Unions are why you have 5 day, 40 hour full-time work weeks. Unions are why they have to pay you in actual dollars instead of “company credits” that you can only spend at the company-owned stores. Unions are why there are fucking fire exits at your place of work. Unions are why it’s not okay for your supermarket ground beef to be any percentage human.
You think your company pays you out of the goodness of their hearts? Or even out of “market pressure?” The “job market” is a myth perpetuated by the capitalists. Corporations would pay you nothing if they could get away with it. And you argue “oh, but if they paid me nothing I’d just go to another one.” Wrong. Because to maximize profits, they all want to pay you nothing. Corporations exist to maximize profits while reducing risk for investors. It’s part of their entire function to find ways to cut costs as much as possible, and that includes finding ways to pay you nothing.
Unions are your defense against that. You think all a union does is strike? If you pay union dues, a lot of that is spent on lobbyists in various governments reminding your lawmakers that you have rights as a living human being that a corporation should not be able to stomp all over. Unions hire lawyers so that if you’re fired for bullshit reasons, the union can stand up for you against your boss. They’re called unions because workers are uniting to pool resources so that they can stand up to these corporate overlords with more money than God. Unions exist because you might not have the words, resources, or time to fight workplace injustices all by yourself. That’s the whole fucking point.
And if a business shuts down because a union is striking, it’s because the business was abusing people and didn’t deserve to be in business anyway. Don’t make excuses for the corporations. They already have trillions of dollars and a couple million lawyers to do that for themselves. They don’t need your help.
A lot of union folk very literally fought and died for the workers’ rights we have today. Like no joke, bosses would hire goons to straight-up murder unionizing and striking workers.
All the most basic workers’ rights we have today were all paid for in blood. And conservatives have never stopped trying to take them all away again.
NEVER FORGET THAT LABOR DAY IS ACTUALLY ABOUT. I know people who legitimately think it’s like a secondary mothers day - you know, for going into labor.
But it’s about workers rights and the people who campaigned for it to be a holiday knew this fucking day would come.
If you are in the US and about to celebrate a 3-day weekend, thank a goddamn union worker.
funniest thing about dnd is that I made my character a failson specifically to make a rich guy suffer, but I keep rolling really high on important things, so everything has been working out for him really well, and his belief that rich people should never face any consequences just keeps getting reinforced again and again
I have, multiple times, told the other players “Hey, my character is an asshole. I am telling you things in a way that makes it clear I am obviously lying for my own benefit. I won’t be upset if you guys call him out. You can stab me. Please stab me. Please make him feel pain.” And they’re just like “Nah this is funny. We trust him with our lives. 🙂”
Telling the DM “Remember I’m a level 3 warlock. One hit could take me out. I won’t be mad if my character almost dies” and I’ll hear dice and then “Does a 4 hit?”
had to roll 3 times for deception at different points and got a 20, 17, and 19. Not counting the +5 modifier. This man is destined to never suffer. Made this guy thinking I would have a humbling character arc when faced with the real world and instead it's just him going "Wow! I really am better and more special than everyone else!"
The DM gave us a map of the world he made, and I chose my character's home city as being from a city from the northern continent, because I figured we'd be staying to the southern one (which had much more detail at the time) and told the DM that his dad was in charge of the city and part of an old-money political dynasty. I also had a backstory where he got his name stolen by the fae, so he can't pull a "Don't you know who I am?" and figured nobody in the south would recognize him. Basically a Kennedy-esque failson.
Turns out that the DM planned the climax of the story in the northern continent, and it had less detail on the big map because he was working on a super detailed map specifically for that area and it wouldn't all fit on the zoomed out big map. My character's hometown is the most important and politically influential city-state. He is essentially a prince. We ended up in his hometown today and everyone is recognizing him and doing whatever he asks.
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.
As much as I admire the techlash, I have some serious reservations. I worry that there's some pretty useful tech babies that we are at risk of throwing away with the bathwater.
For starters, there's the idea of "intermediary liability," which is the degree to which online services are held liable for the harms their users inflict on each other. Lots of people want to make Meta, Google and other tech giants liable for their users' actions, such as harassment and disinformation. These people are doubtless well-intentioned, but boy have they failed to pay attention to what happens when we create these liability rules.
Historically, the most important intermediary liability law is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Despite the fact that this law is only 27 words long, it is among the most badly understood aspects of tech policy, worldwide:
CDA 230 says that platforms aren't required to police their users' speech. If a user libels another user, or harasses them, or threatens them, that's between the users, who can sue each other, but not the platform (CDA 230 only relates to civil liability; it has no bearing on the ability of platforms to be held criminally liable for their users' actions).
Importantly, CDA 230 also says that if a platform does intervene to prevent one user from harming another, that doesn't mean they have to intervene in every such case. There's a good historical reason for this: back in the paleolithic era, Prodigy, a commercial online service, was sued after they stepped in to protect some users from other users' bad actions. The suit argued that once they'd set the precedent that they were going to police user conduct, they acquired an obligation to police every instance of bad user conduct. In response, Prodigy – and its competitors – stopped moderating altogether:
No one who's used big online services would say that the CDA 230 world is a great one – but it's provably a vastly better world than the world we get when we take away 230's protections.
Yes, provably.
In 2018, Donald Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA into law. This is a (supposedly) narrow exception to CDA 230 that makes platforms civilly liable when they are used in connection with sex trafficking:
Obviously, sex trafficking is a terrible crime (and again, CDA 230 has never affected a platform's criminal liability for sex trafficking, only civil liability). None of the people who spoke out against SESTA/FOSTA did so because they wanted to protect sex traffickers.
Rather, the opposition to SESTA/FOSTA was motivated by concern over the collateral damage that would ensue, and those concerns have been entirely borne out. Opponents of SESTA/FOSTA predicted that platforms would be unable or unwilling to distinguish between consensual sex work and trafficking, and that they would simply sweep all consensual sex work off of their platforms.
That's exactly what happened. Not only did the spaces where sex workers advertised and booked their work disappear, but so did the private "bad date" forums where sex workers helped one another steer clear of dangerous clients. Sex work moved back into the streets, and with it came a revival of pimping – a scourge that had been all but killed off by the use of online platforms by sex workers to find work and stay safe:
To the extent that sex work survives online, it has been relegated to a few fringe services that have no competitors and exploit their captive audience of sex workers to rake in massive fees for sub-par services. Meanwhile, the forcible relocation of sex work from searchable, visible online spaces to the streets has made it significantly harder for law enforcement to detect and interdict actual sex trafficking:
That's the evidence for what happens when you make intermediaries liable for their users' conduct. Far from being a gift to Big Tech, protections from intermediary liability primarily benefit smaller online spaces, which can't afford the high compliance costs of spying on and controlling their users, unlike, say, Facebook, which is why Mark Zuckerberg wants to get rid of CDA 230:
Every Fediverse host depends on limitation on intermediary liability. So does anyone who hosts one of the new, federated Bluesky relays:
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
SESTA/FOSTA isn't the only experimental evidence we have for what happens when we kill CDA 230-like protections. In the UK, the Online Safety Act imposes a duty on people who provide online speech forums to monitor and police their users' words. The immediate effect of this was to kill off many small business and hobbyist forums. Now, even large, multinational corporations are killing off their forums and relocating them to Facebook, where there's the budget and resources to conduct the surveillance and control required by the Act:
Moving every independent speech forum to Facebook is a funny way of punishing Big Tech. Fundamentally, the lesson here is that we can't fix Big Tech by making it use its power more wisely – the only way to fix Big Tech is to get rid of it, to make it smaller, to take away its power.
That's a lesson we keep missing. Take age verification laws: these require all online forums to exercise total control over their users, because they require platforms to know who a user is, to associate that user with every interaction, and, finally, to verify the user's age. But you can't verify a user's age unless you know which user is at the other end of an online connection. This affects every user, not just kids, because the only way to prove you're an adult is to prove that you're not a kid.
Age verification and intermediary liability are measures that are diametrically opposed to the mission of making Big Tech weaker. These measures only work if Big Tech stays all-powerful, and they devastate independent online alternatives to Big Tech. What's more, they cut directly against efforts to make it easier for users to leave Big Tech, through interoperable gateways that make it possible for users who depart an online platform to stay in touch with the people who stay behind:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
These interoperability mandates figure heavily in modern anti-Big Tech laws like the EU's DMA and DSA, but they cannot peacefully coexist with stricter liabilty and age verification rules. A platform simply cannot identify, monitor and control users and allow users to leave their platform while maintaining contact with their friends who stay.
These efforts to force Big Tech to behave don't just undermine interoperability mandates, they also kill off "adversarial interoperability," the principle that a user of a technology should be allowed to reverse-engineer and modify it, for example, to block ads or tracking, to sideload apps or extract their data or to monitor a platform's moderation failures:
When Big Tech does adversarial interoperability, they call it "move fast and break things," and that's another baby the techlash stands ready to throw out with the bathwater. There's nothing wrong per se with a technologist changing how a device or service works without permission from its maker. Every ad-blocker does that. So do accountability tools that scrape Facebook to document its failures to police paid political disinformation:
Moving fast and breaking things is fine, depending on whose things you're breaking. For example, I want every Tesla owner to be able to walk into any mechanic's shop and unlock all the subscription features and software upgrades, without paying a dime to Elon Musk:
And I want every person who uses a powered wheelchair to be able to alter its handling characteristics and other digital features without waiting months and paying through the nose to one of two private-equity backed duopolists:
Adversarial interoperability means that you and I don't need to convince tech bros to give us what we want: we can just take it – from them.
That's important, because if there's one thing that tech companies keep proving, over and over again, it's that they don't give a shit what we want. Think of how they're force-feeding us AI (and how nice it would be to subscribe to a service run by adversarial interoperators who would automatically block every accursed AI popup in every app and service and device you use):
Or, more prosaically, how much mobile phone design has congealed around a monolithic design that has no room for a clicky little keyboard – something I first saw demoed 23 years ago:
It turns out that we don't have to take that shit lying down. Like Prometheus, we can steal our clicky keyboards and 3mm headphone jacks back from the tech gods. That's exactly what the Q25 Pro does: it's a mobile phone that is built inside the housing of a Research in Motion Blackberry Classic Q20, with a modern processor and camera, and a recent version of Android:
https://linkapus.com/products/q25-pro-full-device
It's a project from Zinwa Technologies, led by a young Chinese hacker named Zinwa who explained the gadget's design in detail on a recent installment of Returning Retro:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOrKsVKAbGA
Zinwa explains how he grew up with Blackberries (and also Chinese clones of Blackberries) and never learned to enjoy a modern distraction rectangle. So, as all good hackers do when they get an itch, he scratched it. He realized that there was an essentially infinite supply of old Blackberry housings sitting around in drawers or making their slow, inexorable way to an e-waste dump, where they would leach out poisonous ooze forever, and that, rather than spending $200K+ to design a chassis for a new phone, he could just create a motherboard around a modern processor with a recent-model screen, all sized to occupy exactly the same space that the original Q20 board fit in.
The new device supports 4G/LTE networks and Android 13. It has an SD card slot, USB C, and NFC on-board, as well as the classic Blackberry keyboard and yes, a 3mm headphone jack. Zinwa is launching with a small batch of conversion kits for hardware hackers who want to try their hand at a retro-restoration, with fully assembled units to follow.
Now, this isn't for everyone, but there's a huge community of people who are very excited about it indeed:
Mostafa, who sent me a tip about this project, writes:
After using [a Blackberry-like phone] for 3 years now, the form-factor is perfect for healthy phone usage habits. I’ve found the physical keyboard/small screen combo to be an optimal solution to the problem having a simultaneously infinitely useful tool/infinitely novel toy in your pocket at all times – maximize the tool factor, minimize the toy. This concept has spawned a rich community around it.
If you want to be a part of that community, you can hang out on their Discord:
https://discord.com/invite/D2P7UqFdXz
The point here isn't merely that Zinwa is doing something very cool that meets the needs of a group of people who Big Tech doesn't give a shit about (though he is doing that): it's that anyone should be able to do this to any technology. That includes Zinwa's Q25: in his interview with Returning Retro, Zinwa waffles a little about whether the Q25 will have an open bootloader, which would allow other hackers to replace the OS with one that's been modded to their heart's delight. Whether or not you get to modify the tech you use to suit you better has nothing to do with whether it came from someone with good or bad intentions – you should have that right, no matter what, because it's your technology and you should be in charge of it.
This is the spirit of small tech: tech that communities bend to suit their needs. Just as CDA 230 primarily benefits small groups who are underserved or abused by Big Tech, the right to change your tech primarily helps marginalized groups. Marginalized groups have always relied on adapting their tech, because their needs rarely get taken into consideration by design teams at tech companies:
The world is full of "outdated" technology that has been replaced with enshittified versions. A robust right to tinker means that we can divert this superior, well-built technology from landfills, by retrofitting it with modern guts that keep it up to date with the good things that have emerged since it was built, while discarding all the garbage that came along with it.
Take the Thinkpad X220, one of the greatest computers ever made:
https://btxx.org/posts/x220/
As Brad at btxx wrote in 2023, the X220 is built like a tank, had every port under the sun, supported compact lightweight batteries and massive external ones, sported one of the greatest keyboards ever to grace a laptop, and had an open bootloader, making it a dream to run Linux on. It was incredibly easy to repair and maintain, too (I once swapped a keyboard on one of these one-handed while holding my infant daughter in my other hand).
I would love to have an X220 with a modern processor, a shit-ton of RAM, and and updated screen. There's no way I'm ever going to build it, but there's probably a couple thousand people like me who would pay, say, $2500 each for these retrofits. For some enterprising hardware hacker, that's a pretty good year's wages, and a project that could launch a reputation and future projects.
Thinkpads went steeply downhill after the X220, so much so that I abandoned them altogether, after more than a decade of annual hardware purchases, switching to the wonderful, repairable Framework:
The fact that Lenovo – the current owner of the Thinkpad line – just sucks at making computers is no reason for those X220s to go to the landfill. Someone could – and should – move fast and break Lenovo.
For more than 20 years, we have tried to make tech better by "holding tech to account," trying to make giant tech companies wield their power more responsibly. This has been a total failure, which has done nothing but strengthen tech companies, making them both too big to jail and too big to care. A better tech future isn't one in which today's tech companies behave better, it's one in which their bad behavior doesn't matter because they no longer have any power over us.
To bring that future into being, we have to take away tech power, not try and direct it in positive ways. We need to design our policy around evacuating tech platforms, not fixing them. We need to encourage moving fast and breaking (Big Tech's) things. The problem with the world isn't that the wrong tech bosses weild vast power over the lives of billions of people – it's that anyone has that power.
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
has YOUR favorite fictional woman over the age of 30 experienced fandom misogyny from people who are mad at Their Mom From Real Life? call our offices, toll-free, day or night. we're the nation's #1 law firm that specializes in defending adult women who make choices and have character traits. if the prosecution has started calling her a selfish bitch, pick up the phone today!!!
Excuse me, does your firm also represent women under thirty who experience fandom misogyny from people who are mad at That Girl From College/Work/High School?
That feeling when your body is requesting something but you're not sure what so you just start eating and drinking random stuff to try and figure it out
im stacking extension cords on each other like theyre tinker toys. constructing a tower of babel in the name of the god of electricity. there'll be at least 100 outlets when ive hooked these boys up nice and good. ill never run out again
the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds
#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)
I'm not sure what's more concerning here: the idea that the Tumblr vernacular, a principally written idiom, is discernible in spoken communication, or the fact that if you click through to the original post, its contents appear to have been replaced at some point in the last two months with Minecraft YouTuber fanfic.
This is me, a linguist, being pedantic but what you’re describing (a particular pattern of speech/grammar/vocabulary indicative of a defined group) is technically a dialect; an idiom is a turn of phrase that means something other/additional than the literal meaning of the words (“raining cats and dogs” or “see the light” etc etc). You may have been thinking of an idiolect, which is the particular dialect of a single individual.
And if I, a linguist (an intellectual 🧐), hear Tumblr English out in the wild, I get so excited. Genuinely, I seriously considered writing my masters thesis on tumblr english and only didn’t because my advisor was a bit of a stick in the mud. This is a VERY Exciting Time™️ for linguists because the advent of the internet (and more specifically areas of the internet that encourage communities to form among people scattered across the globe) has created an era of exceedingly rapid language change, and gives us a huge opportunity to study how language changes on a much shorter timeline than usual. Throughout human history, geography has been a huge limiting factor in language bleed, transmission, and change; but now we have the ability to talk to people from all over the globe regularly enough that we are picking up vocabulary, grammar, and linguistic markers from all over the world.
Like, do you get how fucking cool it is that english speakers who have never visited Asia are able to use borrowed words like isekai and honorifics like -san fluently?? Do you get how many idioms and weird little grammatical constructions we’ve created that are unique to OUR dialect of english? Think of pissing on the poor or (like I used earlier) me, an intellectual. Our dialect, here on this hellsite, is the only one I can think of that has created a significant catalogue of complex tone markers specifically for the written form to compensate for the shortcomings of the written word in communicating meta-linguistic information like sarcasm or mockery or excitement. This dialect, primarily created in the written form (which is nearly UNHEARD OF), exploded onto the linguistics scene in 10 or 20 years when normally it can take centuries for dialects to distinguish themselves. It's academically BONKERS and I am HERE FOR IT. It's in the same realm as Nüshu, the Chinese written script only used by women.
TLDR: As linguists we are collectively shitting our pants about this fucking dialect and are OVER THE MOON to hear it 'in the wild.'
“Listen to me– all of you out there! You were told by this man– your hero– that America is the greatest country in the world! He told you that Americans were the greatest people– that America could be refined like silver, could have the impurities hammered out of it, and shine more brightly! He went on about how precious America was – how you needed to make sure it remained great! And he told you anything was justified to preserve that great treasure, that pearl of great price that is America!
“Well, I say America is nothing! Without its ideals– its commitment to the freedom of all men, America is a piece of trash! A nation is nothing! A flag is a piece of cloth! I fought Adolf Hitler not because America was great, but because it was fragile! I knew that liberty could be snuffed out here as in Nazi Germany! As a people, we were no different than them! When I returned, I saw that you nearly did turn American into nothing! And the only reason you’re not less then nothing– is that it’s still possible for you to bring freedom back to America!”
–Captain America, “What If (Captain America Were Not Revived Until Today)?” Volume 1 #44 (Peter Gillis, writer), April 1984
Imagine paying Columbia-amounts of money to be taught by someone with kindergarten-level art literacy. Like, motherfucker, the wholeass point of 4’33” is to emphasize how every performance of live music is inextricably linked to the ambient sounds of the context in which it is performed!!!!!!! Paying attention to and thinking about the context of the performance is the point of the song!!!! If the point was to hear birds chirping and people walking, John Cage would have fucking recorded that instead. Insisting that art is only good when contains good things and makes you feel good things is baby-level art criticism. How the fuck is this dude a professor.
Actually I’m not done going off yet. This pisses me off so much. How can you teach the humanities and be so obstinately ignorant? Like bruh, if the chanting outside makes you feel uncomfortable and upset, maybe you should take about four and a half minutes to contemplate why you feel that way. During that time, you might consider things such as: why are there students chanting? What are they protesting? Why do they feel so strongly about this issue that they’re willing to disrupt their lives to bring attention to it? Should I also feel as strongly? Should I be protesting with them? Is my desire for silence more important than the students’ desire for justice? Why do I find the noise they’re making more upsetting than the genocide they’re protesting?
Being like “loud noise make me angy 😠” is so fundamentally incurious and baby-brained it’s honestly unbelievable
online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.
and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.
there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't think anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.
i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.
I have some news for members of the united states armed forces who feel like they are pawns in a political game and their assignments being unnecessary.
How come you're all about "feminism" until it's time to protest? We haven't seen you make a single fucking post about the LA riots and it's really disappointing.
Hi friends. This is your reminder not to reply to questions like this. You do not need to self-report your behavior. This is a guilt trip designed to make you violate your own Miranda rights.
Also, they are not riots (Freudian slip, fed?), they're peaceful protests and are a democratic right under the first amendment.
where to find your local protest
donate to legal funds
my local immigrant support network
Sorry babes but as someone who lived lug around 500 cds they can die. To me lps are at least pretty and pretentious like a fine wine. Cds have no point
The real point is that you OWN a CD. You do NOT own anything digital you purchase.
Google Play stole hundreds of dollars worth of music I paid them for from me by forcing me to upload it to YouTube Music (or lose it entirely) which is behind a subscription paywall, requiring me now to pay more money every month if I want to listen to MY music I PAID for without constant advertising.
You do not own anything digitally purchased. It can be taken back from you at any time and it is fully legal for big corporations to do so for some reason.
CDs can't be taken from you unless they come into your house or car in person to physically pry them out of your cold dead hands.
That's why the resurgence. As funny as that person's reply to you was, it's not in fact because they look sexy. It's because you actually own them.
I spent so many hours burning CDs in high school. AND I STILL HAVE THEM. IN A CD FOLDER IN MY CAR. Because sometimes I drive through the mountains and lose cell reception and can no longer stream Spotify over bluetooth.
CDs are useful, my lambs.
Also this whole thread has made me feel Very Over 30.
And for reference, since they took the disc drives out of computers for the same reason they fucked with headphone jacks, you can get a CD burner drive with a USB connection for like $30.
I work in a public service. My local school districts are cracking down on cell phones. A teen came into my work to try to burn their first cd.
Their first cd.
They were having some trouble and I was secretly like (this is my moment, holy Shit, burning CDs almost continuously from middle school until a couple years ago is About To Be Relevant, what the fuck, fucking hooray)
And I go over, and I listen to the teen (they bought a cheap stack of 100 READ/WRITE CDS. 100!!! And a single-disc cd walkman!!), and we fuss with it, and I troubleshoot the issue they were encountering.
It was So Easy. To fix this issue. I had to do almost nothing. Media player was grumpy bc the files were not in the folder it wanted them in. I moved them. It started working.
“Oh my god, you’re a MIRACLE WORKER!!”
I will be thriving off that moment for Years.
And before I had to go, I told them, “hey, if you can find a compatible player for cheap, you can fit way more songs per disc on an mp3 cd. We just burned an audio cd.”
They got So Excited.
In a fully digital world locked behind paywalls and subscriptions and opaque tablet OSs, knowledge of desktop systems and the resurgence of physical media are everything.
Last week, my boss was going through our closets at work to clean them out. We had a tower stack of blank read/write CDs. We are (supposedly) a digital-only workplace and we have nothing to use them with because we have no CD/DVD drives. They're now mine because they otherwise would have gone into the garbage. My boss was astounded to discover I still burn CDs. "But what about digital music?" "Everything I buy I burn." That music is mine.
i'm so glad goncharov happened when it did, right before prolific public use of AI. that was pure honest gaslighting straight from the heart. real human whimsicality and trickery thru blood sweat and tears. we were a family. and we all gonched, together. you cant replicate that with any machine.
