Ispeacetoomuchtoaskfor - I'm Always Tired - Tumblr Blog

>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.

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

>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.

>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.

can we just talk about how in the old Pokemon anime they n e v e r acknowledged the madness Ash got up to? Or that he had been a national class Pokemon Trainer ever since the Indigo League? Or how he knew so many famous people?

There were literally episodes where they'd have people talking about how they supported [X] trainer and had watched the last Pokemon League, and then had them not even recognize Ash.

I think about this a lot.

im having feels about the og pokeani coming to an end.

It's been over a year, but still.

“Friends today, friends tomorrow”

I am so sick of fic writers making 10-year-olds talk like babies.

I work with children and have taken numerous classes on adolescent development. Here's some of what I learned because I might actually kill someone if I read another fic where an older child is essentially a four-year-old. (No hate to anyone in particular. Children are confusing.)

(Slight trigger warning for 13 & 14 year-olds. Puberty/sex mentioned)

(Most info is from Chip Wood's Yardsticks: Child and Adolescent Development Ages 4-14)

Wooden Ships and Obscure Disney Films

The RLS Warrior was three days out of Montressor, sails full of the solar wind, and her commander closed his eyes and felt the Etherium around him.

For a number of reasons – not least his old ties with Admiral Amelia – Jim had been heavily involved with the design of the ship, as well as the tradeoffs involved. For all that he wasn’t even twenty-five, yet, the ship was built as much to his ideas as to those of anyone else in the Navy, and after three days he was really starting to get a feel for her.

And he was proud of the work.

The yards had done right by them, and no mistake. She sailed the winds as sweetly as the old Legacy, and if that was partly due to her studdingsails to give her extra sail area – they’d calculated it out a dozen times, even getting Doppler involved, and every time it had come out that the sails were worth the hassle. And the engines sang a fine note, while the treated timbers making up her hull were finely seasoned and showed no sign of weakness or wear.

“Captain?” a nervous voice said, then the voice’s owner corrected herself. “I mean – Commander?”

“Captain is preferred,” Jim replied. “Can’t have more than one captain on a ship.”

Then he opened his eyes, and grinned at the young woman who was nervously clinging to the ropes around the mainmast crow’s nest. “But since there doesn’t seem to be anyone else up here, you can call me Jim if you want.”

“I couldn’t do that!” the woman said, astonished, and her ears flicked down. “You’re – you’re the Captain! And you’re a hero of the Second Procyon War…”

Jim chuckled.

“Midshipwoman Brooks, ten years ago I was a complete tearaway,” he said. “So, did our other midshipmen and women put you up to coming to ask the scary captain about his past? Or is this you personally with a question?”

He shrugged. “I don’t mind either way, I’m just curious. And come on, sit – it’s good you’re comfortable in the shrouds, but there’s no reason to hang there while we’re talking.”

“Right,” Brooks said, still sounding nervous, and clambered into the lookout spot.

For a long moment, there was silence.

“It was just me,” she said. “I was… I suppose I wondered about something, and – I wanted to ask, but it feels like a silly question now.”

“Take it from me, sometimes a silly question is just the question that needs asking,” Jim replied. “Or answering.”

The Warrior shivered a little as they came about, turning six degrees port and adjusting their vector four down as the helmsman pointed them at a different star.

“Well-” the midshipwoman said. “I… why are we on a ship like this?”

Jim raised an eyebrow, something he’d been practising, and Brooks flushed.

“I don’t mean that as a criticism,” she added. “It’s a good ship, of course! I’m just thinking of…”

“The ironclads?” Jim replied.

“The ironclads,” Brooks agreed. “I know they were important in the Procyon war. I also know the Procyons lost, but… the ironclads were so difficult to damage. It feels like even sailing ships like these is a strange choice, let alone building new ones.”

Jim nodded, doing a quick assessment of the girl.

She was… definitely less delinquent than he’d been. She sounded curious, and… realistically speaking, this wasn’t going to stay a secret for long anyway.

It was his decision, and… in this case, he was going to nurture the young officer.

“You’re not wondering anything that we didn’t,” he said. “I was heavily involved in the discussions, actually… perhaps we will end up building the same kind of ironclads as the Procyons were building – I wouldn’t be involved in those decisions, because they’re going on right now and I’m not exactly there.”

He stood, and looked out over the sails of the Warrior. They glowed with inner fire, both directly propelling the ship by catching the wind and also providing the power that let her engines burn at high power for long periods of time.

“I’ve already given you the answer,” he added, glancing at Brooks. “Your academy scores show you’re a bright young woman, midshipwoman – what do you think it is?”

Brooks frowned, and her tail twitched as she thought.

“I think…” she began. “You said… the same kind of ironclads. What other kinds of ironclads are there?”

Jim patted the royal mast, the highest of the four huge cylinders making up Warrior’s mainmast.

“You’re sailing on one,” he answered.

Brooks looked confused, then stood up herself to look down at the sails.

“...how?” she asked. “Ironclads – they don’t look like this!”

“What makes an ironclad?” Jim asked. “It’s the iron, that’s what… experiments showed that it’s actually helpful to have the iron backed by wood, that makes it more resistant to attack. So that’s what Warrior is. She’s a test ship, all right – an ironclad cruiser, with the masts and sails to travel long distances on patrol in a way the Procyon War ironclads never could, and with armour that’s almost as strong.”

He tilted his head, a little. “Midshipwoman, have you ever used a solar sailer?”

Brooks looked a little thrown by the sudden change of topic.

“...no,” she admitted. “I’ve sailed a cutter before, but those have a proper keel and mast… solar sailers seem too dangerous to me. They’re not much more than a board, an engine and a sail, aren’t they?”

“That’s right,” Jim agreed. “And they’re very able to manoeuvre, in ways you can’t even manage by just welding an engine directly to a board. The key is the sail – you’ve done vectors in your classes, the key point here is that you can combine the vectors from the sail and the engine, and the transverse resistance from the sail if you push it to go in a direction against the one it’s meant to go. You can pull some incredibly tight turns.”

Brooks was frowning, clearly processing that information.

“That sounds like it’s personal experience, Captain,” she said. “You’ve done that?”

“I’ve done both,” Jim agreed. “And I’ve captained wooden ships against ironclads… ironclads struggle to turn fast, because they only have differential thrust, and they struggle to move quickly as well. And the former is what let us run circles around them… and strategically, they were dependent on covert support ships carrying fuel. Do you think the Warrior is the same?”

Brooks shook her head.

“No,” she replied, then frowned. “So you’re saying that… the sails are an advantage?”

“They might not be forever,” Jim conceded. “Maybe some day all our line warships will have to be full ironclads, where even the risk of mast damage is too much. But I think even then there’ll be a place for cruisers to have sails, for some years longer.”

He clapped her on the shoulder. “And maybe we’ll both see that day – but right now, if we ran into an ironclad from the Procyon Wars, I’m sure we’d clean their clock. Because this is the finest ship and crew I’ve yet seen, and I’ve seen a few crews.”

Then he looked slightly awkward. “Admittedly, my first one had about ninety percent of it be pirates…”

“Pardon?” Brooks asked. “Was that during the war?”

“Before,” Jim replied. “During my misspent youth. Though… you may as well tell the others this, Miss Midshipwoman – I think I’m going to have all of you young officers, and perhaps the rest of the crew, have at least one go each on a solar sailer. I believe there’s four in one of the holds, and it’s a useful skill… once you’ve flown one, not much else can scare you.”

The feline midshipwoman looked at her captain, still not sure how to take the oddly informal conversation.

“Should I be worried?” she asked.

Jim shrugged.

“That’s more BEN’s department than mine,” he admitted. “He flat out refuses to come up to the crow’s nest, though, so I’ll have to ask him on deck…”

...welp obviously that failed.

Retry?

....nah not until after I'm on my meds

... Someone's probably already said this, but if Ahsoka's training Sabine, who was also trained by Kanan...

The shatterpoint lineage has crossed over with the disaster lineage. Mace Windu must be rolling in his grave.

And now I've run out

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

A couple of our servers have gotten a bit overwhelmed, so we're taking some down time to give them a chance to catch up. We'll be back as soon as possible!

2024-09-02 11:30 UTC

I can't finish the series 😭😭

A couple of our servers have gotten a bit overwhelmed, so we're taking some down time to give them a chance to catch up. We'll be back as soon as possible!

2024-09-02 11:30 UTC

...I may have forgotten about it.

Oops.

I will be setting to work after this week!!! Because right now I am a student leader for a bunch of middle schoolers and a few high schoolers and yeah no time to focus on the kids.

Anybody have any fic recs for the McCallisters finding out what Kevin did in the Home Alone movies?

I couldn't find any and thought I'd ask before setting to work on a post Home Alone 1 fic.

Tex went missing in Central Kansas during the bad winter storms of 2023-2024

I miss him

floof

gray and white tuxedo floof

precious floof

making bread with his sleepy toe beans

caUSING CHAOS AND EATING NERF BULLETS-

my floof

okay so. Are there any fics where Nico admits to knowing Percy in The Son of Neptune?

I've found one. It was barely a single chapter and is nearly a year old. https://archiveofourown.org/works/46402042

Help. P l e a s e

I want to see this and do not have the time or energy to write it

random people: Tolkien is better than Lewis!

Other random people: Narnia is better than Lord of the Rings!

Me and my entire family:

a version of chronicles of narnia where those closest to the kings and queens get put into a sleep when the pevensies are brought back to their world, from which they're awoken only when their beloved four rules return, something à la sleeping beauty.

so the pevensie siblings return to narnia, and logically, it's been thousands of years. their closest friends, those they viewed as family, are, to their knowledge, dead, and they are completely alone now.

until peter and caspian encounter each other in the woods, and are about to get into their fight. it's the moment where peter's back is turned, and caspian has his word raised. lucy is screaming, tears in her eyes, susan and edmund are too far away to do anything, and there's a moment of chaos before caspian's strike is blocked by a larger, longer sword.

oreius, completely disgruntled and still very out of the loop, but only focusing on the fact that his king, his friend, his son, is in danger, glares daggers at caspian, not looking away for a second, even as tumnus gathers a now-relieved, sobbing lucy up in a tight hug, and edmund and susan shriek with joy upon seeing the beavers and mr. fox.

and any feeling of tension or fear immediately seeps out of peter, who drops the rock he had picked up, and stumbles to his feet and to oreius' side, being able to lean on the centaur for the first time in a year, and not have to worry about his safety or his siblings' safety. and oreius, without taking his eyes off of caspian and his followers, just puts an arm around peter.

and caspian remembers. he remembers the stories of the high kings and queens of narnia, and their beloved inner circle, and the absolutely terrifying centaur who called them sons and daughters of his heart, and he can't quite help but think about how utterly fucked he is.

Kansas, off screen: What they don't seem to realize is that the Midwest hates the coasts equally

New York: this made up beef west coast people have with east coast people.

New York: why would I hate you all the way out in California when Jersey is right there?

Yoda: And these two, who are?

Ezra: I'm Ezra Bridger, my master was Ka -

Ahsoka: -leb Dume. Right, Ezra? *aggressively elbowing*

Ezra: Oh, right!

Mace: ... uh-huh... *can sense the truth in his words but also what was up with that???*

Luke: I'm Luke, Luke S -

Cal and Ahsoka, v panick: STARKILLER, HE'S LUKE STARKILLER!

Mace and Yoda, who can tell that they're being lied to: ??

Luke and Ezra: ???

Luke: Anyway I got trained by Obi wan and Yoda!

Ezra: If you count a month on a swamp planet and a few days in hyperspace as training, sure.

I know you have several time travel AUs already but consider: the last (4) Jedi wind up in the Clone Wars era.

Only one of them is an actual Jedi, half of them are romantically involved with someone (maybe even with each other if you ship skybridger), another half are extremely close with one or more Mandalorians, and none of them have had more than two years of training. And somehow THEYRE the only ones left.

The council would have a conniption.

i have a LOT of thoughts about this au but as always, gotta start with the silly

(commission info // kofi support!)

Well there is the elaboration of my being a demisexual straight cisgender Christian girl

To elaborate on my whole "token straight cisgender Christian girl" thing-

there is no elaboration

or questioning

i simply am

happy ninjago anniversary!!! if you reblog ninjago stuff today,, tag it with #ninjago so maybe we can get it trending :00

My “draw the squad” memes so far

So, I didn't get a diagnosis because my doctor has never made any mental health diagnoses before but we both agree it's highly probable and if I decide I want meds for depression or ADHD she will prescribe them

No one:

Absolutely nobody:

Okay is this why we get diagnoses:

Me, full of feral energy, in the midst of a research high and being chaotic as all get out: Must. Know. All the things! *is focused intently on the one subject to know all the things about* *feels like I'm about to vibrate out of my skin when I hit a stall*

Also me, five seconds later being squirrelly as we leave family friends' house: wait is this what people mean when they talk about ADHD hyperfixations?

why have Marvel vs DC when you can have Marvel and DC 

Thank you, ops! Now, let's stop the fighting, please? As the last stated, both have their high and low points and it's okay to like one more than the other. I personally like b o t h.

why do i like marvel so much?

i like marvel because marvel saves the civilians. iron man’s suit can only hold two passengers? he finds a way to save them all anyway. the train’s derailing? pietro maximoff, who has barely used his powers before, saves all those in the way. the city is about to collapse with everyone on it? s.h.i.e.l.d. comes in and saves every single one. marvel saves the people while dc would knock off all of gotham for the hell of it. dc collapses football stadiums and hangs people to prove a point. marvel saves everyone because they’re just as important as the heroes. that’s the real point to be proven. and that’s why i love it so much.