this meme was my Facebook profile cover for a while 😁

Why not? I still look up information there too, but I use an adblocker, so it’s not like Spez is profiting from me.

If you don’t want to give them traffic, you can always visit the search result URL through the Wayback Machine or Archive.today.

I’m using whichever is the freshest version BakaBT allows (v4.5.4 right now).

check out the other posts in the right sidebar, there are so many great ones :D

btw the source of this is a fucking brilliant webcomic/blog thing: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

This illustrates really well why word filters are a terrible idea; they have no regard for the conversational context.

Interesting that this sir/ma’am thing is very location-dependent. I’ve been living in Scotland more more than a decade now and I probably heard someone address me as “sir” a grand total of twice. I remember because it always felt so jarring, like why was this random shop assistant speaking to me so subserviently O.o

But I heard in some places (USA?) it’s very commonplace.

My high school class was in mid-'00s, and there was one girl who very much had that butch/tomboy vibe going on. I drifted away from the class, so only heard rumours after graduation, but I think she never actually came out as anything. On the other hand three others of us (two of whom, including myself, I never would have guessed back in high school) eventually came out as various shades of queer :D

It’s probably specific to my social circles, but in the late '00s some of my family and acquaintances started using certain vegetable and food names as synonyms for stupid person. E.g. “you carrot”, “you cake”. I guess this was a less openly offensive way of disparaging someone’s intelligence.

I’m happy for your realisation, OP!

For me it was homophobic and ableist slurs as general words for “bad”. It’s very common in my native society, so after I started learning more about social justice issues, it took a few years to wean myself off.

Also, looking back, I realise now that in middle school I was lowkey cruel to some classmates, manipulated them for my own amusement. I was never one to bully others, but I was often a bystander entertained by others being bullied. (Even though I was being bullied myself by the same people on other occasions. But I somehow never made that connection with their other victims, I guess my empathy wasn’t fully developed back then. Or maybe it was a mental self-defence mechanism, idk.)

Not that advanced, but two things I found useful:

• If you’re in a country that blocks torrent websites but not trackers (eg. UK), visit the sites via Tor browser.
• Rutracker.org and Rutracker.ru are surprisingly not blocked in the UK and have lots of good software. They’re BBCode-style forums, so fairly obvious how to navigate/search them even if you don’t speak Russian. If you want to read the description or comments of a specific torrent, pop the page into google translate.