Kittyy

Christine (1983) dir. by John Carpenter

or possessed psycho

Arthur looking the whole goddamn time:

survivor!kieran who came back different. He wasn’t the same nervous stable boy who once stammered over his own words and laughed at the gang’s teasing. No—this Kieran was quiet, haunted, always looking over his shoulder like he expected someone to grab him again.

survivor!kieran who wears a cloth over his missing eye, fingers always adjusting it, as if he’s still getting used to it being gone. He won’t let anyone see what’s underneath, won’t talk about what they did to him, but when his hands shake at night, you know he remembers every second of it.

survivor!kieran who can’t stand people standing behind him. The first time someone does, he flinches so hard he nearly falls over, eyes wide, breath coming too fast. Arthur backs off immediately, muttering an apology, and after that, everyone makes sure to approach him from the front.

survivor!kieran who hates pity. He doesn’t want people feeling sorry for him, doesn’t want their hushed voices or the way they avert their gazes when they see the scar peeking out from beneath his bandage. But you? You never look at him like he’s broken. And that scares him just as much.

survivor!kieran who keeps to himself more than ever. He spends long hours brushing the horses, whispering to them in that same gentle voice he used before—because animals don’t stare, don’t ask questions. He’d rather be with them than sitting around the campfire where the shadows play tricks on him.

survivor!kieran who still hears their voices when it gets too quiet. Sometimes he wakes up choking on air, heart hammering in his chest, and before he can stop himself, he reaches for his gun. The gang learns quickly not to wake him up too suddenly.

survivor!kieran who doesn’t know how to accept kindness anymore. When you bring him food, he hesitates. When you offer to fix the tear in his sleeve, he stares at you like he doesn’t understand the words. Why are you being so nice? What do you want?

survivor!kieran who melts under your touch despite himself. When you brush your fingers over his knuckles, he swallows thickly. When you patch up a cut on his hand, he watches you with something like disbelief, as if no one’s ever been gentle with him before.

survivor!kieran who lets you touch the cloth covering his eye one night—just for a second, just to feel your fingertips against the fabric. His hands tremble, his breath shaky, but he lets you do it, lets you close that distance without pulling away.

survivor!kieran who doesn’t believe he deserves you. You’re too soft, too kind—too good for someone like him. But when you cup his face, press your forehead against his, whisper "You’re still Kieran. You’re still you," he feels something in his chest crack wide open.

Level 1: browser extensions

This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.

Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.

Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).

uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.

Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.

FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.

Level 2: leaving enshittified services

The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.

Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.

Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery

DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.

Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.

With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.

Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery

Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.

To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.

Level 5: automated media piracy

The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.

The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.

Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.

Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.

Level 6: fucking with Android

Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.

Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.

Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.

You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.

Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.

Level 7: fucking with Windows

This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.

Level 8: switching to Linux

I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.

thanks for playing with me