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@justanotherordinaryh-u-m-a-n
The fact that you can’t raise taxes on billionaires even slightly without them pouring money into fascist political movements is, of itself, evidence that billionaires as a class shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place.
I’d just like to point out that every single thing that has happened in the 6 years since I created this post has only reinscribed its absolute moral correctness in my mind.
Farewell online privacy
What happened?
Trump happened.
just get a VPN?
You can’t just tell people to ‘get a VPN (Virtual Private Network)’. Buying a VPN is like buying a house. It’s very very important. Having no VPN or having a ‘wrong’ one can seriously damage your life. Especially for Americans because their privacy laws are garbage. I am going to try explain why you should get a VPN but bare with me, I am from Germany and my English is far from perfect.
Let’s start with a simple test. Click this link here: https://whatismyipaddress.com/ It will tell your IP adres, your ISP (internet service provider), and your location. The location might not be very accurate, but then again, it’s just a simple website. Imagine what the government can do!
So basically, everyone can find out where you live. But there is more danger. Your ISP. Your ISP logs your every move online and they are required to keep it in case the government wants access to it (or if a 3rd party wants to buy your data (yikes). They have everything. What websites you visit. How long you stay on a website. What you download. Your search terms. European laws are more subtle on this but if you are from the US you are #@*#&, especially because Trump doesn’t support the open internet. It’s scary but maybe in the future you can’t get a job because the recruiter knows your searched on ‘how to deal with depression’ or anythings else that’s supposed to be private because it’s your f*cking right. Or you get a $100k fine because you pirated a movie 15 years ago. You need a VPN. You’re dumb for not using one. but what does a VPN do?
A VPN encrypts all your data so if it were be intercepted no one can ‘crack the code’ and damage your privacy.
Usually being online goes like this (simplified): Your computer —-> ISP (—–> keeps data —–> sells it)
But with a VPN it goes like: Your computer —–> VPN (encrypts data)—–> ISP (ISP can’t see shit)
Furthermore, a VPN hides your IP address and location by giving you another IP address located in Spain for example (you can often choose from a list and change as many times as you want).
Now that you know why you should get a VPN and what is does it is important to educate yourself because people often choose the wrong VPN. VPN providers are also businesses and have to obey the law. If you choose a VPN provider located in the US then you are throwing your money away because the laws in the US shits on your privacy. If the US gov wants the provider to give all their logs they have to obey. The ISP still can’t see what you are doing online and sell your data but the US gov can interfere with your VPN provider so NEVER CHOOSE A PROVIDER LOCATED IN THE US.
I just wanted to make that very clear so my followers don’t buy false security.
There is still more danger! Who says your VPN provider isn’t selling your data? You need to check their logging policy. Do they keep logs? If yes, what for? For how long do they keep them? Tip: Choose a provider who doesn’t keep logs
More about law The US is part of the Five Eyes program (the worst):
The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence (source)
There is also a Nine Eyes (bit better) and Fourteen Eyes Program (better). You don’t want a VPN provider who is located in one the Five Eyes countries. If you had to choose go for a provider located in a country that’s part of the Fourteen Eyes Program or even better, go for a country that isn’t part of any program!
I know this is a shitty explanation and please pardon my english but now it’s time to do your own research. Take your privacy seriously. Maybe WWIII breaks out and you get killed for liking the ‘wrong’ FB-page.
Go to this website: https://thatoneprivacysite.net/simple-vpn-comparison-chart/
Make sure that your future VPN provider both has green boxes for Privacy Jurisdiction and Privacy Logging.
I recommend ovpn.se and trust.zone. ovpn is located in Sweden so they are part of the 14 Eyes Program and they keep minimal logs. Their business ethics, however, are alright.
Trustzone is located in the Seychelles. No country can interfere and their privacy jurisdiction is the best you can get. The US want your data but needs to get it from Trustzone? The Seychelles will simply give them the finger and wave them goodbye. However, this makes this provider very appealing for people who torrent and criminals because they keep no logs (and that is how it shoud be) Also, there are almost no marketing efforts so this provider is one the cheapest)
Also, often providers such as ExpressVPN are being called ‘The Best’ on websites about VPNs but know that this is just marketing which also makes those provider more expensive (and they too shit on your privacy)
This must be the worst article you have ever read but please, please take your privacy very seriously.
EDIT: I got many people asking me which provider I use. For those who want to know, I use Trust Zone. They offer a free 3-day trial with no strings attached. But still do your own research!
I am also with Trustzone but I think you forgot to explain one of it’s most important features. It protects you when you are using someone else’s Wi-Fi. If you are at Starbucks and you use their Wi-Fi your privacy is at risk. Anyone with ill intentions could steal your information. Especially if you are using an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot. With a VPN your data gets encrypted so no one can steal it.
Wait, what’s going, on? Did trump destroy internet privacy with a bill or something? Where’s the news? Oh wait, why am I getting visions of Alex Jones and selling water purifiers?
He hasn’t yet but he says he wants to. And if he is serious about it it would be really easy to do. Since all our data is already recorded, as the person above explained.
Trump wants more surveillance of Muslim Americans. This in a country where internet privacy is already close to non-existent.
Trust.Zone has a free trial. Use it.
btw this post only has 11k notes? That’s quite disappointing for something this important.
Don’t reblog this post to save a life. Reblog this to protect an entire family!
@earth-ruins @writing-prompt-s Should I get trustzone for my mobile device?
If you use public Wi-Fi, then yes. Which VPN you use is up to you, amigo. Take @earth-ruins advice. Do your own research first.
@elvesfromthedeep just brought the current situation in the US to my attention (March 30, 2017).
Sources
Anger as US internet privacy law scrapped
Congress just voted to let internet providers sell your browsing history
To all my friends in the US, please read this entire post. Making everyone aware of VPNs is going to be my mission. Your privacy matters. Please reblog this post.
Don’t tell me you just wanted to scroll past this. Stop looking at pictures of cats for a moment, okay? Don’t you realize how important this is? This is dangerous! ‘America, the best FREE country in the world’ my ass.
With this new law your ISP can sell your Internet history which could include passwords, usernames, religion, credit card numbers, race and much more to the highest bidder. So here is what I want you to do. You are going to read the whole thing and before you think ’this is so important. Let me reblog this real quick and go back to admiring cats again-’ NO! Don’t reblog this. Take action first. Then reblog. Sign up for a free trial! Trust.Zone offers one (here). Yes. It might be difficult to set up a VPN for some people. But is that going to stop you from protecting yourself and your family? 30 minutes. 30 minutes is all that it takes. 5 if you know how to install software. The problem with some of you is that you see ‘difficult’ as something negative. I want you to see difficult differently. I need you to push through this stuff. You are going to protect yourself. There is nothing negative about that. VPNs are fun and costsaving too! A VPN bypasses geographical restrictions so you can access websites you normally can’t or you could start Netflix’s one month free trial over and over again- forever. And it’s legal! (unless you use it to buy weapons etc.,) Don’t tell yourself that you are too tired and that you will do this tomorrow. Because that isn’t going to happen and you know it. You have to do this right now. You only have to click on it. Don’t let this/shit/life just happen to you. Take yourself seriously. Get a VPN.
Privacy is not a privilege, it’s a fundamental human right
Hey is thatoneprivacysite still good? The link works and it does take me to an article about vpns, but it just looks like an ad for expressvpn with extra steps.
No they switched to https://thatoneprivacysite.xyz/#simple-vpn-comparison a couple years ago
Welcome to the VPN Comparison! This section is meant to be a resource to those who value their privacy, specifical...
I had Trust.Zone when this post first started making the rounds on Tumblr and I forgot about it after Biden took office. I recently sent them an email asking why my subscription wasn’t automatically renewed and why their website hasn’t changed since 2017(?). Their answer:
Shady people, good people, this company only cares about privacy and doesn’t care who it serves. But now with Trump and Musk this is the only VPN I’ll use.
I understand some people might not want to use this VPN on moral grounds, but it’s genuinely one of the very few VPNs set up in a way that no authority can touch you. ExpressVPN and other ‘popular’ options operate in jurisdictions favorable for profits but their privacy is just a band-aid our government can easily rip off if it demands information. I’m a trans man, I’m afraid of our government, and at this point, I simply don’t care anymore.
For a second I was like noooooo, not this long post again! Haven’t seen it in years and I always thought it was a bit extreme and exaggerated. Now that we are in 2025, I am like, nahh, these people knew what they were talking about all along. First time I am reblogging this.
Also I don’t think anyone has said this yet but the free trial only requires an email address. No credit card details or anything. Refreshing.
Could someone please put the link to the free trial here? I don’t want to scroll back up 10 miles. Thank you.
here you go @foxbridgeni
Trust.Zone Free Trial
The argument against VPNs has always been, “but I have nothing to hide.” Now that an unpredictable lunatic is in charge, purging based on whatever whim strikes him, that sentiment is quickly fading. VPNs aren’t just about hiding personal secrets; they’re about protecting freedom, autonomy, and your basic right to live without unjust scrutiny or arbitrary persecution.
Reblogging again bc this is important
Not socialist in a “I won’t have to work” type of way but socialist in a “I’ll still be working but I won’t be worried I won’t make the rent” type of way. In a “billions won’t be hoarded by one person” type of way. In a “janitors, fast-food workers, child care workers, preschool teachers, hotel clerks, personal care and home health aides, and grocery store cashiers, will live comfortably” type of way. In a “the sick and elderly will be cared for” type of way. In a “no child should work” type of way.
Socialist in a “won’t let perfect be the enemy of better” way personally.
ecology is painful on the brain because you'll be reading a paper seeking to answer a question about fragmented suburban woodland edge habitats and most of the paper is trying to figure out "What is fragmented," "What is suburban," "What is woodland," "What is edge," and "What is "habitats." and for each of these things there are like 7 different mathematical and statistical models for quantifying and the models are still shockingly limited and its like FUUUUUUUUUUCK
never taken a formal ecology class so everything i know abt it is from experience and reading a bunch of stuff on google scholar
my impression is that a big part of ecology is Scale. So imagine a bird lives in a forest. The bird's habitat is forest, right? Wrong.
Imagine there is only one tree in the world. The bird can't live, can it? No, one tree is not a forest. Now imagine there are 20 trees. The bird still can't live. 20 trees is not a forest, either. Now imagine that there are 2,000 trees. The bird is able to live in this forest. But what if there is only one forest, and the forest is only enough for one bird? The species dies.
Now imagine there are 20,000 trees, but those trees are distributed miles away from each other, all over the country. 20,000 trees isn't a forest if the trees are that far apart. Now imagine that there are 20,000 trees, but those trees are all together in one forest. If 2,000 trees is enough for one bird, there should be 10 birds able to live in a 20,000 trees forest, right? Maybe, maybe not. It is possible that 100 birds can live in a forest of 20,000 trees, because the middle of the forest, surrounded by more forest is actually a different habitat type than a small forest surrounded by fields.
was going to write more but i became tired only halfway through explaining What Is Fragmented.
guys. please
both of these simultaneously
Therapy is expensive, but there are free non-chatgpt resources out there
Free worksheets, treatment guides, and videos for mental health professionals. Topics include CBT, anger management, self-esteem, relaxation
Finch - Your New Self Care Best Friend
You feel like shit. That sucks. You Feel Like Shit is a game designed to help you help yourself through your shitty times and practice self
Introduction to the Analog Brain - Skip the intro and go to the tool - Sometimes (lots of times) (all the time), I have the urge to do
I've used all of these and can vouch for them. Stay safe, love u guys 💖
im american and i knew that like in kindergarten so i think some of you are just stupid sorry
"US curriculums don't talk about-" ok? And? Are you guys not absorbing literally any information from the outside world? Tv, movies, books, people talking around you? Hello????
I'm sorry do people need to be taught that other countries have metropolitan cities in school or is that information you can kinda infer from like. existing in real life
Absurd that people will just say shit like this with their whole chest. If I had somehow gotten through life to age 21 believing that my country had cities but my silly primitive sepia-toned neighbours didn't then when contrary information came up I'd keep my mouth shut and head right to wikipedia. I'd take that misconception to the fucking grave.
For USAmericans who care to listen; the issue here is not that you were never taught or exposed to facts about the world but rather that ignorance is used as a shield for criticism. This is considered a dick move as you're basically saying you know you're ignorant, you're saying you don't want to learn.
If you're older than fifteen and not currently trapped in or recently escaped from a very overbearing cult then "I wasn't taught that at school" isn't an excuse for beliefs that reveal that you fundamentally don't think of other places as real or important. "It wouldn't occur to me to put 'USA' on my address for international shipping because I just expect everyone in other countries to know where my state is even though I don't know theirs" "I just assumed that other countries on my continent wouldn't have cities for some reason" "naturally I just assume that having states is a US thing and other countries either don't have them or they don't mean anything, other places don't have regional differences like we do, we're so varied and everywhere else is a Country Of Hats" THIS IS A YOU PROBLEM. We all have shitty education systems, yours isn't special. We all have racist governments and nationalist propoganda machines, yours isn't special. Your American exceptionalism isn't suddenly cute and humble if you try to make it about your country being extra bad instead of extra good. You just learned you made a stupid assumption due to inherent racist or nationalist or whatever beliefs? Now you have better information. Maybe think QUIETLY TO YOURSELF about what other dumb assumptions you have because of that and spend some time on wikipedia or watching foreign movies or something instead of crying to the internet that it's your fourth grade teacher's fault for not making you memorise a list of foreign cities.
We all believe dumb shit and don't know anything. You think I know anything about your states? I don't. When people from non-English-speaking countries started buying my books online I couldn't understand the address formats to post them; I had to learn. I don't automatically know which countries in the world are larger than mine, I look up the info if I need it. Sometimes I say make a bad assumption and dumb shit and people are like "Derin what you said is wrong actually" and tell me otherwise and then I learn that. This is not an issue of having information. Everyone can be wrong about stuff, but your "uphill in the snow both ways" ranting about how nobody should expect better from you because Your Uniquely Bad Culture And Schooling is at fault for every problem is getting old.
Y'all don't seem to understand that, for a lot of Americans, the first time they experience truly global thinking is University. That's why Universities are so dangerous to certain political factions. It's not rocket science, but education is IMPORTANT and not all educations are created the same. I would encourage you to try to understand that an alarming % of the USA is illiterate or has a very low level of education. That's not necessarily their fault. Be kind. Understand that the world SUCKS and some people need a little help seeing that the world is this huge, complicated, interconnected machine that runs BETTER with kindness.
What Americans leaving comments like this think they sound like:
What they actually sound like:
It is true that, since this is such a widespread phenomenon among USAmericans, there has to be some non-individual factor that causes it. But that isn’t the education system not teaching that other countries have real people in them, it’s the degree to which American exceptionalism is ingrained in US culture— and I suspect that “progressive” USAmericans often can’t recognize that this isn’t just an education system problem because they don’t want to admit that they could have actual deeply rooted biases, and would rather just imagine that this isn’t all a simple educational blind spot. If that’s all it was, then you would just look it up and move on.
You're not wrong but think more than that the answer is a little bit simpler: Americans, as citizens of the world's foremost cultural and economic hegemon, have no material incentive to learn about the rest of the world. They simply don't *need* to. Everywhere else in the world you kinda need to have a baseline level of knowledge about the USA and other first-world countries, but in the USA you don't need to have a baseline level of knowledge about anywhere else in the world, so most people never learn it.
Which honestly by itself would be fine with me, can't blame them for responding to the material incentives present in their society.
But what I *can* and *do* blame them for on a cultural level is that, when confronted with this fact, the vast majority of americans construct this weird narrative wherein lacking that baseline level of knowledge about the world is a sign of them being uniquely disadvantaged (worse educated, more propagandized, more overworked and underpaid, more unable to travel, more affected my a culture that discourages learning and intellectual curiosity) compared to the rest of the world, instead of facing the reality that it's a sign of them being uniquely privileged in the sense that they can get through their entire life without *needing* to know any of this stuff.
Okay I am going to be mean for a second.
"But you see! America is so illiterate! We cannot help ourselves, we are just illiterate, it's a huge issue! You would never understand!"
Oh, cry me a fucking river
Straight for Wikipedia: World map of countries shaded according to the literacy rate for all people aged 15 and over.
Please note where the US is on the list.
And now look at the rest of the world, where people somehow don't react to being corrected online by claiming that the reason they never assumed other countries have cities is because they have such huge rates of illiteracy that the rest of the world could never understand their struggle.
My grandma has only four years of primary school and SOMEHOW she knows other countries have cities. It's nearly as if formal education is not the only possible source of information.
A symptom of this I often see is that a great many Americans also feel the need to highlight to the entire world around them when something they encounter is Other, or outside of their wheelhouse, and this applies even to the most mundane of things. I have two examples of this:
First, back in 2020, a lost walrus visited the Welsh town of Tenby for many weeks and menaced its lifeboats by sleeping on the slipway. I wrote a lengthy post about this, and included the fact that the good folks of West Wales named the walrus Wally, after the children's book franchise Where's Wally.
I was inundated with Americans reacting with everything from astonishment to derision that the character is not called Waldo outside of America. It was constant. Everything from "Wait you guys call him Wally??? Not Waldo???" all the way to "Are you guys fucking stupid his name is Waldo omg"
Which is very interesting, because Where's Wally is a British franchise. He was called 'Wally' first. His name was translated into over 30 other languages, including Charlie and Jonas, depending on region. Nonetheless, I did not get one single solitary note about the name from anyone else; it was exclusively Americans, unable to keep their amazement to themselves, unable to not highlight and point out that SOMETHING IS DIFFERENT FROM US.
Second, I once wrote a post in which I, a speaker of British English, used the word 'gaol' - the BE spelling of 'jail'. Again, I was flooded with comments, asks, messages, etc from Americans who simply could not fathom why I had done so. Four of them very literally sent me asks that asked why I had done it (I mean this literally - "Why did you spell jail like that?" was word for word one of the asks), so unable were they to work out on their own that spellings differ between dialects. I responded to one, saying that I was baffled by it, and suggesting that maybe the polite thing would be to google these sorts of things for yourself rather than requesting to have your hand held through the process of learning that other places have different words and spellings than you're used to. I said I did understand, but that this was something I myself fetched up against all the time with American media, and had since I was a child - but I simply used context clues to work out meaning, or google when I couldn't, because I get that American English is a different language.
And then two things happened: the first was that a non-trivial number of Americans lost their entire shit at the very suggestion that there was anything at all rude about this (again, I really don't know what answer they wanted to that beyond "Because that's how it's spelled in my language", information readily available with a single google search), and the second was that I was then inundated with non-Americans sharing stories of how they love writing fanfic but they had to start doing it in American English because when they used their own, they would get flooded with comments from Americans trying to 'correct' them, and it just wasn't worth the hassle.
And it's ultimately a 'dominant culture' sickness, I think. When everything is constantly catering to your understandings and cultural expectations, anything outside of it feels Other, and Must Be Commented Upon. I'm Welsh, and I find absolutely any mention of anything Welsh around most English people gets the same reaction; they absolutely have to comment on the Thing They Think Is Weird. Just last week I was discussing a fieldtrip for my students with an English colleague of mine, and I said I was taking them to the Bannau Brycheiniog. He didn't interrupt, to his credit; but he got the stupid grin that I knew meant he was going to comment. He waited until I finished asking for his risk assessment input, and then rather than answering, his first response was "The Bah Bah Bluh Bluh?"
If I'd said an Anglicised or English name, he'd have just continued the conversation. But he didn't recognise the name Bannau Brycheiniog. So We Must All Flag Up That It's Weird.
And that's dialled up to 11 for a great many Americans.
(Though not all, by a long shot. I do want to stress that. In both examples I've given, I had far more Americans who agreed with me than not. But it is a common behaviour, unfortunately.)
I had this very experience with the infamous 'housecoat poll', where I used two UK English variant names for a particular garment worn within the house, often when feeling lazy or in pyjamas, or after a bath. It was meant for like at max 10 people, most of whom would be using UK English. And it blew up. Many non USAmericans responded with their own local version of the name, and that was cool! Canadians even responded pretty politely, which was nice. But the yanks. Most responses from them were anything from the smarmy warrior cats meme, to acting like anything other than 'robe' or 'bathrobe' was illiteracy, to outright mockery. One or two folks even (probably-jokingly) claimed they wanted to 'beat the British out of OP', i.e me. Now, if they had any idea, they'd know that calling a Scottish person British or English is very likely to be at least a faux-pas, if not generally offensive by itself, but the aggression and threatening attitudes genuinely got upsetting. Ended up getting hatemail over it, too. The worst bit about it all is that if you respond with a 'don't talk to me like this', you're likely to be met with the same aggression that they'd been dishing out for no good reason in the tags. It could have been avoided by simply googling the words 'dressing gown' or 'housecoat' and finding out they're just words from a different version of English than that of the majority.
One of the common mistakes I see for people relying on "AI" (LLMs and image generators) is that they think the AI they're interacting with is capable of thought and reason. It's not. This is why using AI to write essays or answer questions is a really bad idea because it's not doing so in any meaningful or thoughtful way. All it's doing is producing the statistically most likely expected output to the input.
This is why you can ask ChatGPT "is mayonnaise a palindrome?" and it will respond "No it's not." but then you ask "Are you sure? I think it is" and it will respond "Actually it is! Mayonnaise is spelled the same backward as it is forward"
All it's doing is trying to sound like it's providing a correct answer. It doesn't actually know what a palindrome is even if it has a function capable of checking for palindromes (it doesn't). It's not "Artificial Intelligence" by any meaning of the term, it's just called AI because that's a discipline of programming. It doesn't inherently mean it has intelligence.
So if you use an AI and expect it to make something that's been made with careful thought or consideration, you're gonna get fucked over. It's not even a quality issue. It just can't consistently produce things of value because there's no understanding there. It doesn't "know" because it can't "know".
its been just over a year since i posted this and i still encounter people saying things like "i asked chatgpt and..." or "i made this with chatgpt and...". and these arent like teenagers or students they're adult professionals using this shit for their job. i dont know how people live like this
I don't know how to make this any more clear but if you use ChatGPT to do work you're only hampering yourself.
If you stop using it (or Co-Pilot or any other bullshit AI helper) you will learn and grow more, develop new skills, and become a more valuable employee at work and/or do better at school. There's no shortcut to developing useful skills, you just gotta keep working on it.
SURPRISE SURPRISE
Researchers find that the more people use AI at their job, the less critical thinking they use.
#it is easy to say this now but it was also incredibly easy to say this at the start and at every point along the way ( @qqueenofhades)
It’s wild to me to see transvestigator conspiracy theories online that could be so easily explained by natural human variation. That woman has a deep voice? Yeah, sometimes they do. A woman has broad shoulders?? Maybe she plays rugby or hits the gym a fuckton. There’s a “bulge” in her tight pants?? Maybe her vulva is just fat. All the “markers” of trans woman that transvestigators use to harass any woman aren’t even things unique to trans women.
Transphobes talk about women like they’re Barbies. Have you forgotten the existence of cameltoe? Tiny boobs? Narrow hips? Broad shoulders? Why do you think choirs have altos and not just sopranos? What do you think female athletes look like? Do you think a woman that lifts weights and plays contact sports will look like a 90s supermodel? At what point in history did we collectively forget that human bodies have natural variability???
official anti terf post
Idgaf if you don't want to write essays for school. I don't care if you don't want to write corporate emails yourself. I don't care if you can't draw well, I don't care if you can't write well, I don't care if you just really really want to talk to your favorite fictional character but don't want to RP with a real person because you have social anxiety or whatever
If you're still regularly using generative ai, chatgpt or midjourney or character.ai or literally whatever the fuck, im personally blaming you when my utility prices start going up.
Why would utility prices go up because of ai?
(I am not defending the usage of generative AI/ChatGPT/Character.ai etc etc i am very much against it - I am just curious as to the correlation between using it and utility price surge please don't come at me this is a genuine question)
Happy to help.
ChatGPT uses so much energy that the US is literally reversing course on coal and gas usage to make up for it. In Santa Clara, for example, data centers used 60% of the ENTIRE CITY'S electricity.
ChatGPT uses 1-3 bottles of water for cooling for every query you put into it. This is FRESH WATER, which is evaporated and eventually mostly returns to the ocean, effectively removing a lot of it from our already dwindling fresh water supply on the planet. It also consumes 17 THOUSAND TIMES more electricity than the average American home.
The AI boom wastes so much electricity that we are very immediately risking US cities having to have rolling blackouts just to keep up with the energy demands, as early as NEXT YEAR
Gen AI's water usage is projected to hit 6.6 BILLION meters cubed by 2027
More AI use = more data centers = power drain on local cities = gas, electricity, and water utility prices rise because all of our resources are being funneled into a machine that makes garbage
To be clear, these data centers aren't exclusively ai. In general, we need to do a hell of a lot better with how we manage and maintain our online infrastructure. But generative AI sure as hell isn't helping.
How can we help 😔
Gaza Funds
Donate if you can. Spread this if you can't. Direct support to these families is the best thing we can do right now.
Occasionally forget people genuinely think capitalism is thousands of years old
One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism
reminder that capitalism was literally invented in the 16th century
That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.
Capitalism is only 200 years old and I have to say, they have not been an impressive 200 years
I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.
Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.
An alarming amount of people seem to think capitalism = all trade, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
And that, comrades, is why we need to seize the means of production
not to be a downer or anything but being alive in 2024 is experiencing weeks upon weeks of unlimited widespread carnage, death, displacement and destruction, then inevitably coming across something that makes you realize you're just now at the tip of the iceberg. whether or not the prediction is true, the fact that it's even being made by someone with a title like earth systems scientist makes your blood pressure go up just a little bit.
I think some people (myself included) think that 100k is short because we are used to reading fic of more than 250k but you are right. I know that 100k is a lot of work and effort but that does not mean that because of our very twisted way of seeing things, we do not value every word that writers share with us (or at least that is my case)
hmm i’ve seen people say “i won’t read a fic if it’s less than 300k because it’s not worth my time,” and i’ve seen people demand more more more more despite a writer giving them a 80-100k story (a literal book). so i get that reading fic of more than 250k might skew perception, but even 20k, 40, 80k — that’s a lot of work. time. effort. thought. care. not all writers have the time or energy to write 800k epics. it doesn’t make their work any less worth praise and love, which is what i’d really like this fandom to wrap its head around.
If this is you, I honestly urge you to like ... reconsider your thoughts on this? It takes so bloody long to write stuff. Way longer than you might expect.
I write fast. I average 1k an hour. This, as far as I can tell, is much faster than is typical. So lets say it takes me 100 hours to write 100k. Those hours then have to be broken down into what is actually achievable in a day. You can't write for 10 hours every day unless you're on a coke binge. I might do 4 on a weekend day, 2 on a weekday, because I have a job, other hobbies, and responsibilities. Not accounting for rest days or things coming up that prevent me from writing, it might take me 6 weeks to write an initial draft of a 100k story, by these metrics. Then comes the editing. I read everything I post at least 3 times to check flow, SPAG, and other things. This takes way more time than reading a fic normally because you're consciously taking in every word and every bit of grammar. During this, you write your edits and your additions. You might send it to a beta and they then have to take the time to read your fic.
All up, that 100k story probably took 14 weeks for me to complete. And, remember, that is quicker than it may be for most.
Devaluing medium length stories can kill a fandom. Those are your bread and butter, the stories you go back to again and again because you can read them in one sitting. These are the majority of fics. Most fics are not 200k+ and they are sure as shit no less valuable and no less deserving of love and appreciation than longer works.
Not to mention, not every great fic has to be an epic? Sometimes the best stories that give you the most fulfillment are the ones that are about a low-stakes mystery or centre around your ship cooking breakfast or waking up together or just loving each other in everyday situations. Maybe this is an age thing, I don't know. But not every story needs to rip your heart out of your chest. Sometimes the best ones wrap you in a blanket and give you a glimpse at your favourite characters living an easier, more idyllic life than you yourself get to. That's not to say that shorter stories can't make you feel intense emotions, but this is a common argument that I see. I just don't think it's a valid one.
As an aside, most novels are 60k-100k. Nobody is looking at The Hunger Games or Catcher in the Rye and thinking they're too short and not worth the bother. So why do it to fics?
Y'all, the author has to be Quite Good to have a coherent plot past about 150k. I'd rather have a fistful of exquisite 25k fics over one monster 350k that really ought to be a series.
So…these people wouldn’t read quite a few incredibly famous novels, then.
Also short form works are their own art form and medium within the written medium. One sentence, three sentence, drabbles, double drabbles (one hundred and two hundred word fics explicitly), all of those also take skill to construct and are worth appreciating.
Guys. Can we also just put things in perspective here?
30,000 words is a perfectly respectable short novel.
100,000 words is a fat book.
500,000 words is a fucking tome.
Some famous novels by word count:
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: 38,421
The Great Gatsby: 47,094
A Wizard of Earthsea: 56,533
The Color of Magic: 65,113
A Farewell to Arms: 74,240
The Dark is Rising: 82,143
The Left Hand of Darkness: 94,240
The Golden Compass: 112,815
Ulysses: 265,222
Jonathan Strange and Mister Norell: 308,931
A Dance With Dragons: 422,000
War and Peace: 561,304
The idea that a short novel is, by virtue of being short, not worth the time to read is ridiculous. Also, it's fucking pretentions. Can you imagine someone talking about novels that aren't fanfic saying, "Oh, I never read anything less than 100,000 words!”
Frankly, the longer a novel is, the more I want to know that it's worth my time before I get involved in reading it.
Back in March, Ralph Nader estimated the actual death toll in Ghazzah to be closer to 200 000. It has been 3 months since then and the situation just keeps worsening. We have no idea what the death toll might be, all while a blockade has been enforced and society struggles to continue operating under external pressure.
As we speak, 18 million Sudanese people are going hungry, more than one third of the population, and a famine is looming over the nation. We have no idea what the death toll might be, all while a complete communications blockade has been enforced and society experiences a total blackout of information and exchange.
The IOF and RSF are: preventing people from growing food and feeding themselves, they burn the arable land, they target hospitals to destroy all chance of life and survival, they burn villages down whole, they destroy aid that passes through, they send air strikes down on entirely residential villages and cities, they have completely cut off communications networks to keep people in the dark, they kill doctors & healthcare workers, they kill journalists, they rape women, they kidnap children.
We live in an age of monstrosity, where these horrific circumstances are considered normal for our people. WE DO NOT ACCEPT THIS.
As we fight, continue to fight with us.
Free Sudan from RSF and foreign intervention.
Free Palestine from foreign occupation and intervention.
by the way this is the procedure to get out of gaza
it costs 5k USD per adult and 2.5k USD per child
if you want to raise this money via GOFUNDME it has to be arranged by someone who is NOT living in Palestine because GFM does not release money to Palestine. GFM also verifies every detail so it has to be accurate so you need someone who is out of Palestine and also familiar with the bureaucracy.
once you raise the money one of your FIRST ORDER RELATIVES have to deposit this money IN CASH and IN PERSON at the Cairo offices of a company called hala. this person cannot be a Palestinian male under 40 because they are not allowed to be Egypt without a permit
once you pay the money you have to WAIT for your names to be published by Egyptian military at the Rafah crossing and the you have 24 hours to get out
it is a very long and convoluted process that is impossible for most Palestinians who do not have contacts in other counties. Please please donate to the GFMs you see floating around because they’ve been verified and this is only the first step in an arduous journey. Once in Cairo, Palestinians aren’t allowed to work so they need money for their support also.
DONATE TO GAZAFUNDS.COM
Find vetted fundraisers for Gaza here
