in love with sheep & trees & cats

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.

the jacob wysocki tulpa manifesting inside my brain:

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

For a Gothic Horror Literature class at university level.

There was not a single person in that room under the age of 20. We were all adults, mere months away from graduating with our bachelor degrees, and this person felt comfortable trying to police us and the class contents like we were five.

Needless to say, we did not participate in a vote. Nor did the professor call her stupid to her face, no matter how much she might have wanted to. Instead, she invited anyone who felt uncomfortable to drop the class. Bafflingly, the student who complained didn't leave, but she made damn sure to let us know during every class discussion that she didn't agree with the morality of the texts.

And this wasn't recent. This was over 15 years ago, long before TikTok, so this was home-brewed idiocy likely strained through the puritanical discourse of some LiveJournal flamewar.

Basically, what I'm getting at is 'what's old is new again.'

And in an interview on the history of horror movies, German Studies Professor Jenny Taylor, of William and Mary College, pointed out [paraphrasing from here on out] that the genre of horror movie was invented by filmmakers in the Wiemar Republic, as the society came to terms with the horrors of losing the First World War ...

catching peace instead of fish

Rachel Ann Bovier is a Pittsburgh legend who has been publishing her poems in city newspapers for decades. In more recent years, she started putting up these bill boards along major roads. For what reason? I have no clue. But I would often pass them on my way to Oakland for therapy. They never failed to cheer me up.

As a young trans writer, they gave me this precious little spark of joy. There was someone like me, a writer, a Pittsburgher, a trans person, who was confident enough to put their face on a bill board! I would always smile as we passed by and my mom took note.

Fast forward a few years and it’s my 21st birthday. My mom has been super excited about my gift and teased me about it over and over again. She said it was the best gift she’d ever gotten me and in many ways she was right. It was a custom poem she commissioned from Miss Bouvier! It congratulated me on my birthday, my academic success, lots of little stuff. It was simple and sweet and perfect.