Graw!

op disabled reblogs but I found this from this post. you should check out the reblogs they’re funny ash

Troy (2004) cast Diane Kruger, who is German/Polish, aka a foreign barbarian who is neither Ancient Greek nor Ancient Turkish, meanwhile Helen of Troy (2003) cast Sienna Guillory, who was English but whose father descended from Turkish Jews, so a possible connection there especially if you believe in the Venerable Bede's theory that the English are descended from the fleeing Trojans.

Here's what I need you to do:

If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.

Yes, that's really it.

I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.

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.

"If your civilization is your home, you must defend it with the same passion and force as if an enemy intruder is inside your own house where your family lives," Miller said. "That is the level of dedication and urgency that is required."

It has come to my attention that some of you have never seen what I firmly believe to be the greatest music video of all time: Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. It is the perfect marriage of a galactically bombastic power ballad and a writhing mass of 1980s video clichés, thrown into the path of a wind machine and blasted down a moodily lit corridor into the realm of legend.

In case you’re wondering what the heck they were thinking of when they made it, I remember Bonnie once explaining on TV that it’s about the dreams of a headmaster’s daughter, hence all the boys in (and out of) uniform. In retrospect, the whole shebang is quite fascinatingly female gaze-y, and I’m pretty sure it was a major formative influence on my pubescent imagination.

Steinman told Playbill in a 2002 interview that he wrote “Total Eclipse of the Heart” as a vampire love story. He said its original title was “Vampires in Love.”

iFixit

iFixit is a wiki-based site that teaches people how to fix almost anything. It was started in 2003 by Luke and Kyle, in a dorm room at California Polytechnic University when they tried to fix an old iBook together. With no instructions, they tinkered, fiddled, broke some tabs and lost some screws. But they fixed it. When they decided to start selling spare parts themselves, iFixit was born. It now hinges around its step-by-step repair guides, which are free to download and use under Creative Commons licenses.

Now, anyone can create a repair manual for a device on iFixit and anyone can edit the existing set of manuals to improve them. The site’s founders say that thousands of people make use of the guides every day.

“We’ve heard repair success stories from forensic detectives, field translators, and even kids,” say the pair. “From New York to Alaska, Tibet to the Faroe Islands, people have used our guides to fix their stuff.

“Our philosophy is that if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Once you disassemble, repair, and put back together your laptop or iPod, you have a much better understanding of what goes into it. It’s astounding how just 20 minutes of work can make an iPod good as new – but most people have no idea that there are instructions available to make the work easy. And why should they? Apple tells everyone that the battery isn’t user-serviceable.

“That’s where we come in, filling the ecosystem hole that Apple created by manufacturing a device without an end-of-life maintenance and disposal strategy.”

Restart Wiki

This is a place where members of the Restart community share tips for mending appliances and gadgets with people who are starting out, or whose knowledge lies elsewhere.

This wiki won’t show you how to fix a particular make and model of device: they leave this to the various fix-it websites and disassembly videos. (You can also get help with a device on social media using #SOSRestart). Rather, contributors to this page concentrate on basic and widely applicable principles, for example soldering and how to stay safe while fixing things.

The site is aimed at anyone with a curiosity about how things work and how to fix them. No prior knowledge is assumed. In the spirit of spreading knowledge as widely as possible, everyone is welcome to read it – and to share it. Anyone is welcome to reuse anything on the wiki, under the terms of the Creative Commons ShareAlike Licence 3.0.