Live with intent.

are u guys hearing this

“Inadequate”

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.

Edit: the title for this comic is “Puzzle Rat” this one’s a few days late due to having a lot of doctors appointments sorry it’s  just 9 pages, and about some rats… it’s more symbolic than anything really

I call this phenomenon Jack Sparrow Syndrome because Jack Sparrow in the original POTC trilogy is Not The Protagonist; he's more akin to The Trickster or Mastermind or The Cunning Fool archetypes or some combination of these, which is what made him so compelling in the first 3 movies. None of these are compatible with being a Protagonist (at least not in the conventions established by POTC as a franchise) because the audience has to know what the protagonist's motives are to have any interest in the plot. a huge part of why Jack Sparrow *WAS* compelling in the original trilogy was that we (the audience) and characters around him never quite knew What His Deal Was.

a huge part of why the last two POTC suck ass (apart from the fact they're Just Bad) is because they made Jack Sparrow The Protagonist, and in doing so had to make him legible to the audience in a way that requires fundamentally altering the character's function in the story, and therefore fundamentally altering the character altogether. Often, for the worst. Jack Sparrow is far from the first or only character to suffer this fate.

I'd argue an early significant example of Jack Sparrow Syndrome is Lestat De Lioncourt, who was so fundamentally altered by becoming The Protagonist between IWTV and TVL that reading the books back to back had me seriously questioning if they were even written by the same author. Earlier still, one could make an argument for later Sherlock Holmes stories. Another example is Loki in the MCU, who went from being the literal god of mischief to a fucking COP for all of reality in his own show. I would also argue Spok suffers from this in many Star Trek reboots/spin-offs. There's another, more recent example, which is actually what inspired me to make this post, but the author doesn't deserve the attention.

When I explain this concept to people, they often suggest that I am talking about Flanderisation. While there can be some crossover, Jack Sparrow-ing is not reducing a character to their surface-level mannerisms, but it can appear that way. Often the character's typical mannerisms are ramped up to cover for a drastic character overhaul that places them in a more prominent role than they were designed for. Jack Sparrow-ing is taking a character who was never meant to be the Audience Way In. making them thus, and completely changing them in the process. While there are *some* examples where taking a Side Character and making them the Main Character has worked, it is my opinion that those are exceptions and not the Rule. It is also my opinion that this is one of the more tragic things that can happen to a character you love very much. thank you for coming <333

the babies who serenade us as they await their meat