Whatever catches my eye

(Photo IDs in alt text)

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.

Forty years later, I still think Rodimus Prime gets profoundly misunderstood, and I suspect a lot of that misunderstanding comes from the era in which he debuted.

In 1986, The Transformers: The Movie did something that genuinely shocked its audience. It killed Optimus Prime, a character who, for many children of that era, functioned less as a toy commercial protagonist and more as a mythological father figure. Optimus was certainty. He was wisdom. He was strength. He walked into every scene sounding like he had just stepped down from Mount Sinai with stone tablets in hand. He did not second guess himself. He did not visibly crack under pressure. He was designed to feel eternal.

Then the movie ripped that away and handed the future to Hot Rod, who became Rodimus Prime.

And fans have been punishing him for it ever since.

Part of this is undeniably emotional. There are still people who reduce Optimus’ death to “Hot Rod got him killed,” which has always felt like a wildly unfair reading of that scene. Megatron was going to shoot Optimus regardless. Hot Rod made a reckless choice born out of desperation and inexperience, but he was not malicious, nor was he solely responsible for the death of a character Hasbro had already decided needed to be removed to make way for new product lines. Corporate toy strategy killed Optimus. Rodimus simply inherited the audience’s grief.

That grief hardened into resentment because Rodimus was not trying to be Optimus, and more importantly, he could not be Optimus.

That is what makes him fascinating.

Watch season three of The Transformers now and what stands out is how unusually modern Rodimus feels. This is a leader consumed by self doubt. This is someone who understands that he inherited an impossible standard and feels crushed beneath it. He knows his troops compare him to Optimus. He knows the audience compares him to Optimus. Worst of all, he compares himself to Optimus. Episodes like “The Burden Hardest to Bear” are practically built around imposter syndrome decades before fandom regularly used that phrase.

And somehow this gets interpreted as whining.

I have never understood that criticism because leadership is often terrifying, especially when it is thrust upon someone who never truly asked for it. Rodimus did not spend years preparing to become the next great Autobot leader. He was a young soldier suddenly handed the Matrix and told that history now belonged to him. He was expected to lead veterans who had fought beside a legend. He was expected to embody the same calm certainty as someone who had decades more experience and a fundamentally different temperament.

Of course he struggled.

Frankly, I would argue Rodimus was ahead of his time. Modern genre fiction is filled with protagonists carrying burdens they are not sure they deserve. Jon Snow spends much of his story wrestling with leadership and responsibility. Optimus Primal frequently questions his decisions. Captain Benjamin Sisko was defined early on by reluctance and emotional scars. Even modern interpretations of heroes like Peter Parker often emphasize exhaustion and sacrifice over idealized confidence.

These characters are often praised for their humanity.

Rodimus was mocked for the exact same qualities because he arrived in a decade that largely expected heroic certainty, particularly in children’s entertainment. He was written with emotional vulnerability that felt out of place in 1986 but feels remarkably natural now.

There is also something deeply symbolic about the backlash. For many fans, Rodimus represented an uncomfortable truth they did not want to confront as children. Heroes do not live forever. Leadership transitions are messy. The next generation will not look exactly like the last one. Growing up means understanding that the people who inspired you will eventually leave, and someone younger, less experienced, and far more uncertain will have to carry that legacy forward.

That is not failure. That is life.

And perhaps that is why I have always found Rodimus more compelling as an adult than I did as a child. Optimus Prime is who we want leading us when we are children because he makes the world feel safe and ordered. Rodimus Prime is who many of us actually become as adults.

We inherit responsibilities we were not fully prepared for. We compare ourselves to giants who came before us. We wonder if we are enough. We make mistakes while trying to live up to impossible standards.

And then, if we are lucky, we grow into the role anyway.

it’s not weird to love it and comment and leave kudos because the author will probably still see it someday and it will make them happy.

it’s not weird to like said author’s work so much that you want to go look for other fics from them.

it’s not weird to go through the authors profile and look for other fics from the ships you like (or maybe some that you’ll give a chance because you liked the author) and maybe bookmark them for later.

it’s not weird to read these other fics and like them too and comment on them because you actually like them and you want to let the author know.

it’s not weird to read fanfiction from 5, or 8, or 10 years ago and actually enjoy and engage with it because it’s perfectly normal to relate to something that’s less than a decade old!

let’s stop treating fanfiction like they’re instagram posts that stop being interesting in 24 hours! fanfiction is NOT social media, fanfiction is art!!! and art doesn’t get old in one day, one year, or even a decade!

Ohohoho, this is a spicy one!

I wrote this in the space of about thirty minutes so typos may exist.

WC: 642

I like to leave very long rambling comments on people's fics and that has actually netted me some very real, genuine friendships and we've become cheerleaders for each other. My friend has a D&D Podcast that she doesn't get ANY sort of engagement out of, so I started listening to it at work and livereacting the things I enjoy about it and showing her my investment and it makes her very happy and it makes me happy that she's happy.

for one, stories don’t have to be finished to be enjoyable and worth reading. but also? an unfinished fic is a whole little universe that just keeps on existing in my head! their world stays alive for me in a way that doesn’t always happen with fics I binge read and finish, and i love it. i don’t know how their story ends, so it just keeps going! and even when those stories DO update and finish years later, they’ve been in my head for so long that they stick around like old friends.

so to any author with unfinished works: thank you SO much for sharing what you had without waiting to finish it first. you’re just giving me the gift of getting to spend more time with your story and your idea. if you do update again someday, i’ll be delighted to jump back in! but if you don’t, just know a little piece of your world still lives on in a beloved tiny terrarium in my brain. i promise i’m taking good care of it :)

FIRST:

The easiest way to get rid of the majority of the bullshit that Windows is forcing on us, as of October 2025, is this one-stop-one-click debloat solution from a modern day hero:

It's very easy, even if you're not tech savvy or get scared of pop up windows saying "ARE YOU SURE?" Yes, you are sure, I promise. This program takes maybe two minutes and will save you SO MUCH pain, time, and money (and exploitation).

Now that you've done that, here's the cleanup, to catch the little shit that the debloat might have missed (most of this will already be done by debloat, but hey, it's good to double check).

Even just reading about some of these features makes me angry. Fucking Copilot and "Discover" AI scrapers are in Notepad. NOTEPAD. And then there's this uncanny valley garbage:

No uncanny valley video calls for me, thanks! (Also, what else is it doing while it scans your face and listens to your calls? What else, microsoft? Because there was a lot of memory being assigned to this program for a simple "smooths your skin" add on).

The truly insane number of places they have stuck ads on your own home computer is sickening. Become Unmarketable.

Bonus:

Some background programs you probably don't need that are taking up space and how to remove them (Microsoft forums, 2024)

Your Samsung Galaxy Phone comes with 22 apps you don't need (Android Police, 2025)