when you haven’t written for a while and you’re intimidated by the project Looming in front of you, you feel like those baby otters that are learning how to swim at the zoo, crying and screaming the whole time despite being perfectly adapted to doing this activity,
my stupid fucking aunt loraine bought us an air friar for our wedding present 🤦♀️ the apartments barely big enough for the two of us now weve got this dumb asshole flying around preaching at us … every time i get a migraine he tries to give me herbs and poultices 🙄
I think one of the reasons why tree law is so popular and people are so enthusiastic about it is because a big, old tree being killed feels so awful. You’ve got something that took years or decades to get that big, that provides so many benefits, and then it’s just…gone and irreplaceable. Of course people are like oh boy, you didn’t think that thing was valuable and now the law is gonna come for you and you’re gonna regret it.
And it feels like one of the few cases where the rich (not the mega rich, but the regular rich) actually get held to account for their crimes, because the punishment is designed to match the actual damage they do. You cut down a bunch of your neighbor’s trees to make your property more valuable? The punishment is basically the cost of your property.
You know how back in the pre-Internet days, it was nearly impossible to watch a TV series in its entirety because the local affiliate stations would deliberately air the episodes all out of order, then do some sort of statistical sorcery to figure out which particular episodes gave the
advertisers the best return for their dollar and just run those ten or twelve specific episodes in an endless semi-randomised rotation, and that was why every time you channel-surfed across a particular show it always seemed to be the same damn episode?
Twitter’s algorithm is literally the social media equivalent of that.
In middle/high school I put all the music I had on an off-brand mp3 player and would just set it to Shuffle All. I quickly realized the player’s shuffle fuction wasn’t purely random–it was weighted towards my favorite songs (aka the songs with the most plays).
Only I had never chosen those songs. They were just the random few to pop up the first time I shuffled everything, and they started playing more and more frequently as this horribly short-sighted algorithm fed itself bad data, until I was so annoyed at those few songs that I stopped listening entirely.
Anyway a few years later Facebook did the exact same thing with my friends list, siphoning me off from seeing most of my feed because OBVIOUSLY I interacted with them the most, therefore they must be my besties. But really they were just the only people showing up for me to interact with in the first place, until I was down to just a few people I never really talked to from high school, a college prof, and my racist uncle I kept calling out.
And shortly after that, YouTube followed suit, replacing “Subscriptions” with “Recommended” as the default category, and trying to find “things I liked” when it was really just whatever three channels I’d watched last, whatever unrelated viral vid it wanted to push that week, and weird perennials like Whose Line clips or lockpick reviews or YTPs that seem to hibernate for months at a time then return like locusts.
All this to say: the big mysterious algorithms that now run all the major platforms on the internet are never acting in your best interests. They’re just that junky mp3 player’s Shuffle All with a fresh coat of paint, and, to be clear, this is by design. They are VERY good at what they do, which is funneling users into nice predictable pockets of content that advertisers can exploit.
having cash is like having secret money. like whos gonna find out i’m buying tacos with this crisp $20 bill??? not my bank account, that’s for sure
That’s literally why the government wants to stop it
Defend cash. The existence of a cash economy is so so necessary for the survival of every population that the government wants to kill. Homeless people, sex workers, undocumented people, addicts. They all need cash to survive.
“But what about crypto!”
Crypto is a scam. They’re hyping up fake currencies that they know will crash and they’re counting on people like you to contribute to the hype and eventually lose all your money in the inevitable crash.
But there is definitely value in having anonymous online money! If you need to buy something online that the government doesn’t want you to have, knowing how to anonymously use crypto will help you do that. I hope that in the future we’ll see better, reliable and more environmentally friendly forms of anonymous online currency. But right now, yeah, sometimes you need crypto to have a little bit of secret money online.
But don’t use it for more than that. Keep remembering that crypto is a scam.
yeah i’ve been putting through a lot of orders that I’d normally put off until way closer to when I need the stuff. Most of it comes via usps anyway, but on the off-chance the vendor uses ups, I’m getting stocked up. order ahead if you possibly can, babes. shipping is about to get nuts.
People die on the job every summer. Remember that water and shade breaks are crucial when working in the heat, and calling emergency services for signs of serious heat illness (fatigue, nausea/vomiting, headaches, dizziness, clammy skin, confusion, agitation, slurred speech, high body temperature, rapid heart rate, etc.) is entirely appropriate. If you’re afraid to call 911 for reasons such as being undocumented, you’ll need to get very familiar with how to prevent, recognize, and treat heat illness. If you are symptomatic and not allowed a break, water, or medical treatment, walk out. No matter how broke you are, your job is not worth your life.
“how to look androgynous” “nonbinary fashion tips” you are skinny im not listening to you
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Youre supposed to interpret it as “skinny nonbinary ppl see themselves as the default state of being nonbinary and exclude fat nonbinary people constantly especially in discussions of presentation” hope that helps
companies underestimate how much locking their content behind needing an account will just make me go do something else. oh your website wants me to make an account to view this content? oh your website doesn’t show media to logged-out users? okay. i didn’t actually want to see it that bad. yeah. bye ✌️
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