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Jan Ployshompoo and Jingjing Yu for Gentle Monster

Bonus:

(What's the outfit theme today?)

Jingjing: A gardener.

@sissa-arrows source (french)

Over 200 Algerians were killed that night over 500 if you count the one killed in the following nights but thousands more were arrested (over 10000) every single ministry was an accomplice they used to public buses to transport them kept them in a stadium because the precincts were not big enough… While the people killed were men and women, the people arrested were a huge majority of men. So the following days the women and children started calling for a peaceful march to ask for their husbands and fathers to be released. This time they knew that the public opinion wouldn’t look kindly to it if they killed them. So the police instead arrested the women and sent them to a psychiatric hospitals saying they were unstable and needed to be locked inside. Luckily the director was a good man so he refused to lock the women inside the hospital saying they were perfectly sane but he also refused to let the police take them. So he waited until the police left to help the women leave back to their places.

There’s a documentary about it (I don’t remember if the psychiatric hospital was in this documentary or in an other) made by an Algerian woman in the diaspora in France. It’s filled with testimonies and a woman explains that when her husband left for the protest he told her to take care of the children and that if something happened to him she needed to make sure their children would go to school school and be good students. He survived to October 17 but was found and killed by the police on the 19th.

They are owned by the same corporation as bittorrent and are practically identical in all but name these days. They are proprietary, closed source, have built-in ads, and use telemetry to track usage. They are a privacy nightmare and a scourge on the torrent ecosystem.

qBittorrent is open source, full of features, modern, has a wonderful community, easier to use, has less cruft, natively cross platform, and tends to be more secure in their usage of up-to-date dependencies.

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.

my first thought is to "take the bullet for the president." the bullet of course being cat yack, and the president being the thick luxurious carpets of my bedroom.

i discard this thought. im clean. i like being clean. i have been clean for only four seconds.

my second thought is to remember that there is a large, plastic sheeted area in the corner near the cats food bowl. ms. kitty is a messy eater, so she has to eat on the sheet.

i grab my cat and toss it across the room onto the sheet. i feel like im throwing a live grenade out of my trench. cat drives heaves once in my arms, then throws up in midair, approximately one foot out of my grasp.

i watch the barf fly in the same arc as my cat. conservation of momentum. theres not much velocity imbued by peristalsis.

both land at the same time. vomit splats. cat lands gracefully. she turns around, looks at me with total serenity, and throws up a second time. still on the plastic. i tell her that shes a great cat for staying still to do that. she does not give a shit.

i get some dirty clothes out of my laundry hamper and pile them up so she can sit on them. she loves dirty laundry. cats are nasty like that. i clean up the barf and she watches with interest. i have tossed her across the room, and now, stolen her barf. i am utterly befuddling to her. she tolerates me though because i give good scritches.

i toss the vomit soaked paper towels into the trash and come back with a bowl of bottled water (she has preferences) and a cat squeezy treat. she accepts three sips of water but declines the treat. very reasonable. i go back downstairs and put the treat in a ziplock in the fridge so she can have it tomorrow. i come back and shes trotting on her wheel.

i ask how long shes been able to do that. she doesn't answer - in part because she is a cat, but mostly because she is an asshole. she just keeps jogging. i turn to walk away and she meows at me to spin the wheel faster.