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Boyfriend: So does being an ant person

Me: Again, baby, they’re not ants

Boyfriend: YES THEY ARE. They communicate via pheromones— LIKE ANTS.

Me: So back to the soulmate thing….

Boyfriend: You could trick them into following orders and thinking they’re dead by spraying them with a spritz bottle. I think they need a queen.

Me: So back to the soulmate thing…. Seems hellish!

Boyfriend: Not really. If being around the other person is what triggers the changes, if you want to go back to normal… all you need to do is leave.

Me, writing: (You found your soulmate. It’s changing you in scary ways. All you need to do is leave… how difficult would it be to leave? What pressures exist to stay?)

Boyfriend: So these ant-people—

The name of the jumper is “Memory of” label sweater, from Maison Margiela, but this is a cool tweet! Maybe it’s just a coincidence but it is a pretty good one!

Found under this link:

On OTB.net, and on their website for the foundation:

Remember how the We Made It Director’s Cut mv ended?

In Memory of Naya Rivera

Please, please I’m begging you, use firefox.

PLEASE install firefox as a mobile browser and then run adblock on your mobile browser it’s so good I promise.

Look.

Look.

I know I’m a total grind about open source stuff but browsers are the PERFECT place to learn to love open source software and for so long FireFox was a major part of the browser market and sometimes if you want to see what kind of fuckery google is up to it helps to see the kinds of things they block in firefox and just

There’s an organization that makes free, excellent, safe software that doesn’t collect and market your data but for some reason two thirds of the world uses a google product and most of the leftover population uses apple and just

I promise, firefox is so good - the extensions are incredible look - I can use lightbeam to see what sites I use and how they connect to other sites (bottom right should give you an idea how much time I spend on tumblr)

or I can look at ublock origin and see that it’s blocked over 2 million requests since I installed it or I can run the facebook container extension and stop facebook from tracking me and you know what I bet you can do a lot of that on chrome too but you’re doing that while chrome itself is tracking you and gobbling up your activity for google and

firefox is so fuckin great and it’s such a great ambassador for other open source projects please be a big old fuckin nerd with me and use firefox and run a bunch of funky extensions and customize the fuck out of your web experience.

Wanna be a hacker? Firefox.

Wanna use instagram on desktop? Firefox.

Wanna be a killer researcher? Firefox.

Wanna properly credit artists? Firefox.

Wanna read a whole shitload of books? Firefox.

Wanna make video responses to shitlord youtubers?

Wanna shoot cat lasers at bugs?

Wanna use youtube as a music streaming service?

FIREFOX.

The built-in privacy settings are no joke either. Even the built-in ad blocker is great; it took me literal months to figure out what was blocking ads on duolingo after disabling all of my privacy extensions lmao

Uninstall chrome and replace it with firefox, I promise it’s worth it.

Disclosure: I’m a software tester, so while my results aren’t professional-grade as I’m not doing this in a scrubbed environment with formal testing tools, I do use the same methods, just without writing dozens of multiple-step tests and screnshotting every page.

I just changed back to Firefox as my primary browser a few months ago after getting frustrated with Chrome killing my resources and losing my pinned tabs.  My laptop is a Dell XPS 15 9575,  only two years old, and has 16 GB of RAM.  Up to half of that would be used by Chrome, and it would spike my CPU at random intervals, causing slowdowns.  Even stripping extensions didn’t help; I ran it bare just to see what would happen, and though it took a little longer to do it, it would still eat my resources at an alarming rate until I restarted the browser and sometimes, restarted my laptop.

Firefox uses AT MOST half the resources Chrome did; I mean this literally.  I tested this on Windows and in Xubuntu using five pinned tabs + a.) five tabs, b.) ten tabs, and c.) twenty tabs when I did the changeover, just to see if I was imagining it.

Right now, Firefox is using 1.5 GB of RAM for ten tabs, eight pinned, five of those pinned for at least five months, and ten extensions, including XKit, AdBlocker, and NoScript.  The only time I have to restart Firefox is when there’s an update.  Casual checks of RAM usage I’ve never seen above 2 GB (at most), and the ‘casual’ part is important here; the only reason I check is if I remember to do it, whereas with Chrome, I was doing it every time my entire laptop slowed down which was several times a week.

Chrome, if it didn’t crash, I had to restart weekly at minimum and around the time I switched to Firefox, every three days .  Again, this is on Windows and confirmed in Xubuntu.

Firefox also never loses your pinned tabs. Chrome couldn’t manage to keep my pinned tabs for more than a week; I had to have an extra extension just to restore them.

To give perspective on what an asshole Chrome is:

My work laptop is a brand new Dell Precision laptop we got when we went to work at home in March. Everyone in IT got the same one–cheaper in bulk?–so we all received workstations that assume we’re going to be creating, updating, and querying multiple tables in supermassive Oracle databases, creating and sandboxing multiple dev, SIT, UAT, and prod environments, stress testing both our individual programs and all of them working together to see if we can crash the network, and compiling shit on the side. 

(As a tester, I get the joy of having to be able to do all of that because I never know what I’ll be testing next.)

It has sixty-four GB of RAM; when I got it, I almost cried.  I buy stupid expensive laptops for myself and this is like, three to five times better than mine (and almost three times the price of my most expensive laptop, a new Alienware 17 R2 I bought five years ago).  The stress test I did on it when I got it almost made me cry; it was beautiful.

Now, Precision on Chrome:

For browser agnostic testing of one of our native IE programs, we have to test in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, and right now, we’re in Chrome.  We’re prepping for a redesign from a literal web 1.0 interface with multiple inline frames and javascript hell that was designed for fucking IE 6 (yeah), so in the meantime, we’re testing polyfills to translate IE to Other Browser.  It’s going great, thanks.

Chrome has minimal extensions as required by the state, and four pinned tabs; one my gmail, the other three work related: one for JIRA, one for JAMA, and one for our case creation tool. None of these are high-resource programs; JIRA and JAMA are for story and task tracking and linking.  Testing is opening a page on the network that’s a basic page with ten HTML/Javascript elements from the program with the polyfills to make it work in Chrome. Not even the whole program here: just tiny HTML/Javascript elements that we click a button (or ten) and get a code-y equivalent of a ‘success’ or ‘fail’ message.

If I leave Chrome open for more than three days without a browser restart or laptop restart, it slows down a new Precision laptop to a crawl.  When I’m not using Chrome for testing but just for story and task tracking in JIRA and JAMA?  I get a week.

Y’all, Y’ALL. This bird is consciously deciding to put itself in danger in order to save the life of a very stupid creature. A creature which, if the bird did nothing, could be free food. 

Shortly after the success of The Buddy Program, Parton learned in dealing with teachers from the school district that problems in education often begin during first grade when kids are at different developmental levels. That year The Dollywood Foundation paid the salaries for additional teachers assistants in every first grade class for the next 2 years, under the agreement that if the program worked, the school system would effectively adopt and fund the program after the trial period.

During the same period, Parton founded the Imagination Library in 1995: The idea being that children from her rural hometown and low-income families often start school at a disadvantage and as a result, will be unfairly compared to their peers for the rest of their lives, effectively encouraging them not to pursue higher education. The objective of the Imagination library was that every child in Sevier County would receive one book, every month, mailed and addressed to the child, from the day they were born until the day they started kindergarten, 100% free of charge. What began as a hometown initiative now serves children in all 50 states, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, mailing thousands of free books to children around the world monthly.

On March 1, 2018 Parton donated her 100 millionth book at the Library of Congress: a copy of "Coat of Many Colors" dedicated to her father, who never learned to read or write.