>First, Weve Discovered That About A Quarter Of All The Internet Connection In Or Out Of The House Were

>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.

If you're afab and find yourself thinking stuff like "I wish I had a body like a trans woman," I'm gonna need you to stop and ask yourself what you mean by that. Like reeeeally deeply, introspectively ask yourself. Because your answer probably reveals a lot about your hidden biases towards trans women. Do you want a penis? Great, but not all trans women have those, and it's really weird to try and define a whole group of people by their genitals. Do you want to look more masculine? Because, and I really hope I don't need to say this, viewing/defining trans women as "more masculine women" is super transphobic and fucked up and you need to stop viewing us like that immediately. There are no meaningful universal differences between cis and trans bodies you can define that do not in some way reduce us to our anatomy and/or stereotypes about us. So, instead of comparing yourself to whatever imaginary idea of trans women you have in your head, just be yourself. Explore your body and gender on your own terms, but please, leave us out of it.

started imagining a little rpg health bar replenishing when i eat food and drink water. its easier to take care of myself if i frame it in my mind as keeping my stats up

So what if I splashed around in your bird bath. It’s there for me

oh shit

this is genuinely the best implementation of this i've seen

they named his ass stupid banana