Hey Rope Nerds, New Knowledge Just Dropped On Rope Bondage, Check Out The Science!

VPNs do not make you more secure

here's how they work!

first of all, most of your internet traffic is already encrypted via TLS (Transport Layer Security). Things that aren't encrypted are usually videogames or less important applications.

a VPN encrypts traffic between your computer and the VPN server you're using.

your Internet Service Provider (ISP) sits in the middle of that transaction.

cue the MS paint diagram

Without a VPN:

With a VPN:

the traffic between your VPN server and the rest of the internet is not encrypted any further.

things that VPNs are good for:

bypassing geo-blocking

bypassing website blocks set up by your ISP

obscuring network traffic from your ISP

things that VPNs are not good for:

browsing the internet without having your activity logged. every company that gives internet service logs the activity, it's half of how they make sure they're not being hacked.

hiding information from the government. VPN providers WILL bend to subpoenas, they WILL turn over logs of your network activity.

cybersecurity. VPNs can't save you once the traffic is between them and the final destination. they don't analyze your traffic to detect and stop hackers, they don't add any encryption where it matters.

VPNs are not a shortcut to security. you cannot pay 15 dollars a month to forgo all responsibility for your own digital privacy. do your research, use a password manager, stay safe.

my friends i hope you find this information useful. you have been sold a lie. remember to show extreme skepticism to youtube sponsorships and journalism websites which sing their praises.

sources: i have a certificate iv in cybersecurity

There's been a lot of lists floating around twitter of 100 books of a particular genre, or of a particular level of 'literary' merit.

Well, this is my list. 

If you don't like it, make your own.

In no particular order:

1 Exquisite Corpse, Poppy Z Brite

2 Lost Souls, Poppy Z Brite

3 Call Me By Your Name, Andre Aciman

4 Leash, Jane DeLynn

5 The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux

6 Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, Eric Larocca

7 The Last of the Wine, Mary Renault

8 I, Claudius, Robert Graves

9 Sarah, JT LeRoy

10 Dogs of War, Adrian Tchaikovsky

11 Moby Dick, Herman Melville

12 Dead Silence, SA Barnes

13 Ghost Ride, Hope Zane

14 Dark Rise, CS Pacat

15 All Systems Red, Martha Wells

16 Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time, KM Szpara

17 The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

18 Everyone On the Moon is Essential Personnel, Julian K Jarboe

19 The Willows, Algernon Blackwood

20 To Be Taught If Fortunate, Becky Chambers

21 Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake

22 Deerskin, Robin McKinley

23 A Dowry of Blood, ST Gibson

24 The Putrescent Vein, Dorian Bridges

25 The Wingspan of Severed Hands, Joe Koch

26 The Faerie Hounds of York, Arden Powell

27 The Monster of Elendhaven, Jennifer Giesbrecht

28 The Apple Tree Throne, Premee Mohumad

29 An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon

30 The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

31 Slippery Creatures, KJ Charles

32 The First Man In Rome, Colleen McCullough

33 A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

34 Mexican Gothic, Sylvia Moreno-Garcia

35 Psycho, Robert Bloch

36 Under the Pendulum Sun, Jeanette Ng

37 The Crows, CM Rosens

38 Ritual, David Pinner

39 Dear Laura, Gemma Amor

40 Here, the World Entire, Anwen Kya Hayward

41 The Orange Eats Creeps, Grace Krilanovich

42 Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

43 Philip and Alexander, Adrian Goldsworthy

44 The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova

45 Babel, RF Kuang

46 As Simple as Hunger, D Des Anges

47 Heavy, D Des Anges

48 The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, Storm Constantine

49 God's War, Kameron Hurley

50 Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee

51 Perdido Street Station, China Miéville

52 Midnight Sun, Stephanie Meyer

53 Damascus, Christos Tsiolkas

54 Penhallow, Georgette Heyer

55 Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss

56 Valiant, Holly Black

57 Interview With the Vampire, Anne Rice

58 The Secret History, Donna Tartt

59 Flowers in the Attic, Virginia Andrews

60 Generals Die in Bed, Charles Yale Harrison

61 Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay

62 Dune, Frank Herbert

63 Red Dragon, Thomas Harris

64 The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin

65 A Kiss Before Dying, Ira Levin

66 Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

67 Orlando, Virginia Woolf

68 The Tommyknockers, Stephen King

69 Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higgenbothem

70 Strain, Amelia C Gormley

71 Sons of Devils, Alex Beecroft

72 Carnivore, Jonathan Lyon

73 Passchendaele, Paul Ham

74 Let the Dead Bury their Dead, Randall Keenan

75 Angel Mage, Garth Nix

76 The Long Walk, Stephen King

77 The Black Jewels Trilogy, Anne Bishop

78 Huge Rat Comforts Himself With Lies, Mikko Harvey

79 The Two-Headed Calf, Laura Gilpin

80 Sisters of the Vast Black, Lina Rather

81 Your Mind is a Terrible Thing, Hailey Piper

82 Vagabonds!, Eloghosa Osunde

83 The Boy in the Dress, Jonathan Butler

84 Salome, Oscar Wilde

85 Macbeth, Shakespeare

86 Killing for Company, Brian Masters

87 The Stranger Beside Me, Anne Rule

88 The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber & David Wengrow

89 Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

90 The Trauma Cleaner, Sara Krasnostein

91 Iron Widow, Ciran Jay Zhao

92 Kursk, Robert Moore

93 The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben

94 Spectred Isle, KJ Charles

95 The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

96 Catch-22, Joseph Heller

97 Dead Europe, Christos Tsiolkas

98 All I See is Mud, Andrew Dunkley

99 To Hell and Back, Sydney Loch

100 The Wicked Boy, Kate Summerscale

How's that for a list of 100 books that fuck!

orig

i know this means absolutely nothing to most people but basically all of the little web game things I've made recently (angels in automata, hex plant growing game, d.a.n.m.a.k.u., life music, sudoku land, the metroidvania style map editor, etc etc etc) are all entirely self-contained individual client-side html files that can be downloaded and run offline and have literally no libraries or frameworks or dependencies, because i'm an insane woman who enjoys hand coding my input handling and display code from scratch in vanilla js and having it all live in one single html file with the game logic and the page structure and the page style all just living and loving together side by side in a universal format that can be run by any web browser on any devixe. i'll even include image files as base64 data-uri strings just to keep every single asset inside the one file.

If any of y’all didn’t know, there’s a free online library, aka

https://openlibrary.org/

and I found like, twelve ebooks I’ve been wanting to read on there, and blasted through like three of them during the course of a boring-ass shift.

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

What do you all study when you're doing art studies??

Creative & DIY

I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.

to anyone in the areas impacted by the wildfire smoke, my #1 biggest piece of advice as someone whos been dealing with wildfire smoke in the NW united states for years, is build yourself a Corsi-Rosenthal Cube

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!

i think it took us maybe a half hour to put ours together, if that, and we replace the filters every 3 months. it's really made a HUGE difference, both when the air quality is bad, but also with our allergies

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.