small loaf

How to Build a Small Solar Power System - Low-tech Magazine

commission art for upcoming book 'Call Me Traitor' by Everina Maxwell @avoliot

our lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.

i find so much therapy talk aimed at humans has too much flowery abstract prose about mindfulness or whatever but for myself I really prefer an approach focused on hard science and what biochemical processes are responsible for me feeling this way, especially anxiety. Also why i prefer listening to lectures given by psychologists or counselors made for other fellow psychs and counselors.

But yeah I feel like there’s lessons anxious humans can take home from anxious dogs

reactiveness is usually the product of fear and unconfidence

when something becomes too overwhelming slow down, add more distance

every time you practice an avoidant behaviour it gets more ingrained and will take more effort to beak the habit once it has been well established.

try refocusing on something else when you feel yourself starting to get worked up over something

progress is slow and if you think you can fix things overnight you are setting yourself up for disappointment

don’t only correct mistakes, actively give praise as well

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.

true north aid (an organization aimed at providing support to remote/northern indigenous people in canada)

canadian red cross wildfire fund

ontario spca and humane society (links to their donate page specifically aimed at supporting pets and animals in areas impacted by the fires)

A male human and a female human are roughly the same size and same coloration.

Meanwhile, male black widow spiders are brown and a tenth the size of females. Anglerfish females are a full foot long and have a bioluminescent protrusion on their heads; males are barely half an inch long with no bioluminescence or protrusions. Male elephant seals are ten times bigger than females and have massive snouts. Male orangutans have big jowls and neck sacs that look like goiters, while females look more like other apes. Peacocks have flashy coloration and a long tail that they can display. The females are brown and simple.

Lowland Gorilla males tend to be 2.38x on average the mass of Lowland Gorilla females. Humans? That ratio is something line 1.15.

Male gorilla canines tend to be about 2 inches long, easily twice the length of some of their other teeth. Male humans have canines the exact same length as human female canines and the exact same length as the rest of our teeth.