my girlfriend wanted more than the amount of children you can adopt in skyrim so she taught herself how to mod it so that you could adopt them all, and uploaded it to a skyrim modding community so other likeminded player could utilize her code.

months later, an update was added to skyrim that was basically her code, verbatim, lifted directly from the mod, without credit or even permission. this made her so angry that she, at age seventeen, booked a flight to maryland, went to bethesda headquarters and demanded to see todd himself to yell at him.

of course, she was immediately denied this request and escorted out of the building because she was a scary six foot seventeen year old canadian lesbian who had flown all the way to yell at a man who probably had no idea her code was stolen, but she is still legitimately, 100% furious with him to this day

i fucking love her.

FACE YOUR CRIMES, HOWARD

i’ve long since retired from collecting fake internet stories but this stands out in my mind as one that’s just so bold faced and iconic because at no point in skyrim was there an update that allowed you to adopt more than 2 children. i love this post

🩸Blood & Honey 🩸

So... The campaing I'm dming for my friends,,, Mystery of Blood and Honey... No longer a mystery. Reveals that had been planned like three years ago coalesced into what have been two sessions full of reveals, old loved (and hated) npcs appearing and a lot of stress and strong emotions. Super glad to have experienced the thrill of leaving clues for the pcs and watching how they fared elaborating theories. I cannot stress enough how fun this was and god, i wish i could share it with y'all sometime in the future in some way. Dnd, am i right?

Apparently Iran came this close to having a moderate succeed Supreme Leader--if Khomenei had died like a year earlier, Hussein-Ali Montazeri would probably have succeed him, but Montazeri publicly opposed the mass murder of political prisoners in 1988, and was expelled from Khomenei's inner circle.

Imagine where they might be now!

If you look at the overall structure of its government and opinion polling, Iran is a pretty normal country politically, it just has this ideological parasite of far-right politics grafted on to what is otherwise a fairly common political structure that is designed to ensure the dominance of one political party. In that respect it is probably even closer to a normal democracy than a one-party socialist state, because elections are competitive and matter. It’s not a country with a stunted or deformed or underdeveloped political system, it’s just one where some right wing assholes rigged the constitution to give themselves permanent power.

I think that’s why it infuriates me so much—it would be so easy to fix! It would be enormously popular! But the particular design of the system is basically ideal for its indefinite continuation (especially wrt having a specialist armed force that would lose out massively in any reform, thus highly motivating it to coup any reformist leader who might otherwise accrue significant power), even while the Principlist minority remains massively unpopular. It is an ideal exercise in entrenched minority rule.

(And on the other end of the spectrum you have Cuba which seems to be evolving into something like a functional democracy while maintaining the forms of a one-party state. Comparative government is weird.)

So You've Finally Switched to Firefox: a Brief Guide to a Some Very Useful Add-Ons.

This post is inspired by two things, the first being the announcement by Google that the long delayed Manifest V3 which will kill robust adblocking will finally roll out in June 2024, and the second, a post written by @sexhaver in response to a question as to what adblockers and extensions they use. It's a very good post with some A+ information, worth checking out.

I love Firefox, I love the degree of customization it offers me as a user. I love how it just works. I love the built in security features like DNS over HTTPS, and I love just how many excellent add-ons are available. It is a better browser than Chrome in every respect, and of the many Chromium based browsers out there, only Vivaldi comes close.

There are probably many people out there who are considering switching over to Firefox but are maybe putting it off because they've got Chrome set up the way they like it with the extensions they want, and doing all that again for Firefox seems like a chore. The Firefox Add-on directory is less expansive than the Chrome Web Store (which in recent years has become overrun with garbage extensions that range from useless to active malware), but there is still a lot of stuff to sift through. That's where this short guide comes in.

I'm presently running 33 add-ons for Firefox and have a number of others installed but disabled. I've used many others. These are my picks, the ones that I consider essential, useful, or in some cases just fun.

Adblocking/Privacy/Security:

uBlock Origin: The single best adblocker available. If you're a power user there are custom lists and scripts you can find to augment it.

Privacy Badger: Not strictly necessary if you're also running uBlock, but it does catch a few trackers uBlock doesn't and replaces potentially useful trackers like comment boxes with click-to-activate placeholders.

Decentraleyes: A supplementary tool meant to run alongside uBlock, prevents certain sites from breaking when tracker requests are denied by serving local bundled files as replacement.

NoScript: The nuclear option for blocking trackers, ads, and even individual elements. Operates from a "trust no one" standpoint, you will need to manually enable elements yourself. Not recommended for casual users, but a fantastic tool for the power user.

Webmail Ad Blocker: The first of many webmail related add-ons from Jason Saward I will be recommending. Removes all advertising from webmail services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Popup Blocker (Strict): Strictly blocks ALL pop up/new tab/new window requests from all website by default unless you manually allow it.

SponsorBlock: Not a fan of listening to your favourite YouTuber read advertisements for shitty products like Raycons or BetterHelp? This skips them automatically.

AdNauseam: I don't use this one but some people prefer it. Rather than straight up blocking ads and trackers, it obfuscates data by injecting noise into the tracker surveillance infrastructure. It clicks EVERY ad, making your data profile incomprehensible.

User-Agent Switcher: Allows you to spoof websites attempting to gather information by altering your browser profile. Want to browse mobile sites on desktop? This allows you to do it.

Bitwarden: Bitwarden has been my choice of password manager since LastPass sold out and made their free tier useless. If you're not using a password manager, why not? All of my passwords look like this: $NHhaduC*q3VhuhD&scICLKjvM4rZK5^c7ID%q5HVJ3@gny I don't know a single one of them and I use a passphrase as a master password supplemented by two-factor-authentication. Everything is filled in automatically. It is the only way to live.

Proton Pass: An open source free password manager from the creators of Proton Mail. I've been considering moving over to it from Bitwarden myself.

Webmail/Google Drive:

Checker Plus for Gmail: Provides desktop notifications for Gmail accounts, supports managing multiple accounts, allows you to check your mail, read, mark as read or delete e-mails at a glance in a pop-up window. An absolutely fabulous add-on from Jason Saward.

Checker Plus for Google Drive: Does for your Google Drive what Checker Plus for Gmail does for your Gmail.

Checker Plus for Google Calendar: The same as the above two only this time for your Google Calendar.

Firefox Relay: An add-on that allows you to generate aliases that forward to your real e-mail address.

Accessibility:

Dark Reader: Gives every page on the internet a customizable Dark Mode for easier reading and eye protection.

Read Aloud: A text to speech add-on that reads pages with the press of a button.

Zoom Page WE: Provides the ability to zoom in on pages in multiple ways: text zoom, full page zoom, auto-fit etc.

Mobile Dyslexic: Not one I use, but I know people who swear by it. Replaces all fonts with a dyslexia friendly type face.

Utility:

ClearURLs: Automatically removes tracking data from URLs.

History Cleaner: Automatically deletes browser history older than a set number of days.

Feedbro RSS Feed Reader: A full standalone reader in your browser, take control of your feed and start using RSS feeds again.

Video Download Helper: A great tool for downloading video files from websites.

Snap Link Plus: Fan of Wikipedia binge holes? Snap Link allows to drag select multiple hyperlink and automatically open all of them in new tabs.

Copy PlainText: Copy any text without formatting.

EPUBReader: Read .epub files from within a browser window.

Tab Stash: A no mess, no fuss way to organize groups of tabs as bookmarks. I use it as a temporary bookmark tool, saving sessions or groups of tabs into "to read" folders.

Tampermonkey/Violentmonkey: Managers for installing and running custom user scripts. Find user scripts on OpenUserJS or Greasy Fork, there's an entire galaxy out there of ingenious and weird custom user scripts out there, go discover it.

Browsing & Searching:

Speed Dial 2: A new tab add-on that gives you easy access to your favourite sites.

Unpaywall: Whenever you come across a scholarly article behind a paywall, this add-on will search through all the free databases for an accessible and non-paywalled version of the text.

Web Archives: Come across a dead page? This add-on gives you a quick way to search for cached versions of the page on the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, Archive.is and others.

Bypass Paywalls: Automatically bypasses the paywalls of major websites like those for the New York Times, New Yorker, the Financial Times, Wired, etc.

Simple Translate: Simple one-click translation of web pages powered by Google Translate.

Search by Image: Reverse search any image via several different search engines: Google Image, TinEye, Yandex, Bing, etc.

Website Specific:

PocketTube: Do you subscribe to too many YouTube channels? Would you like a way to organize them? This is your answer.

Enhancer for Youtube: Provides a suite of options that make using YouTube more pleasant: volume boost, theatre mode, forced quality settings, playback speed and mouse wheel volume control.

Augmented Steam: Improves the experience of using Steam in a browser, see price histories of games, take notes on your wishlist, make wish listed games and new DLC for games you own appear more visible, etc.

Return YouTube Dislikes: Does exactly what it says on the package.

BlueBlocker: Hate seeing the absolute dimmest individuals on the planet have their replies catapulted to the top of the feed because they're desperate to suck off daddy Elon sloppy style? This is for you, it automatically blocks all Blue Checks on Twitter. I've used it to block a cumulative 34,000 Blue Checks.

Batchcamp: Allows for batch downloading on Bandcamp.

XKit Rewritten: If you're on Tumblr and you're not using whichever version of XKit is currently available, I honestly don't know what to say to you. This newest version isn't as fully featured as the old XKit of the golden age, but it's been rewritten from the ground up for speed and utility.

Social Fixer for Facebook: I once accidentally visited Facebook without this add-on enabled and was immediately greeted by the worst mind annihilating content slop I had ever had the misfortune to come across. Videos titled "he wanted her to get lip fillers and she said no so he had bees sting her lips" and AI photos of broccoli Jesus with 6000 comments all saying "wow". Once I turned it on it was just stuff my dad had posted and updates from the Radio War Nerd group.

BetterTTV: Makes Twitch slightly more bearable.

Well I think that's everything. You don't have to install everything here, or even half of it, but there you go, it's a start.

A white kangaroo. Nothing special apart from that this was taken in Finland.

A bit lost

My guy off the shits

Odd mouse

Honestly, it makes sense that it was Finland

Full of forbidden monke knowledge

"What's wrong with me?"

"I think your crazy"

"Want a second opinion!"

"Your also lazy"

Is this a fucking space mission or something. That poor pot...

dead souls keep callin' me

A self-loading rifle designed by John Douglas Pedersen (1881 - 1951) in 1924, USA 

The design of the Pedersen self-loading rifle. A drawing from the patent.

The scheme worked according to the principle of operation of the automatic machine gun of the Schwarzlose system: the deceleration of unlocking was carried out by the resistance of a pair of articulated levers and the redistribution of recoil energy between the two parts of the shutter.

Pedersen's self-loading rifle with an open bolt.

A special double-row pack was designed to hold 10 rounds

Technical specifications:

Total length 1117 mm

Barrel length 610 mm

Weight 4.1 kg

The patron .276 Pedersen (7x51 mm)

The magazine capacity is 10 rounds

In total, about 200 units of self-loading rifles of Pedersen's design were produced, the rifle was not put into service with the army

OH MY GOD