You probably have a higher attack surface from the gremlins in your walls. OTOH, Amazon knowing that you use Mullvad is a tangible downside, as they will probably use that to stick you in a marketing group or something. Monero is still an easy solution with the ~same cost if you’re concerned about that.

How would Amazon track a voucher? It’s a physical scratch off code, sealed by Mullvad before they send it over to Amazon. More importantly, if you think that was possible why would Mullvad be unaware of it and/or lie about it? Just go with the vouchers if you want untraceability. They’re also cheaper in USD than other methods IIRC, at $29/6 months and $57/12 months.

Yeah there’s a few ways they could be acquired. I don’t do Amazon or Kindle but they appear to be on Kindle Unlimited. They’ve also apparently been sent out for free a few times. I feel like it puts a bad taste in my mouth either way; even if I could sidestep the cost, by reading them it would still be supporting the books and therefore the gouging of others, in an indirect sense.

I haven’t read this series yet but it’s on my TBR. Is there some kind of actual justification for the price of these books? The combined total word count of all the books is ~350k, which is 50k words shorter than a few books I’ve recently read that cost $7-8 each. Meanwhile the entire Murderbot series costs $76 to purchase, most of them being 30k words for $12.

I’m lethargic on both getting around to reading it and not letting those hefty prices color my opinion if I were to read it, so I’m not sure if I ever will.

I wrote a short guide on this method recently: https://lemmy.ml/comment/6708735

Alternatively, is your fursona sufficiently well-designed to avoid instant biological problems? Most foxes are missing their internal organs for example. As for fur, people with pets can attest that your cooking is going to have fur in it and that’s just the way it’s going to be.

Vote with your wallet regards any sort of purchase. By giving money to someone you are giving them the most encouragement possible to continue doing what they’re doing. If you purchase something that you end up not liking, they will still receive your initial vote loud and clear. The gaming industry especially has shown us that companies will happily take both the money and the negative review and say ‘thank you’.

I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it’s more like gambling with your wallet if you don’t get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.

I like stories to have stuff to aspire to, rather than characters that share the pains of a hopeless millenial.

Yeah I feel that. I wouldn’t call it a light read if you’re feeling depressed, and there’s some clear parallels and lessons from the book’s world to be applied to ours. The story likes to punch you in the guts whenever it feels like it, and a hopeless feeling lingers throughout. I should make an amended edition where the characters frequently get the hugs they deserve.

it’s hard to come by good furry literature

Surely. Oftentimes it feels like any furry media that exists has to have a compelling reason why the people are animals, with human-based stories being the default if you can’t think of a good one. It’s nice to have a good story regardless, with the animalistic flavor largely just being garnish on top.

helping attract some more attention to a project

Hopefully at some point it will stick and be properly recognized. It was released in 2017 and has excellent Goodreads reviews, but the author is young and surely will eventually make waves if they can keep the creative spark going.

Wow I feel dumb for not thinking of that. In my defense I like the text as #FFF on gray. KOReader’s arbitrary CSS snippets and style tweaks are really neat.

This is all I needed to do so: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=314220

Run the script from the second post, then eject the Kobo and let it install. Afterwards you can open it from the new NickelMenu button at the bottom right. My Kobo just stays in KOReader mode all the time.

It’s half true. They enjoy certain privileges while others are beneath them. By giving others the same privileges they lose what makes them “special”, even though they are not losing anything directly in a zero sum fashion. It’s a greedy and fearful way of thinking, but those properties make it an easy ideology to adopt during crisis. That’s probably the most favorable motive I can apply.

You can change the background color by changing the ["cre_background_color"] key in settings.reader.lua (again, I dislike needing to configure it like this). On my Android and desktop I set it to ["cre_background_color"] = "0xECECEC",, which inverts into a nice gray when I set it to night mode, then I invert all the image colors so they’re a normal color. Font color can’t be changed though, TMK. You can change font color with custom CSS snippets.

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Have you tried KOReader yet? It’s not Material UI and doesn’t have any sort of “theme”, since it’s very focused on just showing your text, but it lets you extensively pick fonts and styles for your books, has dictionary lookups (tap and hold), page view, and it can sync with itself (available on the desktop and many physical ereaders). My main gripe is that it’s very configurable, and I don’t personally like many of the defaults. After setting it all up it’s quite powerful, and I use it on my physical ereader, Android phone, and desktop PC in roughly the same configuration.

I really don’t think it’s “love” at this point. I understand that point of view, but I rarely ever see those types of people anymore. They don’t even necessarily need specific religious litigation to back up their views, and they can pretend that their god “would support them” in their endeavors just as easily. These people want punishment for those they deem “other” because the normalization of “other” challenges their privilege and makes them uncomfortable. I think their fear of these outcomes is the most likely “rational” explanation. Semi-related, the world is not in a good place right now with capitalism running rampant. I think these people are even more frightened at their precarious living conditions and their sense of survival is pushing them to hold onto the privilege and lifestyle they have in any way possible.

That was my takeaway from this video as well. It was a lot of “aw shucks can’t we all just get along” and not understanding that in today’s world, getting along is a left-wing policy. I think there is still merit to saying that part of the reason we’re so divided nowadays is that we are forced to interact more often, but it shouldn’t be represented as the entire problem. In a way, I think a video like this is actually worse for discourse because it might convince people that there is only one problem that needs to be solved.

You’re right, and I suppose I was half-thinking along the lines of “we have all the pieces to solve this, but we don’t because we’re frozen in place by greed” instead of “this is something we could do with infrastructure today”. If everyone could collectively let go and re-distribute wealth and materials efficiently everyone would be much better off for it, but instead we’re stuck in some game theory hell where the optimal personal choice results in one of the worst outcomes.

I’m not nearly as qualified as your professional help, but there are always bright spots and safe spaces to exist when you’re low. Everyone is exhausted these days, and you’re not going to change the world by dedicating your entire life to worrying about it. Take what you can and fight for what you’re able to, but don’t overexert yourself. Ideally half the fight needs to be done by people who are not the minorities in question - these people have the most privilege and population to actually enact change. E.g., telling the homeless to fight for themselves is not how you end homelessness.

It feels like some people need hobbies. They have nothing better to do in their lives than campaign against minorities that have zero effect on their life. I hope we’re going in the right direction but we’ve been backsliding on a couple things recently and it’s sickening to see people close to you that were quietly in support of that. Maybe we need another Pokemon GO phenomenon to remind the bigots that there are other things they could be doing with their lives.