A Series of Unfortunate Shitposts

Hey I keep seeing the term "lolcowing" thrown around as if it's just a good time or even morally good and I need you know, from the bottom of my heart, that everyone ever branded that did not deserve the treatment they got and everyone who harassed them were awful.

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

"People back then always married young it's natural!!!" Every single 1800s guide I've ever met casually mentions that, of course, you really shouldn't get married before you're at least 20, and waiting until 25 is usually better.

Or, like. Okay here's a long segment:

Just firmly going "it is crazy sexist to blame The Wife for overspending when thirty seconds of asking questions will immediately establish that her husband was outright lying to her about how much money they had. Talk to your wife like a normal person."

Or--okay, here. A section on being honest and not writing love letters in secret, because that's usually a good sign that there's something untoward going on....

....except that he then immediately acknowledges that sometimes, the reason you're hiding this from your parents is that your parents suck. That there are parents who frankly have not earned the right to approve or disapprove of your partner.

"Men and women being friends with each other is literally normal. Don't be a controlling freak."

"If you have to abuse a child to keep order in your classroom then you're a bad teacher."

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Police know that the first sign of affiliation into a new gang is a change in the subject's vocabulary. New words. Unfamiliar names. Did little Johnny never mention the words "locating datum" before he suddenly blurted it out by accident one night at dinner? It may be time to have a conversation with his teacher, to find out more about who he spends his time with at school. If you can get to it early enough, you can nip it in the bud.

In a similar vein, it's important to figure out where all their money is going. Kids who get hooked on the machinist lifestyle will often buy ridiculous things in order to "prove" their affiliation with the gang. One mother of two in Rhode Island came home to find a bunch of strange metallic cylinders on her doorstep, shipped overnight from FedEx to her youngest child. Round stock. She thought it was "just a phase." Her child is doing time in a federal penitentiary, after getting all fucked up on DYKEM markers and stabbing an engineer for submitting an insufficiently dimensioned drawing.

Last, an obsession with precision is often your last chance to have a talk with a wayward child. Are things in your house suddenly becoming rigidly aligned to an invisible grid system? Are you noticing things becoming burnished or otherwise polished, that weren't before? A trusted adult's timely intervention when your kid is micrometering a piece of sheet metal found in the alley may be all that is saving your kid from a lifetime of obsessing over thousandths.