A little nonsense

Here’s HSTHETE, the 24 hour comic I drew this year!  Thanks to everybody who followed along on twitter this weekend as I posted these pages <3

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

And weirdly enough you’re really good at this: making pizzas and dealing with shitty customers and breaking up fights in the parking lot and pretending to be Duncan’s cousin on the phone so the utility company doesn’t cut off the power. But running a store is a lot of work for two dumb kids, so slowly you start accumulating a bunch of competent weirdos to help out, like the nun who left her convent because god told her to help you make pizzas, and the elderly school teacher who just survived a mass shooting, and the guy the papa johns down the street hired to run you over. And really there’s no way any of this should be working as well as it is - you’re absolutely committing fraud of some kind here - but you’ve managed to dodge the landlord every time he’s stopped by, and the health inspector never shows up to tell you to stop letting your dog hang out behind the counter and you’re all still kinda looking at each other and asking ‘are we allowed to just do this?’ before shrugging again and continuing to make pizzas, until somehow, through a series of unlikely technicalities, your doofus coworker ends up on the ballot for governor.

Saw this going around and tested it myself, and I can confirm that this is unfortunately legit. Four hidden bots have been placed in any existing or newly created Discord server that are harvesting data, images, and most concerningly, one seems to be a face swap bot.

Due to them being invisible, banning them from your servers isn't possible without their ID's, which I've typed out for easy access.

1153984868804468756 1288638725869535283 1090660574196674713 1104973139257081909

Banning is done with the /ban command with each string pasted in one at a time. Four ban commands in total.

Image proof below and further information. This was in my PERSONAL server that has existed for +5 years. Discord is harvesting your shit without your consent, fight back.

The answer is yes, you absolutely can! It'll look like this - the numbers you paste will be what's "banned"

However my sibling tried this in her servers and found that One of them was NOT a string of numbers, like so:

And for clarity it isn't a difference in user or device, this is what she got elsewhere:

So if you ban these numbers and the message shows the actual username? Pretty sure that means they were in there.

Very unpleasant way to check the veracity of this post but hopefully this is a helpful tip for anyone who was concerned - my sib would have No Reason to add these in herself and didn't have any clue it was in there.

Personally, I'd say even if you are still worried about misinfo/fearmongering/etc from this post, think of it this way - worst case scenario is you're banning a bot you'll never use or need. Not a person, a bot. There's no real damage done playing it safe and running the ban commands through, aside from maybe losing some time doing so.

Instagram link Credits after the jump

This was always the cadence that Solas slipped into whenever he remembered something ancient that affected him in the Fade. In Inquisition, Lavellan only joined this cadence occasionally, when on the same page as Solas in conversation.

10 years later, not only is Lavellan mildly on the same page as Solas - now she has somehow fully and completely on the same page as him. Lavellan has become closer to Solas, after thinking of him so long. She is now “singing” the same song that he sang, fluently, in full verses. Lavellan has one foot in the world he loves, the world he had to leave behind, the world he longs for. The world she is fully prepared to enter with him, because she can speak his language and sing the song fluently.

Is this cadence really how the ancient elves used to speak to each other? For example, all of the mural memories are in this Hallelujah cadence, and Elgar’nan, Ghilan’nain and Mythal are all perfectly in the cadence when they speak:

A very telling detail to me in this cadence is the memory with Elgar’nan and Mythal so on the same page, so of perfect accord and of the same mind, that they are finishing each other’s lines.

In that memory, Solas is relegated to his own private segments that neither of the others join. He is exiled within his own Hallelujah cadence.

It is also interesting to note that Solas and Mythal never share this entwining that Mythal and Elgar’nan have. (The only times Mythal shares Solas’ line is to interrupt him with “Impossible,” and the moment they are apologizing while he kills her.)

Now, maybe this cadence is not an Ancient Elf Spirit Thing, and the cadence appears this way because it is filtered through Solas’ memories. After all, he painted these.

(And also, characters like Felassan do not speak in this cadence even once. So it’s not how all Ancient elves spoke all the time.)

But there is the use of Hallelujah between Solas, Mythal and Lavellan during Solas’ finale scene, and also one more example that makes me think the ancient elves may have at least occasionally spoke like this, and that this way of speaking, this song, is something that Solas is longing to hear again:

It’s this - it’s also in Solas’ conversation with Elgar’nan!

Solas is mocking Elgar’nan for being so blighted and corrupted, he can no longer speak in Hallelujah cadence. Solas seems to equate the cadence to “speaking elven,” speaking the language they should both speak. And I checked, neither Elgar’nan nor Ghilan’nain speak this way in dialogue.

So, it leaves me with this image of Solas as the last of his kind. Everyone who spoke his language is dead. The blighted monsters and ghosts can no longer hear or understand the music, they can no longer speak elven.

But Lavellan, half a world away, DOES.

Lavellan speaks this lost language of the gods.

Solas’ heart speaks Solas’ language. She has thought of Solas for so many years, she has endured her trials, and she has come to understand him even more than she had before. She has somehow, knowing the truth, become even closer to him, able to see both the good and the bad with open eyes.

Lavellan knows how to speak in elven, she can hear the hidden, mysterious currents that he can. Lavellan is his still-living family, his heart, the other part of the duet that Solas so clearly longs for.