@miss_rodent whenever I see someone's phone or computer without all the privacy stuff I have, it looks basically like an apocalyptic hellscape. I don't know how it's even usable without taking constant psychic damage.

@alice Hm, tiny, hair, creepy and doll?

@alice should I ask about the creep hair totem?

@kaya I'm dedicated to my jokes.

@DavidNielsen oh, please do!

@alice Yeah, I don't know how its usable either. If I did not know that adblockers and scriptblockers and such existed, I would likely just abandon the internet entirely.

@alice They just complain that their Internet is slow.

@alice @miss_rodent Can I quote you on that?

@drwho sure

@miss_rodent

@alice

Something like 2000+ over the last few days for me.

@alice so about this creepy human hair totem, I am assuming Victorians are involved.

@alice I've been pushing for ad blocking at work. None of our browsers have any ad blocking or ad prevention measures implemented or permitted.

The amount this is adding to our mobile data bill must be huge, not to mention the constant interruptions and shit thrown at people when they are working and looking for stuff.

That's one of the advantages of WFH - my Kinkpad is built for speed and shit blocking, which means I can find things out far quicker than on my work issued device.

@alice @miss_rodent Thank you very much.

@DavidNielsen someone asked "how do you even keep track of all your followers?" and I said I make tiny hair dolls for each one, so I can tell whenever one is out of place.

Then I spent over an hour searching for the perfect photo of a small, real human (or cat) hair effigy.

I was disappointed that I couldn't find just the right image, so I started searching for felting instructions so I could make my own.

Like a perfectly normal person.

I'm now the proud owner of this.

Like a perfectly normal person.

@CaptMikeYates ads are also such a common vessel for malware and scams; blocking them is the safe thing to do.

@alice Yup, I've been clearing and cleaning up computers infected via adware and malware delivered by ads for more than two decades. Ad blocker is the first thing that gets added any computer I work on.

@alice Browse the web? I haven't done that in forever. I doomscroll, and I might click a link someone shared here. There's a few RSS feeds I follow. And a couple of pages I bookmarked to go to directly.

There is no browsing.

@alice I'm a teacher, I use adblockers, automatic cookie decliners and similar addons. Sometimes I assign my students online grammar exercises. When I see the same website I always get a shock and try to gently suggest that maybe they should look into getting an adblocker. Similarly, my heart drops everytime they just click "accept all" to get the cookie banner to disappear as quickly as possible.

@alice very... very carefully

@alice I don’t install an ad blocker on my work computer because…internal software reasons…and I *loathe* looking at web pages on it.

I guess it’s a good way to keep me from browsing the web on work hardware.