credit

and now, some input from macklemore

but in all seriousness, respect to macklemore for this because holy shit

New post, gonna use this to document my journey as a trans woman

Going to the store

by 阿玫小酱当当囧

First words~

Jules didn’t stop yelling “Wobbuffet” for weeks much to Jessie’s dismay. Jessie and James were still very proud that her first word was such an advanced one

Uncle Meowth helped Jean learned how to speak. Their first word was “Rocket”, just like him!

Happy Kojimusa Day!!!!!

As a wheelchair user I'm trying to reframe my language for "being in the way."

"I'm in the way," "I can't fit," and "I can't go there," is becoming "there's not enough space," "the walkway is too narrow," and "that place isn't accessible."

It's a small change, but to me it feels as if I'm redirecting blame from myself to the people that made these places inaccessible in the first place. I don't want people to just think that they're helping me, I want them to think that they're making up for someone else's wrongdoing. I want them to remember every time I've needed help as something someone else caused.

To the people saying this also applies to fat people - you are not derailing! This is true!!!

falling apart

Dungeon Meshi Convention Episode

There are now over 15 million empty homes in the US, and 650,000 homeless per the very bias official numbers, or 23 houses per person

googling ‘jobs for autistic people’ and realising that everyone still thinks autistic people are either sheldon cooper or really tall toddlers

NVM ONE SUGGESTED NIGHT GUARD OUTTA MY WAY GAYBOY IM GONNA FUCK FREDDY FAZBEAR

this post is destroying my notifications but it’s two waring factions and i am simply caught in the crossfire.

there’s the version without my addition offering genuine discussion of ableism against autistic people when it comes to finding jobs, real advice and words of wisdom.

and the people who also want me to fuck freddy fazbear and are cheering me on

I bought this expensive ass yogurt as a gift to myself so that I could make little candles in the tiny terracotta pot it comes in and it turns out it is the best, creamiest, most buttery heavenly delicious yogurt I have ever tasted and I’m now addicted

sometimes things that are expensive are worse but sometimes things that are expensive are astronomically better and that’s where the real problem lies

YOU CAN TORRENT GOOD YOGHURT. If the good yoghurt has a live culture you can use it to make a whole pot of new yoghurt with the exact same bacteria culture. You'll have to add flavoring yourself but it should be similar.

HOW?? YOU CAN CLONE YOGURT?

Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election

I'm in to TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (Monday, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.

But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.

To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.

But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.

It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.

Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.

Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo

On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582

They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html

And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/

But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

Time UK law was updated to make these illegal practices that Amazon is undertaking costly for them.

In the meantime I'm sponsoring foxglove to take them to court.

Ma'am did you seriously just gainax while crushing a woman to death

sex in the shower? no. slip and bust my ass. break my dick. she slippin too. she knock her head on the tile she passed out. bleedin. i cant walk cause my jimmy snapped. thought this was gonna be sexy and we both end up half dead.