Life is tiring

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
nonbinaryidiot
inkskinned

kids remind me, often, of the things i've taught myself out of.

i have a big dog. he looks like a deer. he is taller than most young children. while we were on a trail the other day, a boy coming our direction saw us and froze. he took a step back and said: "i'm feeling nervous. your - your dog is kind of big."

goblin and i both stopped walking immediately. "he is kind of a big dog," i admitted. "he's called a greyhound. they are gentle but they are pretty tall, which is kind of scary, you're right. their legs are so long because they are made for running fast. i am sorry we scared you. would you like us to stand still while you move past us, or would you feel more safe in your body if we move and you stay still?'

"oh. i didn't know that about - greyhounds. i think i ... i want to stay still," he said. at this point, his adult had caught up to us. "i'm nervous about the dog," he told her, "so i'm - i'm gonna stay still." she didn't argue. she didn't make fun of him. she just smiled at him and at me and held his hand while goblin and i, with as wide of a berth as we could make, crept our way through.

behind us, i heard him exhale a deep breath and kind of laugh - "he was really big, huh? she said it's because greyhounds have to go fast."

"he was big," she said. "i understand why that could have made you a little scared."

"yeah. next time i - next time do you think i could maybe ask to touch him? when - i mean, next time, maybe, if i'm not nervous."

later, going to a work event, in the big city, i stood outside, trembling. my social anxiety as a caught bird in my chest. i took a deep breath and turned to my coworker. she's not even really my friend yet. i told her: "i feel nervous about this. i am not used to meeting new people, ever since covid."

she laughed, but not in a mean way. she said she was nervous too. she reached her hand out and held mine, and we both took another deep breath and walked in like that, interlinked. a few people asked us - together? - and i told the truth: i feel nervous, and she's helping. over and over i watched people relax too, admitting i feel really kind of shy lately actually, thank you for saying that.

the next time i go to an event, and i feel a little scared, i ask right away: wanna hold hands? this feels a little dangerous. i hesitate less. i don't hide it as much. i watch for other people who are also nervous and say - it's kinda hard, huh?

i know, logically, i'm not good at asking for help. but i am also not good at noticing when i need help. i've trained myself out of asking completely, but i've also trained myself to never accept my own fears or excuses. i have trained myself to tamp down every anxiety and just-push-through. i don't know what i'm protecting myself from - just that i never think to admit it to anyone.

but every person on earth occasionally needs comfort. every person on earth occasionally needs connection. many of us were taught independence is the same thing as never needing anything.

each of us should have had an adult who heard - i feel nervous and held our hand and asked us how we could be helped to feel safe. no judgement, and no chiding. many of us did not. many of us were punished for the ways that we seemed "weak".

but here is something: i am an adult now. and i get nervous a lot, actually. and if you are an adult and you are feeling a little nervous - come talk to me. we can hold hands and figure out what will help us feel safe in our bodies. and maybe, next time, if we're brave, we can pet the dog that's passing.

thesaltofcarthage

this is just beautiful from beginning to end

nonbinaryidiot
theculturedmarxist

My son has set the house up with a Pi-Hole. It’s a raspberry pi running Ad blocking on the whole house’s network.   We’re a few hours in and we’re seeing effects, as well as some teething problems.  — Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 11, 2022ALT

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

For you can do it too!https://t.co/l1SLzPrzp6  — Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 11, 2022ALT

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

They show your your stats on a neat little dashboard. pic.twitter.com/RQB39IvnKD  — Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 12, 2022ALT

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

There’s a handy explanatory video from Dr. Johnny Ryan which sets out how we could end up with Just So Much ads.  Each webpage load can potentially run an auction (with you as the prize pig on the block) sending data to loads of different brokers. https://t.co/wUosBLjM3f  — Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 12, 2022ALT
Privacy International has a short and clear guide to what hardware you can use for setting up a Pi-Hole as well as some setup instructions.   Ad-blocking (home surveillance thwarting) is a human rights issue too!https://t.co/1vphCsaug1  — Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 12, 2022ALT

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

This has proved a popular thread. I have no soundcloud, and the things I sell are not of general use.   But you can always follow & support Digital Rights Ireland (who once knocked down a state surveillance law for half a billion people) @DRIalerts https://t.co/vrAPYsxjP4  — Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 13, 2022ALT
monitor-offist

fastest reblog in the west

nonbinaryidiot
froody

image

girl I would kill myself if I did that lol

tricotbf

reading harry potter actively makes you less literate

spiffiesttea

image

j why did you censor the name of the scottish play

some-j-name

I think doing that is way funnier than saying the Scottish play, and I’m not going to risk actually saying the name and having something bad happen

spiffiesttea

i just realized despite me making fun of you for saying m*cbeth, i refused to say it myself. i am fucked up

froody

even I, the op, flinched while writing it in the notes 😔

lorebird

image
catgirlforeskin

do y’all only post from inside a theatre?

foone

All the world's a stage, catgirlforeskin.

archiveofidentityconstellations
archiveofidentityconstellations

when i was younger i always wondered why parents and grandparents didn’t really talk about their lives. they had lived history! don’t they want to talk about it?

but now that i’m older, i find myself understanding.

if someone asked me about the housing crisis and what was going on, or where i was during the pandemic, i wouldn’t want to answer. not because it necessarily traumatized me, but because i don’t want to talk about that. i want to see kids bounce in their bouncy castle and give them italian ice to eat. i want to buy them books about their passion, and hear what they think. i don’t want to talk about my time, that’s in the past. i want to see the now.

sanctusoctopodus
penrosesun

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!