If You’re In The US (or In Correspondence With People From There) And You Haven’t Been Paying Attention

Here's a legal PSA:

If you've committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he's not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. ...

YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.

Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional "detectives" who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.

If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say "I want a lawyer".

Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician's assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it's likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.

YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.

Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.

Know your rights. Don't let eccentric detectives put you away.

Lovely people of tumblr, if I may speak with my librarian hat* on for a moment:

If you are in the US, you may be aware that librarians are Going Through It because some malicious people believe in fascism and have decided to make that our problem. Whether you are in the US or not, there is something you can do to help your local librarians out:**

Say something nice to us.

You can post on social media and tag your library, you can find the library’s main phone number and call, you can go in person, you can send a card (we display cards in our break room)! I guarantee you that you will make the day of the person you talk to, we will immediately go tell all our colleagues how lovely you were, and you will help us live to love and fight another day.

*it is a fetching piece of millinery in purple silk

**I propose we make this an international group project. Whether your librarians are going through it or not, we all appreciate a kind word.

A "better" way to do planks.

Depending on the person, planks may either seem too easy or very difficult.

Just like with any other exercise, we can adjust the difficulty to our current ability - this helps us get stronger faster!

If the Internet Archive goes down or stops allowing the uploading of books, the other GG archivists and I have everything backed up and are working on disseminating the archive amongst ourselves to make it more infallible. We'll reupload it if we must. I hope it doesn't come down to that, but I'm grateful we were all here to save everything while we're still were able to

As I've said before, will say again, and will say some more in the far future: The internet is ephemeral. If you love it, save it. Your copy may one day be the only copy.

it's quick it's easy and it's free: piracy

my roommates are very, very good programmers. some of the most technically competent people in the world. and yet both of them flail around helplessly when it comes to piracy. one of them couldn't pirate rimworld and the other needed help getting howl's moving castle. how? perhaps not all people are gifted with innate knowledge of Crime?? i dont understand it, but ive decided to write this helpful guide for them and everyone else with no cyberpunk in their souls*

Helpful reference but too much information for your first time: r/Piracy megathread

Download vs Torrent vs Stream

There are three main ways to pirate things:

Downloading**: this is when you go to a website and click a button and then your browser firefox gives you a little notification telling you it's downloading a file. Then you have the file on your puter and you open it or run it or whatever.

Torrenting: this is when you go to a website and download a torrent file. Then you open that file with another program called a torrent client and it downloads the real file for you.

Streaming: this is when you go to a website and you press play on a video/song and it plays you the thing right there in your browser firefox. no file ever gets downloaded to your machine

Or in flow chart form:

Downloading: firefox -> website that has Movie (2022) -> download button -> wait for it to download -> Movie (2022).mp4 is in your Downloads folder -> you play Movie (2022) with a video player VLC

Torrenting: firefox -> torrent website The Pirate Bay -> search for Movie (2022) -> download the torrent file -> open the torrent file with qbittorrent -> it downloads Movie (2022).mp4 -> Movie (2022).mp4 is in your Downloads folder -> you play Movie (2022) with VLC

Streaming: firefox -> streaming website swatchseries -> you find Movie (2022) -> click play -> Movie (2022) plays in your firefox window

Security Shit

Will I get in legal trouble (in the US or Canada) (I am not a lawyer this isn't legal advice etc etc):

Downloading: No

Streaming: No

Torrenting: No, see fine print. If you use a VPN Mullvad, then no, definitely not. If you don't then: there is a small chance the copyright holder will notice and send a letter to your internet provider. You will get a scary letter from your internet provider (ISP). If that happens a lot there is a chance your ISP will turn off your service (I don't know anyone who has actually had this happen). There is basically zero chance that the copyright holder will sue you: they don't know who you are. They need to get that information from your ISP, and ISPs don't give that information out very freely. They would also have to actually successfully sue you, and that mostly stopped. Overall the risk is that your ISP gets mad at you, not that you get sued and/or go to jail.****

Will I get hacked???

Streaming: No. If you don't have ad block it'll probably open a bunch of annoying popups tho. Get uBlock

Downloading/Torrenting Data (Video/Music/Books): These will generally be safe. Keep your player/reader software updated. Make sure the file has the right extension (mp4, mp3, pdf/epub/mobi, etc).

Downloading/Torrenting Executables (Games/Applications): Not safe. People can and do insert malware into the executable. It will still run, but it will do things in the background you don't want. The way to avoid this is by downloading only from places that are well-known and vetted by the community. I recommend fitgirl repacks. If for some reason fitgirl goes down, check the r/Piracy megathread

Don't ever give anything administrative permissions unless you're really super duper extra sure.

And of course, standard internet security advice applies. See the r/Piracy list of untrusted sites if you're curious about a particular site.

Books

Use libgen. Note that every once in a while libgen gets kicked out of a particular country and that link will break. In that case you should use your favorite search engine to search for libgen and find the new extension

Scientific Papers

Use scihub. Same thing as libgen applies.

Movies/TV

I generally recommend streaming rather than downloading. There's less risk and it's rare that you can't find what you want. Currently I use 123 chill (use uBlock). You can also use Video DownloadHelper to download a video file from a streaming site.

Music

uhhh tbh I get music with a script I wrote myself. Good luck lads, try reddit???

Games

Get torrents from fitgirl

thread.

*I'm deliberately picking one program/site for each step to minimize complexity. please dont do anything unbearably silly like list 8 different torrent clients or get into the minutiae of Firefox vs Firefox Developer Edition***.

**inb4 someone says "well actually torrenting is downloading too". you fool. you absolute buffoon.

*** if you so much as mention chrome I'll download your car.

**** if you are torrenting a lot then maybe your ISP sells you out. if youre going to torrent idk every video game ever then get mullvad

I just read that Donald Trump and his circus took down a website called reproductiverights.gov

This was a website to help women learn about their reproductive rights in the US and to find health care.

This is absolutely disgusting so I’ll share in this post some resources in case you need them:

https://www.nichd.nih.gov/

Contraception and Birth Control Resources

Links to websites of groups that study or provide information about contraception and birth control.

Reproductive Freedom for All

Resources for Accessing Abortion Care

Browse resources for accessing abortion care: find providers, get information and advice, access abortion funds, legal advocacy and more.

plancpills.org

PLAN C: Abortion pills by mail in every state

Plan C is an information resource for self-managed, at-home abortion with pills. Learn how people in the U.S. are accessing abortion pill op

National Abortion Federation

Home - National Abortion Federation

The National Abortion Federation (NAF) is the professional association of abortion providers in North America. We believe that women should

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn

We've lost a lot to the onslaught of enshittification but I can think of none more brazen than Discord getting rid of the send button