Fandomlover

Stop going on trips and going to restaurants without masks.

Keep educating yourself and protesting and calling and donating and signing petitions.

Wear a mask. End white supremacy. Defund police.

blehh! avac doodle dump!!

i know panic isn't the appropriate response for this, but we all KNOW the government's clampdown on dissent is only going to get more stringent from here on. and while tumblr is unlikely to be affected anytime soon, here's how you bypass india's censorship to an even further extent:

VPNS.

those who don't know what those are, they essentially mask your IP address, meaning that long story short, you can be in India physically but browse the internet from any other country you want to.

For those who can't buy one (this includes me too), GET OPERA BROWSER. (or Opera GX for PC because it's cooler) I cannot emphasize this enough. It's one of the most easily acceptable VPNs out there, both for mobile and pc, and it's completely free too. I've been using it for months to pirate disney plus and it works perfectly. In addition it has free adblock, and much better data policies and transparency compared to google.

I'll add more info in reblogs, including maybe a tutorial and what to do for other apps on mobile. keep an eye out

tagging like every desi I know under the cut (which, admittedly, isn't a lot):

when you download it (here's the link to the official site) and open it, it should look something like this:

the top right corner looks like this. click on the rightmost button and scroll down the menu

you will find this. Click on 'Enable in Settings'. This will take you to another tab with settings.

it should look like this. Click on 'enable vpn' and configure accordingly (the settings you see are what I would suggest).

On the top left corner of any tab, the small button reading VPN should turn blue. This means it is enabled. Click on it to choose locations and configure settings.

as proof that it works, here's me opening tiktok (which is already banned in india) for the first time in my life:

Opera GX is very similar, it's just a cooler, more efficient, more gamer-oriented version. I'd recommend that (it's also free, btw), but it's your choice. Both work just fine.

Here's what it looks like:

Click on the red "O" icon on the bottom right, and this tab should open:

click on Settings. this will take you to the settings, which should have this:

Click on Enable VPN

Bonus:

Scroll down in Settings to find the "Search" category and set DuckDuckGo as your default browser (because seriously fuck google) :D

this is also tiktok tested :)

Like, there’s two clips going viral right now about the whole thing that I think sum that whole time period up- the first is an interview Spears had with Diane Sawyer where Sawyer just tears into this obviously struggling woman like she’s a politician or a criminal or something. She’s a pop star, not a member of congress. And Sawyer’s doing shit like reaming her out for ‘breaking Justin Timberlake’s heart (which- that aged well, huh?)’ and justifying the then first lady of Maryland saying  “Really, if I had an opportunity to shoot Britney Spears, I think I would” at domestic violence prevention conference with “ “It’s because of the example for kids and how hard it is to be a parent.” Like, are you kidding me? 

(This is nothing to say of Sawyer’s other infamous celebrity interview around the same time-Whitney Houston- another woman who was clearly ill and needed treatment, not a tv piece with an interviewer who could barely restrain the contempt for her. “Oh well Houston was clearly lying about not doing drugs!” Yeah? Who gives a shit? That doesn’t mean Sawyer handles her with the same gloves she’d handle a member of the Bush Administration about it. At what point does a journalist decide the “newsworthiness” of an interview is less important than the mental wellbeing of its subject?)

And then there’s the clip of Craig Ferguson that’s also big right now where, three days after Spears shaved her head, he says ‘I’m not gonna make fun of this young woman who is clearly ill and neither should you, because we all helped make her sick through our consumption of her.’ In it he mentions the recent death of Anna Nicole Smith, and people in the audience laugh. They laugh at a woman dying and leaving behind a 4 month old. And Ferguson kind of catches it with a look, but keeps going on with his monologue, and it just made me so sad for all of those women that the only person in the media who openly took pity on them and supported them was a comedian who’s in recovery himself. That no one else extended any empathy or reflection about their role in making Britney Spears, Whitney Houston, or Anna Nicole Smith sick (Or any of the other women they chewed up and spit out- Lindsey Lohan and Mischa Barton come to mind.).

I know there’s a lot of hand wringing about social media and how vicious the internet is to women-both famous and not-but I actually think it’s better now than it was then. Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez are both bipolar, and Lovato’s also struggled with drugs. Can you imagine if they’d gone through that in 2005? Or if Taylor Swift had her anorexia and paralyzing chronic anxiety when US Weekly was the most powerful piece of PR? One of them would probably be the new Britney Spears or Lindsey Lohan. 

I don’t want to minimize the effect social media and celebrity culture has on young people, especially young women and girls, now. I think there is a danger in the fact that it’s always available on tap and that anyone can be famous so we should all try to look like famous women. But there just isn’t the same industry dedicated to rapturously following every move of, then shifting into judging, before finally absolutely destroying famous women for entertainment and then selling that destruction to regular women as both entertainment consumption and a morality warning. I’ve seen a lot of people in their late teens/early 20s tweet stuff like “How did Diane Sawyer get away with that interview???” or “Why didn’t those paparazzi get arrested for trespassing or being really dangerous??” and it’s like, babies. We cheered them on.