Entomotheist

but anyway people were commenting about how many new outside free gyms for adults are going up like ‘why can’t they just build adult sized playgrounds why even outside do we have to do the gym’ and it’s a fair point. they’ve got hanging bars and no jungle gym. climbing the stairs to a high slide is a workout with the slide reward. you could argue that children who are too small would attempt to use it and hurt themselves but there are already different sized playgrounds for children based on their age/growth.

Level 1: browser extensions

This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.

Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.

Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).

uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.

Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.

FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.

Level 2: leaving enshittified services

The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.

Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.

Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery

DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.

Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.

With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.

Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery

Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.

To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.

Level 5: automated media piracy

The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.

The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.

Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.

Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.

Level 6: fucking with Android

Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.

Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.

Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.

You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.

Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.

Level 7: fucking with Windows

This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.

Level 8: switching to Linux

I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.

You literally have to collect rare stones from remote locations, put them into specific formations to work. All of this gets written down in symbols which don't make sense to the uninformed. It gets powered by energy which can not be seen in most cases.

Cute how people who say this shit dont say transphobia doesnt exist just because shitty parents might kick out a trans kid because they think it's because they're gay. It's all terrible and parents being bigoted and neglectful and abusive. To parents like that it doesn't matter if you're gay or trans or ace, it's all the same to them and they don't want you in their family.

Using this as a "gotcha" to belittle the experiences of those who've gotten kicked out after coming out with the bonus of not even being believed for what they came out as is disgusting.

In this recent UK study cis asexuals were the most likely to have conversion therapy equal to cis gay/lesbian people. And the most likely to have it offered.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/721704/LGBT-survey-research-report.pdf

1) Stop equating sexuality to behavior. Don’t do it with gay people, don’t do it for ace people.

2) Faith based groups, especially those who are not pro-LGBTQ don’t magically see aces as acceptable. They view them as not-straight therefore wrong.

3) If you are abstinent it’s supposed to be a sacrifice you suffer through to show your strong faith. Sex is meant to be your reward for being married. Being abstinent in a faith based groups works until you are meant to get married, be fruitful, or summit to your husband. The moment you decide you don’t want any of that for yourself now or in the future it’s a seen as a problem.

4) You’ll note that lots of number 3 is sexism, sex negativity, and the forced continuation of nuclear families something that directly and indirectly adds to homophobia and transphobia. And instead of saying “hey this ace, this victim of abuse, gives us an opportunity to discuss all of those wrongs in society, plenty of people just reblog “but why would you kick a virgin out??”

Kid one the bus next to me whose backpack starts moving and it turns out he's got three chickens and a painted turtle he caught in there? This is Perfectly Normal. Humans have been catching small game and transporting it home in whatever they had since we invented bags to put chickens and turtles in.

I traded him three king-size snickers bars I had on me for the turtle because I vaguely remembered that many freshwater turtles were toxic to eat (incorrectly, as it turns out, but this was when I still had a Nokia Brick that lived a blissful, internet-free existence), and didn't want him accidentally poisoning his family, but didn't want to just. Steal his hard-won turtle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans have been cautious about poisons, looking out for strangers kids and bartering shit since before we were technically humans, probably.

Having acquired a turtle, I now needed to transport the turtle to the on-campus pond that effectively served as an Invasive Freshwater Turtle Containment Zone, but did not have a bag that could adequately contain him so I had to sit the rest of that bus ride, at the station and all through the next bus ride holding the turtle like the world's angriest hamburger. Multiple people were curious about and delighted with the turtle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans love an animal, especially one that is capable of appearing grumpy, and hands are for holding things.

By the time I got back to Campus, the anthropology and child psychology building that the Invasive Turtle Containment Pond was in had closed, so I had to figure out how to climb the tree over the wall and get down off the roof while holding The World's Angriest And Sharpest Hamburger. I eventually ended up having to briefly shove the turtle into by bra to get up to the initial branch and off the roof without breaking an ankle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans are, as a species, a bunch of barely-evolved arboreal frugivores and really good at Tree Physics, and I don't know a single titty-having bitch out there that hasn't used their bra as Emergency Pockets at least once, if not daily.

I released the turtle into the Turtle Containment Pond and then had to solve the problem of getting back OUT of the locked building, but Nokia Brick never loses a signal or drops a call (including that time I accidentally dropped it off a 13-story building in the middle of a call to my parents and the damn thing BOUNCED but kept the line open. I miss that phone every day.) and while campus security has been carefully trained to not let people IN to places without proper ID and a call to someone inside, they assume that if you got locked in somewhere, that you got in by legitimate means and not Lemur Shenanigans, so i just called them, apologized that I'd been working late with headphones on and didn't realize I'd been locked in. This is Perfectly Normal, people have been lying to cops since laws were invented, and will continue to do so because all cops are bastards.

@caffernnn

@officialsquaremom

@blonde0chaos

@heepthecheep @the-sleepiest-salami

@weightoflivingpartii

@miraculorum

@elmoswunder

@sanestparadisecitizen

(my favorite!)

AND OF COURSE. the best for last. too many people have mentioned them to tag

im happy we could all be united by Love for Pigeon.