Quick! To the bat-fax!

Reblog storage unit for @sandybrett (formerly @time-and-water)

[writtenoffantihero]

Google will block sideloading of unverified Android apps starting next year

Google says it’s no different than checking IDs at the airport.

This is just another form of censorship, control of what we can/can't see and engage with, and another means of getting our private information.

[monarchofmonsters]

Alternative forks of AOSP (Android Open-Source Project) which are not maintained by Google and will not be affected by this:

LineageOS (I use this one)

Graphene OS

Functionally they are virtually identical to stock Android. Android began as an open-source project, and these versions are built off of that.

Fuck Google.

[mordcore]

[amiibo-king]

for those like me who cannot install alternative android forks on their phone because the phone in question is thoroughly unrootable, I would recommend downloading anyapk on your phone while you still can. In their own words:

anyapk is a lightweight Android application installer that bypasses Google's developer verification requirements by using local ADB (Android Debug Bridge) connections. Smoothly install any APK file on your device without restrictions, gatekeepers, or corporate approval.

If you're reading this after Google's lockdown date and are unable to install anyapk the regular way, there is a method outlined on the github linked above which tells you how to install anyapk on your phone by plugging it into a computer with ADB installed on it. Once you have anyapk on your phone, you will not have to do that ever again (unless you delete anyapk off your phone)

[aromanticbastards]

[Description for the first image:

a tweet by @/Pirat_Nation:

From September 2026, all apps, including those outside the Play Store, must come from verified developers.

No more anonymous sideloads. No quick comebacks for malware gangs.

First: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand.

end description]

[chromalogue]

[Description for the second image: a post from jrepin that reads:

"Sideloading" is the rentseeker word for "being able to run software of your choosing on a computing device you purchased". There is no reasonable case for an operating system developer having a say over what programs you run on your hardware.

--Eugen Rochko of Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115093185284473606]

[creekfiend]

lots of the people talking about how they don't count as a person who has been harmed by these academic systems bc they've been able to narrowly succeed have been making me think about my experience in brain jail in Detroit a little over a decade ago.

this brain jail was not meaningfully different than the other ones I have been in, but it was more overt about how it was using the inmates against each other (which ironically allowed me to identify this pattern in other institutions when it is more subtle) and I'll explain what I mean by that.

there were two wards for adults at this place. one was for inmates who were considered dangerous and one was for inmates who were considered not dangerous. if you read those words and immediately thought "wow I bet the ward for dangerous inmates contained mostly Black people, addicts, and people who had highly stigmatized diagnoses" then you understand exactly how things work at places like this. LOL.

I was of course placed in the ward where people are not considered dangerous. I don't have any personality disorder diagnosed, I'm not an addict, I'm white, when placed into traumatizing situations I often shut down rather than lashing out. I was considered a danger only to myself.

here is where I think it's really important how we frame these systems.

I was luckier than the people who were put in the other ward. I had privileges they did not have. I was treated better than they were.

and also, that institution was an institution that used systemic violence to control behavior and disappear human beings.

the looming threat of the Other Ward is one of the tools of violence used to control the behavior of all inmates. at this particular brain jail this was made explicit and they would actively threaten you with being transferred to that ward if you were behaving in ways that were inconvenient to them or that they did not like for some reason. many people received this threat while I was there, including myself.

the threat was effective because 1. it was implicitly understood that those inmates were treated worse than we were, and 2. we were encouraged to view those inmates as being fundamentally different from us. they encouraged us to therefore be afraid of being among them.

this has been true at every brain jail that I have been in to a greater or lesser degree. even if the inmates are not separated explicitly in this way the way that the "bad" inmates are treated is used as an implicit threat to ensure that the "good" inmates stay in line and don't rebel against the authority figures.

so I'm reading a lot of things like, "well, I have succeeded at college, but every time I had to take a leave of absence I felt a gnawing fear that the administration would take away my status as a good student who deserved accommodation," and often people are saying this because they don't want me to think that they are somehow appropriating my experience. but the thing is that in order to have solidarity with the Bad Students, you have to understand that actually you're not different than us. you have to understand consciously what you already understand subconsciously (or else you wouldn't be afraid): whether or not you fall into the black hole is arbitrary. the presence of the black hole is used as a tool of violence to control your behavior. the people who have control over whether or not you fall into the black hole can treat you pretty much however they like whenever they like for any reason. because they have a black hole they can throw you into.

homelessness is used this way in society broadly, also. and that is why we are encouraged to see homeless people as fundamentally a different category of person than we are. while at the same time, homelessness is the gun that is held to everyone's head to keep us productive under capitalism.

what I'm saying is that I think the idea of... being able to "appropriate" the experiences of someone who had it worse than you (and I did have it worse than many of you! and some people had it worse than me! we don't need to deny those facts) is fundamentally at odds with the goal of solidarity. something something James baldwin quote about my suffering is only important in that it allows me to connect myself to other people who have suffered.

all of this to say I would encourage all of you who feel guilt about having not been thrown into the black hole but having been made afraid that you might be (or about being thrown into the black hole for a shorter period of time, or whatever other luck you may have had within a violent system,) to examine and put aside those feelings in favor of an understanding of how your experience fits into the broader way these systems function. my experiences and your experiences and the experiences of the people who got put into the Bad Ward are all necessary to allow these systems to continue to function.

[creekfiend]

I think the thing I find really refreshing about your perspective you’ve been sharing is how an ideal education system would account for the needs of ALL students, not just those deemed sick enough to get (questionable) help.

Like a previous asker, I feel a lot of guilt about my high school years because I constantly struggled under the workload, and I only got through because my teachers gave me lots of extensions and grace. And in college, I often had to take multiple incompletes a year, and I felt like I had to struggle three times as much as some of my peers just to manage the same amount of homework that they successfully juggled on top of hobbies or a job (not that that’s healthy either, you’re just told it’s the norm and that you’re not going to get a job after college if you can’t ALSO build your resume on top of your full coarse load?).

Anyway, I often felt like I just wasn’t really the right kind of disabled in college. Like I had an undiagnosed health problem that made it hard to read or use the computer because of my eyes hurting all the time, and I had what I didn’t realize was horrible executive dysfunction, but I didn’t have official diagnoses and so disability services didn’t know what to do with me. They helped me a little, but they said that things like asking for a modified due date schedule or skipping a morning class occasionally to make sure I had time to do my homework for another class didn’t count as accommodations I could ask for, so I constantly struggled. And I watch my partner who has ADHD struggle in the same way and dropout multiple times, and they don’t even qualify for incompletes because of it being a government funded school with different regulations…

Sorry this was long, but I just appreciate how these discussions are making me see that my experience is still part of a larger problem, they still matter even if I wasn’t disabled “enough.” I too had an alternative schooling (prior to high school) and I know it’s possible for there to be systems that actually accommodate students! But alas.

this is why I think that a diagnosis or identity based framework for disability is unhelpful. to me the proof is in the pudding: the struggling is in the struggling. no one wants to struggle. no one chooses to struggle. if someone is struggling, that means they need help. we need to always assume that they need help for a good reason, whether that is dealing with disability, homelessness, familial abuse, pregnancy, the death of a loved one, poverty, growing up racialized, ANYTHING... all of these things are effectively disabled by society but only some of them are considered cause for accommodation, and of course even then the supports are minimal and insufficient, and the hoops we are required to jump through to access them are downright inhumane.

we need less gatekeepers and less litmus tests. we need less exclusion. and honestly I truly believe that saying with your chest "it doesn't matter why you're struggling, if you need help then you are part of the category of people who need help" breaks down barriers between students who might not identify as disabled and the students who might otherwise be relegated to a special ed classroom. which I think is a GOOD thing. because we need to normalize the idea that actually everyone has needs and requires supports, and it's just that certain supports are built into our society and considered normal and others are considered extraneous.

lots of this is pretty basic disability theory but. one problem with knowledge dissemination re: disability theory is actually that a lot of people don't consider themselves disabled enough. as your message illustrates! a huge number of disabled people I encounter do not really consider themselves "disabled" and just consider themselves to be somehow lacking in moral character or inherently lazy etc. and I think that this is where the rhetoric that anything that is causing you to struggle with the expectations of society is disabled by our society comes in really useful.

you do not have to identify as A Disabled Person in order to recognize that there are experiences that you are having that are disabled in our society. disability theory and disability advocacy are relevant to you. and so is anti-capitalism, because it is so tightly intertwined with disability stuff that I find it impossible to separate them, tbh.

online is looking at this question are so preoccupied with identifying how to sort people into categories in the most objectively accurate and morally pure possible way, and also free occupies with trying to find individuals who are like, "privileged enough" to justify mistreating (ohhh boy do I have a lot more I could say about this phenomenon) and I think that has been incredibly harmful. like, when a lot of the actual sensible anarchists and communists (they're out there! u can find them!) talk about solidarity and community, this is what they're talking about. what we have in common matters the most. what we need and are not getting is what matters the most.

[screambirdscreaming]

Agree with all this, and I also want to emphasize another aspect of the importance of a system that makes accommodation available on an opt-in basis without barriers to entry: it defangs one of THE most common arguments used to deny people support, that it would be "unfair to other students."

I was so often told, "If I give you this extension, it wouldn't be fair to everyone else who finished it in the given time, regardless of what THEY were going through" or "If i give you a late pass for your headache, do I have to give it to someone who stayed out partying and is hungover? Is that fair?"

To which my strong answer is yes and also yes. Give everyone the accommodations! Literally!

'Guy who was out partying' is invoked because that's a caricature of someone devaluing their own education in pursuit of short term fun. You are supposed to want to distance yourself from this judgement, to reassure the teacher that you don't value fun (or your wellbeing) more than you value your education, of course!

But lets take seriously someone who shows up to class late and hungover. They showed up! They are engaging with the classwork - and if being hungover is making that difficult, they are learning about the natural consequences of being hungover. And if they need more time and support to catch up on what they missed, they should have it! Because if they want to put in that extra work, it is because they want to learn!

If that person is treated punitively - if they are reprimanded or turned away from joining the class at all - what is being reinforced to them is the idea that having fun at parties is fundamentally incompatible with being a student, that they Must chose one or the other. That going to class is something they are supposed to want but not enjoy. It's assumed that any natural consequences (not being able to get as much out of the class due to missing some or being hungover, having to work harder to catch up on missed material) don't actually matter, so punishment Must be enforced that pushes the consequences all the way to their grades (they are barred from having access to the missed material, or support in learning it, so that they will do worse on tests, or their grades are directly dinged for being late or missing class).

This pushes forward the assumption that classes are not inherently rewarding, that there is no internal driving motivation to learn the full breadth of what is being taught. Which is turn, fully disincentivises teachers from caring about *making* classes rewarding. To the point where many teachers - even those who fully believe their classes are rewarding to Good Students, who Care - also believe that the punitive framework is fully necessary to making anyone do any work at all.

I also went to an ~alternative~ highschool, which had pretty much completely removed the structures of punishment for not showing up, for being late, and for not turning in work. (If at the end of the semester, you had only turned in half of the work, you would get half of the credit for the course. This was the real actual consequence - since you need to accumulate credit to graduate. In some ways it was actually stricter than giving full credit combined with bad grades. But it did allow people to work towards graduation incrementally - 25% credit is better than a fail!)

Anyway, I got to watch a LOT of teenagers go through the process of having punitive consequences suddenly removed. And yeah, a lot of people floundered at first - because they'd never before been in positions where they had to maintain their own motivation and keep track of long-term consequences without short term punishments. But for most students, once they'd gone through the floundering adjustment stage, they were able to reorient towards actually caring about the work they did and the material they learned! It was really cool to see! It was trickier for some classes than others - students were able to make their own class schedules (with one-on-one advice from a teacher-advisor), and there were often a lot of classes offered that would give any particular credit requirement, but at some point you did have to take the annoying things like the graduation-required government and economics class. But the teachers were actively talking about and trying things to make those classes more engaging - because the structure had been built that the way to get students through a class without them having to retake it (or have to make independent projects later to make up partial credit), was to have the work of the class actually be interesting so students would actually. Do it. And if a particular project wasn't working for you, it was *always* an option to negotiate with the teacher for an alternate project that worked better for you.

So when I got to college, and instructors were like "well I can't give you accommodations without being unfair to all the people I'm punishing, and if I remove the punishment structure all of education will fall apart" I was just. Like. That literally isn't true actually.

If you remove the structure of punishment, what falls apart is the training scheme for getting people used to operating under short-term-punitive models at the expense of their own motivation and wellbeing! That's just valued more than actual learning.

[sysid-ace]

🌑 One of the more annoying things about the modern social media paradigm is that banned accounts have their profile pages wholly deleted and they're not even replaced with a reason for banning.

🌑 This allows banned users to tell flagrant lies about the nature of their banning (or, charitably, to not realize why they were banned), and excepting sweeps of archives of the main page of their account or people remembering interacting with them there's very little that can be done to contradict them.

🌑 This can lead to certain narratives that are convenient for people who get serially banned to constantly accumulate "evidence" and remain almost entirely unchallenged, these mostly fictitious things becoming part of the site's wider lore instead of... just...

🌑 When You Get Banned For A Tendency To Tell People To Set Themselves On Fire, You Tend To Not Mention That Part After The Fact

[egg-tats]

of all the problems someone can have with lowtax, this is something something awful got incredibly correct! every users moderation history is open, and you can view any user's rap sheet by clicking the button below their avatar whether they've been banned or not. so if someone's being a raging prick in the post your favorite pet pictures thread, you can look at their rap sheet, see that they were temporarily banned 6 months ago for being a dick in that thread, and then report them, where they'll be publicly banned (with the specific post having a note that this is the one that got them banned).

when you ban someone, don't un-person them, let them stand as a testament for the sort of behaviour you don't want to see on your platform. otherwise no one learns a thing,and it's your fault matt

[tsarina-anadyomene]

i'm not sure i know what america is

[tsarina-anadyomene]

like i'm not even sure the american civic religion people and the burn it all down people are talking about the same thing like. semantically. indexical relativism about america!

[quantumshade]

i get why people are skeptical of claims about “rising antisemitism” in a world where a genocidal state is claiming everyone standing up to them is being antisemitic, but the reality is that the average person actually genuinely is being more antisemitic. every comment section on every single post i saw about Holocaust Remembrance Day was like this

israel’s actions ARE causing a rise in antisemitism in the average gentile, because they push the narrative of representing jewish people as a whole, which would make us all culpable for their horrific actions. and even the people who aren’t being antisemitic themselves are certainly more okay with the people around them being antisemitic. it's likely someone you know or are close with believes in some sort of conspiracy about jews running the world or having all the money or controlling the media etc etc. not zionists, not israelis, jews. israel wants jews to believe that everyone hates us and they’re the only safe place for us to exist. as a diaspora jew whose family fled the shoah this is not fucking true and it’s insulting to say that it is, but being a gentile saying this shit only helps israel’s cause because it's what they want us to believe. they want the world to hate jews. don’t fucking fall for it. judaism is not zionism and zionism is not judaism.

[quantumshade]

to be fair, this is kind of exactly why people are skeptical — institutions like the ADL and similar groups that produce these statistics are deeply zionist and are counting anyone speaking out for palestine in these hate crime statistics. it’s important to acknowledge that both of these things are true; that zionist groups are coopting the idea of antisemitism to suit their needs (making the word feel as though it means nothing!) AND that actual antisemitism — that is, hatred towards judaism and any jewish people, holocaust denialism, saying that we “deserved” the shoah or that “hitler was right”, that kind of thing — are all happening more and more in increasingly public spaces

[creekfiend]

I've been struggling to think of how to articulate a way I've been feeling about the way a lot of "you must respect your queer elders" conversations that I've seen lately have gone, and then today I saw a clip of Angela Davis speaking at an event recently and it made me realize it's the conflation of "respect for those who came before you and who built things you benefit from" and "giving those people the authority of dictating the culture."

she was talking about like, gender diversity and the ways in which that fits into liberation and the ways it hasn't always been included, and she was positioning herself in that space as someone who did a lot of EXTREMELY important work that made a huge impact, but she did not imply that that meant that those coming after her owed her writing and perspective deference on every level. which was such a wonderful thing to hear as someone who read some of her early statements about things like queerness many decades ago and felt disappointed and hurt by what she said about it. she said "we are all building on the work done by those who came before us. we all stand on their shoulders. many people stand on my shoulders, and often those people know more than I do about certain subjects, and it's important to me that I am able to learn from them." she was saying like, "yeah, my work often benefits people who come after me and who have more knowledge than I do about a component of what I am discussing, and their perspectives in turn enrich my own frameworks," and I found that really encouraging as a way to look at this. not "this activist's work was imperfect and that means it is bad," and also not "you young people don't understand what it was like, and your perspective that I have overlooked things or gotten things wrong is a threat to my work and my legacy," but "this is a collaborative effort between countless individuals over a long span of time, and we all enrich each other's frameworks with our knowledge and experience"

no one person can outline All Oppression in one perfectly informed way -- we are all cobbling together a big picture based on all of our personal experiences and our perspectives that are based on those experiences. many people stand on her shoulders, and some of them know more about some things than she does, and she values what they add to what she has done. she thinks it's important to learn from them like they have learned from her.

idk I think that's such a. I respect that way of framing activism/liberation work a whole lot. I think we live in a very authoritarian society that encourages us to conflate "granting someone respect" and "granting someone authority over you" and I think she illustrates really well how to navigate separating those concepts when talking about intergenerational discussions like this.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

obliterate the concept of "spoiling" a child. excise it from your lexicon like a cancer. that is some "the opposite of sin is suffering" Puritan ass bullshit. it is not possible to ruin a person through an overabundance of kindness.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

@ the authors of comments I've deleted going "but what about this imaginary child I made up who hypothetically did something rude that I think treating them worse would have prevented" please understand that had I the power I would cover you in melted cheese and leave you out for the raccoons

[dragon-in-a-fez]

a few more things to consider in response to various notes:

it is normal to want things and normal to not be happy when you can't have them. neither is a moral failing and if you think it is you better be living like a cave monk.

while learning to deal with disappointment is an important emotional skill, research has yet to deduce the relationship between this fact and the way parents act like they are heroically throwing themselves on grenades for the benefit of humanity because they could have bought ice cream but decided not to.

most children are, in fact, capable of understanding the difference between "material circumstances make this impossible" and "authority figure arbitrarily said no", and do not necessarily learn from the latter how to deal with the former.

it is true, as a few people have noted in tags, that some parents hurt their kids by trying to make up for emotional absence with material gifts. if your concern about this is genuine you can probably recognise that insulting the child is not the best response.

if you want to see someone who "can't handle being told no", try watching a parent whose child has just said no to them.

[fierceawakening]

I continue to see “if you enjoy Harry Potter, even if you only ever read fic, you don’t care about trans people” and it makes me so confused. Do I not care about me? Or do I care about me because I haven’t bothered to reread them in a while?

I’ve got a few books by the Marquis de Sade on my kindle app. The dude was clearly a horrible guy, and probably from the biographies I’ve read a classic sociopath. Does this mean you now know I endorse rape? Maybe even murder? Maybe you know I eat poop!

…or maybe what books someone has read says nothing about them and you’re lashing out because it’s easier to yell at your friends, who are likely to feel bad if you’re disappointed in them, than it is to overthrow the government.

Maybe that.

[fierceawakening]

Can you point me to where in my post I say anyone should be giving Rowling money? I’d be very surprised if I did, as I usually try to be careful not to say things I don’t believe.

My post is defending things like people posting fic to AO3, continuing to participate in the Marauders fandom or discuss Snape meta on tumblr, etc.

Many of the people I know who do those things are trans, so I’m uncomfortable with posts that say that if you do those things, you reveal to trans people that you are unsafe to be around, and you do this revealing because you are too immature to “find a different wizard book/game.”

I do not think I am morally superior to my friends for posting about Strixhaven rather than, as a few of my friends still do (all of whom I can think of off the top of my head are trans), Hogwarts.

I do not think anyone should think I am. I think that is absurd.

[kyraneko]

I spent the first decade and more of fanficcing defending against accusations that fanfic was plagiarism and stealing from the author.

I'm not inclined to entertain attacks from the other direction, that the mere enjoyment of characters much more written by fans than by the original author constitutes putting money in the author's pocket.

Honestly the whole situation here is like if the Communist-type media bans on "subversive" stories and the Puritan ethos of people being tainted by contact with "sinful" things got together, had really, really boring sex, and made the world's most insufferable idea baby together.

[fierceawakening]

People like you are exactly why I defend people who write Potter fic. I wondered when you’d show up. 😁

The idea that *you* hate trans people because you still Snape meta drives me insane.

Uh. No?

[mossbone]

"I have depression." - character who has been through extensive therapy.

"I feel dead inside all the time and nothing helps!" - character who does like, regular introspective thinking and is aware of the concept of mental health.

"Leave me the fuck alone I'll be fine once I get over my stupid shit." - repressed character.

"It's fine I'm just having an Empty Time. What? Yeah, empty times, you know, when everything is like bzzzzzz in your brain and you don't shower for two weeks. Why, what do you call it?" - ooooughhh now we're talkin

[ruffboi-mags]

#this post is a jillion times better than all the posts that complaina bout therapyspeak #this one SHOWS the relationship between characterization and conceptualization #of depression #as an example of that relationship in general (via @rubynye)

[teaspoonnebula]

I get in the dumps at times, and don’t open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I’ll soon be right.

- Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet

[self-winding]

I have definitely seen plenty of therapyspeak from characters who would never talk that way, but I would disagree with the point that a character needs to have been in therapy or even be particularly introspective to engage in therapyspeak. At this point it's trickled into pop culture so it's quite easy for people to parrot it back. "I have depression" is a phrase spoken by many people who have never spent a day in therapy. The question is just whether or not a character is someone who would choose to phrase it that way.

[the-grey-tribe]

If you want realism, then characters should use therapyspeak, but use it wrong. They should say things like "I'm felling depressed about the economy" or "Our company is OCD about customer satisfaction".

[self-winding]

Yes, but then of course you get readers complaining about characters using the words wrong because they assume the authors don't know any better (unless someone points it out within the text).

[self-winding]

Whenever I see "discomfort is not harm" and "your rights are not being violated if you are uncomfortable" type posts, I generally agree with whatever argument is being made (usually against censorship). But at the same time I've always found "discomfort is not harm" to be a pretty unhelpful statement navigating real world ethical problems, because the difference between the discomfort and harm, and how to decide which is one verses the other, is almost never clarified or explored within these posts.

Like, I think most people would agree that emotional/psychological harm is a real thing. People can have an experience that traumatizes them and causes lasting damage, and it's not always the big things that you would expect.

Long-lasting, pervasive discomfort, even if it's relatively mild, can also cause harm over time because it is exhausting. If you are constantly dealing with a discomfort (like, say, being a little too hot or too cold, or a loud environment, or being surrounded by people who you personally find very grating and stressful) that will eventually add up to some type of "harm." Sometimes discomfort is a thing you can acclimate to. Sometimes it's not.

If body odors give me migraines and the coworker in the desk next to mine refuses to bathe regularly because baths are unpleasant to them (not an example from my life, just an example), a statement like "discomfort is not harm" doesn't really provide any guidance as to which of us is in the right and which one should adapt and just deal with the discomfort. I mean, ideally we just wouldn't be sitting next to each other but life frequently doesn't give people the option to be picky about who they get to interact with. Sometimes you have to decide whose discomfort is more valid or rational.

And this is the point where people start to rationalize about how their own discomforts are not mere discomforts but actual harm, and the things that other people say are harm are actually mere discomforts, and no one can agree on how to objectively measure the difference.

[self-winding]

Expanding on this, if I were to give my own definition of "discomfort" versus "harm":

Discomfort is a mild pain that goes away on its own. See: "This work environment is louder than what I'm used to, this is unpleasant...now that I've been here a few days though, it seems normal."

Harm does not go away on its own and instead compounds over time: "This work environment is louder than what I am used to, and every day I am here, the noise becomes more exhausting and my resentment grows."

But of course, the difficult thing about this is that there is often no way to know in the moment whether you are experiencing harm or mere discomfort. If you are exposed to a new stimuli that you find unpleasant, whether that stimuli is a physical thing in the environment or a type of person/behavior, only time will tell if you'll feel better or worse with continued exposure.

And of course mentality plays into this too. If I feel strongly that people should not have to work in loud environments and that this is a violation of my basic rights, I am more likely to pay attention to the noise level and feel angry when an environment is loud, and this anger and sense of injustice becomes an addition source of discomfort which might be as bad as (or even worse than) the physical discomfort of the noise itself. If this is a topic I frequently discuss with other people and it's an important tenet of my belief system, then I am likely to not only pay a lot of attention to the noise level and how it affects me, but to meticulously document how it affects me and present this as evidence for why noisy environments are objectively bad and why this problem needs to be taken seriously. In which case, I may actually resist adjusting to the noise level because that feels like a type of moral surrender.

All of this is not to say that noisy environments cannot be genuinely distressing. Like, I do find it frequently stressful and exhausting to be in noisy environments, regardless of whether or not I feel that it's "unjust" on a moral level.

But all of this complicates that discussion around discomfort versus harm and what unpleasant things should be considered a violation of someone's rights versus just one of the trials of life that people have to find some way to deal with.

[self-winding]

There's some recent post about how Boomers and older don't have a "gender neutral script for interacting with another human" program in their head, they only have scripts for interacting with men versus women, and that's why they have trouble with nonbinary identities and the like. But most Millennials and younger do have something resembling a "gender neutral script." The post attributes this shift to the rise of women in the workplace and other changing social norms around the feminist revolution.

I think there's something to the "gendered versus gender neutral scripts" idea but I'd attribute it less to the feminist revolution of the sixties and seventies. After all, women in the workplace are still recognizably women, and women having jobs is not a recent feminist invention. Rather, I attribute the shift to recent generations growing up with the internet...and specifically, the text-based early internet.

Pre-internet, having a "penpal," was a rare novelty; most actual human interaction was face to face or at least over the phone. The internet introduced the idea of having people who you talk to day after day, week after week, month after month, without ever seeing their face or hearing their voice. All you had was text and a pfp, so there was no way to reliably know whether these people in forums and chatrooms and message boards, who had become a real presence in your life, were male or female. I mean, sometimes they told you outright, but not always. You could make guesses, but you were frequently wrong. Asking directly was kind of awkward...and of course, even then, you had no proof that someone was telling the truth. And most of us internet young'uns also had the experience online of being mistaken for a different sex, and then when it came out, realizing, "Oh, huh. This person was interacting with me for the last few weeks wrongly assuming I was a boy/girl." And also realizing that maybe you had a better rapport with them when they were working under that mistaken assumption about you.

So Millennials, the first generation to really grow up with the internet, developed a gender neutral mental model for interacting with people. They developed a mindset where you waited and looked for clues to someone's sex or gender rather than just knowing based on their face or voice.

Probably not surprising that Millennials are the first generation to have a relatively mainstream concept of genderqueer or nonbinary identities. And yes, obviously they didn't invent these identities, there have always been people who didn't fit neatly into one box or another and queer communities have always had some way of describing these people. But pre-internet, this awareness was always kind of a niche thing.

[self-winding]

It's difficult to measure deaths caused by a system, whether that system is capitalism or communism or something else, because preventable deaths will happen in any conceivable society, so for a death to "count" it has to be presumed that it wouldn't happen under an alternative system.

For instance, let's say someone living in a purely free market system gets sick and dies because they couldn't afford an expensive drug that could potentially have extended their lifespan. To say that this person was "killed by capitalism" presumes that under a command economy, the same drug would be provided free of charge to anyone that needed it. But of course, it doesn't always work this way.

Similarly, you can point to deaths under communism caused by deprivation and economic stagnation or corruption and say these people were "killed by communism" but this involves a similar set of presumptions about how these problems would not exist under capitalism.

And of course, because capitalist and communist countries tend to fight a lot, if your system is killing people you can always point to outside influences and say, "well it would have worked better if not for their meddling!" This is something often claimed by communists to explain the failure of communist governments because the United States does have a long history of fucking around with the governments of communist countries and sometimes deliberately sabotaging them.

There is a vaguely parallel phenomenon where capitalists can point to failures within a capitalist system as being caused by bureaucracy rather than the free market, since most capitalist-leaning countries will still have some level of government regulation.

There are of course going to be cases where "deaths caused by a system of government" will be relatively straightforward because governments will sometimes directly murder their own citizens. But when we talk about deaths we are often referring to deaths that a system failed to prevent or allowed to happen. And regarding this, often the best we can do is to zoom way out and look at a meta-analysis of the average quality of life under different types of systems. But even then, people can object with, "Yeah, but those countries are only doing well because they're exploiting other countries!" and due to the messy way everything is interconnected this can be hard to either prove or disprove.

Edit: To be clear I think "capitalism with some level of government regulation" has emerged as the system that produces the best outcomes, just discussing the inherent difficulty in measuring the outcomes of different systems.

[maculategiraffe]

the thing is that every time they invent a new thing that everybody has to be able to do to get along in society, that also involves making some people disabled who weren't before, because they can't do the thing. and they never could do the thing, but it didn't used to be a disability.

driving a car. making a phone call. navigating the internet. getting a mortgage. you know? they keep adding new things that everybody has to be able to do or else there's something wrong with you. well maybe there's something wrong with driving a car. maybe it's a hideous activity. did they ever think of that

[daniel-r-h]

This is true, but to be fair, they also remove things you have to be able to do. I canʼt handwrite well; this is partly lack of practice and partly something that I would never have been good at. I now rarely need to write in a way others can read (I can, when necessary, as long as it doesnʼt also have to look good and I can take twice as long as anyone else and write a bit larger); I am still disabled in other ways, but that one is now barely a disability and getting less so every year.

[king-of-men]

"Work heavy agricultural labor twelve hours a day 300 days a year", how's that for a thing that you're disabled if you can't do? Or "survive smallpox", that's a good one.

[self-winding]

The broader point of "the nature of disability is dictated by what society expects the average person to do and by the level of technology and the complexity of that society" is a fair one, but yeah even if there are some modern tasks I find heinous, I'm sure I'd be way more "disabled" 500 years ago than now. (Or dead.)

[doloneia]

studying ancient history & archaeology is awesome because you get to follow citations like a little trail of breadcrumbs 😌 and when you reach the end you realize everyone else has been playing the worlds worst game of telephone

[magratmakethetea]

I would personally love to hear about the dipylon oenochoe!

[doloneia]

well, i’m glad you asked! [opens can of worms]

this is my best friend, the dipylon oinochoe. its a beautiful little wine jug from the late geometric period. 22cm tall. you may know it from such hits as “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” or “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” etc etc. i’ve been researching him for a project lately. and i think i’m the only one who understands him now.

anyways it’s one of the oldest longer inscriptions we have from the late 8th/early 7th cent BCE. everyone and their mother wants to translate this little guy. they’re all reading it and going “oh wow! its got a perfect hexameter at the start! ‘whoever of the dancers dances most delicately!’" and then they all go "Wait What Do Those Last Signs Mean.”

there are 24 different interpretations. but thats fine. whatever. beef over the last signs seems normal enough. you see that a lot. personally i think its too broken to really tell for certain (those fractures are a bit unfortunately placed tbh) but i fear i am also just a very skeptical guy when it comes to definitive translations so my take on that should be considered with a grain of salt.

but because im researching this oinochoe, i'm reading all these articles arguing over what it Means and what the Implications Are. and you would think… its 2025… we’ve kinda all agreed “pots aren’t people” for several decades… surely there’s an analysis somewhere that focuses Solely On This Pot’s Context... idk like trying not to focus solely on its inscription for once???

but no. no, this is too much to ask for apparently. everyone’s going “well it must've belonged to a dancer! lets talk about dance competitions and homer and the gymnasium how this is all reflected in this one jug!” someone even dropped this one line theorizing it was “passed around at a party,” like it has just been consistently assigned as belonging to a dancer you cannot escape this idea. i tried to find any different ideas. i could not.

so i’m stuck here going “Where Is The Context” because it seems to be, uh, Not Discussed Anywhere. every article is citing back towards stephanos koumanoudes (the guy who purchased it in 1880) but they are Also saying “yeah it was found in 1871! source: koumanoudes!” But He’s Not The Guy That Excavated It, Guys, Where Is It From? nobody is giving me the answer. my favorite one is culhed, he just says “under obscure circumstances,” which is quite possibly the least helpful way to describe this somehow nebulous provenance. but then culhed offhandedly cites someone else. just in the footnotes, as you do. and that someone is yannis galanakis, my new hero.

now yannis galanakis (2011) does not give a single flying fuck about the dipylon oinochoe. he is here for one thing and one thing only: an unpublished stirrup jar that was bought by a totally different guy. most of his article is just concerned about this stirrup jar, how it was sold with a skull (??), and Who Sold That Skull. but galanakis’ stirrup jar is, coincidentally, from this same excavation in 1871. so in his article, where he’s referencing all these people associated with private excavations northeast of the dipylon gate (around modern-day plateia eleutherias), galanakis casually drops the line “among the finds associated with these excavations are some of the most important examples of late geometric pottery, like the dipylon oinochoe.” this is 1) more than Literally Everyone Else I Have Been Reading has been saying and 2) PROVIDING PRIMARY SOURCES FOR THIS DIG?

and these sources.... these primary sources have never been mentioned in Any Other Publications re: the dipylon oinochoe??? except MAYBE one from 2013 (coulié) thats in french, apparently only available in print, and the nearest copy is a library 2hrs away from me (so i cant actually verify what she says yet). but every other article about the dipylon oinochoe is basically like “yeah, see powell 1988” -> “yeah, see koumanoudes 1880” -> “i bought this from some guy named ioannes, lol” and its just created this Massive Echo Chamber where the provenance is "Koumanoudes" and the context is "Dancer." when... we have... two publications... written by people who were actually involved in this private excavation (which to be clear here was very much illegal at some points, but ioannes palaiologos do not care abt the government saying Stop Excavating Please). these two sources are hirschfeld (1872) and rayet (1888).

the provenance that these 1870s/80s accounts are providing isnt Actually That Detailed, but there are parts that line up pretty well (ie, swords/spears/knives being found in the graves, murex on top, several layers of successive tombs) which are Totally Absent from later articles talking about the purpose of this vessel, of its inscription, and of its owner/transcriber (which i dont think can be determined Anyways [cf Arrington 2024, this is just a Normal Take i think] but like whatever i guess Pots Are People Now, according to Powell 1988+Binek 2017+Osborne 2006). i phrased it in my paper and my presentation as “its like this oinochoe been totally disconnected from its context” and its to the point where its so egregious that someone will, in one article, drop a reference to galanakis’ research on the excavation of 1871 (where he cites two eyewitness accounts) and not. Not Once have they looked into it.

because if they had. and this is the fucking crazy part ok this is where i Lost My Shit For A Solid Week. there is, in hirschfeld 1872, an identical oinochoe (number 48, page 147 in this journal) with the same damn height (22.5cm; powell 1988 says the dipylon oinochoe is about 23cm) and decoration (a grazing deer) and concentric lines its a goddamn identical piece just judging from the description of it (and hirschfeld very unhelpfully did Not include this jug among his plates). deers grazing arent very common in late geometric pottery, its mostly just the dipylon workshop cranking them out AND theres only a few oinochoe attributed to dipylon workshop so This Is Quite Possibly The Same Vessel (or so i thought, we'll get to that). the one problem is that this vessel is just NOT from dipylon??? its from the old military hospital in athens??? which was built south of the acropolis in 1834??? and they found roman mosaics during that construction??? so this mentioned vessel could actually have been found in the 1830s??? and again nobody has said jack fucking shit about this connection, afaik i am the only one who has ever actually sat down with these Implications all lined up in a row, so i had to try and disprove myself on my own like it was 5d chess. i was the “I Want To Believe” meme but if it was about the dipylon oinochoe being from somewhere near dipylon.

and i'm digging through as many sources as i possibly can find to prove there's a mysterious second jug that might be from this hospital area (which, granted, was still a funerary space during the geometric period). i went through all of hirschfeld's references to alexander conze's plates showing pottery shapes, but they just ended up also being oinochoe, which made me lose my mind even more. hirschfeld would be like "yeah this deer was in this position from conze taf VII-2" and you go "ok so whats conze taf vii-2 look like? oh my fucking god its a GRAZING ANIMAL AGAIN." at some point i ended up reading a phd dissertation from the national and kapodistrian univerisity of athens to know more about this military hospital?? and then i switched gears and went searching through coldstream 1968’s list of geometric pottery (it might be outdated now, but it was the only thorough source i could find atp) and went through Every Single Oinochoe from the dipylon workshop and almost every single one was totally different. like they just could not be this mystery oinochoe (in which case, I Would Have Some Really Bad News About The Dipylon Oinochoe).

until i found my second best friend. munich CVA 3 taf 112. who literally nobody except me gives a shit about. its taf description is 2 paragraphs long. its the exact same height as these two aforementioned oinochoe. it has the exact same deer grazing motif. fuck it, its even got an unknown provenance because it was acquired from Some Guy Named Paul in 1907 (who also has connections to people like furtwängler [most unfortunate last name ever], another guy who wrote about the dipylon oinochoe in 1881). so in my quest to achieve some sort of emotional resolution here i possibly found a sister vessel to the dipylon oinochoe??? and maybe even that jug's provenance. who knows. i dont wanna say anything definitive yet. also if anyone has access to paul julius arndt's personal papers and especially his financial records, hit me up, because where the fuck did he get this identical looking jug.

however. most modern scholarship about the dipylon oinochoe does not care about munich cva 3 taf 112 (and its similarities to the dipylon oinochoe), or the few references to the 1871 excavations at palatia eleutherias several blocks northeast of the dipylon gate (and what little context/descriptions they provide of funerary remains), because they do not care about the dipylon oinochoe. they care about the letters inscribed on it, and they want to debate the meanings of those letters in a self-inflicted vacuum devoid of all other evidence beyond 35 legible signs and 11 fragmentary/illegible ones.

this seems to me to be a futile endeavour, especially seeing as everyone just keeps citing each other as to where the vessel came from & who to look at for more information & cutting it all off at koumanoudes (or, slightly better, galanakis). and i cannot for the life of me fathom why they have all stopped at koumanoudes or galanakis, if they're so desperate to find this concept of a person behind the oinochoe, because they could actually gain some possible insight into that person through the few grave descriptions provided. but they're only citing others who are citing others who are going off of koumanoudes' limited description from an article's addendum in 1880. and i'd argue that this sort of circular discussion strangles any attempt to actually examine the Dipylon oinochoe in a meaningful sense.

[rettaroo]

Op I seriously hope you publish this. This is what scholarship is all about!

[sigmaleph]

so like normally if someone said something like "common mistakes like using the passive voice, which should be avoided" i would assume they were being ironic or perhaps in a self-aware manner highlighting how common advice doesn't always generalise but. i think they just said that genuinely.

[sigmaleph]

this was in the context of a course on accessibility recommending Hemingway Editor as a tool for accessible writing, doing things like highlighting long sentences and telling you the 'grade level' for readability. maybe that works for making content more accessible, i don't know and fortunately i don't need to find out.

but hemingway editor doesn't seem to market itself as an accessibility tool? i don't know what it markets itself as. it talks about making writing 'concise and correct', and i can certainly see what it means by concise: no passive voice, no 'adverbs'*, no use of 'i think' or 'maybe', any number of words automatically considered overly-complicated versions of shorter ones, no long sentences (it highlights them as 'hard to read' based on something that isn't just wordcount but clearly also isn't a semantic understanding of the sentence. my guess is some combination of word count and word length). is this 'correct'? who is it correct for?

not me, certainly; if i exclusively had to write in a way approved of by this app i would murder someone. the name of the tool suggests it's people who want to write like ernest hemingway, but it's not them either; the editor will happily mark any number of 'mistakes' in literal hemingway's writing. maybe my problem is looking at it as a pass-fail thing instead of a 'these are aspects of your writing to think about, but ultimately you as the writer have the decision of what to keep' thing? i can imagine people who feel their writing isn't concise enough using it as a way to search for good places to focus their editing on, i guess, but is that how it's meant to be used?

idk. i am of the opinion that writing advice should be more focused on 'this is the effect writing something in this way has, and here's a way of writing a similar thing that would have a different effect' and less on 'this sentence is bad while this one is good', and so it feels intensely weird to see a tool that a) will mark basically any piece of good writing i can think of as failing its standards and b) doesn't seem to say anywhere what goal is being served by its standards being what they are, beyond conciseness.

*not literally, thankfully. i mean they do say they highlight adverbs and that they are a mistake, but they don't actually highlight every adverb, just some subset of them.

[phaeton-flier]

People get real goddamn weird about renting things. It's fine! A house is a machine for living. Our social policy shouldn't be based around maximizing the number of people who have home equity because that's counterproductive as all hell. Like if our food policy was based around having as many people as possible have backyard gardens. Not the way to solve hunger!

[waystatus]

I have a slightly counter intuition on this because: I think we should encourage home ownership because landlords are bad, but we should not do that through constantly increasing housing prices because rent-seeking is bad.

[phaeton-flier]

That's the thing, Landlords are not Ontologically Bad, there is not some quality of Renting Property that turns them evil.

It's the result of social and housing policy, pursued by both landlords and homeowners, that has given landlords much more leverage to extract from renters! But those policies are not set in stone and we need not consider them inherent to the landlord-renter relationship!

There are, in fact, several benefits to renting over homeownership that are inherent to renting (low need for upfront investment, ease of moving, low commitment, etc) such that the optimal amount of renting is far above zero