It's rabbit holes all the way down.

having an evil shishu: also extremely normal. what, you can have an evil shixiong but your shifu can’t? grow up.

having an evil shidi: also fairly common, although there might be a larger issue at play so keep your eyes open for that

having an evil shifu: this is itself an issue, since you are now in one of the classic Confucian Conundrums and have to choose between sacrificing righteousness or filial piety

Therefore there are approximately 4 dozen people who make ALL the important economic choices.

The rest of us labor to make their dreams reality.

How to address this?

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

Odysseus: Regret it why?

Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.

Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in. 

*A couple of months later* 

Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit. 

Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure. 

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.

In the words of Bruce from Finding Nemo "you don't want one of them to pop".

... I think I might have been insane for this 😳

Same pattern, different modifications. The parts that made me question my sanity the most: on the left, the double 500+ stitch Latvian Braids, and the fact that I had to remake it three times because the colors kept bleeding even after pre-washing the yarns; on the right, FOUR i-cord loop braid sections, and several false starts before I finally got the colors right 🫠

My new oil on canvas painting 🖼 😍 ✨️

Available for purchase