tali

They are owned by the same corporation as bittorrent and are practically identical in all but name these days. They are proprietary, closed source, have built-in ads, and use telemetry to track usage. They are a privacy nightmare and a scourge on the torrent ecosystem.

qBittorrent is open source, full of features, modern, has a wonderful community, easier to use, has less cruft, natively cross platform, and tends to be more secure in their usage of up-to-date dependencies.

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.

nngh... why do my pronouns hurt?

when i was 11-12, i was just finding out that queer people are a thing. i understood gay and bisexual people pretty well, but i had a misconception about trans people. i thought that trans women were women that transitioned into men and trans men were men that transitioned into women. i do not know why i thought this??? i was even watching trans youtubers at the time and still thought that???

oh yeah i also thought that when they transitioned, their pronouns never changed. ever. obviously you can be a trans woman with the pronouns he/him, or a trans man with the pronouns she/her, because pronouns don't equal gender, but i thought that the norm was that trans women/men didn't change their pronouns when they transitioned.

when i made my first ever trans oc, who is a trans woman, i misgendered her SO MANY TIMES (used he/him on her, she uses she/her) because middle school me did not understand trans people as much as he thought he did. i vividly remember writing out her backstory and using he/him on her and was like "hmm. using he/him doesn't seem right." and still did not intuit that maybe, just maybe, i was misgendering my poor girl. 😭

AROMANTIC PEOPLE

ASEXUAL PEOPLE

AND AROACE PEOPLE

ALL BELONG IN THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY

you have to be kinder to people who are slow processors.

you have to be kinder to people who don't understand your jokes.

you have to be kinder to people who forget important dates.

you have to be kinder to people with cognitive decline.

you have to be kinder to people who were always this way, too.