People don't like how I pronounce it so I'm doubling down
Oh, yes.
A few years ago I went to pick up a woman I met on OKCupid for a date, and a friend of hers was there. They kind of over-explained “Oh, she just showed up to say hi” and there was a vague nervousness in the air that even my autistic ass was picking up on. Her friend was playing conspicuously with her phone. I went “Ah, the safety. Need to get a picture?”
Dead silence for about a second and a half, then the friend took a picture, looked at my date, and said “Have fun” and walked out the door.
(I would ordinarily have been clueless, but I’d just been asked to be the safety the previous night.)
My advice to male-presenting folks: recognize that this not your problem. By which I mean, this sort of security check isn’t a problem for you. It doesn’t hurt you. You aren’t being insulted or disrespected. And if you treat it like what it is– a reasonable adaptation to an unreasonable situation– and just roll with it, your dates will be more comfortable, and you will have a better time as a result.
The same applies to phone calls mid-date. Let them answer the damn phone without drama.
They aren’t accusing you of being a dangerous person. The very fact that they are willing to go on a goddamn date with you means that they have extended a certain level of trust. But the fact remains that there isn’t really a way to distinguish between “a man who isn’t dangerous” and “a man who knows how to behave like he’s not dangerous.”
there isn’t really a way to distinguish between “a man who isn’t dangerous” and “a man who knows how to behave like he’s not dangerous.”
One of the great things about Holga is that she is a Barbarian.
How she moves, how she fights, how she hits, it all feels Heavy. She feels Tanky, able to hold on multiple enemies at once. Her punches feel like they have weight and we see the soldiers struggle fighting her, using their numbers to compensate that she otuclasses them in Physical Prowess.
She is the embodiment of the DnD Barbarian. which is that If she hits you, You Go Down.
Streaming companies are the landlords of media. You will rent in perpetuity, and never actually own anything.
✨🏴☠️ PIRATE AND DOWNLOAD YOUR FAVORITE MEDIA IMMEDIATELY. PIRATE AND DOWNLOAD YOUR FAVORITE MEDIA IMMEDIATELY 🏴☠️✨
1. Download Firefox
2. Add the following extensions: uBlock Origin, AdBlocker Ultimate, Privacy Badger, Privacy Possum, minerBlock (ClearURLs and Don’t track me Google also recommended but not necessary for this)
3. Go forth brave soldier
I actually wanna chime in here and give my two cents since I’ve done a lot of anxious research for similar fears of mine. So here goes. Summary/TLDR at the bottom:
The more browser extensions you have installed, the more fingerprintable your web browser is!
That’s why on the TOR Foundation’s website they recommend that you install ZERO extensions on the Tor Browser. Of course, in reality most people want or need some, so here’s what I’ve come to learn on a few vital and mentioned ones. The goal is to minimize your extensions as much as possible.
You don’t need two ad blockers. uBlock Origin is the best of the best, and has an element zapper if it ever misses anything automatically, which it rarely, if ever, does.
Privacy Badger is (allegedly) an outdated extension that doesn’t do very much other than make your browser more fingerprintable.
minerBlocker (while I haven’t don’t much research) doesn’t sound very useful. Because Firefox, if you change the Cookie Block settings, can block CrytoMiners on its own. uBlock Origin can also do this with a special script, but that’s beyond me, so you’ll have to turn to Reddit if you wanna use it for CryptoMiner blocking.
If you’re worried about viruses, the app Malwarebytes is cross-platform and open-source. It’s widely trusted by r/privacy and r/piracy. The free tier won’t run automatically after your free trial is up, so just run it every time you install a piece of pirated software, and then every once in a while after.
Also, you forgot the golden rule of torrenting. A good browser and extensions only prevent fingerprinting from a website, itself. This isn’t what’s gonna get you in trouble with the law. So: GET A VPN!! The ONLY way to prevent your internet service provider (ISP) from seeing what you’re doing is to encrypt your network usage with a VPN. Mozilla (the makers of Firefox) have a paid VPN which I personally use and is very beginner friendly and cross-platform. Most free VPNs cannot be trusted and usually collect, sell, and report illegal data, which defeats the purpose. Without a VPN, however, your ISP will be able to see that you’re downloading peer-to-peer content. Now, that isn’t always a bad thing. Some ISPs don’t care, and won’t do shit. For example, Mozilla VPN has failed a few times for me when I left my client running overnight, and nothing’s ever happened. If you live in Germany or another country with stricter piracy laws, or you have a stricter American ISP, you could get fined and/or have your service turned off. In Germany people have even gotten jail time. The #1 thing to do if you have anxiety about piracy is get a well-trusted VPN like Mozilla’s. In fact, if you only do one thing from this thread, THIS is the one to do. I highly recommend that you NEVER download to upload peer-to-peer pirated content without one, as it is a serious risk.
And finally, use r/piracy as a means to find reliable websites. Do not download torrents or files off random websites before looking it up on r/piracy. Stick to popular and active torrents, and I would suggest primarily using 1337x.to as a trusty website. Also, look for trusted crackers and repackers. For example, if you’re torrenting Mac Apps, a well known cracking group is TNT. If you want games and Windows software, FitGirl and DODI are popular repackers for them. DODI’s repacks are also among the only ones I’ve found that word with Translation Layers like Wine, WineSkin, and CrossOver on macOS and Linux.
Also, no amount of extensions on Firefox will make you anonymous. If want anonymity, you need to download the Tor Browser, add ZERO extensions, and NEVER change the default window size or settings. This level of security usually isn’t necessary for your average torrent downloader, though. I’d much rather use Firefox + a VPN than Tor. Tor is extremely slow because of it’s Onion Anonymizing Network, and is really only needed for people who have a reason to hide from the government, ie: political whistleblowers, protest organizers, etc.
There is also an extension called NoScript. It’s the only extension that comes with Tor, and it can be downloaded on Firefox as well. This extension is your gateway to preventing websites from collecting and sharing your data. HOWEVER, this extension will break websites, and it can be very frustrating to use if you aren’t privacy-minded, tech savvy, and patient. So, if you’re a beginner, I’d recommend trying this one at another time.
And finally, you need a way to download the torrented data (duh). The only two clients (apps) most people trust are qBittorent and Transmission. uTorrent is no longer trusted due to privacy issues. DO NOT USE IT. If you’re a beginner and want something with a pleasant UI, I highly recommend Transmission. I’ve been using it, and personally I love the simplicity over qBittorent; however, I know a lot of more advanced users really love qBittorent.
So, if you wanna get into the basics of piracy, here’s what you need:
- Firefox
- uBlock Origin
- ClearURLs
- “Strict” or “Custom” Cookie Setting on Firefox
- Mozilla VPN!!!
- Transmission
If you wanna go more in depth, add NoScript and swap Transmission for qBittorent.
And if you wanna go really advanced, replace Firefox with Tor Browser and download ZERO extensions. If you need me to tell you how to use Tor and what it’s for, though, then you probably don’t need it.
You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.
Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”
Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.
I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones.
Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of y’all automatically siding with McDonald’s over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because “hurr durr dumb kid didn’t know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lol”, I will grab that McBoot you’re licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.
2nd degree burns actually heal pretty quickly and that’s in adults, children have a borderline superhero-level healing factor. Also the nugget was pressed against the child’s skin for a full 2 minutes. The mother is more at fault than McDonald’s here for giving the small child the food almost immediately after getting the order that was cooked at a fairly normal temperature and collected swiftly. Of course it was gonna be hot. Hot like the handle of a cast-iron skillet, you can hold it for some time but after a bit it’s gonna hurt, and for longer you could blister.
The chicken nuggets were being served at a temperature of ~200°F, despite McDonald’s supposedly having a policy of serving food at temperatures no higher than 160°F. The girl is autistic, and the chicken nugget remained in contact with her body that long because she was unable to communicate to her mother where the chicken nugget had gotten caught as it was burning her. She has a permanent scar from the experience. The family was only asking for $15,000, which is not for anywhere near the level of profit that we know that McDonald’s has made from repeatedly choosing cost-cutting tactics over the health and safety of their consumers and employees. And by the way? Most insurance companies require the victim to sue, and won’t cover any medical costs if they don’t.
What part of all the way up your McFuckingAss did you not fucking understand?!
Ronald McDonald isn’t going to fuck you, and if you want to pathetically simp for a multi-billion dollar corporation, you should do that on your own fucking post.
Wait what? 200°??? Permanent scarring? My info put it at a second degree burn at worst, even a pretty bad one typically heals relatively well.
Second-degree burns can range from quite mild to fairly severe - they can absolutely lead to permanent scarring if they are on the severe end of the spectrum. In this case, yes, the incident in question left permanently scarring - and the girl’s mother testified that her daughter (now seven years old, as this incident was three years ago) refers to the still-quite-visible burn scar as “her chicken nugget”.
And as for not having read anything that mentioned the “served at 200°F” part of this whole case? HMM IT’S ALMOST LIKE THERE WAS SOME EXTREME JOURNALISTIC SPIN APPLIED TO MAKE THIS CASE SOUND WAY MORE FRIVOLOUS THAN IT ACTUALLY WAS.
Wild how people will do that in cases where there’s a huge monetary incentive to minimize what happened, huh? Maybe someone should make a post about it.
Speaking of therapy, I say, as though we're old friends, and you're not a stranger trapped in this metaphorical elevator with me and you can hear the suspension wires starting to fray.
I've been doing a lot of work recently that's focused on imposter syndrome and the feeling that no matter how well or how much I do, I'm not good enough. That I'm somehow tricking everyone into thinking my work is actually good.
Some days it's a minor niggle in my head that I can gentle and soothe with logic and affirmations. Or smother, depending on the mood. Other times it's loud and all-consuming and the mental anguish it causes me is so real I can feel it twitching in my muscles. This desperate fight-or-flight instinct with nowhere to go and nothing to fight but myself.
Anyway, because I'm several types of Mentally Unwell™, I was switching between workshop sheets ahead of next week. Filling in different forms. (Trying to get a good grade in therapy) And I got my "recognize your harmful ADHD coping mechanisms" worksheet mixed in with the "you're not actually lying to people, you just feel like you are because your brain is full of weasels" worksheet, and seeing them side by side made something go topsy turvy in my head, and I just had to sit and breathe for a couple of minutes until the urge to scream passed. Because it clicked, it all suddenly clicked.
The reason the imposter syndrome workshops and therapy sessions aren't sticking was because I do routinely trick people into thinking I'm someone I'm not.
Because I'm masking my ADHD for their convenience.
I've always known there was something wrong with me. My neurotypical peers made it abundantly clear I didn't fit in or was failing in some way I couldn't see nor remedy, no matter how hard I tried.
So I compressed myself into a workaholic box of hyper-competence in the hopes they'd stop noticing the flaws and exploit like me instead. And then subsequently lived with the daily fear that if they looked too close, they'd realize I'm a monumental fuck up with enough personal baggage to block the Suez Canal.
If you ever need someone to burn themselves to ashes for your comfort and convenience, I'm your gal.
Or I used to. Until I had a bit of a breakdown, and the rubber band holding my brain together snapped and pinged off into the stratosphere, never to be seen again.
Unfortunately, the trauma of living like that didn't also fuck off and instead left a gaping maw where my personality ought to be, so now I get to deal with that aftermath.
And it's that aftermath that's affecting the imposter syndrome shit. Because yes, I am hyper-competent and good at what I do-- but it doesn't feel real because that is how I mask.
And the truly frustrating thing is I am good at what I do. I am not pretending. I worked hard to be good at this. It just feels like I'm dicking around because 90% of my personality turns out to be trauma masquerading as humor in a trenchcoat, and having people genuinely like something weird I'm doing is so foreign my brain has decided it's just another form of masking.
I'm pretending to be a good author so people will think I'm a good author, and my brain thinks we are in Danger of being found out. We are in Danger, and writing is Dangerous because then people will know I'm Weird and not whatever palatable version I've presented myself as for their NT sensibilities.
Like the neurotic vampire with a raging praise kink wasn't an obvious giveaway.
Anyway. I got nothing else. Thanks for listening.
I'm going to go be very normal in another room and not stare into the abyss of my own soul for a bit.
I brought this post up with my ADHD therapist today (who also has ADHD), and she got so still that I thought our Zoom call had frozen.
Turns out she just needed to stare into her soul for a bit and it looked like this:
I appreciate Karl Jenkins bemused reaction to the theory that he, a 79 year old white Welsh man composer, is, in fact, a 41 year old black American woman from California.
I mean, how else do you respond to an accusation like that?
“Look, my moustache isn’t that cartoonish and silly, surely?”
Like, what is this scenario? It’s Scooby Doo and Fred rips off the mask to reveal: “Oh my God, it’s the Duchess of Sussex!”
And she would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling hardcore royalists.
