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Oh no it’s Pledge Drive!

It’s pledge drive time again! Here’s the pitch: We Hunted the Mammoth is not only unique; it’s ad-free, and depends entirely on support from people like you. If you appreciate this blog and its perspective, please consider donating by clicking the button below.

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You can make a one-time donation or pledge to donate a little bit every month. (And big thanks to those who already contribute monthly; you make it possible for the blog to survive between pledge drives.)

You can also donate by Venmo at David-Futrelle-1.

It’s been more than a year since the last pledge drive, so if if you can donate a little extra this time I sure world appreciate it. (If you want to offer non-financial help, that’s also fantastic; see this page for some ideas. The technical help I got from readers during the recent, er, troubles was invaluable in getting WHTM back up and running properly; I’m especially grateful for the tireless work of one tech maven in particular, whose assistance went well beyond the call of duty.)

It’s been more than ten years since I started this blog and brought my peculiar obsession with online misogynists to the world. I’ve been ahead of the curve in tracking (and documenting, and mocking) the rise of the new misogyny over the past decade – from Men’s Rights “activism” to incel hate to Semen Retainers doing what it is they do – and I hope to be ahead of the curve covering whatever comes next.

Thanks in advance for your support, and , again, for all the support some of you have been providing between pledge drives.

–David

PS: Thanks to Devo for the headline idea. Yes, I am very old.

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Surplus to Requirements
Surplus to Requirements
2 years ago

I’m missing one of my browser tabs. It’s not in “recently closed tabs”, and I didn’t choose to close it, so this looks like a deliberate act of sabotage.

How do I recover it? And how do I defend against this attack in the future? In particular, how do I make absolutely sure that no browser tab I don’t wish to close ever disappears on me again?

TacticalProgressive
TacticalProgressive
2 years ago

@Surplus
I’m going to have to be blunt here, but your constant congnative distortions on every single inexplicable and sudden inconvenience or mild annoyance that happens to you somehow being part of some kind of “deliberate act of sabotage” or outright “attack” by some unspecified and unsupported, nebulous “force” is a level of Karen level tinfoil chewing that insists on estranging you from reality and wind-mill chasing that is frankly immature and insulting in the face of people who have to deal with actual problems to contend with.

At this point I’m convinced that if you accidentally stepped on a lego: you’d think that the placement of that lego was part of some arbitrary and nebulously malicious plot by some enigmatic and undefined bogyman.

Your insistence on asserting these cognitive distortions and estranged from reality conspiracy mongering and windmill chasing is getting tiresome and distracts from actual problems and actual threats.

bumblebug
bumblebug
2 years ago

Donated! Thanks for keeping this blog running!

@Surplus: This is not an attack. Glitches occur. Applications crash. You may have accidentally closed a tab without realizing it.
There is no way to make sure any software runs perfectly for an indefinite amount of time. Instead of keeping tabs open it’s more stable to have pages bookmarked.
I don’t want to sound insensitive, but you really need to bring this up with a therapist. Your beliefs that someone is out to get you seems to be happening more often and it’s not healthy. I am honestly worried about you.

GSS ex-noob
GSS ex-noob
2 years ago

But I already have too many coffee mugs and tote bags!

(I worked several pledge drives in the 90s with a group of friends. It was a good way to get together, eat free food, and help the PBS station.)

Last edited 2 years ago by GSS ex-noob
Surplus to Requirements
Surplus to Requirements
2 years ago

@bumblebug: Perhaps you missed the bit where whoever closed the tab also went into the history and purged all record of it, so I wouldn’t be able to easily undo what they did? That’s the evidence that points to enemy action here.

Contrapangloss
Contrapangloss
2 years ago

Surplus, I’m also worried for you.

I know mental health care is hard to find, especially when underinsured and on a budget, but I really think it could help.

I’m not saying I think you’re mentally ill: You don’t have to have a mental illness to need some help with brain maintenance every once in a while.

And we’re in the 23rd repeat of March 2020. Brain weasels are festering in a lot of us, which can make finding a therapist especially tough right now, but consider it anyway?

You are clever person, and can be extremely insightful. I like having you around.

I don’t want you to have to keep dwelling in fear and frustration about all the things you can’t control. Or dealing with constant worry that someone’s plotting against you when anything unexpected occurs. It sounds awful, and stressful, and I want you to be able to live better than that.

I don’t have anything I can do to help you.

I’m sorry.

.45
.45
2 years ago

@ Surplus to Requirements

A good conspiracy theory uses a lack of evidence AS evidence.

I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you expect from us. Every time you come here saying things like this, asking, if not demanding, someone explain or help you with something sight unseen, 9 out of 10 of us don’t even have the technobabble skills to understand any of the more complicated stuff, let alone the ability to diagnose something as vague as “I’m missing a browser tab” from another freaking country, and you basically reject any explaination anyone can come up with.

Ever play Far Cry 3? There is an infamous cutscene where one of the villains monologues about the definition of insanity, the old “doing the same things over and over expecting different results” deal. You aren’t changing here. We aren’t changing here. The world isn’t changing here. Of those three, you can only change the first one.

Honestly, as someone who has struggled with depression most of my life, reading that back kind of pisses me off. It is the same bullshit advice any therapist would say off the bat without knowing anyone’s situation, the kind of thing that basically smacks of “Why don’t you just change and be happy?” I fucking hate that directed at me, and here I am directing it at you.

Problem is, whether it pisses me or you off, it has some truth to it. We can listen, we can empathize, we can make suggestions, but we can’t fix your life for you from thousands of miles away. “I can only show you the door Neo. You have to open it.”

You come here wanting something from us, reject anything we give you, get a pile-on of increasing irritated people, post long essays explaining why you are right and can’t change anything without half a million dollars (euros?), give up and stop responding, move on to a different thread as though nothing happened in the other one, then a week later come in with another “the New World Order/God/Bill Gates/Flying Spaghetti Monster/Whatever is playing with my internet settings again, someone tell me how to make them heel”. Same thing over and over, are you expecting different results?

Of course, I recognize I am doing the same thing, trying endless variations of arguments when you have demonstrated you aren’t going to accept or apparently even consider anything I say anyway. With that in mind, I’m not really seeing how helpful the usual recommendation of get therapy actually is for you. Your track record suggests you would view a therapy session as an argument to win, and pointless from the get go.

As someone in a previous thread commented, there are parallels between your behavior and an incel insisting all is lost. Both rejecting anything anyone says and refusing to accept the possibility that your worldview could be wrong in any way. That utter conviction can be a boon in the right circumstances, but from where I sit, it isn’t doing you any favors right now.

Surplus to Requirements
Surplus to Requirements
2 years ago

Actually, I was just hoping someone knew of a second way to retrieve past browser tabs, besides the “recently closed tabs” thing; perhaps a backup file Firefox keeps somewhere, or an obscure UI option.

bumblebug
bumblebug
2 years ago

The only place I can think of it being is in your history. But from what I can tell the history is organized by when the tab is opened. So if it’s been open a long time it may be very difficult to find it (just because there would be a lot of scrolling)

Surplus to Requirements
Surplus to Requirements
2 years ago
Threp (formerly Shadowplay)
Threp (formerly Shadowplay)
2 years ago

Got the bloody flu. First time in two years. I didn’t miss it over much.

GSS ex-noob
GSS ex-noob
2 years ago

@Threp, how sad is it that I thought “thank goodness it’s only flu and not Covid”?

I guess you were the unlucky recipient of a variant that wasn’t in the flu shot this year?

@Surplus: I’m sure Marj will be calling out the Gazpacho Police on someone for that article.

CallingUFO
CallingUFO
2 years ago

If ads would help, I wouldn’t mind ads at all.

Queen of the Harpies
Queen of the Harpies
2 years ago

@Surplus

Please consider my vent blog idea again. If you make it public, I’ll even comment on it.

I once had an add-on that let me recover and save tab sessions (on desktop PC), but since add-ons are being so phased out these days, I don’t know if it’s still available.

Old School HTML
Old School HTML
2 years ago

@Surplus (or others who like keyboard shortcuts)

A great keystroke combo for recovering a recently closed window or tab is CTRL+SHIFT+T (tango). If it has disappeared from history, it may be gone, but I find using the shortcut much faster than navigating to history and finding the tab.

A related shortcut that I really love is CTRL+SHIFT+D (delta) — it bookmarks all open tabs, and you can name the folder that they’re in. I often do this if I’ve opened a lot of things, but I probably won’t get to them today (or I’m not fully in the mood for them), usually by date + a word about topic — like “Feb07-mostly-tedium-archives”.

That one can be useful if you have several things open and you know your computer’s flaky (or out to get you) — as a way of staying ahead of the curve and being able to then resume where you were, whether or not the PC crashes.

(I mostly use I.E. and MS-Edge because that’s all that’s allowed at work, but I believe these work in other browsers, also. If not, now you know these capabilities exist and can search for your specific browser’s implementation.)

I hope this helps?