twovests

twovests OP wrote (edited )

Reply to Tom Scott video on VPNs, very thorough explanation of when *actually* to and when not to use a VPN for privacy reason by twovests

EDIT: A TLDR of the video:

VPNs are useful for:

  • Appearing to be from a different country to get past content restrictions (piracy!)
  • To get past firewalls/filters (e.g. in China)
  • To stop your ISP or people on your network from seeing and monetizing your DNS queries
  • To hide your public IP address from sites you connect to
  • To protect your data on HTTP / non-SSL sites from your device to the proxy
  • (Not mentioned in the video) for creating a virtual network, useful in some work situations

VPNs don't actually help much with protecting the contents you send over the web (these are usually encrypted), i.e.

  • Bank passwords and data
  • Stopping advertisers from tracking you (there's a lot of stuff other than your IP)
  • Making you anonymous
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twovests wrote

Reply to comment by Moonside in Can someone succinctly explain what's special/interesting about Homestuck? by Moonside

I have not seen Adventure Time, so I can't make any comparisons.

That said, Homestuck definitely revolves around certain themes, many of them emotional. I don't want to spoil things too much, but a lot of these things are pretty timeless. I recently re-read Homestuck (i.e. in the past year), and it holds up well.

I will admit, there's definitely a value to having had been there to discuss, speculate, and theorize with others. It gives one time to digest and metabolize each update, a forced pacing that one might not get when reading it straight through.

But that's true for any TV show! Game series! Written fiction series (especially penny novels)! Or anything else that has a release cycle.

If you're interested in Homestuck, I wouldn't want "being late to the party" to be the reason you don't read it. I was late to 17776 but it was (and still is) a great read. (BTW, if you like Homestuck, you might like 17776.)

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twovests wrote

Reply to Can someone succinctly explain what's special/interesting about Homestuck? by Moonside

Things I liked about Homestuck:

  1. Easy to keep track of characters/who's who.
  2. Interesting narrative mechanics.
  3. Very fucky storyline, complicated to understand. Timelines, parallel universes, etc.
  4. It gets very meta, in good ways.
  5. Genuinely funny.
  6. Elation at having had successfully read one of the longest pieces of fiction in the human language.
  7. Music that slaps
  8. The majority of the story takes place in chatboxes (think AIM), which is relatable to me, as someone who spent a lot of time inside on AIM and not a lot of time outside.
  9. Running gags, callbacks, and references galore.

A problem: The first few acts was a kind of text-based-game deal, with the author literally making updates in response to user submitted commands. This structure is apparent, and it does not age as well as the rest of the comic.

The direction and basis of the comic kind of shifts over its 7 year lifespan. This is pretty apparent even without being super invested in it like I am.

One problem is that the original flash animations are being deprecated, replaced with HTML5 when it can, or YouTube videos when it can't, which sucks because the pixel-crisp animations and YouTube's CBR encoding do not mesh well. Even worse, [S] Cascade, arguably the most important animation in Homestuck, is not properly accessible from the main site.

If you do get into Homestuck, let me know, I can find you the mirror that hosts the flash animations.

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twovests wrote

Reply to fucked up by ellynu

lol look them up on google and see their location on map

like

all of canada and then some

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twovests OP wrote

Reply to comment by hollyhoppet in slack is bad by twovests

at least it's reliably bad

everyone knows what to expect with irc

and then if someone told me, "hey, they made an IRC 2, it's going to be a lot better"

i'd expect all the bad things to be fixed

not to have a bunch of bad things added, and also some emoji

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