Splendid Palimpsest

Okay so obviously the chemtrails people are nuts ("THEY" are dosing us with EXPERIMENTAL CHEMICALS and HIDING THE FACE OF THE SUN AND SKY to PACIFY AND DEMORALIZE US!) but I think one thing they harp on is actually pretty interesting: aircraft contrails can be very persistent, and if you live in a place where air traffic has increased by an order of magnitude over the last 70 years... the sky may look super different than it used to (depending on local climate and weather etc).

Imagine if air travel started today. The NIMBY/environmentalist backlash would be apocalyptic. You'd have liberal activists coming out from under rocks to say how the native tradition of venerating Father Blue Sky means that any change to the appearance of the heavens is racist and illegal! Every podunk hamlet in Montana and leafy suburb in "one of the 50 highest-earning zip codes in the US" would be a nonstop war zone as the local city councils try to establish a no-fly zone between the ground and the Kármán line! Papers about how the endangered eastern dung beetle relies on subtle natural sky color striations for wayfinding on their epic continent-spanning migrations would make the front page of the NYT!

One could argue that that situation would be better than the status quo, but either way I think it's interesting that, instead of holding a society-wide Contrail Thunderdome, we've taken all the people who care about the appearance of the sky and put them in a little containment chamber of 90s-era conspiracy forums and the gross part of Twitter.

Dartmoor - March 2020

That’s him, that’s the man

diversity loss this trans man is just as much of an emotionally unavailable avoidantly attached brick as any cis guy

he has a pussy yes but does he have a heart. post cancelled that sounds like a taylor swift lyric

my boy he has a pussy but he doesn't have a heart

he's playing games with me just like i'm mario from kart

i'm a published writer btw

Whenever I see a post talking about how it's okay to steal from huge corporations, when they have shit like self checkout, I always want to jump up and say they have cameras and are collecting your information and you need to be so careful because yeah like they're inflating the prices and running monopolies and price fixing with competitors but everybody is caring about shoplifters more and that's really fucked up, but you also need to consider that Target might be keeping track of every time you don't scan something or intentionally scan it wrong, and just waiting for it to add up to a felony.

Which feels entirely beside the point and almost inappropriate to bring up when the point is that the customer is already a victim of theft, but I feel like there are people encouraging others to do stuff that can absolutely end up with them in jail without mentioning at all that it's a risk.

This is real and here are some sources discussing facial recognition in various retail settings. fuck corporations but also go in knowing all the facts 🫡 Kashmir Hill is a great journalist who’s entire beat is facial recognition and how it’s deployed, and she’s an amazing resource if you want to learn more about facial recognition in general. highly recommend her new book on clearview ai too, it’s a great read

ACLU lawsuit that stops clearview from being sold to retail in the us (but doesn’t stop retail from buying other facial recognition tech) https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/technology/facial-recognition-stores.html

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/barred-from-grocery-stores-by-facial-recognition/

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/barred-from-grocery-stores-by-facial-recognition/

Targets privacy policy, scroll down to the camera section

You are the coolest person in the world to me for finding all those sources.

Thieves should be stopped actually.

Matthew Lillard and Angelina Jolie in Hackers (1995)

lillard in this movie is like a rosetta stone for tgirl fashion of the 2000s its a true revelation

Lancetooth snail and greenfoot fibercap

me: hmm time to google something

google every time: can i PLEASE have your location PLEASE 🥺🥺🥺 I need to know where you live so BAD 😫😫😫😫 Where do you fucking from?????? 😩😩😩😩😩😩

3 seconds into dungeon meshi and they’re already living my dream. i love eating things I ought not in unfamiliar ecosystems

one time in undergrad we went to this big farm & greenhouse where they were cultivating rare & endangered plants and during the tour the botanist let us all taste a leaf off of a particular plant & I was like oh some of these are edible!

so we got to the next plant and when he took questions I asked if it was also edible and he said “I mean. It’s not poisonous, but I’m sure it won’t taste good.” I asked if I could try it anyway and it seemed like he was just perplexed enough to indulge me so he gave me one leaf. It was terrible.

At the next plant he offered me a leaf before I asked and he wanted to know what it tasted like

For the rest of the tour he gave me a leaf from each non-poisonous plant and I told him how they all tasted (mostly like nothing at all but some unspeakably terrible) and that’s how I ate several dozen rare & endangered leaves.

So anyway. I’m a fan of this blonde guy already. I think we’d be friends

I get this a lot. Incidentally I bet if I grew leaves everyone would want to eat one to see what I taste like

it’s insane how quickly your life can just. suddenly improve. i used to be so miserable but now i own 5 swords

@cadaverkeys on it boss.

pictured is two rapiers, a fencing foil, a saber, and a rapier thats been shortened down <3

my arm hurts so much.

The five of swords. Heated competition, boastfulness, victory at any cost.

I'm sad the kids today will never know about Candlejack. When you talk about early memes that one was a classic but, like the show that spawned it, I fear that it

I just can't suspend my disbelief about anteaters. It doesn't make any sense that a mammal that huge can keep its body sustained eating just ants and termites. "Oh but they raid hundreds of nests per day and eat thousands and thousands of them!" Dude, I feel like even you must know you're reaching here. Come on.

It's a shame, because the idea is genuinely really cool, a big fluffy guy whose main deal is slurping up insects with its crazy tongue, what's not to love. But they went too far and felt the need to make that gimmick its ENTIRE food supply, and then it just... doesn't work! Nobody would be complaining if it ALSO ate some berries or something every once in a while! Your worldbuilding is allowed to have some nuance!

And I guess they tried to address this when they made the aardvark by introducing the aardvark cucumber, which is a special melon-looking fruit that only aardvarks care about and which supplements their mostly insect-based diet. Which... okay to be honest I think that's a really ham-fisted and dumb solution, but at least it's something.