Fyrasha

if you already have an LG monitor or TV or intend to buy one, you probably want to watch this video and keep an eye on gamers nexus for updates (or anyone else covering the LG spying situation):

posted july 16 2026

LG is doing some bad things. how bad? well. here are some very brief bullet points. I am not an expert, gamers nexus is, see the video for more information than this:

LG monitors (brand new and years old, cheap and expensive) auto-install LG's own adware-spyware called LG Monitor App onto windows 10 and 11 computers. you plug in an LG monitor for video output and this gets installed automatically. no hitting OK, no confirmation, no toggles, NOTHING.

the auto-installed LG Monitor App auto-grants itself access to your internet connection and ALL computer resources. the LG Monitor App has the ability to collect: geolocation data, device data, personal information, online activity data, contact data, and more!

...and it shows pop-up ads! because fuck you

on some affected versions of windows, auto-installed shitware like the LG Monitor App can be prevented by navigating to gpedit.msc -> computer configuration -> administrative templates -> system -> device installation -> prevent automatic download of applications associated with metadata

...but, if your LG monitor already installed the LG Monitor App, this is like closing the barn door after the horse got out. and that horse has the logs of everything you were doing on your computer! someone stop that fucking horse!!!

unrelated to the LG Monitor App, many LG TV owners are now required to tell all household members and guests that their LG TV is recording and processing ALL nearby voices. or else they may be in violation of local eavesdropping and wiretapping laws. for owning a fucking LG TV.

plus, how many businesses, workplaces, public spaces use LG TVs?

allegedly the microphone spying can be turned off by disabling microphone features, but LG has been caught disregarding opt-out settings before.

LG TVs can record everything that happens on the TV, including the video output of connected devices like phones, computers, gaming consoles, anything that happens on the TV screen.

LG was sued for their spying, and as a result of that spying suit, now shows pop-ups saying oops! they got caught spying and intend to continue spying. thanks for buying LG!

as of when the video was posted, there was no list of every spying LG monitor or TV. but this stuff is getting rolled out to more and more LG devices, including those purchased years ago.

and that is the shortest summary I can make of this situation without just summarizing more of the gamers nexus video.

⬆️posted july 23 2026

gamers nexus is fairly respected in technology journalism. they fly around the world investigating companies that fuck people over and have pressured major companies to make major changes over the years.

so for gamers nexus to say that this LG spying situation is both unprecedented in how uniquely bad it is in this era of spying, and that it gets even worse than their video where they already say to stop buying and using LG products while recanting every prior recommendation for LG products?

Also LG is the epitome of planned obsolescence and while they often make very clever products, they also do things like not having parts available for less than the cost of a new machine and designing stoves that will destroy themselves with the self clean function.

I'm very proud that generations of activists before me are the reason why I can freely access menstrual products and condoms in the places I frequent, they have saved my skin multiple times. I'm very proud that generations of activists before me are the reason why my parents could have an interracial marriage, I wouldn't have my step family or my sisters without them. I'm very proud that generations of activists before me are the reason why my little brother wasn't taken from my family and institutionalized or beaten for being semi-verbal and high support needs, I wouldn't have my baby brother in my life without them. I'm very proud that generations of activists before me are the reason why my aunt was able to have both a medically necessary surgery for an ectopic pregnancy and a medically necessary abortion for a late term miscarriage, those activists saved her life and kept her in mine. I'm very proud that generations of activists before me are the reason why I can safely go to the gay bar and loudly and proudly exist as a faggot with my friends, they have brought me immeasurable joy with so much sacrifice and loss of their own.

Our part might just be the part that secures our lead and eventual success, even if we don't cross the finish lines ourselves. Our part might be an endurance challenge, just keeping a steady pace in the face of rough terrain so the next runner can sprint ahead. The race isn't over just because we barely made it through. Our part might have major setbacks. We might get completely fucked over by someone trying to trip us up, but we can still get back up. In that case, we frankly have to still get back up. We can't win every sprint but we can do what we can to reduce the time regardless.

any time someone is in any kind of crisis or upheaval, offer to feed them. tell them they don't have to choose what it is if they can't make decisions, just ask about allergies and preferences and tell them you're just gonna make food happen at their house.

friend having a baby? delivery gift certificate to order food to the hospital after the kid shows up.

someone's relative passes away? offer to make them dinner.

buddy gets laid off? ask if you can order them lunch.

pal stuck in a depressive episode? offer to drive them to fucking mcdonalds, if that's what they want.

people in crisis are tired and sad and angry and the last thing most of them are doing is thinking about feeding themselves. so if you have the ability or time or money, providing that is always, always a good move.

Try: "Is there a good time I can bring you food?" then follow up with questions about allergies, if X type of food is OK.

i cannot emphasize enough that warrior cats is, functionally, game of thrones for children

with all of the violence, politicking, and poor writing decisions that implies

whatever level of brutality that RP had was probably on par with the actual series

Hmm... The RP wasn't as heavy on the GOT-Style Politicking, and it didn't have much interpersonal violence (the cat colony was a very cooperative group for reasons that will become obvious in a minute) buuuut I think it might have been worse because the RP was a different Genre of Horror: Being A Small Mammal In The Wild. Disease. Predators. Hurricanes and other natural disasters. Urbanization and Pollution. The threat of starvation vs. the risk of the hunt. The balance of how much you were doing for the colony vs. how much it benefited you.

It wasn't a forum-type freeform RP, it was more of a chatgroup-based TTRPG where everyone played multiple characters and there was a lot of interpersonal RP, but there were very much encounters/combats/puzzles that were governed with the rules of a game called Mouseguard, which is very much from the school of early D&D where you'd show up with a binder full of characters you'd rolled up, because you were expecting most of them to die. Some sessions could involve multiple generations of cats.

The Game Master of that RPG was a former Hackmaster player of mine, and when she was busy with grad school, it was convenient for her to have me come in and play an antagonist for her players, instead of making her play ALL the NPCs. Some of the Antagonists I played were:

A female cougar that systematically hunted the colony to drive them to extreme paranoia so they'd fragment and be easier for her to hunt as her pregnancy progressed and she became less mobile/her cubs demanded more from her body. She was based on real-life events where a female cougar destroyed a large and controversial local cat colony over the course of a winter. The party did not defeat her, they had to leave and re-settle outside of her territory.

A Rabid Bat, and the subsequent Rabies Outbreak, with me taking over Player Characters as they succumbed to the disease. I remember a deliciously tragic post by the player who was the medicine cat. They decided their PC was so devastated by the outbreak that they consciously decided to go insane and join the rest of the rabid despite not actually being infected.

A Great-Horned Owl that should have been a fairly moderate encounter for the colony but somehow ended up killing like 80% of the PCs before they finally got it? RIP Horohoro, you were a wonderfully stupid menace to play.

A Team of human Trap-Neuter-Release volunteers, which got really existential and traumatic really fast. We kind of agreed halfway through that this was actually too depressing and moved onto my next, less tragic and Much funnier antagonist:

A Horse With A Phobia Of Cats. Cats had a 20% chance of encountering The Horse if they crossed a specific meadow, which they had to cross All The Time, because the only two sources of water and the fucking moonpool were in the meadow. It presented a severe logistical nightmare with a countdown- the cats had to figure out how to deal with the horse before the next half-moon or risk getting cut off from the starclan, and every day they didn't deal with the horse they had to roll for complications for dehydration. It took them five deaths and 26 days to figure out they could just Open The Gate.

Assisted in playing some natural disasters including a Hurricaine (and resulting flooding) , an 8.0 earthquake (and resulting tsunami), and a wildfire (and resulting famine).

Just A Fucking Alligator, who the players weren't actually supposed to fight, it was just there to prevent them from crossing a river at a convenient place on the map that the DM didn't want them to use, but Getting a 12AM Text from a friend asking me "Hey, wanna be an alligator?" When I was zooted on cold meds was really fun if somewhat disappointing in that I wanted to be magically transformed into The Objectively Best Reptile.

An Escaped Serval, who was actually perfectly friendly towards the PCs but *massively* disrupted the social and political dynamics of the colony because he was just so extremely fuckable. He got murdered in an ides-of-march style uprising by the male cats who felt they had been cucked, which lead to a full-on civil war event.

An Outbreak of Rabbit Papilloma Virus that had mutated to effect cats as well. Don't google that after dark. That arc lead to a shitload of political fuckery and the ascension of the new clanleader: Stageye, who became a very bitter believer in Nominative Determinism.

Since the Players enjoyed the Mountain Lion Psychological Horror so much (and everyone was playing too many characters and wanted a die-off event), I returned as another systemic colony-killer: A pack of similarly magical and hyperintelligent Feral Dogs. The Ash River Cemetery Pack were some of the best antagonists I've every played. I'm trying to find my RP notes but I remember Streetmeat, Third-Rail Racer, Overhead-Underhand, Two-Buck Luck, Darkstar, and Magenta, son of Tangerine (the medicine dogs were all named after different shades of red/purple/orange, AKA colors dogs normally can't see). I should draw them sometime. IIRC, the cats killed at least three of the eight dogs but ended up having to cede a lot of their territory to them and make an alliance with a previous rival colony to survive the winter.

Garfield, Eldritch Entity (Joke session modeled on a Simpson's Halloween Episode)

Cats disembowel 'on-screen'

There actually was a cougar menacing the cats

for a while everyone thought one of the clan's leaders had rabies. Turns out he was possessed by his wife's dead stalker(I stopped reading before this happened)

Cat heaven and cat hell decided to duke it out and dragged the living cats into it

One noteable character got her face ripped off by dogs

A cat learned how to control dogs

fire

The second series was about the cats having to move because humans had decided they needed to bulldoze the forest they started in

disease outbreaks. So many disease outbreaks.

Assassinations

TNR's been alluded to

The very first main character joined the clan cats for the sake of his fireballs(IYKYK)

One of the cats travels to the past and meets a possibly eldritch cat being

Sometimes a bird snatches a cat and they just have to deal with it

Also kitty bigotry. So much kitty bigotry.

I'm honestly genuinely pleased at the level of gritty realism about the horrors of being an outdoor cat because that's the sort of thing that embeds itself in a young person's mind and makes them never let their own cats out.

Actually the RP might have been nicer than the books because the Trashcan (it was trashcan after all) was getting hit with mass death so often they literally could not afford to do Cat Bigotry, and had plenty of external threats to hate on.

I'm not sure what the timescale of WC is because I am curious about the relative death tolls of each.

There were about 12 players playing an average of 5 characters at any time, but I was called in when the average got over 8 PCs per player, so like, I'd start with a colony of 100-120 PCs and was expected to bring that number down to like, 20. Each antagonist arc I did played out over one week to three months in-game, and I think I calculated the average death rate to be a little over 21 cats per week across all of them. The Horse had the highest kill rate at 26 cats in 3 days (I was on dental surgery drugs last night and couldn't do math), but the Dogs had the highest total kill count, taking a colony of 150 cats down to 8 over the span of three months, with one session spanning one month in-game and running through 100 total/3 entire generations of cats.

My antagonists weren't meant to be defeated, they were meant to be dealt with- by leaving the area, coming to a truce, changing the way the colony operates etc. The Game Master's antagonists were meant to be killed or dealt with without as serious a death toll, but sometimes the dice would decide otherwise, which was part of the fun. She made some great ones like:

Trashclan was looking for a new home when they found this beautiful woodland area and abandoned factory thing full of slow, dim-witted prey and absolutely no humans for miles and miles. Paradise, really, except for the ghost cats that looked like rotting corpses that seemed absolutely determined to not let them settle in the area, causing disasters, possessing PCs and general terrorism. Trashclan tried to hold their ground against what they thought were cats that had been banished to cat hell, until one of the medicine cats managed to commune with one of the ghosts to ask what their fucking problem was. Best in-game use of the "This is not a place of honor" warning ever.

The game was taking place in a post-apocalyptic New Jersey. Like, far enough after the apocalypse that there were cities and civilization again, but there very much had been a major apocalypse.

The Moonpool develops a Carbon Monoxide leak from vegetation rotting under the mud.

Just straight-up Growltiger from Andrew Lloyd Webber's CATS. Years before the movie, so look up the stage musical.

Also the Great Rumpus Cat from the same musical

She used a lot of the characters from CATS as NPCs. And the lore as the basis for the afterlife lore of the American warrior cats. So rather than going to the star place, Trashclan believed they would go to the Heavyside Lair.

An Alien Invasion Force lands and the cats save Earth when they eat the 6-inch tall would-be colonizers. There were a lot of them and they had laser guns, but there were a lot of very hungry cats too. Some of the PCs developed alien mutations from eating too many aliens tho.

Not an antagonist per se, but the GM and two of the players got very, very deep into the science of feline inbreeding so they could have a realistic incest mechanic and I think one of them ended up publishing a scientific paper about it because they had done all that research, they might as well get that grant money.

Godzilla, who actually turned out to be a major boon for Trashclan because he laid waste to the city with the TNR volunteers and opened up a bunch of new territory for them. He was grated godhood and ascended to part of their panthe(r)on.

PROFOUNDLY DISAPPOINTED WITH THIS SERIES NOW.

2. Guess who might be playing a next generation of the Ash River Pack?

:)

It's me

:)

Rebecca (not her real name) has apparently been continuously running this RP since 2006, and my last participation in it was in 2016. Becca manages this by having an in-game clock where players need to finish encounters/make decisions/accomplish goals by an IRL date so ten years have also passed in the Trashclan RP.

As it stands, there is some Three Houses bullshit going on where the MASSIVE Trashclan (15 players and over 200 PCs!!) is threatening to split into three smaller clans, which would make sense in-game, but none of the players actually want to do that because it's a huge logistical hassle.

So when I texted Becca earlier today, she was DELIGHTED to hear from me because "They've had it too good for too long."

:D

She's setting up a proposal for a Decimation Event, and I'm skimming the timeline channel to catch up, but there's a very real possibility that I'll get to cry havoc and release the dogs of war upon an RP server again.

Oh no. There is ONE player character left who remembers the Ash River Massacre.

Oh No. She's in dubious standing with all three factions.

OH NO. Trashclan hasn't actually *seen* a dog in over 3 years because of their magically shielded location. The majority of the current population doesn't even know what a dog looks like.

OH NOOOOO

so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.

this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.

And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:

“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”

I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.

And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!

they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.

obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.

the phone immediately began to ring.

“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”

“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.

I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.

@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.

My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:

me: hi there, you’ve got TST-

him: *strained, wheezing dutch laughter*

me: hey, is everything o-

him: pfffHAHAHAAH YOU MAKE THEM SO MAD. THEY THINK SO LITTLE OF YOUUUUUUUU BUT THE MEN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE FOOLISH! HA! HA! HA! YOU HAVE DUPED THEM!

SIKE

THEY'RE GAY

And they're not some rare exception to the rule, either!!!

About 25% of black swan couples consist of two swans of the same sex (typically, two males).

These couples will court each other, build a nest, and raise their young together in a more-or-less committed monogamous relationship.

In fact, these same-sex couples have a high success rate of 80% when raising their young to adulthood, as opposed to the 30% of their heterosexual counterparts! Two big buff papa swans are better than one when it comes to stomping on invaders of nesting territory.

"But," I hear you say, "where do their baby floofballs come from? Does mpreg exist among black swans?"

Alas, no, but there is a very elegant solution to this. The swan couple may simply temporarily associate themselves with a female swan.

Afterwards, the female swan deposits their eggs and swims off free to live her single girlie life if she wishes (or, find a boyfriend. Preferably one who isn't already committed to another boyfriend.)

So whenever someone commits the naturalistic fallacy "homosexuality bad because unnatural >:(" I like to point out not only their glaring illogicality, but also, respectfully, there is homosexuality happening in the local lake right now.

Panama’s golden frogs beat extinction

The amphibians are returning to the wild 17 years after a deadly fungus nearly wiped them out.

It’s been 17 years since the bright yellow Panamanian golden frog (Atelopus zeteki) hopped through its native habitat. But after nearly two decades of hard work, conservationists are finally reintroducing a new generation of the tiny fluorescent amphibians back into the tropical island’s ecosystem. It wasn’t that long ago that golden frogs were staring down almost certain extinction. The saga began in the late 1980s, when an invasive fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) arrived in lower Central America. Soon, Bd spores spread throughout Panama. The fungal spores had no difficulty traveling through water—and because golden frogs only live close to streams, they soon encountered the fungus themselves...

Stop backing up my fucking files.

Stop asking me to back up my fucking files.

Stop taking my fucking files off my fucking computer.

I don't want a fucking reminder in three fucking days. Let me fucking say no.

Here's a text tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 11.

Here's a video tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 10.

Here's a video tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 11.

It's common enough that young black kids are told to keep any identifying information on them at all times just in case someone reports a black kid breaking and entering by walking into the house they've lived at since they were born. Because that has happened.

When you add mental illness and the healthcare industry into the mix, things only get worse from there. To be clear, you don't need to be black or mentally ill to be treated poorly by a doctor or nurse that's decided they know you better than you do. But it sure doesn't make things easier.

And people have died as a result- or have we already forgotten the death of Adriana Smith who went to THE HOSPITAL SHE WORKED AT AS A NURSE reporting severe headaches and was dismissed as exaggerating and imagining the severity, only to be declared brain dead upon arrival less than 24 hours later and artificially kept alive to force her dead body to carry her baby to term- which couldn't even happen and they had to remove him via C-section anyway.

B-17 bomber is riddled with German anti-aircraft fire but miraculously survives. Later they discover the explosive shells were all inert; sabotaged by Nazi slaves working in armament factories.

found this in one of the news articles