oh fuck *falls back into old habits* *screen fades to black* *level loading* TIP: your belief that you are incapable of changing for the better will become a self fulfilling prophecy if left unchallenged

#TIP: the only way out is through #TIP: the time will pass anyways

cleromancy

i feel like it's a pretty normal thing as an adult to come to terms with fucked up shit from your childhood you thought was normal at the time so i also think its an extremely reasonable impulse to want to re examine stories with young protagonists through that lens even if or especially if its a power fantasy for young people. stories have multiple applications here and speak differently to different people at different stages in their lives... you can grasp that smth is intended as a power fantasy for children and still want to engage with it as an adult realizing you were parentified you know? its the mark of a good story that has the capacity for that

cleromancy reblogged

livingmeatloaf

animentality

queselevaaser

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)

#search engines

cleromancy reblogged

iamwestiec

saathi1013

I'm so tired of discussions about fandom's broader behavioral patterns devolving to focus on individuals' personal excuses for not liking a specific female character /character of color (&tc), instead of us having the necessary discussion about how we (in aggregate) have fostered a community space (fandom) where people who DO like/celebrate/create fanwork for those characters are erased, marginalized, or driven away.

cleromancy reblogged

habunnn

As recompense for no season 2, I will slowly begin inserting scum villain characters into other various media

#svsss

cleromancy reblogged

everythingfox

“So hard to walk a human these days”

Source: instagram.com

#bruce and tim #bruce: i dont need a robin any--#tim: NOPE

cleromancy reblogged

nineties-effect

cleromancy reblogged

aqua-dan

lesbianboyfriend

i love my bedroom it’s awesome here. it even has bed. and blanky.

cleromancy reblogged

trailcam baby

cleromancy reblogged

Things that will make your computer meaningfully faster:

Replacing a HDD with an SSD
Adding RAM
Graphics cards if you're nasty
Uninstalling resource hogs like Norton or McAfee (if you're using Windows then the built-in Windows Security is perfectly fine; if you're using a mac consider bitdefender as a free antivirus or eset as a less resource intensive paid option)
Customizing what runs on startup for your computer

Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:

Installing firefox and setting it up with ublock origin
adding the Auto Tab Discard extension to firefox to sleep unused tabs so that they aren't constantly reloading
Closing some fucking tabs bud I'm sorry I know it hurts I'm guilty of this too

Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:

Running malwarebytes and shutting down any malicious programs it finds.
Correcting disk utilization errors

Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:

Clearing cache and cookies on your browser
Restarting the computer
Changing your screen resolution
Uninstalling unused browser extensions

Things that do not actually make your computer faster:

Deleting files
Registry cleaners
Defragging your drive
Passively wishing that your computer was faster instead of actually just adding more fucking RAM.

This post is brought to you by the lady with the 7-year-old laptop that she refuses to leave overnight for us to run scans on or take apart so that we can put RAM in it and who insists on coming by for 30-minute visits hoping we can make her computer faster.

ms-demeanor

There are people saying "what does this mean" so:

Meaningfully Faster

HDD means "hard disk drive" SSD means "solid state drive." An HDD has a spinning platter and a mechanical arm that has to wiggle back and forth very quickly to read the information written on the platter, while an SSD is a silicon chip that has the information "flashed" into it (basically it takes a snapshot of bits with electricity - it's unimportant how it works, just that it doesn't require mechanical movement to access data, and is therefore MUCH faster).
Installing an SSD does *not* require an M.2 slot and does *not* require a ton of expertise on most computers. There are many SATA SSDs available and if you want to replace your HDD all that you need to do is c lone your hard drive and look up how to install your new SSD on ifixit (link in a bit).
Your storage drive (SSD or HDD) is the drive that stores the files and programs on your computer. People often confuse long-term drive storage with "memory" and when they get low-memory warnings they think they need to delete stored files. This is inaccurate because:
RAM is Random Access Memory - if is basically the "working memory" of your computer, it keeps track of all the things that your computer does/is doing. For example: if you are working in your browser, the browser is not saving everything that you're doing to your desktop so everything that is going on in your browser is using RAM to remember what pages you've got open and what images are on them, etc. Same if you're working in any other program: if you're writing a word doc and you haven't saved it in a while, all the changes are being tracked by the RAM but are not yet saved on your storage drive. "Low Memory" doesn't mean you're out of room for your computer to hold onto files, it means your computer is low on memory to think about stuff. Because programs are written to use more and more memory as time passes (which is a good thing, for the most part, but causes frustrating problems for people with older devices) older computers will struggle to run modern programs with the amount of RAM the older computers have in them.
RAM comes in different speeds, and the speed of your RAM does matter but if you get RAM that matches the speed of your installed RAM you should experience better speeds from your computer. Some computers have the RAM directly soldiered to the motherboard and cannot have RAM added (this is pretty much true of all macs. I do not recommend buying macs.) but if your computer DOES allow you to add RAM it is generally an easy process - check IFixIt.Com for instructions: just search the model number of your computer and look at the replacement guide for RAM and you will be able to see if you can replace your RAM and see the steps to follow along if you want to do that. There are a large number of tools to look up what RAM will work in your computer. Personally I like the Crucial RAM Configurator tool. Just look up your computer and it will recommend compatible RAM. You don't have to buy the Crucial RAM, you can use the Crucial RAM configurator to get the specs you need and then search for yourself by Size, Memory Technology, Speed, Format, and number of Pins.

Graphics cards are for graphics processing and they're "if you're nasty" because adding a dedicated graphics card is kind of a big hurdle these days: computers are smaller inside than they used to be and graphics cards are big and they are also very expensive right now. Unless you are using a gaming laptop you likely cannot add a graphics card to your laptop, and unless you have at least a couple hundred dollars to spare you can't add a graphics card to your desktop either. But also they will only speed up a very specific subset of applications; if you don't do anything that requires a GPU to get shit done (video rendering, really complicated math, etc) then it isn't going to make your computer faster.
Norton and McAfee run in the background of your computer at all times and can suck up a lot of valuable memory, especially if they decide to randomly start a scan or check back in with the mothership to make sure you've paid for another seven years. They are annoying and they can slow everything else down - McAfee in particular is notorious for this. Modern Windows Operating systems (10 and 11) have a lot of security features built in at baseline and Windows Defender is a perfectly functional whole-device antivirus for almost all users. It was never true that macs couldn't have software infections or couldn't be infected with malware, it's just that *people used to write fewer malicious softwares for mac( and NOW there are a lot more infections written for OSX *and* mac users often think they don't need antivirus. Buds. You do need antivirus. Since Bitdefender only has a free virus scanner for Mac, not antivirus, and Sophos Free is only good for a month, and Avast has recently sold customer data, try Avira.
If you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and click on "task manager" you will find a list of applications that run on startup. Programs that run on startup are turned on and active every time you start your computer, regardless of whether you use the program or not. So, for instance, let's say you have an HP printer and there are drivers for the printer on your computer but you only print things maybe twice a year. If your HP Printer Print Utility is set to run on startup that means that every time you start your computer it wakes up and turns on this program, which slows down your startup time and takes processing power in the background. So just disable it on startup and only start the program when you need it. The only difference here is that it'll take a few seconds to start the utility when it's time to print. Things that I've got disabled on startup include: Microsoft Edge, Adobe, and Cortana.

Faster Browsing

You should be using Firefox anyway because Firefox rules and in literally hundreds of tests performs as well or better than chrome. If someone says that firefox is ridiculously slow it is because they've either set up a really weird configuration, have had the install go wrong, or just don't understand what they're doing. But ASIDE from that you should use Firefox with Ublock Origin because Ublock Origin is an *amazing* adblocker that doesn't whitelist ads and lets you do things like manage cookies and block annoying popups and a bunch of other stuff. And as of 2023 it will be impossible to install Ublock Origin on Chrome so you may as well switch to Firefox now and live that ad-free life. Ad-blocked browsing speeds up your browser because your computer isn't spending extra energy on loading ads and less shit loading means less RAM utilization means faster computing.
Auto Tab Discard is an extension that allows you to set tabs to sleep after an amount of time that you determine. You can customize your experience so that it doesn't sleep tabs with partially filled forms, or doesn't sleep tabs with media playing in them, or doesn't sleep a specific tab for a session, or doesn't ever sleep tabs from a specific website. Many people use OneTab, which basically turns your tabs into a bookmark list that opens the page when you click in OneTab, but I personally prefer Auto Tab Discard - neither of those are "better" than the other, it's just a question of what works for you.

Faster if you are having an actual problem

Open tabs eat RAM. Your computer is expending memory thinking about what's on all of those pages and even if most of them are slept you probably have more awake tabs than you need.
Malwarebytes has a free virus/malware scanning and removal tool that you can download and run to identify and remove malware or viruses that may be stealing your information and running background programs that are fucking up your speeds. If you think your computer might be slow because you might have a virus, go to malwarebytes, download the free version, run a scan, and follow the instructions that it gives you.
Disk utilization errors happen for a number of reasons and they will all slow down your computer. Here are some of the reasons they happen and some ways to fix them. If you hare having a persistent disk usage error issue *DO NOT* replace your HDD with an SSD until it is resolved because these errors can destroy an SSD.

Superficially Faster

Your browser cache and cookies are the things that your browser remembers between sessions: it might be logins for various sites or the logos of your homepage or a bunch of other stuff. If your browser is running super slow because you haven't cleared cache/cookies for a long time, doing this can help because it will basically make your browser forget about the cookies it has been carrying around for five years for a site you haven't logged into since four years and seven months ago. These are tiny pieces of data but they can add up over time which is why they will make your browsing experience faster if you haven't done it in years but won't make a difference if you clear your cookies and cache monthly. Doing this will log you out of all the sites you're logged into (which shouldn't be a huge deal, but you do need to be ready to log in a bunch, so you should HAVE A PASSWORD MANAGER TO MAKE THAT EASIER). This will make your browser run a bit faster, but if your computer is slow for non-browser reasons or if your cache/cookies have been cleared recently it will have no impact on your computer speeds.
Restarting your computer will speed your computer up for a bit because it will shut down all the programs you had running and clear your computer's RAM of all the stuff it was remembering for as long as you had those programs open. This is, again, a superficial improvement, and if you have, say, restarted your computer three times today it is unlikely that restarting again will do anything for you. But yeah if it's been a couple weeks, friend, restart your computer it is tired and it wants to run patches and it needs to forget the twenty docs you're editing for a minute so it can get its head on straight.
Reducing your screen resolution can make your computer run a bit faster if you're doing graphics-heavy stuff and have really shit built-in graphics support, but realistically all it is likely to do is make your computer look weird.
Your browser extensions run on startup and cause your browser to use more RAM at baseline; you should be installing minimal browser extensions and uninstalling any that you don't need. If it's been a while since you checked your extensions go uninstall the unused ones right now and restart the browser and you may speed up a bit. But the majority of people in the world run pretty minimal extensions so this is unlikely to fix most people's problems.

Will not make your computer faster

Unless your storage drive is within 10% of its maximum capacity it is in no way fucking up your speed. If it is within 10% of capacity go delete whatever's in your downloads folder, clear out your temp files, and empty your recycle bin. If that doesn't take care of it, use a backup drive or a thumb drive and copy off the photos, videos, and music you don't use very often, and only keep what you're using on your computer. If you've got an SSD having too little storage available can fuck with the lifespan, so aim to keep at least 10% free.
Registry cleaners are supposed to clean your computer's registry; basically they're supposed to look at the index of all the stuff your computer knows and delete redundant or outdated entries on the index. However it has been literal decades since a registry cleaner would be able to meaningfully improve performance while they can still absolutely fuck your computer up bad enough that it needs a reinstall and a lot of them are just straight up malware, some of them are actual for-realsies ransomware, a bunch of them sell your data, and you don't need ANY of them. If you don't know enough to fuck around with your registry by hand you shouldn't trust some random ass software that has a history of data breaches and virus infections associated with it. Fuck all registry cleaners.
Manual drive defragging has been obsolete on Windows Machines since Windows 7 shipped with an automatic defragging utility in 2011. In the past when you saved a file to a hard drive it might save that file in a bunch of little pieces scattered all over the platter, so accessing that file meant accessing all the *fragments* of that file and "defragging" meant taking some time every once in a while to put files together into whole files instead of fragments. But then eleven years ago Windows made that process automatic, so unless you have *seriously* fucked up your computer somehow it shouldn't be an issue, and if it is an issue you can run a defrag and then make sure automatic defragging is enabled. But that whole conversation is probably moot since SSDs don't need to be defragmented (and defragging them actually adds to the device wear). So basically if your computer actually DOES need a defrag it is probably more fucked than you initially thought and unless that is the case then it is already defragging so doing an additional defrag won't make anything faster and/or might cause extra wear to an SSD.

ms-demeanor

If you are using an older computer and it is tortuously slow and you can't upgrade the RAM or swap in an SSD but you *can* install software, I would strongly recommend installing Linux.

The vast majority of people these days use computers primarily for web browsing and occasionally use an office suite. Most people don't even store their music or photos on their computers these days. If your computer is basically an internet machine that you don't use for anything other than browsing and basic word processing/spreadsheets, then there is no reason not to switch to Linux.

I would recommend installing Linux Lite, which is a well-supported, widely-used distro that most computers built within the last twenty years should be able to run. It's called "Lite" because it is an operating system that requires minimal processing, storage, and memory to run.

To do this you will need:

A 4GB USB stick or a blank DVD to create installation media
An internet connection to download the software
Another computer or phone that you can use to follow the instructions, or a printed/written copy of the installation guide
A computer on which to install Linux. Installing Linux as the sole operating system on this computer (which is my recommendation here) will mean that everything else on the computer is deleted. Save all of your files/movies/music/etc. to a backup drive or another computer before you install Linux, because installing a new OS will delete literally everything on the computer and make it impossible to get back.

Here is where you can download Linux Lite.

Here is the Linux Lite help manual, I've linked you directly to the step-by-step installation guide. If you get to a step that you don't understand, search the terms that you're unfamiliar with phrased as questions like "why do I need an ISO to install linux?" or "how do I enter UEFI BIOS on my version of Windows?"

Follow the instructions for installing Linux Lite, and then you can install software on your new OS. Linux Lite comes bundled with Libre Office, which is a free office suite like Microsoft Office that has programs similar to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. It installs with Chrome, so I would recommend installing Firefox and uninstalling Chrome as soon as you're able to get on the internet.

After that you can pick and choose from a wide variety of linux-compatible software and you can use your computer as a regular computer. I'd say that it's probably a good idea to be picky about what software you install, and to try to keep your computer as lean as possible if you're trying to get a longer life out of an old device.

There are a lot of people in the notes who are saying "my computer can't even load four tabs" or "my computer can't even open the software I need to do this" and if that is your computer I think you've pretty much got nothing to lose from installing Linux. If your computer is essentially unusable in Windows then it's probably not going to be *less* functional in Linux, unless you're keeping the computer the way that it is for some very specific software you're using.

A lot of people think that they can't uses Linux because it's entirely in the command line or doesn't have a graphic interface or something, but most linux distros only look about as different to users as windows does to mac or vice versa.

This is what the Linux Lite default desktop looks like:

It's got a start menu and a task bar and folders on the desktop, same as any other computer. It's very easy to use and has the help manual installed right there as soon as you're up and running so that you can troubleshoot your way through any issues.

Really, seriously: if your computer is slow as fuck and all you use it for is web browsing, this will make your computing experience significantly better without having to buy anything but a thumb drive.

ms-demeanor

People are reblogging just the first section of this post and asking what these things mean, so I'm reblogging this in hopes that they'll see the comprehensive update in the notes.

cleromancy reblogged

cleromancy reblogged

As someone who buys a shit tonne of vintage and retro items all the time I need to tell you about the "shart zone" and "prime nuclear cockroach material"

when buying used items i will do anything in my power to avoid the shart zone, which is in the range of 5-10 years old, this is a short enough amount of time for especially electronic items to have not found a way to fall apart horribly but have become out dated enough to have no support and likely will not retain any value. I do however LOVE the nuclear cockroach material zone which is anything 20+ years old. If it still works after 20 years it is going to work forever. A great example of this is my pc which exists in the shart zone and has to be revved up to turn on lawnmower style, but my N64 works fine.

wizardpotions

The same goes for clothes, I wear the same 40+ year old knitted jumper EVERY DAY and it only has two small holes in it. It's less that they don't make them how they used to and more survivor bias. You don't see all of the retro items that fell apart within a year because they got thrown away. You only see the nuclear cockroach material that will still be here at the heat death of the universe.