Quintin-Cedar

"come again?"

"i learn more from thinking machine. human gender preference. attraction to same gender, means word 'gay.' all eridian same gender." rocky stands straight up. "rocky come out to grace now. all rocky plural gay, statement."

"...wow, that's... rock, i'm not sure it makes much sense to apply human ideas of sexual orientation to a monogendered species."

a long and judgmental pause. then:

Since wifi is just a standard for sending data through radio waves, and radio waves can go a pretty long way if you use ‘em right, it’s not that difficult to connect two computers by wifi from across town. Then you just keep adding more computers to the network and you’ve got internet!

Small antennae, like for connecting across the neighborhood, can literally be built out of trash

And a larger, more accurate one can be built pretty cheap too

(You can also reuse an old satellite TV dish, or really anything else that’s roughly parabolic)

There are LoRa meshnets in places like New York, India, and all over Europe: Spain (pictured below), Greece, Austria, Germany, etc

As for sharing fresh mëmês, the network to go to is Scuttlebutt. Unlike most social media, Scuttlebutt posts are stored on your computer and sent directly to your friends’ computers (rather than being stored on the cloud and sent to a central server). It works just fine over traditional internet, but you can also view and interact with it offline, and it has protocols for connecting over any means that two computers can share information - that includes LoRa, as well as hardwired connections, sneakernet (basically mailing a USB stick back and forth), etc

What that means is you always know that your info is just as safe as the network it’s sent on and the computer that receives it - no one even theoretically has the ability to collect and sell it all. And, since it’s all run on your computer, there’s no servers to go down or companies to go out of business that could destroy the whole thing

With an update since getting it back:

[X]

A TEMPORARY ONE! Only employed when facing said common enemy. We can continue killing each other violently elsewhere

Anyway I call it TACS. Tumblr Against Chatbot Slop. Currently making a logo give me like a couple hours I've got some sketches down