not all sinks are trustworthy. protect your children.

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.

listen. I love slut silver interpretations. I do. they're very good and very fun. love to read 'em, love to joke about 'em, love to write 'em. but what the black sails canon actually shows us is a silver who is incredibly repressed.

by "repressed" I do mean closeted— silver IS deeply closeted and in denial of his bisexuality— but I don't ONLY mean closeted. I mean that, textually and metatextually, sex and physical intimacy for silver are completely walled off. they are behind a locked door, and the audience is only allowed to catch a glimpse by staring through the keyhole.

to back up for a bit and address my own point from the original post, silver doesn't seduce flint. silver doesn't seduce anyone. we see him employ a wide variety of manipulation tactics throughout the series, but seduction is never one of them. he plays up his youthful naivete in s1 to make people underestimate him; he becomes the shit-stirrer, the provocateur, giving his addresses to make the men turn on each other instead of turning on him; he makes a spectacle of his own disability to incite fear; he uses humor; he uses threats and intimidation; he uses outright lies. he NEVER uses sex. eleanor, miranda, vane, idelle, max— all of them use sex as part of a power play at some point or another, to gain some sort of leverage. there are probably more on that list I'm forgetting! but silver is not one of them.

text and metatext. okay. we don't see silver fuck.

we skirt around silver fucking. we see the beginning and end of the pilot orgy, and we see him in bed with madi immediately after fucking. but we do not see the fucking. even in flint's one miserable sex scene with miranda when he's barely participating, we see the act on camera! but silver's scenes cut around it. there is a vulnerability in intimacy that is being shielded from the eyes of the audience.

and even in those scenes peripheral to sex, silver's mind is elsewhere. max calls him out after the orgy for being more focused on the schedule in his pocket than on the handful of women supposedly pleasuring him. while basking in the post-orgasm glow, what he wants to talk about with madi is the spreading legend of long john silver and whether or not she should trust flint. he's in the brothel nearly every episode in the first two seasons and he is only ever there on business. his interest in sex is either minimal or deliberately obscured— and I'm inclined toward the latter given his awareness of narrative, his resentment of narrative, and his desperation to escape narrative. the most vulnerable parts of silver's life are the parts he refuses to let the audience see.

"Us? Oh, of *course* our Dachshund sleeps inside- we just let him out in the morning and make sure he comes back for dinner. He just does his own thing, no worries."

"Um, you know it's not humane to keep a chihuahua confined to an apartment? They're dogs, they're natural predators. They need to experience hunting behaviors or they get depressed. No we don't leash ours, he absolutely hates it, we just let him come and go whenever."

Yall get how fucking stupid that sounds, right? So stop letting your goddamn cats get eaten and attacked and infected and hit by cars

A toddler would probably love full unattended access to the neighborhood too, but we don't do that either, do we

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

PBS and NPR were never beholden to the US government.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created so that the US government could fund public media without public media being influenced by the government. It was a private non-profit funded by the government, not a part of the government itself. This is by design. This was a good thing. It meant that even small local TV and radio stations, could afford to create media for the public good, without government influence.

This meant TV and radio stations for poor communities. For non-english speaking communities. For rural communities. For minorities. It meant that free and accessible media could be created for everyone, even if the government didn't like it.

That's why conservatives defunded it.

Because if they couldn't control it, and if it helped the people they hated, then they would have to destroy it. Do you really think that a fascist government would defund their own propaganda machine?

Not only is the idea that PBS before being defunded was propaganda wrong, but ignores the fact that defunding it is going to have long-term negative effects on vulnerable communities.

But anime and video game boob jiggling is like. The most uncanny valley shit I've ever seen nine times out of ten. You would think people this horny about tits would have actually looked at some but I guess not.