This Is My One Piece Corner

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

Sorry if it’s a little cramped- had to make this all fit in ten photos. Hope you guys like it….. and again…. sorry Andrew

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Tanabata Sky Lantern Festival, Kyoto, Japan

I think that might be part of it? But I think another part might be the fact that anon hate on here got REALLY bad around 2016?ish? I don't remember the year. But a lot of people disallowed anonymous asks and a lot of people turned their ask boxes off entirely.

it's hard to play ask games when ask boxes aren't open

Whether that was really the cause or not, ask games got less common and so people didn't know how to play anymore. If no one else teaches you the unwritten rules and you don't see any examples, then it can be hard to pick it up on your own.

For example, I've had people reblog ask games for me more than once where their reblog is just the full list of their answers. That's not how ask games used to be played on tumblr, but I can see how they'd assume it was.

A little while ago, I reblogged an ask meme and explained how to play it while I answered the resulting asks.

If anyone out there wants to learn how to play ask games:

here's post number 1