We are all vanishing, pieces at a time and all at once. I play my part in this silencing chorus: my marks on the world are insubstantial; my voice falters. I could slip away at any moment, except: the idea of your disappearance is intolerable to me. I need you to remain. This insistence is both anchor and buoy.
Our lives do not intersect. They brush past one another in these moments of indirect communication, but you do not really know me any more than I really know you. The only tokens of this not-connection are the tangent arcs drawn in the dust of our wakes: a snippet of text. A photograph. A name; a date; a web address, now inaccessible.
I have little to offer anyone, you least of all, but my insistence remains nonetheless. I am still here. Please stay.
thinking about how the cosmetics industry would have been devastated if widespread masking is still a thing in society. lipstick? useless. foundation? transfers too much and sales plummet. the only survivors would probably be eye products and maybe lip balm. i would not be surprised if Big Cosmetics (TM) also lobbied for early relaxation of pandemic policies.
yes this post is motivated by my instagram feed serving me makeup content
During lockdown, women were OPENLY talking about how much more time they had to themselves without being expected to perform an elaborate hair and makeup routine every morning. Just one more thing society has memory-holed for back-to-normal. 🙃
Remember when a UK bookstore offered visitors the opportunity to vandalize Harry Potter pages for 25 pence? They raised over £4,000 for transgender healthcare! And now they need your support. Emily, co-owner of The Bookish Type, is fundraising for her own gender-affirming surgery that's covered in every Western European country aside from the UK and Ireland. Let's help her like she helped dozens of other trans people access care in an increasingly hostile nation. Support her on GoFundMe here.
If your SO can't make a decision about where to eat, play the 5-2-1 game. You give them 5 restaurants, they pick two, and you pick from those.
My gf of 3 years is the queen of “wherever” and “I don’t care” when it comes to this. This little game fixed our problem immediately. It takes the pressure off of her, but still gives her a choice about where to eat.
(this can also work with kids and indecisive friends)
Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”
Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”
Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”
Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”
State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”
The vast majority of conservatives think of themselves as underdogs being repressed by the government/the elite, and they value personal freedom (specifically their personal freedom, they don’t care about other people). The will almost always agree with leftist points if you can find a way to blame the problem on their vague enemies (useful, since rich people are the root of most problems), and tie it back to their ability to say fuck everyone else. NEVER appeal to science, theory, logic, or human goodness. Make it seem as if you are a paranoid lunatic who trusts no one. They love it.
#you need to tailor your arguments to people's existing values and priorities if you want to convince them #the flip side is that it's every bit as easy to tailor conservative arguments to convince a leftist audience #so don't get smug #you're not immune to this either <- prev extremely true
people who are like "but with universal healthcare you'll have to pay taxes!!! Up to 8%!!!" Are so funny. Like as opposed to the 16% of my gross paycheck that goes to private insurance, that won't cover shit unless i call my insurance company, then my doctor, then my pharmacy, then my doctor again because theyre pretty sure insurance got approved then my insurance company because they didn't get the letter, then my doctor again, then the pharmacy again, and then the copay i still am on the hook for.
the only reason the registry exists is because we culturally view sexual crimes as inherently more evil and unforgivable than any other kind of violence. people are more willing to believe that a murder can grow and change than a flasher. if you’re woke enough to believe that ‘innocence’ is a fascist concept and sex is just another thing the body can do, then you should believe the corollary: hurting someone with your genitals is no different from hurting them with your fists
and yet, murderers and other violent offenders do not have their full names, faces, and addresses put on a public database for the rest of their lives. there is no such thing. they are not legally barred from watching movies containing violence, or owning imagery containing violence
in my state, sex offender probation means you can be searched, at any time, without a warrant, and owning a copy of playboy is a violation. it means you’ll be arrested if a family member comes to stay with you and you don’t register their vehicle with the sheriff. the dehumanization is beyond the pale
Multiple people have brought up the point that the sex offender registry disproportionately targets marginalized people and is used to criminalize the existence of queers, etc. That is true, and it's important to know, but, I cannot stress enough:
This post is about rapists.
The sex offender registry is not bad because innocent people are on it. It is bad because it is a gross abuse of human rights. Rapists are human beings. They deserve human rights. They deserve privacy. They deserve free access to media. They deserve the opportunity to grow and change.
Too many of you are only interested in protecting Unperson's rights as a means to protect Good People's rights, and it shows.
i know most leftists agree that everybody should have a right to food, water, shelter, and healthcare but i think a vitally important fifth pillar is privacy. people should not be compelled to be tracked, monitored, or to share personal space with others to access their other essential rights
so christopher nolan drilled into an active historical site to rig a scene, dumped a bunch of plastic skeletons into the ocean with no plan to fish them out, and ruined an actual Viking ship on loan from sweden and refuses to pay for damages. all for that garbage movie.
Swedish nonprofit alleges cost to repair replica was $6,000 but Universal – which made $264m on film’s opening weekend – has not stumped up
Concerns about prop disposal as filming on new Nolan film comes to a close | www.italianinsider.it
looking for a news outlet to pick up the archeologist drama over this but you can google the practical effects used for the cyclops and find the pictures pretty easily
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.
You can get and use windows 11 without logging in with a microsoft account, as of five days ago. I am a local user on my computer. Don't ask me how to do it, because my computer repair guy did it when he reinstalled windows, but there are tutorials out there. Refuse to connect to internet until you're set up and can use the computer freely.
Refusing to connect to the internet doesn't help. You have to open a Command Prompt (Shift+F10) and typing start ms-cxh:localonly (and pressing enter) during installation when you get to the sign in/create stupid ms account screen
For comprehensive deets, tomshardware explains
Maintain only a local account on your Windows 11 PC.
Unless there's really really specific reasons to subject yourself to windows, please consider installing linux mint instead.
Totally normal for a legitimate for-profit company to refuse to reclaim or stop running their products even after they're no longer being paid to do so. I'm sure it's very normal to just keep running your service for free when your contract's been terminated. Spending money to continue running cameras that supposedly no one is looking at is definitely not an indicator they are just run by the federal government to spy on everyone and only a wacko conspiracy theorist would think so.
Lucy Liu shares a heartfelt memory of learning to speak english by watching Sesame Street and finding a family within the cast. Share your favorite Sesame Street memory on social media with #ThisIsMyStreet!
I was five years old when Sesame Street first aired in 1969. I remember coming home from kindergarten and watching the show in the afternoon, and then, the next day, kids talking about what Oscar had said over snack time (he was the first character for children I saw that was allowed to be grouchy and not be “bad”).
Sesame Street celebrated a neighborhood that was multiracial and multicultural. When I was in preschool, that was my reality, too. Though I did and still do have a lot of cultural racism to unlearn, the extent to which I was able to learn how to be friends and neighbors with a diverse peer group was supported by Sesame Street. To be clear, this is why conservatives have wanted to destroy it from the beginning.
The Mississippi State Commission for Educational Television briefly banned Sesame Street in 1970 with the flimsy excuse that Mississippians weren’t ready to see racially integrated neighborhoods. And that happened in a few other Southern states, including one where the owner of a local NBC affiliate chose to air it, for free, no ad revenue, because he thought people were ready for it — or needed to get comfortable with it. And these state ETV commissions eventually relented after getting a lot of negative publicity.
I found a folder of the promotional images I used when pitching 10 Beautiful Postcards (forthcoming on Steam, already on Itch) to the zeitgeist first time around.
The first batch explain the game genre. At the time I felt the game intuitively made sense if you played it but was maybe hard to "pitch", so they also represent my desire to mutilate surrounding vidcon discourse into something that would better suit my adverneeds.
Comic about values
Promotional mailing to ArtForum. Did not receive reply but hopefully whatever intern gets these thought it was funny.
