The first couple of weeks on a private tracker are always pretty rough, until you can build up your ul/dl ratio high enough to get some breathing room.

Some sites make things easier on newbs than others.

If possible, look for recent freeleech torrents, especially popular ones, download them even if you aren’t really interested in the content, and seed them 24/7 to build your ul stats…

You have at least 10 years from when your tapes were written.

Hope the device you have to read them still works …

I just signed up for Matrix because you mentioned it.

I installed the Element front end, because that seems to be the most popular.

It looks like IRC, which is fine if that’s all you need.

It also appears that anything beyond text has to be hotlinked, which is understandable, given that the amount of data transmitted for redundancy between home servers is exponential with the number of home servers.

Really very similar to Lemmy, where the identity of each group is tied to a particular server, e.g. lemmy has !anime@ani.social but Matrix has #anime:matrix.org

So what happens if matrix.org goes away or decides the server admin wants to be hostile to #anime?

What kind of system that depends on centralized servers can ever be secure from government snooping?

That kind of architecture is completely hopeless in that regard.

Is a encrypted, distributed, P2P architecture realistic though?

How to cut off PS online verification: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenP/comments/1624ybw/how_to_fix_photoshop_we_cant_verify_your/

But the tool they recommend using, GenP, does trigger Windows Defender warnings because it modifies binaries, so read the installation instructions carefully.

Or migrate to FOSS software, or pay Adobe to use their product.

There are some specialty content, such as British TV and Asian TV and movies, or complete archives of porn sites, that don’t appear regularly on public torrent sites, or streaming sites for that matter.

If you never watch that kind of thing, then you don’t need to sign up for a private tracker.

The same caution is advisable when searching for any free software.

There’s all kinds of malware, adware, and just plain malicious crap that shows up in search engine results.

The corollary is that a book has to be in-print, or commercially distributed in e-book form, to have any sales.

If neither new printed copies, or commercially sold e-books are available, then taking down pirate sites, or even an archive like archive.org, only diminishes the collection and availability of human knowledge and literature.

Azure is MS’s cloud computing. As long as you weren’t using MS OneDrive, or 365 Office, or something else that relied on MS cloud, you’re good.

From what I experienced working retail, Frozen merch was very successful amongst Disney properties up until a couple of years ago.

I never encountered the likes of the crossplaying AMABs in the article.

Maybe the kids from that era have grown out of it by now, but yeah it was pretty successful.

Hmm, good question.

I spot checked 3 articles on parents, kids and Frozen, and found 3 different writers.

Although I do have to add that the NYTimes has umm, a weird obsession with Frozen, moreso than other mainstream news orgs that I read.

There’s a collection of related articles at the bottom of the article page with titles like:

“My Son Loves Elsa From ‘Frozen.’ I Had to Learn to Love Her, Too”

“The Kids Who Love ‘Frozen’ and the Parents Who Love Them”

“Achieving Transcendence on the Millionth ‘Frozen’ Viewing”

I guess I worded it poorly.

I meant to cleverly say “Don’t hate your nose” and apparently failed.

My apologies.

My advice on contouring makeup: don’t.

It’s like one of those perspective illusion paintings. It only works when viewed from one direction, and looks somewhat unnatural when viewed from any other.

I prefer just making my skin look less flawed with foundation, then following my natural blush areas, adding a little blush color to make the foundation look less pasty.

p.s. Your nose looks fine! Don’t do a Michael Jackson! Don’t hate it!

Don’t blame the writers, some of whom are long dead, and some titles are long out of print.

https://vipleague.im/motorsports-schedule-streaming-links

https://freestreams-live.my/motorsports-streams5/

The full disc images worked well, and hard drive space is so cheap these days, that I’d worry about getting the virtual drive emulator working first.

WinCDEmu is FOSS, so you might look into that first.

Back in the day, I bought Alcohol 120, and it worked great.

The mini-CD image trick (optional): https://forum.daemon-tools.cc/forum/copy-methods-questions-daemon-tools/general-copy-discussion/4900-

Those no-disc patches can be sketchy and infected, so watch out!

My preferred way to play games without CDs was virtual disc emulators, so you can store a copy of your game disc on your hard drive, and virtually pop that game’s CD image into the virtual drive in when you want to play that specific game.

One good trick with these, is that you don’t even need a full copy of the disc: There was some trick to creating a very small disc image that just has enough information to get past the game’s copy protection, but it’s been well over 2 decades since I did any of that, so you’ll have to do your own research.

There are some stores that are noted for being CD-friendly: M.A.C., Ulta, Nordstroms

You also want to look for a local CD group. This page listing active support groups at the time has been down since 2021, but it’s still the best out there. https://web.archive.org/web/20210518050654/http://www.abgender.com/support.htm

They’ll know all the “safe” local places, but most importantly is being able to socialize and not feel like you’re alone.

edit: Aha! I just found this directory that looks like it’s maintained https://tgguide.com/transgender-support-groups/

Download a hairstyles app on your phone, and experiment to get a idea of what rough direction you want to go in, e.g. color, length, etc.

Take a snapshot of what you want to look like, and go to a wig store, show them what you want, and try some wigs in real life.

They’ve seen it all, so don’t feel embarrassed.