fuCK yOu goAtMaN

Literally nothing will make me more evil than just being sort of overwhelmed by Noises

fucking love when I'm on a call with someone and they start to do a little errand or go somewhere else and they say "and you're coming with me" like. absolutely I am let's go on an adventure I've been spirited away

People... watch out for these things!

The saying applies with more than usual force here: if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer: you're the product being sold. (And maybe you're the product being sold even if you are paying for it.)

DO NOT MAKE YOUR PERSONAL PHYSICAL DATA AVAILABLE TO PEOPLE WHO COULD THEN SELL IT TO THOSE INVESTED IN USING IT TO SURVEIL YOU AND POTENTIALLY CHARGE YOU WITH CRIMES.

The most recent generation of Internet users has been carefully and systematically encouraged by Big Data to get casual and easygoing about (for convenience's sake) trusting their data in the hands of total strangers. Time to break that habit.

Don't make it easy for yourself to become someone else's horror story. Take a careful look at all the apps you've been using and taking for granted, and start asking questions about who gets to see the data you give them, and just what they get to do with it.

So, thanks to President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill, remote locations on the Navajo Nation Reservation will be receiving electricity for the first time — ever.

Also, water treatment devices are being developed to help the tribe access clean running water. After decades without.

#controversial opinion: the infrstructure bill was one of the most important bills passed in the past decade (or even... longer)#the fact that biden got it passed can never be understated. that bill sat in congress for YEARS.#we're fixing problems that have been problems for decades because of this bill

Besides all the money to fix all the shit that's broken in the last forty years since we haven't been maintaining things properly and/or replacing them as they wear out, it also includes

$39 billion to modernize transit and improve accessibility--you know how a lot of public transit is not usable for people with disabilities? Here's $39 billion to fix that! And you know how a lot of public transit isn't actually very well designed so it's cumbersome and inefficient to use? Here's money to fix that!

$66 billion for passenger and freight rail--rail is by far the most environmentally friendly and financially efficient way to move people and freight. And we're actually investing in it for the first time in a century.

$7.5 billion to build a national network of electric vehicle chargers to make electric vehicles more practical.

$73 billion to overhaul the nation's power infrastructure, clean energy transmission, and overall energy policy--you know how leftists have been saying for years that renewables are ready to go, why aren't we moving in that direction? Well, that takes money to transition the infrastructure, and here is the money to do it.

$65 billion for broadband development--bringing broadband to rural places where the big corporate ISPs aren't going to bother because they're not profitable enough. With today's economy, a lack of broadband access leaves people isolated disconnected. This is fixing that.

It also MASSIVELY ramps up what the US is doing to make sure everyone has clean water

$15 billion for local governments to replace lead water pipes

$9 billion to address emerging contaminants such as PFAs

$3.5 billion to build water and sewer systems on Indian Reservations

$7 billion to FEMA for handling climate change-related disasters

Many of these line items are orders of magnitude more money than the US has spent on these things before. This is transformational. But the thing is, the Infrastructure Bill was not a one-and-done thing. It's designed to work over several years, because major infrastructure work doesn't just start on a dime. If Trump gets re-elected, all of this goes away.

I have friends who live in Puerto Rico, where the infrastructure is...not great, and this bill gave the island 950 million, which is more than the value of the entire current infrastructure. My friends say since the bill passed they've seen crews out constantly fixing roads, bridges, electric, all the things.

in the latest cyber-news: the internet archive has lost their case against 4 major publishing houses (verge article). they’re going to appeal, but this is still a bad outcome. the fate of the internet is currently hanging in the balance because 4 multibillionare publishing groups missed out on like $15 of combined revenue during the pandemic because of the archive’s online library service. it’s so fucking stupid.

for those who don’t know what the internet archive is, it’s a virtual library full of media. books, magazines, recordings, visuals, flash games, websites - a lot of these things either don’t exist anymore or cannot be found & bought. heard of the wayback machine? that’s part of the internet archive. it is the most important website to exist, and i don’t say that lightly. if the internet archive goes down, the cultural loss will be immeasurable.

so how can you help?

and finally…

cannot stress enough that donating to the internet archive to help them appeal this without going broke is the most important thing you can do right now. my day job revolves around fulfilling digital article and book scan requests at an academic library and a huge part of that is borrowing from other libraries that do controlled digital lending (incl. the internet archive!). copyright law is already hugely restrictive on what we can and can't lend, and we absolutely don't have the option to pirate anything for our patrons due to being a large academic institution. it's difficult to overstate just how bad this ruling could end up being for libraries that have digital lending programs, esp ones that rely on CDR for old/archival/hard-to-find texts.

I'm incredibly fucking disappointed at the bootlickers in the comments claiming that the IA steals from small creators. Eliminating a valuable research, academic and cultural resource because you've bought into the fiction that "potential sales" are lost sales is exactly what these big corporations want. You aren't saving small creators by swatting down a non-profit, you're allowing ginormous publishing monopolies to consolidate even further while they smile a snake's smile over independent creators.

The Internet Archive is absolutely vital for my work and research. Without it, a good chunk of Welsh LGBTQ+ history would be inaccessible. The Welsh books hosted on IA are indexed and searchable, meaning any Welsh LGBTQ+ terminology can be searched for. Otherwise, me sitting down to read every. single. Welsh book ever published *just in case* it contains one of the terms in my data is an impossible task (Welsh books have been published since 1546) . In fact, this is something I refer to in my methodology for this very reason.

I'm also broke as hell rn but when I get the chance I'm gonna donate. Without IA, you can kiss goodbye to a *massive* chunk of academia. My lecturers use IA. So not just like, undergrads and PhD students, but seasoned academics will lose access to a major resource if IA stopped existing.

The argument of "potential sales lost" also makes no sense from an author's perspective. Published authors are usually paid an advance before publication. After that point, they would have to sell an obscene amount of books to qualify for extra pay from those sales, so many authors are unbothered by someone reading their book for free. Libraries allow people to read books for free and IA is essentially one giant library. It even has a feature where if you're reading a book and "check it out" for an hour, no-one else can read the book your reading until the time runs out. Just like a normal library. Potential sales lost to the company is just like when companies claim to have lost millions at a start of the year when they haven't actually lost any money at all. They just didn't earn as much money as they were predicting.

IA provides a vital service and we should be fighting to ensure it isn't lost.

Seconding all of the above -- Since the IA lost its case, I've noticed a number of books have rapidly become inaccessible for me. The negative impact this has had on my work can't be understated, as I've been left without a crucial resource for my research. I. don't believe there's a single article I've written that hasn't been impacted by this, with me often having to scrambling to get access to sources that are rare and/or our of print. I have the advantage of a well-stocked uni library that is good at ILLs, but this is a taste of what's going to come if this isn't resolved in the Archive's favor.

happy birthday diavolo 🎃~!

on a trip with the newbies! … Σ(°ロ°)⁉️

raphael javelin wip

HEH...😏

"mephisto's a straight guy!!11" sorry you are objectively incorrect <3 i will be claiming him now...........🏳️‍🌈

gonna be honest obey me fandom is weirdly fixated on hating mephistopheles. like, he was barely even rude to the mc in comparison to the brothers in season 1 and honestly i don’t even think most of the people being weird about him have even read season 4? like idk man seems a LITTLE iffy to me 🤷‍♂️

This made me bust out laughing

Peer-reviwed from @myturtlegotjacked

[on the verge of having a complete breakdown] i need to make some kind of list or perhaps sort things into categories

And here's a link to the original exposé, published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (behind a paywall)

*RISES FROM THE DEAD*

BABE WAKE UP THEY'RE ABOUT TO RELEASE A SIDE CHARACTER UNIT SONG

girls night

"Wanna see a magic trick?"