the ruins of my mental health

Finn, he/him, late 20s // vent blogging to cope \\ the moderna vaccine is my antifa supersoldier serum

[agriftatsea]

petition to have any Mitch McConnell hospital updates be referred to as VeggieTales

[agriftatsea]

if we're gonna say that cops and homophobes aren't welcome at pride, can we ban the anti-proshippers too? their entire movement is based on "I think you're gross and you are inflicting real harm on real people just by discussing topics I don't like" which is pretty much the current US administration's view on queer people (especially trans people) and people of color being allowed in public. idk I just think that if you're an anti in 2026 you aren't even an ally anymore. you are part of the problem.

[agriftatsea]

oohhhhhh it's a "spend a full hour making sense of the insane notes at your place of work while the sound of your pet playing in the next room is too loud for your senses even through your earplugs" kinda night huh

[agriftatsea]

If you're looking for a sign to stop using AI, this is it:

Nearly 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents have one year to find new power as their utility pivots to data centers

A Nevada energy company recently informed a nearby California utility provider that it will no longer supply electricity to 49,000 Lake Taho

The affected residents, living near the California-Nevada border, are in a unique predicament: served by California-based Liberty Utilities, which receives 75% of its power from NV Energy across the border. While NV Energy claims the transition has been planned and delayed twice since 2009 – long before the current AI boom – the company also recently hailed "unprecedented" changes that data centers have brought to the state's energy grid.

NV Energy's Director of Business Development Jeff Brigger said the company is excited to serve the load and called the data centers "a huge opportunity" at a panel last September. The Desert Research Institute recently recently reported that data centers consumed 22% of Nevada's energy grid in 2024, and the figure could grow to 35% by 2030. Data center builders want the state to triple its capacity, and 12 data centers across Nevada might request up to 5.9 GW by 2033, 2.8 times what the Hoover Dam generates.

If you thought that AI was going to make your life and the lives of other ordinary people better, you were wrong. It's overwhelmingly clear that the AI hype is exclusively in service of corporations and the upper class by eliminating the need to pay workers, creating whatever they think they need without question, and endlessly stroking their ego (as we've seen with Grok and Elon Musk.)

To be pro-AI is to be anti-human.

[agriftatsea]

I think a core issue with a lot of "sexual deviant" discourse is that it assumes that your interests in fictional horror/lolicon/BDSM/etc means that you're going to pursue those things in real life. It's a preemptive punishment meant to try to keep people ""safe"" by weeding out the bad people as quickly as possible. Never mind that a lot of victims actually find comfort and enjoyment in such taboo or extreme media (again, assuming it is fictional or roleplay and not snuff films/CSAM where real people were harmed making it) or that a shocking majority of sexual abuse comes from family members or authority figures who seem perfectly safe; surely, we can tell at a glance who the bad people are, right? Better put them in prison before they actually commit anything, just to be sure.

Do you have to like that sort of thing, or even like the people who do? No. Not at all. But you can and should recognize their right to exist, to have thoughts and fears and desires that may horrify you, and remember that thoughts are not harmful. It is acting on them that is.

There are no clear-cut demographics of good and bad people; it is actions, not thoughts or skin color or religion or sex or gender, that determine who someone is. Until and unless someone actually directly takes action and causes harm, they are innocent. Full stop.

[agriftatsea]

i just think that if your URL is of a white man gay bait ship from an American crime procedural, you should not be so quick to bitch about "white feminism." that house is as glass as it gets. put the rock down. call your representatives instead.

[liberalsarecool]

Those dead blank eyes say it all.

[dekaydk]

Yes, Zuckerberg is a dead shell of a human being, willing to overlook actual genocide and other major harms being driven on the platforms he owns, but this verdict isn't simply the "finally they're going to be accountable" story we're being told.

Torrez is the same guy who as DA fought tooth and nail to keep from having to prosecute cases in a timely fashion, in accordance with the inconvenient-to-him Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, instead being absolutely comfortable with letting arrested people rot in jail for weeks because timely case management conferences was too much trouble for his office. He got slapped down by the courts for that.

Torrez' stated goal now is to enact age verification online. This means everything you do online gets tracked to prove you're old enough. Age verification means you have no privacy at all. It also creates a mechanism for any petty official in America to investigate every site and user. Once they have the tool, they will use it.

[agriftatsea]

Meta must pay $375 million for violating New Mexico law in child exploitation case, jury rules

Jury reaches a verdict in New Mexico trial in which the state's attorney general alleged that Meta failed to safeguard its family of apps fr

The civil trial, which began with opening arguments in Santa Fe last month, centered on allegations that Meta violated state consumer protections laws and misled residents about the safety of apps like Facebook and Instagram. New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez sued Meta in 2023 following an undercover operation involving the creation of a fake social media profile of a 13-year-old girl that he previously told CNBC “was simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations” from child abusers.

...

When the New Mexico trial’s second phase, conducted without a jury, commences on May 4, a judge will determine whether Meta created a public nuisance and should fund public programs intended to address the alleged harms. The state’s lawyers are also urging Meta to implement changes to its apps and operations, including “enacting effective age verification, removing predators from the platform, and protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors.“

We already know that the American Justice System doesn't do shit to protect kids from predators, especially not wealthy ones. Therefore, Meta being liable for criminal actions taken through its platform isn't really a good thing. To put it another way, it is already illegal to drink and drive - Toyota shouldn't be held responsible for making the car used in a drunk driving accident.

Queer people have been called predators for decades and a threat to other people's children, even when 90% of all predators are close friends or family members of the victims. We need to focus on actually investigating and prosecuting people who actually commit harm, not just the people who "might" molest someone in a bathroom or the owner of whatever building it occurred in.

[sandersstudies]

I only hate certain types of fic the same way I hate mosquitos and ticks. Like get these nasty little buggers away from me but also I respect their place in the ecosystem.

[sandersstudies]

Me, spraying bug spray: blocked.

[sandersstudies]

Listen and sometimes? To enjoy running through a beautiful field of grass and flowers (ao3) you have to tolerate the fact that bugs (fics you don’t like) are there and maybe you will even encounter one, but you can use bugspray (filtered tags) to reduce the likelihood of that. Because the alternative is not getting to experience the beautiful field of grass and flowers.

[agriftatsea]

one of the best things about living in 2026 is finally the stress of my job is causing physical damage to my body that I can only endure with controlled substances, AND ALSO I hate my job so much that I don't care if I'm stoned on the clock anymore. fuck this place.

[agriftatsea]

the sooner we all get universal basic income, the sooner you can try to get your dumb incompetent mean coworker fired without the guilt of worrying that they might go hungry if you do

[agriftatsea]

"Did you know OP is a proshipper?" The president of the United States is mentioned over 4,000 times so far in emails exchanged between a cabal of billionaire pedophile torture enthusiasts. Take that rage towards "dangerous people" online and aim it at the politicians who are violating real human rights every few hours. Get involved in your community. Talk to your neighbors. Literally anything other than boiling yourself in smug righteousness about "taking down" people who are just as much of a victim as you are.

[transgenderer]

There is simply no *principled* difference between book piracy and libraries. This doesn't mean you have to be in favor of book piracy if you like libraries, but it means you can't be so on abstract principled grounds, it has to be on a specific materialist "I think below this level of access libraries are good, but above it they are bad; it would be bad if everyone donated books more often, and libraries were much larger and easier to access"

[tesria]

Am I missing something here? I absolutely don't want access restricted at all, the more accessible you can make a library the better. I'd venture to say most library supporters agree.

The principled difference is "I want people to be compensated for their labour."

You know writers are paid when you borrow their books from libraries, right? And that they aren't paid if you pirate them? And library usage is counted when publishers decide whether to keep authors on or commission more books, but pirate downloads aren't?

[transgenderer]

authors are not paid when you borrow books from the library, except for the initial purchase of the book. in a world where everyone donated most books they read to libraries when they were done with them, and there were many more libraries, more easily accessible, people would buy fewer books, and authors would be paid less. and remember, those ebooks on a pirating website didnt come from nowhere, someone bought one and uploaded it. pirating websites are exactly the ideal of a world with more libraries, brought to an extreme. like to be clear: youre allowed to be against this ideal, you can be like, a "libraries moderate", theyre not sacred or anything. but that is the implication of your position: there is a ceiling on allowed library accessibility, above which they become bad

[naranjapetrificada]

Whoa okay wow.

I'm not in the field anymore, but I was a librarian once (degree and all) and wow do people not know how libraries work. To a degree that never ceases to astound me.

I'm gonna try not to go into everything in deep detail because I have things to do right now but I want to address two major myths being so confidently asserting here.

This might seem like the less important myth but it's actually the more misunderstood of the two: when patrons donate books to a public library, by and large those books are not going to end up in the collection. Many municipal libraries (in the US at least, the only place I have firsthand experience with) have a "Friends of the Library" (or similar) group that supports the library, primarily through fundraising. If your library also has a little shelf of books for sale (or in bigger systems maybe a whole separate book shop!), that's where donations are going. The reasons why are many but essentially boil down to the varying quality and condition of donations that come in. I can count on one hand (in fact on two fingers) the number of times I've seen a donation become part of a collection, and both times those were items of a local history interest that did not circulate for checkout. One rare book and one collection of papers, donated basically for archival purposes.

The library field is a major pillar of the publishing industry, and libraries frequently buy multiple copies of a book if they buy one at all because collection developers are experts at stretching their ever-shrinking budgets and can only buy what they think is needed, wanted, and will circulate. When I worked in collection development (a job I loved until it burnt me out) we occasionally had wiggle room for small presses, local authors, etc., but buy in large when I submitted my vendor carts to my boss I was buying more than one of everything. I was in a larger system, so we wanted coverage for multiple branches, but sometimes I ended up having to buy more of something if it developed a following.

You know that friend who goes to the library all the time and is in book clubs and is always recommending books to you? That person is powerful, and their interest in contagious, and in addition to creating more circulation at the library (which makes collection developers buy more copies of a book), a lot of their friends will just buy the book themselves. Ask any author (especially if fiction) and they'll tell you the same.

There's more I could say about how it shouldn't matter how much money libraries spend because they're good for a community but I didn't come here to make a moral argument. I came here because the hap between what people seem to think about how libraries work and how they actually work is wider than the goddamn Chicxulub impact crater.

[agriftatsea]

OP sounds like the kind of person who believes that AI democratizes art, but on top of that let's look at how royalties work and who gets paid (or not paid) when you pirate something.

Pirating a Disney movie is not going to lead to anyone losing their job, but pirating a book can almost certainly lead to that author not getting a second book deal AND directly cuts into their income. Why? Because big collaborative projects like movies/TV shows/video games pay most of their talent up front more than residuals/from sales. It MIGHT mean an individual doesn't get put on the team for the next project, but they still got compensation for their work.

When you pirate books, you are cutting directly into the income the creator will be paid for their work. The advance you get for signing with a publisher is generally Very Small, and most of your income comes from sales. If your novel doesn't sell, you're not going to get another book deal from the same publisher, and it's not likely you'll get a book deal from another person.

You, OP, are not owed unlimited free access to other people's creative work; especially not when doing so affects their ability to provide from themselves. Breaking into someone's house to steal the food from their shelves is not the same as shoplifting from WalMart. Punching down is not praxis, and you are a bad person for pretending otherwise.

[agriftatsea]

clocking out ten minutes early bc you saw something So Racist in a customer's account notes you have to leave before you get tempted to sign up their email address for ten thousand spam publications

[agriftatsea]

we have GOT to start making "depiction is not endorsement" a slogan so popular that it ends up on t shirts at walmart

[agriftatsea]

we are never gonna improve as a society if you dumb bastards don't start accepting "marginal progress" as progress. I just watched someone ask people to "try to avoid hitting animals while driving" get spammed with anons complaining about how it's not always safe to brake or swerve and how it's just gonna make highways less safe for everyone. like. god forbid someone asks you not to go 80 down a country road and splatter a family of geese. it's not gonna kill you to try to drive slower and pay attention to your surroundings, but it might mean you have to turn your music down a little and focus.

a little effort and a little discomfort is good for you, actually! stagnation leads to rot! and for fucks sake, apply critical thinking to the stuff you read online.

[agriftatsea]

person wearing the amulet of horrible conflict resolution talking to a friend: I just don't understand why I can't form long lasting close relationships!

friend: hey did you know your necklace vaporizes anyone you think is being too mean to you?

person with amulet: how. DARE YOU?? I'm LITERALLY a victim of abuse!!! I thought you understood me!!! I can't believe you'd do this to me after all we've been through!!!

the smoking remains of their friend: ...

[agriftatsea]

you know you're an adult in fandom spaces when you see "this gay ship is progressive because neither of the men are effeminate twinks!" get paraded around again like a seven year locust plague. have your preferences, sure, but "thank god no one in this homosexual relationship is a faggot" is not the step forward that you think it is