider worse than what we’re already used to.#either bc we don’t trust it or it feels unnecessary or not yet well thought-through. and suddenly we missed the memo#and it became the standard and then mandatory. it can happen so fast. and it will be annoying and frustrating and probably embarrassing too#reblogged

The economic and political factors shouldn’t be ignored here. I live in a haunted forest just outside a no-stoplight county seat. Until very recently, a large chunk of the internet was more or less unavailable to me because my only internet options had bandwidth caps that assumed you didn’t want to watch more than one movie online per month, and sort of forgot that 75% of the web pages out there embed streaming video ads.

I work for a Public Defender’s Office, and so our clients are the most marginalized of society. Many don’t have addresses, phone numbers, or even emergency contacts, let alone access to the internet or a smartphone. We still do a majority of our intake via phone call or in-person interviews, and it was a huge problem during COVID to switch jail interviews from in-person visits to the jail to calls over microsoft teams. These teams calls completely screw over non-english speakers and Deaf/HOH folks because you can hardly communicate over the video, and it also deprives inmates of one more real life person they’re able to interact with. (Believe me, it can drive you nuts very very quickly.)

Recently, our office decided to roll out an online qualification form, which in a vacuum is a good idea. I don’t think it’s bad to have more options for qualification. We get hundreds of phone calls a day, so anybody that does have an internet connection and/or basic computer literacy - not to mention disabled folks that can’t make it downtown to set-up in person - is good. The problem is that we were told that phone call qualification will go away, so the only options will be to come downtown in-person or sign up online, and that’s a big problem to me. It’s a symptom of systemic issues because the reason we can’t keep doing phone call interviews is because we receive hundreds of phone calls and VMs a day, and we don’t have the staff to keep up with it. Because of that, we’re cutting the phone interviews entirely, making it just that much harder to get a public defender for people that are already completely fucked by society.

there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~

I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant. every single post, every single time. in chronological order starting with the most recent post. note: it will not find #croissants or that time you made the typo #croidnssants. for a tag with multiple words, it’s just /tagged/my-croissant and it will show you everything with the exact phrase #my croissant

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant/chrono will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the exact phrase #croissant, but it will show them in reverse order with the oldest first 

url.tumblr.com/search/croissant isn’t as perfect at finding everything, but it’s generally loads better than the search on mobile. it will find a good array of posts that have the word croissant in them somewhere. could be in the body of the post (op captioned it “look at my croissant”) or in the tags (#man I want a croissant). it won’t necessarily find EVERYTHING like /tagged/ does, but I find it’s still more reliable than search on mobile. you can sometimes even find posts by a specific user by searching their url. also, unlike whatever random assortment tumblr mobile pulls up, it will still show them in a more logically chronological order

url.tumblr.com/day/2020/11/05 will show you every post on the blog from november 5th, 2020, in case you’re taking a break from croissants to look for destiel election memes 

url.tumblr.com/archive/ is search paradise. easily go to a particular month and see all posts as thumbnails! search by post type! search by tags but as thumbnails now

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio will show you every audio post on your blog (you can also filter by other post types). sometimes a little imperfect if you’re looking for a video when the op embedded the video in a text post instead of posting as a video post, etc

url.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/croissant will show you EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant, but it will show you them in the archive thumbnail view divided by months. very useful if you’re looking for a specific picture of a croissant that was reblogged 6 months ago and want to be able to scan for it quickly 

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio/tagged/croissant will show you every audio post tagged with the specific phrase #croissant (you can also filter by photo or text instead, because I don’t know why you have audio posts tagged croissant) 

the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog! 

caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks. 

if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else

You can also do an AND search for two tags at a time like this:

https://silveth.tumblr.com/search/#monkey island #fanfic

i like this a lot but feel the need to add one major caveat: any of these options that include url.tumblr.com/tagged/ only work if the person running the url.tumblr.com blog tags their posts.

if you’re looking for a post on someone’s blog and that someone didn’t tag the post with anything, you can try url.tumblr.com/search/croissant (if you think the word “croissant” was in the body of the post), url.tumblr.com/day/2020/11/05 (if you know the blog made or reblogged the post on november 5th, 2020), or url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio (if you know it was an audio post), but url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant won’t get you anywhere because it ignores posts that the blog didn’t tag.

if that blog does tag things, you can use the url.tumblr.com/tagged/ options. however, depending on how many posts the blog has used that tag on, it may take longer than a few seconds to find the single post you’re looking for. i tag every post on my blog in case i want to find it later, so i can (and do) use howdydowdy.tumblr.com/tagged/[tag] extensively. but i have tags that i’ve used on thousands of posts, so even if i get all of the posts that use that tag to come up, i’ve got to narrow down the results, which can take a while.

It’s not perfect, but I’ve been able to find long lost posts this way before! If you’re sure you remember the exact phrase, put it in quotation marks for more specific results!

Obviously, this only works for posts with text in them, but sometimes it’s better than nothing!

What they mean: "I want to know whether to activate my short term waiting mode where I just wait and do nothing else, or activate my long term waiting mode where I occupy my mind with something else. I fully understand that both are possibilities, and I have no problem whatsoever with either one, but I want more information so I can best adapt to the situation."