forgetthetimetravel reblogged
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
love it when a nondog baby animal is called a pup anyway
hi dogys
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
yall realize you can criticize religion without like. making fun of people for having things that are sacred and holy to them right.
not to be that guy but theres a huge difference between "this religion and it's practitioners has aspects that warrant criticism" and "lmao look at them believing in things" . its one thing to call out the toxicity and spread of dangerous information in, as an example, pagan communities. it is an entirely separate thing to make fun of pagans for what they find sacred and important to their lives, even if it doesnt make sense to you.
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
Absolutely bonkers that I'm now one of those weirdos you hear about on Twitter
I committed to the bit so hard that I also committed misdemeanor impersonation of a government official
@huffy-the-bicycle-slayer honestly I think this was a massive missed opportunity on the part of the government. I literally learned stuff from osha-official that I proceeded to use IN A VERY REAL OSHA COMPLAINT that resulted in my (now-former) job facing some very serious consequences (as in “you have 48 hours to present a plan and timeline to fix this or we’re shutting you down” consequences). The OSHA employee who handled my complaint said it was one of the best-written and most comprehensive he’d seen in the 20 years he’d been doing the job. The bullet-pointing and management jargon I learned elsewhere, but the forklift certification issues and the lack of adequate safety exits? That was YOU.
It’s not a joke that your blog may have saved lives at my job, because out of eleven infractions I turned in, five were deemed to be “an immediate threat to life and safety.” The government should have offered you a paycheck to keep going as an actual OSHA employee, because you were absolutely teaching us stuff that makes our jobs safer and told us what resources to use if we needed to swing the OSHA club at our bosses and you were doing it in a format that was accessible and popular with your audience. That should be any organization’s absolute DREAM.
So if they won’t thank you, I will: on behalf of about 100 employees who are no longer working in a building full of flammables with no fire extinguishers and no exits from the entire back half of the building, a building where uncertified forklift drivers rammed into support columns and made the walls shake, a building where the HVAC system was full of black mold, thank you, for giving me the tools and courage to pick up the phone and fix the problem.
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
If you got enough money to live happily and comfortably for the rest of your life, but everyone who saw you immediately knew what fandom you are in and understood what that means, would you take it?
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
it literally HAS to be okay to choose to be fat in order for fat liberation to mean anything at all tbh
And it's not just "choose to overeat in order to gain weight." It can also mean "gain weight over time due to natural changes in metabolism and choose not to do anything about it." Or even "being predisposed to being fat and choose not to lose weight."
"embracing the side effects of a medication that helps you live" is an important one too! Also there's nothing inherently bad about choosing to get or stay fat, don't let anyone tell you otherwise 💖
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
Studies show that approaching youth with a bystander-intervention model is actually a lot more effective for reducing sexual assault, and it is also more enthusiastically received than programs that bill themselves as anti-rape.
We can tell youth that they are basically “rapists waiting to happen” (anti-rape initiative), or we can tell them that we know they would intervene if they saw harm happening to someone and we want to help empower them to do that (bystander intervention). The kids jump in with both feet for the latter! It was amazing to see children (and young boys in particular) excited to do this work and engage their creativity with it. Also, studies show that not only do they go on to intervene, but they also do not go on to sexually assault people themselves. Bystander intervention also takes the onus off the person being targeted to deter rape and empowers the collective to do something about it. It answers the question in the room when giggling boys are carrying an unconscious young woman up the stairs at a house party, and people are not sure how to respond and are waiting for “someone” to say or do something.
Richard M. Wright, “Rehearsing Consent Culture: Revolutionary Playtime” in the anthology Ask: Building Consent Culture edited by Kitty Stryker
This is also, btw, how the US drastically reduced drunk driving in the US. Telling people they shouldn’t drive when intoxicated made absolutely zero difference. A slogan-and-ad-campaign for “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk!” changed drinking culture. Going after the bystanders is quite often the most effective thing to do in any social change.
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
Ahirue week day one ~ whisper
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
Republicans not wanting to fund libraries is part of their plan to make the next generation illiterate. That is why they are banning books too.
By all means put the library IN the rec centre! Public Third Spaces are important, and having a library in the same building as hockey or the Y just makes it more accessible. Imagine dropping one kid at practice and taking the other across the hall to read while you wait. Imagine picking up books after you have your workout. Imagine studying for a few hours and then going for a swim before you head home.
This is the John Harper branch of the Waterloo Public Library. I wrote a book and did job applications on the left, and then went up to that gym on the right to walk around the indoor track. Parking was free. The library was free. The YMCA had subsidized rates.
Public spaces are the dream.
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
Unauthorized water
It’s not clear when General Electric started boobytraping appliances with DRM. I first encountered it in January when Shane Morris tweeted about his fridge refusing to accept the $19 generic filter he replaced the GE $55 filter with.
The fridges use an RFID detector to distinguish original GE filters from generic replacements, and engage in lots of anti-owner trickery, like memorizing the IDs of previously used filters and refusing to accept them.
Morris isn’t the only one ourtaged that his fridge is plotting against him. One (anonymous) owner was so offended that they created a site dedicated to warning off potential buyers and explaining to other suckers how to bypass GE’s lockouts.
There’s a good reason for the anonymity. Under Sec 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, showing how to bypass an “access control” to a copyrighted work (eg RFID-detecting code in the fridge) is a potential felony, carrying a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine.
This is quite the moral hazard. Manufacturers have learned that if they design their products so that any use that hurts their shareholders (like buying third party parts) requires bypassing DRM, it becomes a felony to use your own property to your own advantage.
Which is why we’ve seen DRM creep into all manner of devices, from insulin pumps to tractors to car engines to Iphone screens. “Felony contempt of business model” is the statute that every monopolist has dreamt of, and with DMCA 1201, they have it in their grasp.
Back in 2011, I wrote a short story about this for MIT Tech Review’s first sf anthology, called “The Brave Little Toaster” (in tribute to Tom Disch).
The issue only got worse, and so last year I published “Unauthorized Bread” as part of my collection “Radicalized” (it’s being turned into a TV show by Topic):
The metastasis of DRM into every product category shows that when business apologists talk about the sanctity of property, they mean the sanctity of CORPORATE property.
If the manufacturer gets to override your decisions about the things you buy - and felonize any attempt to wrest control back - they property ceases to exist. We become tenants of our devices, not owners.
It’s digital feudalism, in which an elite owns all the property and we get to use it in ways they proscribe. The difference is that today, our aristocracy isn’t even human.
It’s the immortal, remorseless colony organism called the Limited Liability Corporation, to which we are mere inconvenient gut flora.
This is why so many copyright activists are saying “the whole system is fucked; we need to rebuild it from scratch.”
I’ve got an older HP color laser printer that I adore, and plan to keep running as long as possible. It wants to phone home for updates but I have that stuff blocked.
It recognizes when I jam a non-HP toner cartridge in there, and delivers some horrific warnings like NON-GENUINE HP PRODUCT DETECTED and DAMAGE MAY OCCUR and USE IS NOT RECOMMENDED but still grudgingly uses it. Newer models simply refuse, and I reckon this one would too if I allowed it to update its software.
And lemme tellya, the price difference between genuine HP and cheap knockoff (that works just fine) is… staggering:
Color laser printing requires four (4) toner cartridges, one black and one each Red/Blue/Yellow, for a combined cost of $704 bucks.
Remember, that’s just for replacement toner.
Compare that to:
$60 for a set of four, black included. That’s what? 12x difference?
Absolutely bonkers.
The GE filtergate website has been downed since the original publication of this post - here’s an Internet Archive link.
The owner gave a shout out to Unauthorized Bread at the bottom.
The internet of things was an insanely bad idea for the consumer.
Buy dumb products. Buy products that don’t have software.
This really shouldn’t be as prevalent as it is. Even learning about ways to fight against this stuff fills me with so much overwhelming *welp guess they win* dread I’ve been wanting to make a comic about this weird ominous foreboding feeling in the air when it comes to the economy. All this tech integration and enshittification of our own property. This policing control of what works where. The big one for me is when I got a kuerig and wanted to go with third party reusable pods. You think it stops here? It wont, It’ll be cloud integration next, then you have to buy only XBrand devices that work on your cloud controlled kitchen. And with everything being internet connected, its a rapid pace now. Alot easier to push out planned obsolete-ism when you just need to push out the software update that chugs the device to a frustrating unusable crawl vs building a sturdy device that takes 20 years to clunk out. Prices keep going up an AI is posed to take so many jobs, costs wont go down, we are past that arent we, that lie, *Oh save the company money and costs go down for consumer* I cant put my finger on it, theres so many comics i want to make about it, im gonna try reading this gentlemans books if i can you know… get past the crippling depression and anxiety that comes with thinking of what feels like the unstoppable future. Like I guess what I need to know is. Whats the solution here? Not just to forced products and ownership, not just increasing costs to just live and access basic necessities, not just the obvious outsourcing of all our livelyhoods to AI while companies will continue to raise prices. Not just the clear and obvious indentured servitude of the working class in all regards. Whats the solution to all of it? To The digital feudalism? Capitalism failed, what happens next? Cause they can control the lawmakers
So they can control the law enforcers
So they can control us staying in the system.
Because outside of sharpening the guillotine only thing I can think of is everybody collectively decides to quite this game. We made up the idea of money. Maybe we all need to stop playing pretend.
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
Wheat fields are more mystical than fields of other crops. You are 7,000 times more likely to meet an old god or see a portent of doom in a wheat field than in a field of like… soybeans.
For your consideration: cornfields
Cornfields are less mystical than wheat fields but more mystical than soybean fields. Two-bit monsters congregate in corn fields to eat people, but their power is nothing compared to the things that manifest in wheat fields.
Have been in both wheat and cornfields; can confirm. Cornfields host monsters who eat people. Wheat fields attract old gods.
I have a theory that this is because the notions most of us have of “old gods” are pretty intrinsically European, and wheat was (and is) the staple crop of European life. It is quite literally tied to the ancestral rituals and beliefs of most white people. Odin, the Morrigan, and even Zeus are actually linked to a set of peoples who cultivated wheat.
Meanwhile, corn (maize) is a crop native to the Americas. It features in the white cultural imagination in a very different way. Corn is a motif seen not in our ancestral myths, but in a much newer genre: the American Gothic. With its focus on the tensions between man and nature and—perhaps more importantly—the United States’s history of genocide against its indigenous population and trade in enslaved Africans, the American Gothic is VERY preoccupied with agriculture. Our monsters come out of corn fields because corn is a symbol for not only what we did to the Native Americans (who were the first to grow the crop), but of what we are doing to the very land itself. Corn is a monument to our cultural sins.
Meanwhile, I suspect that corn features very differently in the imaginations of people of color. If you asked a Native American person or a Latinx person what sort of mysticism they associate with corn fields, I imagine their answer would be very different than ours.
TLDR: White people associate wheat with our ancestors’ gods because our ancestors grew wheat. We associate corn with terrible monsters because it is a literal sign of our own monstrosity.
Native American here, can confirm that small plots of corn feel safe and homey; ideally they should be interplanted with other crops. You find turkeys and possums and raccoons in the corn. It might tell you important knowledge.
However.
Giant monocultures of corn, where the corn grows unbroken for miles and miles, not near human habitation, devoid of local wildlife, just corn on corn in the soft wind? Corn mega monocultures? Those sound like screaming.
malus-syl-vestris
“monocultures attract people-eating monsters” is not the take I expected to see today but I’m glad I saw it
The anthropological analysis and discussion on folklore is spot on. 10/10
Corn lore
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
someone added the tag "the oat" on one of the reblogs of my stoat draws and it amused me
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
angel who hides in an abandoned torah ark
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
Now that Twitter's URL has officially changed, lets all join hands and remember that Elon Musk threw away one of the most recognizable, established brands of the past decade due to his personal chuunibyou fascination with the letter X.
forgetthetimetravel reblogged
you can cut the flowers but you cannot stop the coming of spring