Finding my way back

-Democrats PROMOTED Donald Trump's candidacy as a "pied piper" in the view that he would be easy to beat.

-Democrats sought to hinder the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, lied about access to information by his campaign, and sought to smear him.

-The Hillary Clinton campaign made deals with various state Democratic parties to obtain their support and funds. (This had been reported before by at least two media outlets, one in Maine, and the other by the late Margot Kidder in Counterpunch.) It should be noted that said actions were illegal until June 30th of this year, and only changed thanks to a lawsuit filed by J.D. Vance.

As a result, Hillary Clinton lost support from Sanders voters. She did not seek to appeal to them for the later campaign, and the DNC sought to deny Sanders delegates a chance to influence the platform. This turned off thousands of voters, and was a major factor in helping Trump win the Electoral College vote.

After the news broke, the Clinton campaign looked for scapegoats, and Robby Mook decided to blame Russia. No investigation had been made into the leaks as of that time. Later, it would be revealed that the attribution came from an outside contractor, Crowdstrike, and the FBI simply took their word, and that Crowdstrike themselves could not confirm IF a hack had taken place. (Meanwhile, an independent investigation, led by NSA whistleblower Bill Binney found that, based on the metadata, the files were not obtained through a hack.) But, despite the evidence, the media blamed Russia, and the government soon followed their lead.

As a result of this, the Internet began going after those who challenged the establishment consensus. Those who opposed war, police brutality, fracking, the two party duopoly, and other issues came under scrutiny. Some media outlets equated them with Nazis. Other outlets, like Tumblr, began going after their accounts.

The pattern continued in 2020. The media smeared Bernie Sanders (and Tulsi Gabbard, who endorsed him, and resigned from her DNC position in anger after what the leaks revealed) and sought to back anyone who sought to challenge him (Buttigieg first, then Biden). They kept maligning actual leftists. They covered up the Hunter Biden Laptop, and smeared it as Russian, despite it being found in a repair shop in Rhode Island. In 2024, no challenge to Biden would be allowed positive coverage. But, like 2016, with voters upset over the support of the Gaza genocide, they stayed home, which ensured Trump's win.

Now is a time for a choice. Those who follow the Sanders path are gaining influence. Some have gained nominations. The Democratic establishment is running scared. They have allies in Donald Trump (who recently tried to blame his loss on the Chinese in 2020), JD Vance (who wrote a blurb on a book calling leftists "unhuman"), and Marco Rubio (who won a Senate race against a DNC-backed ex-Republican, as opposed to an actual progressive), who have begun red-baiting not seen since the days of McCarthy. Will they win?

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.

You don't even need a pihole for it anymore. You can throw "dns.adguard-dns.com" into your android phone under Network (or Connections) > Private DNS > Private DNS Provider Hostname in your Settings app. You can also set your router up to use it via the IPs:

94.140.14.14

94.140.14.15

Link to to source for that:

That will depend on your router, just search "How to set up custom DNS for (router name & model)". You can usually find that info on a sticker on the router itself. The model name is often nonsense like CM1000.

For switching to Linux:

If you're worried about software not working, and the software isn't something with work-related requirements attached, you can usually find alternatives. Alternativeto.net is a good place to start with that.

If you're a gamer, protondb.com will let you see how well your specific game runs on Linux. Ranks are from:

Borked - Does Not Work At All, or works so poorly that you cannot play the game at all

Bronze - Sort of works, but with glitches that don't exist on Windows that affect gameplay

Silver - Works, but requires tinkering, and has glitches that don't affect gameplay, or requires heavy tinkering to get running

Gold - Works, requires mild tinkering (usually just selecting another proton version from the drop down)

Platinum - Works out of the box

Native - Is made for Linux

Other common alternatives:

Spotify: I've heard good things about Tidal, but haven't personally used it (I use a cloud storage service and local files for music)

Google drive: Nextcloud. You can find free servers on their website

Google office: OnlyOffice has a desktop/mobile app, and most of the features

Gmail: Free providers aren't common, but disroot is one of them. They also offer quite a few services. Personally I use mailbox.org, but they do cost $36 a year minimum

Google search: Disroot has a searx instance, startpage.com exists, and you'd be surprised at how far you can get by setting your default search engine to Wikipedia. Marginalia's also good, but selective about what they index (mostly indieweb stuff)

I, admittedly, run almost everything through Emacs nowadays, so there may be better alternatives now.

be over-stimulated or edged?

be a voyeur or have semi-public sex?

finger yourself or follow guided masturbation?

watch yourself in a mirror or listen to a recording of yourself?

honey or ice?

sleep in lingerie or nude

receive a voice memo or nude from a mutual?

shaved or bushy?

grope yourself or be groped?

cuddle under a blanket or sleep nude together?

airplane sex or elevator sex?

kitchen sex or shower sex?

pool sex or workplace sex?

watch porn or read erotica?

receive or send a dirty message while at work?

have your dirty thoughts shared with those around you or know the dirty thoughts of those around you?

watch wlw or mlm porn?

hump a pillow or use a vibrator?

boobs or butt?

lose your virginity together or lose to someone well-seasoned

get fingered in the library or at a nightclub?

receive or perform oral?

have “ok” sex daily or amazing sex once a week?

doggy or missionary?

physical touch or quality time?

moan or scream?

lace or latex?

white or black lingerie?