You, an atheist, have died. All the gods that have ever been line up to offer you their version of heaven if only you believe in _them_. Turns out souls are currency and yours is up for grabs.
There are many Gods. They speak, and I am tired. A mass of voices coiling around me, each telling their own tale. They speak over one another, they talk to me, they do not listen. And I am tired.
Currency. Is this what I am to them?
They will not stop speaking. They offer me things. They will take me to my loved ones. They will gift me joy and music. They will have me serve, in their armies, in their choirs. Some tell me stories of how they made me. From clay. From nothing at all. Some tell me they love me, small as I am, that I am their creation and so their child.
Above all, they repeat their stories. They talk incessantly of their power, their battles, of the ways and reasons they are feared. How long will they talk? Time does not happen here. It is so much effort to stay. Effort to maintain. Effort to exist.
So many Gods. Gods whose names I had already heard. Modern Gods whose human disciples still speak their names. Obscure Gods whose stories were written on tablets, on scrolls, thousands of years before, whose only proof and records were discovered underground, in caves, in ancient lands. Every God there ever was. They are all here with me. They have been talking for years. They repeat their stories. Their stories are important to them. They demand, plead for my attention.
I died knowing I was dying. I died as I lived, believing in no Creator, no great demiurge, and no final salvation from death. Knowing that gods were stories we told. I believed only in the universe. That it existed before me and would continue without me.
And it has.
The voices scream their stories. Why are they so desperate for me? Despite their insistence, I know what I knew before. My truth is unchanged. My truth is of the universe, of its physics and particles, of its probable beginnings, of its possible ends. Of the simple fact of existence.
These gods are not my creator. I was created by a long line of life, of unlikely Life happening and colliding and continuing. Eons. Three, four eons, billions of years all lined up behind me, all of my predecessors, their lives and their stories, they are my chapters and I am their sum. I am the story of Life, in all its improbably glory. And gods are as old as humans, but I am as old as Life, and Life is much older.
I think I’ve solved it. I think I know why they seek us. They want what Life wants. To exist. To continue. They need their legends told, at any expense, because:
We wrote them. I said before: gods are stories that we write and tell. We are their Creators. And this is why they scream for me, for my ears, for my attention. Stories exist only so long as they are told. Gods exist only so long as they have a listener. And I know they have nothing to offer me. There are no rooms, there are no gates, there are no hallways, no crowds for me to join. They only keep me here to listen. If I accept an offer, what then? Will they stop speaking, disappointed, and leave me? Will they keep delaying? Will the god of my choice sweep in, desperate, and keep me here as long as I can be convinced?
All of my being is tired. Life is not meant to persist this long after it is through. My presence and existence, temporary from the start, is loosening and loosening. All of my pieces beg to be released. I was not made to last.
I am through. I have given these voices enough.
So I do what life does when it is finished. I dissolve, and return to the world.
Have you ever considered being a writer first and a shitposter second?
Scientists say that memories distort every time you recall them, and I lie here in bed every night recalling the past. I wonder how photoshopped these memories of us are now. I wonder how many scars became airbrushed. Even though I know what scientists say, I stupidly miss you, just a bit… but that’s still a bit more than you deserve.
When the quiet resonates and the thoughts run wild
“If you leave her, make sure she’s not the love of your life. Otherwise you will meet her one day, on an autumn street, yellow leaves blowing about her, her arms full of her child and a happy marriage. And she will as you expectantly, her eyes gleaming, hoping you found happiness too, “What did you trade me for?” And you will not be able to answer. Because all you traded true love in for is empty hands and a half full life.”
— Nikita Gill
Hey, this post may contain adult content, so we’ve hidden it from public view.
If you’ve logged in to Tumblr in the last few days, you will have seen the GDPR warning, telling you Tumblr is part of the Oath family of sites, and requiring you to opt-in to their privacy settings.
You may not have realised that, in contravention of the GDPR rules which ban default opt-ins, if you don’t go into the ‘more options’ button and opt out of each individual sharing partner, Tumblr will share your data with a whole huge list of other companies. Like, 300 of them.
If you’ve already opted in to the Oath privacy stuff, you need to go to your Settings page:
Click the Privacy button on the right:
Then, click the little button next to ‘Cookie Consent’ to revoke it.
After confirming you want to revoke consent, you will immediately be taken to that big privacy opt-in page again. From that point we follow the steps @the-mad-duchess described - first click ‘Manage Options’:
Then, click the blue ‘Manage’ button, and expand the two lists. You’ll see five kinds of data sharing, and like 300 different companies:
The first five you can click manually more easily than using javascript. That might be enough to opt out of any data sharing - but I want to be sure. So, let’s make sure we disable every single enabled partner as well.
However, clicking on 300 little buttons to opt out of is an absurd demand. There is, thankfully, a shortcut, using your browser’s developer tools.
What you want to do is open the web console. In Firefox, you do it like this: click the little menu in top right, then go down to where it says Web Developer:
Then, click the Web Console option:
This will open up the web console in the bottom of the screen. It will have a bunch of messages in it that you can ignore:
As shown, what we want to do is copy and paste some JavaScript code into this, then hit ‘enter’, which will make the browser simulate a mouseclick on every single one of these little buttons and thereby turn them all off. The code is this:
var rows = document.getElementsByClassName("vendor-options")[0].children;
for (var i = 0; i < rows.length; i++) {rows[i].lastChild.firstChild.click();}
If you’re not familiar with JavaScript, let me briefly explain what this is doing. The first line finds the part of the page with all the buttons in it - specifically, the rows in the table of vendors, which is identified by the “vendor-options”. The second line goes through each of them one by one, and for each row of the table, goes inside and finds the button, and simulates a click on it.
If it works correctly, you will abruptly scroll to the bottom of the page and all those little buttons will slide to the ‘greyed out’ position. Now you can go ahead and click Done, click the OK button, and carry on using Tumblr, trusting that if they keep their word, they won’t share your data with those 300 companies.
I’m gonna chat with the New XKit devs to see if this can be added (they may already be working on it). But I hope this saves you some time.
Note also - this is not actually compliant with the new GDPR laws. The rule is that you have to explicitly opt in to letting companies use your data, you can’t have a list of default opt-ins behind a button like this. At some point, somebody will hopefully sue Yahoo/Oath and establish that in court. In the meantime, let’s keep our data to ourselves.
OK, since tumblr on mobile web browser is a fucking piece of shit (but not as much of a piece of shit as their own tumblr mobile app), I can’t reblog @dedalvs ‘s reblog of this post.
So, in order to see these things, you have to either: 1. be in an EU country, or 2. use a VPN to look like you’re in an EU country. As soon as I did that, I got tumblr’s new GDPR notice, so their limiting showing that to just people from EU IP addresses.
