I am a (female and australian) thing who is studying biology (majoring in wildlife). I like animals (especially tauntuans and numbats) and video games and probably you!
Their cult teaches them that the world is full of scary monster people who hate them for being so good and loved by god. If you swear at them and call them names or get in their face you’re just doing the cults work for it.
I’m not saying you have to listen to their presentation or try to debate them (and really getting into a debate without thoroughly understanding what they’re being taught will just make things worse)… I am just saying to be polite and say no thank you like if they were trying to hand you a flyer for something you don’t care about.
It’s easier for them to see the world outside their bubble as less scary if they see everyday people just going about their business and being as nice to them as you are to everyone else. This goes doubly for anyone who happens to dress modestly, not swear, and not drink or smoke because whatever you believe, they’ll see you as a “good” person who happens to strangely have no interest in their “message”, and that might be enough to get some curious about the possibility of themselves living in the real world.
It’s sometimes hard to be nice to people who seem to represent something you dislike. Just remember these “elders” are sheltered young men, some of which are getting their first real contact with people of other/no faiths.
They are not your enemy. They are victims.
They aren’t being sent out to actually convert people, they are being sent out hoping that they will be harassed and treated poorly so they view those outside the cult as dangerous and evil and stick to the safety of the familiar group.
You being mean to some teenager isn’t sticking it to anyone, you’re doing exactly what their church elders want to happen.
PLEASE READ THIS.
Please read this.
Don’t do the church’s work for them.
If you’re kind to enough of them, they put you on a block list.
They were such sweet kids, they’d turn up at my door with the thatch of raspberries out front and try to share their word with me, and I’m me, so, I fed them.
Then it was one of the wee ‘elder’s’ birthday, so I made him a cake, and all the little lads came, and they asked about my books and board games and CCGs, I was just a nice frumpy middle aged Jewish lady, I was no threat, so I fed them and made them cakes and took them to the local gaming store and listened when they talked.
One loved yu-gi-oh cards, and it turns out, one of the other wee lads, we’ll he loved him back, so I got them in touch with some resources so they had support and a different way to pay for college, they’re still together 15 years later, they have dogs, they send me ecards on their birthday. No-one figured out I’d.helped them, I was just the nice lady who made them tea and listened when people were slamming doors.
The next one really wanted to be an artist, so I left out art books and resources, my eldest shared their coptic markers, they draw comic books now, no idea why his folks were insisting he needed to be a dentist, but, he’s not a Mormon anymore, (not a Jew either before anyone makes any counter conversion claims).
The first 2 lads were the only dramatic ones, the rest went back into the network but, like Hugh of Borg, they spread the word, sometimes I’d get Mormons from other cities come and make the journey to break bread at my Sabbath table and be seen.
I still think very fondly of that time.
Many of those boys still email me now and then.
Most of them aren’t Mormons anymore.
Someone higher up spotted the pattern and suddenly no more Mormons at my door.
I was blacklisted, for kindness.
So there you go, if you don’t want Mormons at your door, just love those kids for a couple of years, feed them, help them, and eventually, no more will be allowed to visit
They also aren’t given enough allowance money to feed themselves. When they come to me, I always offer some food cause yeah, I’m living on a uni budget, but at least I’m not on a missionary budget.
The reason these kids aren’t starving is because they get invited to dinner sometimes by other mormons.
genuinely wild to me when I go to someone’s house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven’t seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven’t set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I’ll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital
Share the knowledge
Okay, here we go! I’m gonna try and put this in order from least to most technical knowledge required. I’m not responsible if you accidentally create SkyNet etc.
Level 1: browser extensions
This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.
Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it’s one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don’t. Iceraven is one that does.
Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).
uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don’t like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap ‘em.
Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say “hit like and subscribe” or “Raid Shadow Legends” again.
FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you’ve actually chosen to follow.
Level 2: leaving enshittified services
The software that’s become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.
Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.
Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery
DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network’s DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don’t exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you’re doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can’t really fuck up anything that seriously.
Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.
Once it’s up and running, you’ll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.
With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it’ll get back a message that says “sorry, can’t find it”, so it won’t be able to load any ads.
Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery
Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can’t block ads on your phone when you’re away from home - and what’s worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you’re home.
To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the “local VPN mode”, which doesn’t require you to do any mucking about with your phone’s operating system.
Level 5: automated media piracy
The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what’s called an “arr stack” (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you’ll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.
The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don’t have to do any sharing from your computer, so you’re in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.
Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.
Oh, and don’t be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.
Level 6: fucking with Android
Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.
Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in “root mode” which makes it basically invisible.
You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they’re associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.
Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There’s always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I’ve never had any issues with this one personally.
Level 7: fucking with Windows
This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you’ll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS “playbook” that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.
Level 8: switching to Linux
I’m not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn’t available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you’re confused about stuff.
And that, friends, is a comprehensive approach to banishing the demons of capitalism from your home!
You ever been in a state where you physically have no energy, but you’re bored and socially understimulated so you kind of wish you could just invite people to come over like this:
So you can do this: I regularly burrito myself on the couch next to where my husband and friends are playing D&D and kibbutz, and have been to games with other people doing the same.
You can also call your friends and say “what up I would love to see you but have no fucking spoons do you want to come over and yap while I lay on the couch like a Gothic heroine wasting away from consumption?” And if your friends are cool (since they’re friends with you, they probably are) they will either come over or say “damn I don’t have any spoons either, but we should do that sometime.” And you will have made self-care a little easier for them too, which is very cool of you.
what we say: I am doing it this way because it’s easier for me. what we mean: Your way doesn’t work for me, it’s this way or not done at all. what they hear: I refuse to do it the right way because I’m stupid.
what we say: It would be nice to have a job in something that I’m naturally good at, and something that comes naturally to me. what we mean: It’s draining to spend 8 hours a day only doing things that I do worse than anyone else, and never being allowed to do things I do better than anyone else. what they hear: I want to be the company’s rockstar and put in zero effort to make that happen.
what we say: I don’t know. what we mean: I don’t know. what they hear: I am deliberately trying to anger you on purpose.
what we say: I forgot. what we mean: I forgot. what they hear: I am deliberately trying to anger you on purpose.
what we say: I can’t do that. what we mean: The last time I tried to do that, I burned myself out so badly that the shift manager called me an ambulance twice within 6 months, I ended up in a psych ward, and 3 different professionals told me to not try that again. what they hear: I don’t wanna.
what we say: I’m bored. what we mean: I am so deprived of stimulation that I’m flipping a coin on whether I should try meth or go play in traffic. what they hear:
I’m bored.
One of my best villain characters wasn’t originally even meant to be a villain. I created him as a joke, as a foil and contract to the rowdy, irresponsible and impulsive protagonist, who starts picking on him for honestly no other real reason than the fact that he’s bored and this guy squeaks when he’s startled. And I end up making him and his squeaky distress a comic relief, putting his ass through the humiliation conga line because it was funny.
It’s only when he’s actually performing a carefully calculated assassination for his own benefit, in front of everyone, and getting away with it because everyone has underestimated him and what he’s capable of, I was there like “wait, shit, when did you become like this?” and I look back to all his previous “it’s risky but it just might work”-schemes that almost got the protagonist killed (which he, in the end, only survived by pure luck), and this guy - my brand new and so far the best villain, is right there looking at me like
My favourite kind of ghosts is “creepy but harmless”. Like the finnish manan väki, folk of the dead. They’re literally just people who are dead, who keep showing up. Most of the time it takes a special skill, the gift of a seer, to actually see them - some people are born with the gift, but I’ve heard of many magic spells one can do to get it (like washing your eyes with the same water that a corpse was washed in). Giving yourself the gift is risky, though, since some people will straight-up go insane from horror when they first see the dead, and once you start seeing them, there’s no way to go back to not seeing them.
And they just look like rotting corpses, exactly in the state that they are in in their graves. The newly dead just look slightly yellowed and pale, the more thoroughly decomposed can be missing limbs or so. Those who died violently will have their obvious wounds visible.
Very few who come haunt actually want to harm people. Mothers who died in childbirth will persistently appear, moving things around in attempts to help. Those who moved boundary stones between fields in their lives to steal farmland may be cursed to stand at the rightful border at night, haunting until their crime has been corrected.
There was a tale of a woman - rumoured as a witch during life - who was seen in her family’s cowshed two weeks after her own burial, her hand elbow-deep inside the mouth of her old favourite cow. The ghost explained that she is trying to fish out the communion wafer she once stole from church and fed to the cow as a part of a spell to make the cow thrive - the only way to find rest and go to Heaven is to undo all the magic that she had done in life.
And then there are those who keep showing up to complain about not being buried properly, to complain about how boring it is to lie in the grave, or who simply either haven’t realised that they’re dead, or are too fucking dense to read the room and understand it’s not polite to go around haunting people. The dead are just the same in death as they were in life - if your brother could never read the room while he was alive, being dead won’t grant him the ability either.
The party arrives to a village, where someone - an ordinary villager - tries to sell them a magical item, and promises that it has some sort of a mystical, but difficult-to-observe effect on the wearer. When ‘detect magic’ does nothing to the item, they’re explained that it actually works on a level beyond their simple understanding of magic.
The more you test it, the move obvious it gets that this trinket is 100% not magical or supernatural in any fucking way. But half of the people in the village seem to be wearing them, and swear up and down how magical and amazing they are, with next to no proof.
But if one of the PC:s buy one, they’re also offered the wonderful opportunity to get to sell and distribute them, to become a part of this wonderful organisation and also actually make money while spreading the wonderful gospel of these magic items. Which do nothing.
In the end, the main villain of this village and storyline is a pyramid scheme. Not even a magical one, just a standard run-of-the-mill pyramid scheme selling necklaces.
A high fantasy story about tearing the fabric of reality, where two nations in bloody war suddenly realise that their entire life is only a game of chess between two higher creatures that are like gods to them, who are not even enemies. They are friends, and the game they are playing is over something absolutely frivolous, like who gets to choose where to eat.
At first the protagonists try to stop them, because it’s cruel and senseless for them to pit smaller creatures in smaller pocket dimensions into bloody battle to the death purely on their own whim, but then they realise that they, too, play their own games within their own universe, and every reality is just an endless matryoshka doll of random whims of outside influences, birthing mindless cruelty for truly arbitrary reasons.
Then they all set on a quest to break the 4th wall and come personally kill me, for coming up with such an annoyingly convoluted, pretentiously fake-deep plot.
