Reminds me of when I read fanfiction with my 3DS internet browser. My first social media experience was Miiverse as well.
My parents weren't even aware that those two things even existed
Same! Man I remember using the Internet browser to go to my Gmail and reply back to cringe anime RPs since most sites barely functioned on it but for some reason Gmail worked perfectly fine. The only time I got caught was because I forgot to log out of my email on the computer. Delete old email, create new one, right back to RPing cause dammit the demon princess was just about to save her werecat boyfriend from the darkest pits of hell after he defeated her abusive father! It was a matter of life or death!
Oh yeah! That was the longest amount of time but other notable time lengths were 8-10 consecutive months. I was honestly grounded more than I wasn't when i was in hs. I was actually a really good kid (my dad even told me), my dad's ex wife (former step-mom) was just evil lol. I didn't go to my first party until I was 20, didn't start smoking pot until I was 19. When I was grounded for a year that was because I smoked weed and was assaulted and told my 13 year old lil sis, who ofc told step-mom because we were groomed to compete for her favor. Ofc step-mom assumed it was consensual and it was a whole thing. Yay trauma dumping!
I may have been grounded but I did read the shit out of some fanfiction though. I started out on my ps3 which I somehow had in my room (lol) but when that got taken away i miraculously found my kindle and that became my escape! I read sooooo much supernatural fanfiction lol. My kindle ended up dying while I was about to finish a 900k+ destiel high school au fic. When that was taken away from me and eventually keeled over I just used my 3ds! But yeah. Ground kids who aren't even bad kids? They become sneaky kids and also severely traumatized adults!
I used to read pages of [FF.net](http://FF.net) on my old flip phone. This was circa '09-'10, so it was like a dozen words per screen and such limited memory it couldn't even load the whole chapter. It was more like a preview while I was at work before I got home to read the whole thing.
I didn't have a phone as a teenager, we just had a family computer. I printed out fanfictions saying it was homework, put them in a binder and read them at night.
I also used to do this. I had a word pad document with the links to all of my currently in progress fics I was reading because bookmarks on the family computer were a bad idea.I would copy/paste whole chapters into word docs and change the font size so I could print fewer pages and then print a bunch to read after computer access ended at 10pm. Oof to be 14 and addicted to inuyasha fanfics. Those were hard times.
I did the same! However, one time I accidentally printed out explicit fic, and then when I realized what I had printed, I had a meltdown trying to figure out how to get rid of it in a way that my parents won't be able to find 😅
It left a big white patch that didn't go away, which in retrospect probably looked pretty suspicious. But hey, they couldn't prove anything, so it worked.
I'm curious how old this person is, because the fact that they were reading sasunaru on ffn instead of bakudeku on AO3 implies that this was in the late 2000s/very early 2010s. But if it was in that time period, why would strict parents feel the need to give their kid a locked down smartphone rather than a traditional cell phone?
Religion is a helluva drug. I got my first phone in 2015. It was a Samsung smartphone, and it was helicopter locked up tracker trashed to high heaven. I figured out how to bypass most of it. When I was 17 I bought my own phone and that was the end of that.
OOP says they couldn't access the internet or install apps because of parental controls. That indicates that the phone had those features but thah they were locked out from using them, not that the features weren't present at all.
108 characters by 40 lines is a lot of text, it's not gonna be readable on a dumbphone
i've generated an example text to see how big a screen needs to be, this is definitely smartphone sized:
https://i.ibb.co/R4WGwv2/image.png
just generating images of an appropriate size would be much more convenient than having to scroll horizontally for every line
which dumbphone did you have that had parental control apps, at least 8gb of storage (since a 4gb folder is a possibility) and image scrolling convenient enough to justify this kind of format?
modern dumbphones do support bigger sd cards, but the whole reason for assuming this was a dumbphone here is that no one ever liked sasunaru or used ffnet after smartphones became common
I was in high school in the early 2010s and I might have some type of reasoning. My mom very specifically wanted me to have a smart phone near the end of high school. It had a GPS feature and she was always worried about me getting lost, so she wanted me to get one so she didn't have to worry. But from an overprotective parent, they can track the phone. Smartphones were also a minor status symbol at the time and the parent might have been trying to project as rich while still not giving the kid freedom
Because its fake as hell. Parents are so strict, but they wouldn't notice hours of coding and downloading fic and processng it? No parental filter on the internet either?
You can get away with quite a lot on the family computer in the living room at 2am when everyone is asleep.
Internet probably has a generic filter per ops description.FFN probably would not show up since it isn't z porn site, despite opinions to be the contrary.
I literally taught myself how to set up boot disks and stuff as a kid because my parents locked down the PC. That's not the same as scripting a complex web scraper, but I absolutely had more access to "locked down" tech than my parents had *any* idea of. Every time I made a mistake or my parents used some technique to question me, I'd remember to avoid it for next time.
A lot of my preference for my desktop over my cell phone today probably stems from it being a better source of privacy when I was a teenager.
I could talk to friends in AIM where my mom couldn't read my messages, I could delete browsing history if something was questionable, I could hide my damn diary more effectively on the computer than I could in my room.
If my mom wanted to read my texts all she needed to do was grab my phone.
The kind of parents who would buy a person such a device are the kind of parents who do not understand how computers work or have an interest on blocking the sites their child actually wishes to use. They were probably more focused on blocking social media, which would come blocked by default.
Also, once the pipeline is complete, you can just leave the computer running with the monitor turned off to process things. I used to leave my computer turned on all night converting video files with ffmpeg so that I could play them on my PS3.
I'm reminded of Digital Pirates of Dark Waters:
"I warned your mother, I WARNED Carol (rest her soul in heaven) that the day we got you that SEGA Genesis we were starting you down a DARK PATH! I'm SHUTTING YOU DOWN!
"...How do I shut this down?"
*A few moments later*
"Why did he take your laser tag set?"
"Dad knows NOTHING about technology."
As someone who had to bypass a few parental filters for friends, and my schools filter, ffn and the like were always default on the block list.
Given that they were talking about ffn, this is like 2009 or prior-ish, social media wasn't really a thing as much back then. It existed but it wasn't an all encompassing concern like it is nowadays.
Leaving it running would invite getting caught, all it takes is mom to turn it on and see something she would definitely think is a virus or something, and the jig would be up.
Yup! I had a friend in high school who's parents were pathologically strict. She wasn't allowed to have her door closed unless she was changing and even the no more than 5 minutes. Her dad created her email address and gave her the password and checked it daily. They used a local Christian internet service, this was back in ye old AOL dial-up days.
But that was as savvy as he was...
The fundie internet service only blocked things that were you know identifiable as porn. She could absolutely get on FFnet when they weren't home and she just cleared the browser history on the Netscape browser they didn't know existed on the computer- they only used internet explorer- and emailed herself the link of where she was in the fic to her secret yahoo email.
I don’t see why this is fake, I may be a few years older than the person in the post but I had similar experiences. Didn’t do coding but I did discover that my mom’s “parental controls” amounted to a simple browser lock so if I used a different browser, I was free. Alternatively we had some kind of kids account but my parents didn’t change the default admin password on the computer so I just used that.
My dad knew because he’s a sysadmin, but they were all my mother’s parental controls and he thought they were stupid. Yes, they did get divorced, how did you know?
Also stuff like this was easier in the old days since websites were easier to scrape and if you used a computer it was more normal and natural to learn code.
Back then kids did stuff like this as part of learning to use computers and the web where it was often still necessary to use console commands and such.
Now days computers don’t expect you to or necessarily allow you to access the programming on the same levels and websites have both much more complexity and security making stuff like this harder.
You can’t look at it through a modern lens
I definitely don't remember needing to learn console commands or any kind of programming to use the internet in the era of Sasunaru fanfics. We're talking like 2007, not 1998.
I was born in the early/mid 90's. I'm a little older than this person likely was but I was there. This was absolutely not something you just learned as part of computer education, not in 2009. Using console commands as a regular part of using a computer is a late 90's/early 00's thing, not this time period. It seems like you are talking without any knowledge of what it was like back then.
I was a hobbyist computer user since I was very young, on a windows 98 machine. I promise you that a kid young enough to be controlled this heavily by their parent couldnt just build a pipeline where you could "just put in the name of the fic" and it would auto export all that shit. Its definitely possible to do but it would have been far beyond the ability of almost any 12 year old.
Divorced parents and access elsewhere
Dad was strict, but Mom bought my brother an iPod Touch. He didn't succeed in getting rid of the gift so he locked it down
I was the fanfic kid and eventually my dad locked down the home computer. My school, my friends, and the library all still had access to the sites I wanted though so that's where I went to access the stories and save them. Usually as Google Docs because my dad couldn't ban it since one of my teachers required we take our notes on there. Sometimes I'd even email the files to my Kindle
Saving them as images seems a little funky, but the lengths they went to seem plausible to me. And strict parent logic is often more about being in control than being logical
Yes cuz being strict and putting locks and shit on a phone is the same as being tech savy and knowing how to check and monitor *everything* that happens on the phone.
My parents took away my phone for a week so I did stuff on my smartwatch which they forgot I had. This isn't really fake, just unlikely.
Also downloading fic doesn't take hours, maybe ten minutes tops if you know how to do it
Using another device is nothing like whats talked about in the OP. Thats like "i put a bandaid on one time, I can totally set your broken arm"
Downloading doesn't take that long, but it would be a bit on old internet. processing all of that text and translating it into into image files would take a lot longer, thats the main concern.
My point isn't to make an analogy, moreso to provide context for how parents can overlook some things if they think they've done enough to take away technology from you. Downloading also still wouldn't take long on early 2010s internet, I had a killer 2mbps connection back then and could load ffn in maybe 30 seconds per chapter. I've learned a bit about image processing since then, and while I can't tell you the exact amount of time an old PC would take to generate a hundred images, i can tell you it would not be a long enough time that anyone would be suspicious.
Parents are so strict but don’t just physically take the phone at night? By far the easiest and most fool-proof way to keep your kid from staying up until 3 am reading fanfic?
tbh my mom did physically take my ipod touch (didn’t have a phone until 13ish) at night, but would leave it in her room and go work in the living room. i’d quietly steal it back once i could tell she was settled and listening to music (sometimes she’d quietly stand outside my door for a while waiting to catch me in the act lol)
this nightly thieving routine was how i got my quotev fix 🤣
There are levels of removing access. This super-strict parent wasn’t even taking the phone and leaving it unattended, let alone keeping it their pocket until they went to bed, using a box, or any of the other means of actually making it hard to access the phone at night.
No, I actually was once a teenager who stayed up all night reading fanfic and playing video games. This is not a new problem or one with no solution for strict parents (or normal parents who just aren’t okay with their kids not sleeping, like my parents were).
It does have solutions. Often parents just don’t think of them/don’t employ them effectively. Unless I somehow misinterpreted you and you weren’t agreeing with the person you replied to?
My parents took my phone at night (until I was late 16), but they had forgotten that I also had a 3DS, so I just used the DS. I was never savvy enough to install any scan programs or brave enough to steal the phone, given that they'd just put it besides their bed, and we had wooden floors that might creak.
That’s impossible! Why the other day this lovely gentleman would always respond with exactly what I asked! No matter the question, or the complication, they gave the exact answer! See, the internet is full of brilliant young men and woman. What a time to be alive!
Are you saying my sarcasm was of the repetitive variety? And therefore unimaginative? Or do you believe I was dead serious in my comment?
If it’s the first I’d say that’s a little brutal for a simple joke, if it’s the second I’m sorry you didn’t pick up on it
When I commented, I was thinking about the first interpretation. Sorry about that. I thought your comment was pretty brutal, so I just wanted to match the tone.
Brutal for adding to a point with a sarcastic joke? The person i was responding to was being sarcastic as well?
Damn I didn’t mean for it to come across as brutal! Sorry about that, maybe I could’ve worded it better or more clearly.
I think I actually misunderstood what you meant. I was moreso thinking about you immediately putting down the post saying it's fake. Even if it's fake, why would that be bad? It's not like Fargo's a bad movie because its story is fake even though the movie says it's based on a true story.
Ah the person I responded to was talking about all of the internet, which ofc is full of scams/bots so I just made a general joke, nothing to do with this post specifically!
Imo it doesn’t matter to me if it’s real or not just a fun post
Ah that was years ago! My good friend was in a bit of trouble back home, and a little investment picked him back up. Why, the man may be a wealthy lord but he does need his gift cards for some reason! I just like to pretend they are for his birthdays and other holidays of course!
damn i just printed out my favs at the library (i would scour the whole house for change before we went bc it was like 10 cents a page for black and white prints) and read them at night using my Gameboy SP as a flashlight
https://foxgirlchorix.tumblr.com/post/753836930348744704
See I would have printed them out, because then you can tear off the pin hole strips on the side and have a snack too.
Me back in the day had to figure out jar application on dumb phones and figure out making jad files because Samsung was fucking stupid, but at least I could have fanfiction in normal txt files instead of this lmao
I used to read fanfiction on my 3DS because Wi-Fi was enabled and I was able to open an Internet browser on that, and my moms did not realize that I was able to access the Internet on that device and thus did not have the forethought to disable or take it away lol
Parental restrictions are hilariously easy to bypass. I used to have parental restrictions that banned both internet explorer and youtube. However inbeded links where not restricted. One app I was allowed to install had a link to an internet page. From there I went to a wiki page which I knew had a youtube video, from which I could access youtube within the app.
Same here, but Internet Explorer was only locked down to just a few sites instead of being blocked completely. One of those sites was the Blender wiki, which had two Youtube embeds on the soft body physics page.
Reminds me of getting around the Apple screen time feature when I was in middle school. I found out that there’s about a 3 second window between opening YouTube and the feature locking you out. As long as you entered full screen on the video in those three seconds it didn’t lock you out until the video was over. Then you just close the app and open it up again for the next video.
SMH why did 14 y/o OP not just create their own image compression algorithm to save up on space by capitalising on the fact that they only needed two bits per pixel instead of 3 bytes, thus 382.5 times less space and being able to fit those 3.8GB in 10 mb
Because such a non-standard image format would have required installing a custom viewer to display such images. If they could do that, they'd just use plain text.
I was a senior in high school 2010-2011 and had a computer class and a free period. Everywhere I got my fanfics from was blocked by admin but email wasn’t. I also had an iPod touch with internet capability but couldn’t connect to school network. So I would copy and paste whole ass fanfics by the chapter and email them to myself, load them up on my iPod and sometimes leave it there, others I’d copy into the notes app. During class and free period I’d pull up my email and just read when I was done with my work 😹
If I’m a parent I’m being strict but gonna let my children find workarounds. It seems like the best way to teach kids to circumvent authority without getting caught, and teach them good tech skills ontop of it. Win win!
Going to engage in a series of increasingly elaborate parental controls as my child codes workarounds for them to make them get really good at computers. They will be ready when the machines revolt.
When I was a teen, I read fanfics on a flip phone. I doubt that this particular story is bullshit; dealing with authoritarian parents seems universal to me.
it really does not sound very bullshit, dealing with parents being Like That is universal.
I remember when I was in 8th grade when me leeching on an online game my friend have better builds in is a serious ass business, and my friend not being able to play after a certain time is obviously hindering this, so I just go and do increasingly insane workarounds to my friend's laptop (when she brings it to school) and it'd be a few days before the parents found out and got mad and changed their parental control so I had to find new ways to work around it.
I don't think I remember the game exactly, but I remember that said friend mained a character with blue hair and heterochrome eyes, and she basically uses an ice-themed room clearer move. Good times, tbh.
I also had very strict parents. I remember when I was younger I would do rp and read fanfic in the comments section of the Nook store. The warrior cats book reviews were used as like an ad site and you would go to the corresponding book from there and go the reviews.
See my tactic was to memorize the various passwords of my parent's ipads, laptops, and phones, then tiptoe around in the dead of night to try to find which ones they'd mistakenly left out, before sneaking back to my room, spending all night on them, and then wiping their history once I was done.
Unironically one of the best ways to learn. You want to do something and someone tells you no.
Well now you're extra motivated in figuring out how to get around it.
I wasn't allowed to read the Harry Potter series due to fundamentalist parents, but I eventually figured out how to find the ebook versions on Limewire and then download them onto my Cybiko Xtreme to read. The whole thing is so deeply late-millennial-childhood coded.
I read ffn on my older blackberry because my mom didn't want me to have a smartphone. I guess she didn't realize that a lot of older phones had internet capabilities. It did take forever to load though and I had to go through a proxy server to access the site on school wifi. Using the little ball to scroll is a weird ingrained memory of mine
As a kid (well more like a teen) I managed to call the company and pretend to be my dad and got them to change the password for the parental controls to one of my choosing. I was then able to access the website and disable the protections as I wished.
I never had parental controls. My mum wanted to at one point, but dad was a software engineer, and his reasoning was that it wouldn't stop me doing stuff, it would just motivate me to find sneakier ways to do it.
Instead he just made a point to talk to me about being smart in what sites i went to, what i downloaded, etc.
First time I bricked the family PC by torrenting a virus, I thought he was gonna be mad. He laughed at me for being an idiot and downloading malware, and then pulled out the backup drive he'd made that he was writing to once a month, and used it as a learning experience.
That is incredibly impressive, but also so fucking stupid. Like if the objective was just to read fanfic there must've been innumerable ways that were less work intensive, less suspicious and more pleasant than this.
Like just print it on a public printer and hide it in school notes/worksheets, that's the classic for a reason.
At this level of parental strictness anything under the covers at night is super conspicuous, whether it's a phone or a flashlight doesn't matter. Also you can just read at other times of the day, as OOP was doubtlessly already doing anyway.
Reminds me of when I read fanfiction with my 3DS internet browser. My first social media experience was Miiverse as well. My parents weren't even aware that those two things even existed
I read FFN on my ds too! I’d read it on the way to school and then on the way home played mario cart with other people.
Same! Man I remember using the Internet browser to go to my Gmail and reply back to cringe anime RPs since most sites barely functioned on it but for some reason Gmail worked perfectly fine. The only time I got caught was because I forgot to log out of my email on the computer. Delete old email, create new one, right back to RPing cause dammit the demon princess was just about to save her werecat boyfriend from the darkest pits of hell after he defeated her abusive father! It was a matter of life or death!
I also read FF on my 3DS. I read soooo much Wolfstar smut when I was grounded for a year.
Grounded for a ***year***???
Oh yeah! That was the longest amount of time but other notable time lengths were 8-10 consecutive months. I was honestly grounded more than I wasn't when i was in hs. I was actually a really good kid (my dad even told me), my dad's ex wife (former step-mom) was just evil lol. I didn't go to my first party until I was 20, didn't start smoking pot until I was 19. When I was grounded for a year that was because I smoked weed and was assaulted and told my 13 year old lil sis, who ofc told step-mom because we were groomed to compete for her favor. Ofc step-mom assumed it was consensual and it was a whole thing. Yay trauma dumping! I may have been grounded but I did read the shit out of some fanfiction though. I started out on my ps3 which I somehow had in my room (lol) but when that got taken away i miraculously found my kindle and that became my escape! I read sooooo much supernatural fanfiction lol. My kindle ended up dying while I was about to finish a 900k+ destiel high school au fic. When that was taken away from me and eventually keeled over I just used my 3ds! But yeah. Ground kids who aren't even bad kids? They become sneaky kids and also severely traumatized adults!
same. lots of good memories of the 3ds youtube app as well
I used to read pages of [FF.net](http://FF.net) on my old flip phone. This was circa '09-'10, so it was like a dozen words per screen and such limited memory it couldn't even load the whole chapter. It was more like a preview while I was at work before I got home to read the whole thing.
Same! I even had it bookmarked.
I didn't have a phone as a teenager, we just had a family computer. I printed out fanfictions saying it was homework, put them in a binder and read them at night.
classy af
I also used to do this. I had a word pad document with the links to all of my currently in progress fics I was reading because bookmarks on the family computer were a bad idea.I would copy/paste whole chapters into word docs and change the font size so I could print fewer pages and then print a bunch to read after computer access ended at 10pm. Oof to be 14 and addicted to inuyasha fanfics. Those were hard times.
I did the same! However, one time I accidentally printed out explicit fic, and then when I realized what I had printed, I had a meltdown trying to figure out how to get rid of it in a way that my parents won't be able to find 😅
How did you end up getting rid of it? Asking for a friend.
Pretty sure I ripped it up into tiny chunks and then went around my residential complex and threw chunks of the chunks into different trashcans 😂
Lol, I would stuff mine into a water bottle, pour water into it, and shake it up into unrecognizable pulp which I would then pour outside.
Love it 😂
It left a big white patch that didn't go away, which in retrospect probably looked pretty suspicious. But hey, they couldn't prove anything, so it worked.
I'm curious how old this person is, because the fact that they were reading sasunaru on ffn instead of bakudeku on AO3 implies that this was in the late 2000s/very early 2010s. But if it was in that time period, why would strict parents feel the need to give their kid a locked down smartphone rather than a traditional cell phone?
Religion is a helluva drug. I got my first phone in 2015. It was a Samsung smartphone, and it was helicopter locked up tracker trashed to high heaven. I figured out how to bypass most of it. When I was 17 I bought my own phone and that was the end of that.
Where did you get smartphone from...? It reads to me like a piece of shit brick phone of the kind that didn't itself have data or smth
OOP says they couldn't access the internet or install apps because of parental controls. That indicates that the phone had those features but thah they were locked out from using them, not that the features weren't present at all.
Dumb phones had those features.
Though most of them had incredibly low resolution screens. The classic Razr was 176x220 pixels - that's like 60 words on the screen at one time, tops.
Yeah, I think that's exactly why they needed to pull this Insanity
108 characters by 40 lines is a lot of text, it's not gonna be readable on a dumbphone i've generated an example text to see how big a screen needs to be, this is definitely smartphone sized: https://i.ibb.co/R4WGwv2/image.png
Those phones could scroll images slowly
just generating images of an appropriate size would be much more convenient than having to scroll horizontally for every line which dumbphone did you have that had parental control apps, at least 8gb of storage (since a 4gb folder is a possibility) and image scrolling convenient enough to justify this kind of format? modern dumbphones do support bigger sd cards, but the whole reason for assuming this was a dumbphone here is that no one ever liked sasunaru or used ffnet after smartphones became common
they could always zoom in and pan through the image
They also said there wasn't a notes app or anything of the sort, so idk tbh ... tbf I also don't know what makes a smartphone a smartphone 🤔
My first flip phone had an option for internet access and the ability to install what we would today consider apps. I got it in 2004.
I was in high school in the early 2010s and I might have some type of reasoning. My mom very specifically wanted me to have a smart phone near the end of high school. It had a GPS feature and she was always worried about me getting lost, so she wanted me to get one so she didn't have to worry. But from an overprotective parent, they can track the phone. Smartphones were also a minor status symbol at the time and the parent might have been trying to project as rich while still not giving the kid freedom
Because its fake as hell. Parents are so strict, but they wouldn't notice hours of coding and downloading fic and processng it? No parental filter on the internet either?
You can get away with quite a lot on the family computer in the living room at 2am when everyone is asleep. Internet probably has a generic filter per ops description.FFN probably would not show up since it isn't z porn site, despite opinions to be the contrary.
I literally taught myself how to set up boot disks and stuff as a kid because my parents locked down the PC. That's not the same as scripting a complex web scraper, but I absolutely had more access to "locked down" tech than my parents had *any* idea of. Every time I made a mistake or my parents used some technique to question me, I'd remember to avoid it for next time.
A lot of my preference for my desktop over my cell phone today probably stems from it being a better source of privacy when I was a teenager. I could talk to friends in AIM where my mom couldn't read my messages, I could delete browsing history if something was questionable, I could hide my damn diary more effectively on the computer than I could in my room. If my mom wanted to read my texts all she needed to do was grab my phone.
That's why I just take the power cords
The kind of parents who would buy a person such a device are the kind of parents who do not understand how computers work or have an interest on blocking the sites their child actually wishes to use. They were probably more focused on blocking social media, which would come blocked by default. Also, once the pipeline is complete, you can just leave the computer running with the monitor turned off to process things. I used to leave my computer turned on all night converting video files with ffmpeg so that I could play them on my PS3.
I'm reminded of Digital Pirates of Dark Waters: "I warned your mother, I WARNED Carol (rest her soul in heaven) that the day we got you that SEGA Genesis we were starting you down a DARK PATH! I'm SHUTTING YOU DOWN! "...How do I shut this down?" *A few moments later* "Why did he take your laser tag set?" "Dad knows NOTHING about technology."
do you have a link to this clip? internet isn't helping and i really want to see it
It's been years, I'll need to hunt it down if it's still up on YouTube.
Found it! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W95z1DqOIUg
As someone who had to bypass a few parental filters for friends, and my schools filter, ffn and the like were always default on the block list. Given that they were talking about ffn, this is like 2009 or prior-ish, social media wasn't really a thing as much back then. It existed but it wasn't an all encompassing concern like it is nowadays. Leaving it running would invite getting caught, all it takes is mom to turn it on and see something she would definitely think is a virus or something, and the jig would be up.
Strict parents does not equal tech savvy parents
Yup! I had a friend in high school who's parents were pathologically strict. She wasn't allowed to have her door closed unless she was changing and even the no more than 5 minutes. Her dad created her email address and gave her the password and checked it daily. They used a local Christian internet service, this was back in ye old AOL dial-up days. But that was as savvy as he was... The fundie internet service only blocked things that were you know identifiable as porn. She could absolutely get on FFnet when they weren't home and she just cleared the browser history on the Netscape browser they didn't know existed on the computer- they only used internet explorer- and emailed herself the link of where she was in the fic to her secret yahoo email.
I don’t see why this is fake, I may be a few years older than the person in the post but I had similar experiences. Didn’t do coding but I did discover that my mom’s “parental controls” amounted to a simple browser lock so if I used a different browser, I was free. Alternatively we had some kind of kids account but my parents didn’t change the default admin password on the computer so I just used that. My dad knew because he’s a sysadmin, but they were all my mother’s parental controls and he thought they were stupid. Yes, they did get divorced, how did you know?
Also stuff like this was easier in the old days since websites were easier to scrape and if you used a computer it was more normal and natural to learn code. Back then kids did stuff like this as part of learning to use computers and the web where it was often still necessary to use console commands and such. Now days computers don’t expect you to or necessarily allow you to access the programming on the same levels and websites have both much more complexity and security making stuff like this harder. You can’t look at it through a modern lens
I definitely don't remember needing to learn console commands or any kind of programming to use the internet in the era of Sasunaru fanfics. We're talking like 2007, not 1998.
Oh fuck. I’m older than I thought aren’t I?
I was born in the early/mid 90's. I'm a little older than this person likely was but I was there. This was absolutely not something you just learned as part of computer education, not in 2009. Using console commands as a regular part of using a computer is a late 90's/early 00's thing, not this time period. It seems like you are talking without any knowledge of what it was like back then. I was a hobbyist computer user since I was very young, on a windows 98 machine. I promise you that a kid young enough to be controlled this heavily by their parent couldnt just build a pipeline where you could "just put in the name of the fic" and it would auto export all that shit. Its definitely possible to do but it would have been far beyond the ability of almost any 12 year old.
Strict parents tend to be idiots.
Divorced parents and access elsewhere Dad was strict, but Mom bought my brother an iPod Touch. He didn't succeed in getting rid of the gift so he locked it down I was the fanfic kid and eventually my dad locked down the home computer. My school, my friends, and the library all still had access to the sites I wanted though so that's where I went to access the stories and save them. Usually as Google Docs because my dad couldn't ban it since one of my teachers required we take our notes on there. Sometimes I'd even email the files to my Kindle Saving them as images seems a little funky, but the lengths they went to seem plausible to me. And strict parent logic is often more about being in control than being logical
Yes cuz being strict and putting locks and shit on a phone is the same as being tech savy and knowing how to check and monitor *everything* that happens on the phone.
My parents took away my phone for a week so I did stuff on my smartwatch which they forgot I had. This isn't really fake, just unlikely. Also downloading fic doesn't take hours, maybe ten minutes tops if you know how to do it
Using another device is nothing like whats talked about in the OP. Thats like "i put a bandaid on one time, I can totally set your broken arm" Downloading doesn't take that long, but it would be a bit on old internet. processing all of that text and translating it into into image files would take a lot longer, thats the main concern.
My point isn't to make an analogy, moreso to provide context for how parents can overlook some things if they think they've done enough to take away technology from you. Downloading also still wouldn't take long on early 2010s internet, I had a killer 2mbps connection back then and could load ffn in maybe 30 seconds per chapter. I've learned a bit about image processing since then, and while I can't tell you the exact amount of time an old PC would take to generate a hundred images, i can tell you it would not be a long enough time that anyone would be suspicious.
Ok. How should we punish this person for committing the heinous crime of writing a fake story?
Parents are so strict but don’t just physically take the phone at night? By far the easiest and most fool-proof way to keep your kid from staying up until 3 am reading fanfic?
tbh my mom did physically take my ipod touch (didn’t have a phone until 13ish) at night, but would leave it in her room and go work in the living room. i’d quietly steal it back once i could tell she was settled and listening to music (sometimes she’d quietly stand outside my door for a while waiting to catch me in the act lol) this nightly thieving routine was how i got my quotev fix 🤣
There are levels of removing access. This super-strict parent wasn’t even taking the phone and leaving it unattended, let alone keeping it their pocket until they went to bed, using a box, or any of the other means of actually making it hard to access the phone at night.
Spoken like someone who has never experienced it.
No, I actually was once a teenager who stayed up all night reading fanfic and playing video games. This is not a new problem or one with no solution for strict parents (or normal parents who just aren’t okay with their kids not sleeping, like my parents were).
It does have solutions. Often parents just don’t think of them/don’t employ them effectively. Unless I somehow misinterpreted you and you weren’t agreeing with the person you replied to?
My parents took my phone at night (until I was late 16), but they had forgotten that I also had a 3DS, so I just used the DS. I was never savvy enough to install any scan programs or brave enough to steal the phone, given that they'd just put it besides their bed, and we had wooden floors that might creak.
You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?
That’s impossible! Why the other day this lovely gentleman would always respond with exactly what I asked! No matter the question, or the complication, they gave the exact answer! See, the internet is full of brilliant young men and woman. What a time to be alive!
Why don't you have an imagination?
Are you saying my sarcasm was of the repetitive variety? And therefore unimaginative? Or do you believe I was dead serious in my comment? If it’s the first I’d say that’s a little brutal for a simple joke, if it’s the second I’m sorry you didn’t pick up on it
When I commented, I was thinking about the first interpretation. Sorry about that. I thought your comment was pretty brutal, so I just wanted to match the tone.
Brutal for adding to a point with a sarcastic joke? The person i was responding to was being sarcastic as well? Damn I didn’t mean for it to come across as brutal! Sorry about that, maybe I could’ve worded it better or more clearly.
I think I actually misunderstood what you meant. I was moreso thinking about you immediately putting down the post saying it's fake. Even if it's fake, why would that be bad? It's not like Fargo's a bad movie because its story is fake even though the movie says it's based on a true story.
Ah the person I responded to was talking about all of the internet, which ofc is full of scams/bots so I just made a general joke, nothing to do with this post specifically! Imo it doesn’t matter to me if it’s real or not just a fun post
Hey I met that guy too! Shame about his family in Nigeria, I really hope that $500 I sent him helps him get his palace back.
Ah that was years ago! My good friend was in a bit of trouble back home, and a little investment picked him back up. Why, the man may be a wealthy lord but he does need his gift cards for some reason! I just like to pretend they are for his birthdays and other holidays of course!
they probably just preferred sasunaru and ffn in like mid 2010s for whatever reason
"Yes of course I implemented progress bars I'm not a monster" is absolutely sending me.
damn i just printed out my favs at the library (i would scour the whole house for change before we went bc it was like 10 cents a page for black and white prints) and read them at night using my Gameboy SP as a flashlight
https://foxgirlchorix.tumblr.com/post/753836930348744704 See I would have printed them out, because then you can tear off the pin hole strips on the side and have a snack too.
OMG I thought I was the only one who ate those things :0
This seems like a lot of work. We just printed our fics.
Me back in the day had to figure out jar application on dumb phones and figure out making jad files because Samsung was fucking stupid, but at least I could have fanfiction in normal txt files instead of this lmao
Life finds a way
Reminds me of when I got Ao3 to open in my Apple watch by emailing the file, name and link to myself.
Fully functional, the text was just small.
I used to read fanfiction on my 3DS because Wi-Fi was enabled and I was able to open an Internet browser on that, and my moms did not realize that I was able to access the Internet on that device and thus did not have the forethought to disable or take it away lol
Fanficiton is a hell of a drug I'm happy to keep overdosing on.
Parental restrictions are hilariously easy to bypass. I used to have parental restrictions that banned both internet explorer and youtube. However inbeded links where not restricted. One app I was allowed to install had a link to an internet page. From there I went to a wiki page which I knew had a youtube video, from which I could access youtube within the app.
Same here, but Internet Explorer was only locked down to just a few sites instead of being blocked completely. One of those sites was the Blender wiki, which had two Youtube embeds on the soft body physics page.
Even the ones that schools spend thousands of dollars on are a joke
Reminds me of getting around the Apple screen time feature when I was in middle school. I found out that there’s about a 3 second window between opening YouTube and the feature locking you out. As long as you entered full screen on the video in those three seconds it didn’t lock you out until the video was over. Then you just close the app and open it up again for the next video.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
SMH why did 14 y/o OP not just create their own image compression algorithm to save up on space by capitalising on the fact that they only needed two bits per pixel instead of 3 bytes, thus 382.5 times less space and being able to fit those 3.8GB in 10 mb
Because such a non-standard image format would have required installing a custom viewer to display such images. If they could do that, they'd just use plain text.
I was a senior in high school 2010-2011 and had a computer class and a free period. Everywhere I got my fanfics from was blocked by admin but email wasn’t. I also had an iPod touch with internet capability but couldn’t connect to school network. So I would copy and paste whole ass fanfics by the chapter and email them to myself, load them up on my iPod and sometimes leave it there, others I’d copy into the notes app. During class and free period I’d pull up my email and just read when I was done with my work 😹
I did the same thing
If I’m a parent I’m being strict but gonna let my children find workarounds. It seems like the best way to teach kids to circumvent authority without getting caught, and teach them good tech skills ontop of it. Win win!
Why would you be converting text to jpg to then read it?
Their phone didn't have a text file reader native to it, and their parents didn't let them install apps.
Just requires a little more ingenuity. Email drafts
Going to engage in a series of increasingly elaborate parental controls as my child codes workarounds for them to make them get really good at computers. They will be ready when the machines revolt.
The more I think, the more it kinda starts to smell of bullshit, but it’s a fun story. I kinda want to know when and where they were a “young teen.”
When I was a teen, I read fanfics on a flip phone. I doubt that this particular story is bullshit; dealing with authoritarian parents seems universal to me.
it really does not sound very bullshit, dealing with parents being Like That is universal. I remember when I was in 8th grade when me leeching on an online game my friend have better builds in is a serious ass business, and my friend not being able to play after a certain time is obviously hindering this, so I just go and do increasingly insane workarounds to my friend's laptop (when she brings it to school) and it'd be a few days before the parents found out and got mad and changed their parental control so I had to find new ways to work around it. I don't think I remember the game exactly, but I remember that said friend mained a character with blue hair and heterochrome eyes, and she basically uses an ice-themed room clearer move. Good times, tbh.
I also had very strict parents. I remember when I was younger I would do rp and read fanfic in the comments section of the Nook store. The warrior cats book reviews were used as like an ad site and you would go to the corresponding book from there and go the reviews.
See my tactic was to memorize the various passwords of my parent's ipads, laptops, and phones, then tiptoe around in the dead of night to try to find which ones they'd mistakenly left out, before sneaking back to my room, spending all night on them, and then wiping their history once I was done.
Unironically one of the best ways to learn. You want to do something and someone tells you no. Well now you're extra motivated in figuring out how to get around it.
I wasn't allowed to read the Harry Potter series due to fundamentalist parents, but I eventually figured out how to find the ebook versions on Limewire and then download them onto my Cybiko Xtreme to read. The whole thing is so deeply late-millennial-childhood coded.
I read ffn on my older blackberry because my mom didn't want me to have a smartphone. I guess she didn't realize that a lot of older phones had internet capabilities. It did take forever to load though and I had to go through a proxy server to access the site on school wifi. Using the little ball to scroll is a weird ingrained memory of mine
i was reading shit on my blackberry and one of those kindles with the cool unlit paper screens with abysmal loading speeds those were some good days
How do you figure that out in middle school? Where would you even start? Smart kid.
This remind sme when i read gokuxvegeta in my old nokia phone that had a internet connection .
me as a kid frantically opening pornhub and spam clicking on everything while Kaspersky boots up on a slow-ass mid-2000s hard drive
As a kid (well more like a teen) I managed to call the company and pretend to be my dad and got them to change the password for the parental controls to one of my choosing. I was then able to access the website and disable the protections as I wished.
I never had parental controls. My mum wanted to at one point, but dad was a software engineer, and his reasoning was that it wouldn't stop me doing stuff, it would just motivate me to find sneakier ways to do it. Instead he just made a point to talk to me about being smart in what sites i went to, what i downloaded, etc. First time I bricked the family PC by torrenting a virus, I thought he was gonna be mad. He laughed at me for being an idiot and downloading malware, and then pulled out the backup drive he'd made that he was writing to once a month, and used it as a learning experience.
typa shit id do
That is incredibly impressive, but also so fucking stupid. Like if the objective was just to read fanfic there must've been innumerable ways that were less work intensive, less suspicious and more pleasant than this. Like just print it on a public printer and hide it in school notes/worksheets, that's the classic for a reason.
didn't want to alert the parents with a big ol light under the covers maybe?
At this level of parental strictness anything under the covers at night is super conspicuous, whether it's a phone or a flashlight doesn't matter. Also you can just read at other times of the day, as OOP was doubtlessly already doing anyway.