Whats the Craic

A Minimalist Home in Japan Utilizes a Tent Structure With Open Air Sides

This is the same thing over and over again. Palestinians die every day, but it gets a lukewarm headline from mainstream media because death and destruction is inherent to Arabness. Then an aid convoy with white workers is obliterated, and now both the president of the United States and the president of Israel are making statements apologizing for “the poor protection of aid workers.” At one point we were seeing multiple reports a day of paramedics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society dying, but nothing. Crickets. Because they don’t care. And even in these “remorseful statements” there is a strategic reminder that white lives hold more weight than brown lives.

This is the same dialogue that surrounded Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation. These people’s efforts shouldn’t be disregarded simply because they were white—but at the same time there always has to be a saintly white figure involved to get the general public to care. Why isn’t there this much outrage surrounding the 32k+ deaths, the shooting of aid seekers, the ongoing famine. What about all the Gazans dying. What about them. What about them

They have turned the Palestinians into actual Guinea pigs for the military industrial complex.

We will see the robots and miserable remote controlled dogs at the next big BLM protest on American soil soon enough.

We're in Black Mirror territory

Remember years ago when these robots were being developed and leftists pleaded with people to understand that their inevitable eventual use is as weapons. They are not "cute doggos".

Notice who’s left out…. “To avoid harming soldiers and dogs” what about Palestinians? You’re gonna kill them with murder bots, then.

no piece of art or literature has ever understood me quite like this onion article

When you just finished dicking her down and now you in her pantry looking at all of her son’s snacks you about to eat

Free Palestine mural seen in Quito Ecuador

it really is so insanely funny that american identity is so fucking tied to consumerism and nothing else at all that the oldest concept of american tradtion fascists have to retvrn to is the wold of catalog ads

it broke today that biden airdropped aid to gaza. other than the fact that this is an obvious pr move ahead of his re-election campaign, i think it's important to stress how ineffective this method is compared to just allowing humanitarian aid to come through. airdrops carry far less aid than truck convoys, for one, and require an airdrop zone with a lot of idealistic conditions that don't often coincide. this is a major reason why you hear a lot of airdrops being conducted at beaches--and why a lot of them have been blown to the sea. and what's even more dangerous about that is that a lot of these palestinians are malnourished, starving, in a delirious state of mind. many of them are so utterly hungry that they'd be willing to swim through just to get their hands on a sodden meal. but apparently this is the best thing the us, which literally funds israel's ongoing genocide, can do for palestinians at the moment.

i think the biggest reason i find this so insidious is because it implies the us has to play by israel's rules, even though it's basically already confirmed that there are us soldiers in palestine. the us is telling us that the best thing it can do is airdrop aid, rather than strongarm israel into allowing ground-delievred aid to come through. the us is acting like it has red tape it has to contend with.

but the us is the red tape. the us literally holds the power. it knows what it's doing. it's actually jarring watching the united states government try to infantilize itself.

Nietzsche believed that you’ve gotta be able to think about suicide before you can move beyond wanting to kill yourself because only once you’ve accepted it as an option can you make the choice not to do it, and the alternative, to deny the urge and ignore it, would inevitably cause you to cave to the unaddressed desire you have for it.

And the dude was right. 

The rogue’s gallery of psych students and junior practitioners on this hellsite have hijacked my post about not being mean to yourself to explain to people how actually what I’m talking about is cognitive-behavioral therapy, and how it involves disciplining yourself to never talk negatively about yourself and how it’s important to check with a therapist that you’re doing it correctly, and like, this is why I don’t trust and can’t stand these people.

Being your own friend is a holistic process, there aren’t exercises you can do or therapy methods you can apply, which is why most people relapse almost immediately after stopping CBT or DBT, because they haven’t actually made any progress in how they look out for themselves, they were merely thrust into a disciplinary regimen where they are taught to engage in habits which their therapist then holds them accountable to, and so, without that therapist, they fall apart again.

Not being mean to yourself doesn’t mean censoring self-deprecating humor, it doesn’t mean snapping a rubber band on your wrist when you have a negative thought, it means taking time to sit down and think about yourself as if you were another person, to really take stock of who you are from as objective a perspective as you can muster, and if you really want to grow, realizing that this person you see can’t grow if the person closest to them, which is you, spends all their time berating them and making them feel like shit.

Being friends with yourself is not a series of therapeutic exercises, it’s challenging yourself to evaluate why you’re a dick to yourself in a way you aren’t to other people, or maybe you are a dick to other people, and maybe you want to be a dick to yourself, which is goofy as fuck, but if you’re still suffering, maybe ask yourself why the fuck you want to be such a dick, the answers may surprise you.

That thing of “always avoid negative thoughts” actually does more harm than good, in a lot of cases. It can actually lead to a system where you pretty much scold and punish yourself for not thinking “right.”

SNP have walked out of the chamber after Westminster descends into chaos following the Palestine ceasefire vote.

Speaker of the house nowhere to be seen. Absolute disarray.

Democratic deficit laid bare.

Fuck Labour. Fuck the United Kingdom.

Labour threatened the speaker of the house to change parliamentary procedure without precedent.

Labour are a party for the morally bankrupt. They do not deserve your vote.

modders be like: "this here is a beauty pack for female characters!" *presents you with the most terrifying, artstyle-breaking thing in the universe*

BONUS: Because this is my first post that reached 100+ notes I will thank you all with one of the lovely images that inspired this post

i'm sorry.

I don't play Fallout so I had to look up what ED-E looks like:

I think one of the consequences of getting older is finding out that your parents were kind of right when they complained about technology? At least you can see they weren’t entirely wrong.

I’ve been hearing from friends that it’s getting harder to find quality refrigerators that don’t connect to the internet. Why exactly does my refrigerator need wifi? Or even a computer, at that? Older fridges can last decades because they have so few failure points. They have one job and they do it well. 

I tend not to use my smart TV very often because the damn thing glitches and it’s laggy and too much of a hassle unless I am really committed to watching a movie in my living room. And the worse thing is...can you even buy a non-smart TV these days that isn’t secondhand? Are they even making ordinary...yanno...televisions that don’t need software updates and internet connections, anymore?

Someone in the comments of this post asked how bluetooth earbuds are forced and everyone pointed out that a lot of phones (especially iphones) simply do not have the ports to plug in wired headphones anymore. You must get the apple wireless headphones - and I think that’s the crux of the problem. I am glad I have an android phone because I can use the old wired earbuds I've had for over 12 years. If I wanted to, I could buy wireless earbuds and use them instead, because my model of phone gives me that option.

And that's the kicker: the problem is that as things are "advancing," more and more, options are being taken away. It has nothing to do with consumer demand - obviously there are a lot of people that are not happy with these developments. But as we’re seeing, the products being made don’t reflect customer preference or choice. It’s always about is best for the companies making and selling those products.

Every day we’re hearing about new apps and tech startups and really...does anyone really want this shit? Is the nth attempt to make crypto work, the billions spent on the Metaverse, doorbell cameras; is a fridge with an IP address really allow it to do its job better? Is that actually going to improve the lives of anyone who aren’t the developers of that product? Just the other day I was reading about a tech startup that wants to be able to beam ads into your car's GPS screen. Video ads! On a screen! To tell drivers what's nearby when they can just...continue to look out the window because they're supposed to be driving a goddamn car.

The problem of a world run by tech companies is that the tech isn’t being made to accommodate us, we are being forced to accommodate the tech.

I’ve said it before I’ll say it again.

Nostalgia tech is a thing that would make money if they would just fucking do it. That’s why they still make records and record players.

BUT. Now it’s a luxury and luxury items sell. As LUXURYS.

Because it’s now about money. It never was. It’s about control.

Y’all understand? It was always about control.

So I had a new boiler fitted the other day. The old one had done its job for a long time but finally gave up.

It wasn't until the damn thing was all installed and ready to go that I was told that I would need to download an app on my phone and register my details and prescise location in order to set my heating.

I would no longer have a thermostat in my house. I would only be able to control it from my smart phone.

I am 36 years old and I went mad - not at the poor boiler engineer of course, but I refused to do what he was asking. I asked for an alternative. He initially said there wasn't one. I told him to check with the company. He phoned the company and eventually someone spoke to me about it. Explaining that this was the standard for all new boilers. I told them it was ridiculous. What if I was an elderly person living alone who didn't own a smart phone? What if I lost my phone? What if the wifi failed? What if there was an electrical fault?

It took over half an hour of exasperated bargaining before someone agreed to swap out the smart app connected parts of the boiler with a "standard issue thermostat". At first they were gonna charge me an extra £100 to swap it out, but I argued my case there as well.

After a lot of back and forth and effort that totally drained my energy, eventually I got a standard thermostat fitted. No smart phone app or registration needed. No extra charge. Just a lot of extra effort that someone a bit less stubborn and determined to avoid this technological attack on basic living would have easily backed down on.

We are already living in a world run by tech companies, where every. single. thing. in our lives is slowly being transformed into another system where they can track our every move, steal our personal information, and make life that little bit more complicated.

The fact that even white goods like refridgerators and washing machines are starting to require app connections is worrying. It's not a good thing, and its not being done for convenience. It's being done for data tracking, location tracking, and finding new ways to inflict ads on us.

Sorry if this rant derailed the post a bit, but the memory is still fresh and so apparently is my anger! But at least this is an example where being persistent and stubborn does heed results against them!

Hired someone to swap out my mom's programmable thermostat for an old-fashioned analog one. (She has memory loss. The new one confused her.)

The tech arrived with a "simpler" programmable one. That's not what I asked for, I say.

"I get it. Even these are too complicated for some people. What we really recommend is a smart thermostat that her kids can control with an app. It gets too cold in her house, she calls you. I don't even think they make those old round ones any more."

Haha, I have an ace in the hole: I whip out an analog thermostat, which I bought at a hardware store because I knew this was going to happen. He rolls his eyes, but he does install it.

He didn't even work for the people who would benefit from the data! He was a handyman! But he was persuaded that smart tech was smart, and in the end all I could do was persuade him to humor us.

The problem here is most programmable tech is either proprietary junk that needs a custom app, proprietary junk that needs a proprietary home automation hub, or proprietary junk that needs to talk to a server in the cloud.

It would be kind of cool if I could, say, hook up all my home appliances to a separate LAN via ethernet, and then I could query my home server to see what is running and how much electricity it used. It would be cool if I could turn my appliances on and off like a shelly relay. It would be cool if devices had an RS-232 port so an Arduino could talk to it. It would be cool if I didn't need a proprietary app to talk to my smart devices, if I could just pair my machine via Bluetooth and use generic tools provided by my OS.

That's not even how some printers work any more. HP printers need an app and a server. It's completely uncool that my washing machine has WLAN.

There could be so much cool home automation and monitoring, and it's all thwarted by Bosch devices that don't speak IKEA, Chinese smart watches that don't speak Apple, Phillips light bulbs that don't speak LG.

But by and large, what's the point? What's the point of turning devices on and off remotely, my stand mixer, my coffee maker, my washing machine? What's the point if I'm not there to drink the coffee? What good does it do me if my stand mixer is smart? What good does it do me to have a cloud-enabled scanner if I need to physically insert the pages I want to scan anyway? Why would I want to have a smart TV if I can't even hook it up to a VCR and record a live stream in crappy 4:3 SD.

Honestly, what good does a smart TV do me versus a set-top box?

Maybe in the far future, a home robot looking like R2D2 will be able to communicate with my rice cooker.

But it's far more likely that, far in the future, you will need one app to talk to R2D2 and one app for the Rice cooker, and IKEA will tell you that their smart hub for light bulbs can talk to C3PO, but you need a different protocol droid to talk to their new and improved speaker system. That protocol droid can't talk to the rice cooker, but it can talk to R2D2, as long as you use the right app.

aaron paul has done more for the lgbts by playing jesse pinkman and doing his weird little photoshoots with bryan cranston than harry styles and taylor swift combined

no one is doing it like them

i got anon hate for this post

daily reminder to distrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong