HermitHermitHermit

Please fucking flask your slime when you're on the tavern floor or in your room. Like outside of cleanliness standards (its an adventuring tavern. we know the deal. if anything bears and dire wolf pets are more of a hassle) The cleaning supplies we use are incredibly dangerous to slimes, who are used to feeding off moss and demonic skeleton dust. To say nothing of the rooms, which like. guys. do you know how many wizards stay with us? leaving their implements unsealed all over the place? We can try to clean it up but slimes membrane is incredibly sensitive!!!

They are going places

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

in any URL, a ? character indicates the start of a string of data being passed to the page. sometimes that data is perfectly innocent, e.g. it's often used to pass filters to a catalog page. Maybe you're looking at shirts and there's an option to filter by color, so you click the "blue" color filter. Then ?color=blue gets added to the end of the URL on your results page.

You can pass a pretty wide variety of data this way. A YouTube URL that you want to start at timestamp 45s will have a ?t=45 at the end of it. Search results for "turtleneck" may have ?search=turtleneck (s or q are also common in place of search). You can pass multiple data points connected with an ampersand, like ? s=turtleneck&color=blue. It depends on what the site engineers have built the page to recognize - you can't pass ?color=blue to a YouTube URL and expect it to do anything special - but a general convention is to make the string semi-readable with recognizable English words or shorthand. A savvy user can try writing in their own query strings and see what they get. (A hacker can take advantage of this if it's done poorly - more on that later.)

A very simplistic tracker, like from Tumblr's share button, might include ?source=share. In this case, nothing about the page content is different, but the site servers can tell that you clicked on a shared link rather than just typing the URL directly into a browser or clicking a bookmark. It's pretty naive, but sites love data even if that data is naive.

A more sophisticated tracker, like what Instagram has started doing, may encode more data. When you share an Instagram link, your username is encoded in the ? string, and then anyone who clicks the link will know who originally shared it (and get prompted to follow them). It's very obnoxious and sucks for privacy so this is where you get into the territory of SANITIZE YOUR URLS.

Something like an Amazon search result, that has a URL five miles long? It can be hard to tell what data it's encoding exactly, because it's not polite enough to use recognizable words, but probably none of it is crucial to the page. So yes, @starsailor83 , you can delete everything after the ?. You can delete the ? itself if you want; usually there's no difference between an empty ? string and a missing one.

When I sanitize a URL, I test the shortened version before sharing it to make sure it brings me where I expect and there wasn't an actually important string buried among the trackers. Usually the important ones are in plain English, sometimes interspersed with stuff like %20 (an encoded space character).

So:

https://www.somewebsite.com/catalog/?s=macguffin&zip=99999&range=10&source=share&uid=666

S was my search term, zip & range were filters I set: I want to see all results for macguffin within 10 miles of zip code 99999. But source and uid? Little suspect. UID probably stands for "user ID". I don't need to share my user ID with the person I'm looking at macguffins with.

Shortens to:

https://www.somewebsite.com/catalog/?s=macguffin&zip=99999&range=10