JustAFeatherfool

Mostly fish. Some cats.

[vague-humanoid]

Lakota elders helped a white man preserve their language. Then he tried to sell it back to them.

“No matter how it was collected, where it was collected, when it was collected, our language belongs to us," said Ray Taken Alive, a Lakota teacher.

@mrchicsaraleo @britomartis @el-shab-hussein @paintedwiththecolorsofthewind @stephanemiroux

this is vile

STANDING ROCK INDIAN RESERVATION, S.D. — Ray Taken Alive had been fighting for this moment for two years: At his urging, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council was about to take the rare and severe step of banishing a nonprofit organization from the tribe’s land.

The Lakota Language Consortium had promised to preserve the tribe’s native language and had spent years gathering recordings of elders, including Taken Alive’s grandmother, to create a new, standardized Lakota dictionary and textbooks.

But when Taken Alive, 35, asked for copies, he was shocked to learn that the consortium, run by a white man, had copyrighted the language materials, which were based on generations of Lakota tradition. The traditional knowledge gathered from the tribe was now being sold back to it in the form of textbooks. 

Keep reading

[wiisagi-maiingan]

I’m reblogging this again because people in the notes are focusing on the wrong things.

This isn’t about books. This is about an organization founded and led by two white men using the work of indigenous peoples to create resources for their endangered languages and then not giving those people access to those resources. It’s about them literally copywriting the words of Elders and other indigenous people and refusing to let their tribes use them.

People are fighting to have access to the recordings that deceased loved ones gave to this organization and being denied because those recordings are copywrited. These men are literally taking aspects of these communities and saying, “these are ours now, no one else can use them, not even the people who shared them with us.”

And it’s not just one or two people who have issues with this. It’s not just one tribe. It’s multiple accounts of this organization and its founders violating the boundaries of both individuals and tribes and taking what wasn’t theirs to take.

This isn’t acceptable under any circumstances.

[cant-apult]

The Lakota Language Consortium is trying to strip Ray Taken Alive of his teaching license. His hearing is on June 27th and his wife is on the 29th of this year (2024)!

He is a little less than 50% of his $50,000 goal to fund his legal fees if anyone can donate here.

You can also read the complaint and rebuttal on that same page as well as extra background information.

[gay-jesus-probably]

Hello everybody with summer fast approaching here is your regular reminder that:

Everyone needs to wear sunscreen

SPF 50 is pretty much the best protection you can get, an SPF higher than that will have the same effect

Melanin does not protect you from skin cancer

Tanning is caused by exposure to ultraviolet radiation

Spending the majority of your life receiving regular large doses of UV radiation without any skin protection is a good way to get skin cancer

Don't use tanning beds, and don't go sun tanning

Wear your fucking sunscreen

[gay-jesus-probably]

Okay, people are clowning in the replies, so let’s try this again:

Sunburn is an uncomfortable short term problem caused by being out in the sun for too long without sunscreen. Some people are more susceptible to it than others. Melanin does protect you from sunburn, so people with dark skin are less likely to get burned, but also sometimes people just have a natural resistance to sunburn (or lack of resistance) - I’m white as hell, and literally the only time in my life I’ve gotten a sunburn was when I spent a whole day outside in a swimsuit without putting on sunscreen when I was a kid, and all I got was a minor burn across my shoulders. Never experienced that whole ‘peeling’ thing y’all are talking about, sounds super gross and uncomfortable tho. Rip to all the rest of you but i’m different.

Skin cancer is fucking cancer. It has nothing to do with sunburn, apart from both being caused by a lot of unprotected sun exposure. If you have skin, you are at risk of getting skin cancer. I have little to no risk of getting sunburn, but I still wear sunscreen, because I am protecting myself from fucking skin cancer.

If someone is basically immune to sunburn, then that’s awesome, but we still need to use just as much sunscreen as everyone else. Because we can still get skin cancer. Immunity to sunburn is not a sign that you can go easy on the sunscreen. And honestly, if you’ve got dark skin, you should probably be extra paranoid about applying sunscreen, because the majority of information on recognizing skin cancer is meant specifically for recognizing it on white skin. If you’re black/brown, it will probably take you longer to be diagnosed if you get skin cancer. And cancer is one of those things that you want diagnosed and treated very quickly, so you should be extra motivated to not get skin cancer in the first place.

Everyone needs to wear sunscreen. Wear your fucking sun screen.

[homunculus-argument]

Once again randomly remembered this story about a couple who had a small parrot - pretty sure it was a budgie - who didn't talk but learned to communicate with people in its own way. Once it figured out that people always turn to check their phones when the notification sound comes on, it started making the text message notification sound to request human attention. The parrot also liked to follow people to the door whenever guests were leaving, and would use its wings to pantomime the motions of a person putting their coat on. A very clever, charming bird.

And every once in a while it just randomly hated some people. Not for any real reason, or even reason to suspect bad vibes, but by deciding "fuck this person in particular" for shits and giggles alone. And one time when the owners had invited a new friend to their home, the bird decided that it Did Not Like Her.

So in the middle of polite conversation, the bird - who was free to roam around the apartment at the time - hopped onto the living room coffee table, right in front of the unwanted guest. And in that moment, the owners put two and two together and understood that whatever mischief the bird had decided to do, it was now too late to stop it.

But instead of unleashing the absolute hell that even the tiniest displeased parrot could be capable of, the little budgie made its little "may I have your attention please" cell phone notification sound, and once the guest was focused on the bird, looked at her dead in the eye while doing the putting-my-coat-on wing motion.

The guest did not recognise the pantomime for what it was, but she was nonetheless delighted that the parrot would do a little wing-roll dance for her. And the host couple were at first too stunned and then too polite to tell her how impressive that gesture truly was. Their bird had shown both remarkable restraint and cleverness by using its entire vocabulary of human communication just to say

"I have an important announcement: I think you should leave."

[drchucktingle]

posted this before camp damascus and im postin it again as tingleverse continues to defy expectations. BURY YOUR GAYS is comin like a tumblin wave of outsider art and sincerity, crashin gates and bending timelines ALL thanks to you. LETS TROT preorder here

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

if sex work was legal the workers could unionize

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

I am fully serious about this btw. not "pro sex work" as in "there are no issues whatsoever within the industry", but "pro sex work" as in "these are jobs and the workers should be a) allowed to work and b) protected from their customers by the law"

[tinystepsforward]

i've been a hooker most of my adult life in new zealand where we do have decrim. stigma is still a huge thing, but it really does make things better.

a few months ago, i sat in on a meeting with worksafe, which monitors occupational health and safety. decrim has been in place for twenty years, and worksafe was finally in a position where they thought that maybe they could train their staff to be comfortable inspecting brothels and other sex work establishments for health and safety regulations.

worker after worker, anonymous or activist or academic or none of the above, told stories at least as bad as the ones i've had myself: being locked into rooms or buildings, not being allowed off shift, having pay withheld, and of course worse. and what struck me was that the worksafe people invariably understood most of the ways brothel and strip club owners abuse their workers as the same hazards they saw in agriculture or factories: detaining people is a fire hazard. not paying them, or plying them with alcohol on the job to convince them to work overtime, is illegal everywhere.

and with the law in place — with twenty years of proof that sex work decriminalisation so drastically reduced violence against sex workers that it impacted the overall nz statistics for violence against women — worksafe finally felt comfortable with the idea of going into workplaces that still frequently violate absolutely every nz employment law.

fired up strippers is an organisation here that began as unionisation from a single strip club. it's grown since then to do the things that the increasingly complacent parts of leadership at the new zealand prostitutes' collective, founded pre-decriminalisation, cannot do: name the whole system as still broken, and call for structural change that doesn't stop at technical-legal acceptance. they've set up stripper poles outside parliament and had supportive MPs pose with it. they've called for people to show up in the streets and had crowds, ranging from older white professionals in coats through young queers breaking out the sluttiest gear they have in support, come through.

one of the most toxic instincts in brothels is when people see new workers as "stealing money from my family's mouths", as competition. owners encourage that perspective because it makes it a race to the bottom where we'll accept that they don't wash towels or the degrading pleather is giving everyone contact dermatitis or they're pressuring people into providing specific services. solidarity is the answer, on a level more profound than the natural "brothel mom" dynamic that often pops up.

decriminalisation — not legalisation, because if you make something legal the police still get to decide who falls outside that legal box, and their presence still creates fear and violence — is the only solution.

[liliotl]

who can relate

[monsterlets]

I may be becoming the guy at work who won't let people talk bad about their own singing voices, but to be fair people keep talking bad about their singing voices to me

[monsterlets]

I mention karaoke offhandedly and people start describing ways that their singing voices are supposedly bad and I just

[monsterlets]

"people tell me I sing along to everything an octave lower than it's supposed to be" yeah dude you have a deep voice. that's what you're supposed to do when the song isn't in your range and you're not trying to sing harmony. you bring it into your range while still following the melody. and you're doing that without even thinking about it!

[monsterlets]

one of my coworkers was at karaoke with me and they were talking shit about their voice too like bro. sure it was off sometimes but when it was on you sounded like a fuckin angel. I am tapping the sign. I can tell you what you picked out as sounding bad, it was lack of airflow control and occasionally some notes that may be out of your range

[monsterlets]

what gets me is like. it says something about societal messages around singing when a bunch of teachers, who will talk about growth mindsets all day long, are like "oh yeah I'm just naturally a bad singer and always will be"

like I said in another reblog chain, singing is a skill. or really a bunch of complicated interweaving skills. and if you don't wanna improve your singing that's cool, but you absolutely could if you wanted to

[sandmandaddy69]

[woefully-undercaffeinated]

This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.

They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.

And for eighty years, Americans' favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.

If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.

Servicing them is like disarming a bomb -- their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.

A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.

[jesuisloupseul]

Old school CRT monitors had the same issues.

Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said "Made me feel nauseous"

So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.

No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.

[funnelcloudd]

Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up

[silvysartfulness]

The little crackle if you touched the screen to wipe it...

[effeminate-wastrel-deactivated2]

Omg no one's even talking about the smell of the screen

[horrorobsessor]

This is both horrifying to read and nostalgic

[liberalsarecool]

'Tough on crime' should mean proactive policies, not reactionary punishments.

[depsidase]

[botanyshitposts]

whats the deal with proven winners?

okay. so. this is actually how i got into botany in the first place; i got an unpaid internship at a greenhouse in high school and realized, very quickly, that we live in a jurassic park hellscape where big companies breed plants solely for their looks and performance, and i found that so fucking weird that i couldnt get enough of it and fell down the rabbit hole. i don’t find them bad per say; i find them weird and how they manage their product in terms of policing their retailers is very sketchy to me, but they’re not like, monstanto-level off the shits (yet). with mother’s day next weekend we’re coming up on one of the biggest greenhouse/ornamental plant industry sales days of the year, next to valentines’ day (which favors the rose industry especially), so this is an exceptionally convenient time to talk about this. 

proven winners is one of the biggest ornamental plant companies in the united states, possibly the world. you might know them from their patented white flower pots. they’re centered in california (as, actually, a lot of these large flower producers are) and they manage a HUUUUUUGEEE network of giant industrial flower greenhouses. 

like, you have to understand, all garden retailers have to buy their shit from somewhere, and although the centers and local greenhouses selling proven winners stuff are often small and independent (unless ur talking like…flowerama or something), a large portion of the plants themselves, like many things in capitalism, form an industry of their own dominated by a handful of oligarch corporations, of which proven winners is one. small retailers order bulk products from these companies, should it be through full-color paper catalogs (which exist, btw, and are wild in and of themselves to look at; i actually have a few back home that i keep around solely bc they’re incredibly fascinating in a slightly offputting jurassic park kind of way), online, or through a sales representative for their region. 

it depends on what they’re ordering, but they can buy seeds, plugs (the black trays of like….tiny plants you buy at garden centers to put in planters? the ones that come in, like, six packs? those are called ‘plugs’), and in the case of perennials, woody plants of various ages, among other things. these plants are bred, marketed, and sold on a goddamn industrial scale. it’s wild. 

now….this is where it gets absolutely fascinating to me. this isn’t just proven winners, but proven winners is one of the top contenders of this. some highlights of how plants are actually marketed on an industrial scale: 

-plants come out in collections. like, you have horticulturalist designer people who put their names on some stuff and they all go out as like, The New Hot Thing™. 

-they always promote their top selling stuff, and the plants that won awards, and like, the most popular flower arrangements and stuff. this in and of itself, again, isn’t like…..bad, it just feels weird how plants are marketed as objects rather than living things, you know?

-these plants are 100% bred and optimized for their commercial value and how they look. see the above point about how it feels like they’re treating them as objects. 

-every year, there are new plants, which are put at the front of the catalogue and like, show them off as the Hit New Products. these are all part of the year’s collective collection, so like, proven winners has their 2019 collection all ready on their site in a special little tab: 

FUN INDUSTRY SIDE STORY: looks like they have some new orange petunias this year, which reminds me fondly of the 2017 purge ordered by the USDA of a ton of illegally GMO orange petunias….

you see, orange petunias don’t exist naturally, so what companies do is either 1. systematically breed orange into them, which can take years, or 2. take red petunias and just put in some coding for yellow from the maize genome, which makes them orange. usually, you have to submit all this paperwork and go through a ton of government red tape to sell GMOs, including required trials conducted by the federal government, but what some of these large ornamental seed companies were doing was just….not telling the government and just kind of…pretending that they bred them. so in 2017, a netherlands team noticed that these were like….kind of Suspicious™, and started doing some tests….and accidentally uncovered like, this huge international orange petunia scandal across all these companies, over 30 varieties of illegal petunia being sold internationally. they had to alert the actual EU, which then alerted the USDA, who then gave an actual government order for these large companies to literally burn, bury, or otherwise destroy all their industrial stock of the proven illegal GMO orange petunias. 

small retailers who had bought them assuming that they were legal were allowed to keep and continue selling what they bought, but the actual producers were ordered to just fucking. violently destroy everything. the USDA informed these companies that they could sell them again, but only if they were put through the proper government channels and received proper certification. i checked the old recall list and didn’t see these, so i’m assuming they’re like…Legit, but. im 👀 somebody test these lol

AAANNNNYYway that aside, if you would like to see the Proven Winners 2019 Flower Collection Showcase™, they have a bunch of……weird kind of ads on their youtube channel showing artsy pics of their new shit. to this day i can’t pin down exactly what about them makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but you really do get a sense that they’re selling an object to preform, which i guess is the point, but…idk, it’s just a very different view of plants, i think, then i personally have. very sci-fi-y, if you will. all their ads are like this; these video are essentially very similar to what you get from their print sales booklets, but in video form.

see, last but not least, my biggest beef with proven winners is the weird way they handle their company. 

you get inspected by the plant police.

im not kidding. for those not very familiar with plant reproduction, you can grow vegetative clones of plants through a process called taking cuttings, where you cut off a part of the plant and put it in a new pot under the right conditions, and it develops a root system and becomes a genetic clone to the parent. obviously, anyone can do this with a lot of the proven winners plants, especially because PW plants, as i’ve noticed, tend to be bred to be more vigorous. 

proven winners wants to ensure that there’s no Illegal Plant Downloads taking place, so they literally like….send people out to these small retailers and ask to see their stock to make sure that all the plants are going in the Patented Proven Winners White Pots™ with the Patented Proven Winners Information Tags™. you MUST plant proven winners stuff in the pots they send you, with the instructions they send you, and they will check you for this. the first time my internship mentor ordered from them, they accidentally planted the plugs in generic brown pots instead of the white ones, and the weird proven winners police rolled in unannounced for an inspection and told them that the next time it happened they wouldn’t sell to them anymore. what they’re worried about happening is that the growers will order a small amount and then just make a bunch of cuttings without paying them, and it’s just……weird. like i get why they do it but that’s always struck me as really, really shady lmao

[gallusrostromegalus]

OH BOY STORYTIME

ok so a couple years back I worked at a local greenhouse and we sold Proven Winners and they were HANDS DOWN managment’s least favorite company to deal with because:

The aforementioned Plant Police, who are the worst possible version of ‘police washout mall cop’ and ‘geriatric bitchy HOA snitch’.  Our local Plant Cop was this woman named “Elise” and her picture was stapled up in the breakroom with instructions to Radio 3 if we saw her.  

I’ll get to Radio 3 in a minute.

their product was uhhh… kind of crap? everything we ever got from them was real leggy, prone to carrying Sudden Death Mold, and frankly just didn’t do as well as some other brands in CO. 

They attracted the WORST customers.  You know the kind- the infamous haircut, knows more about plants than the people with actual horticultural degrees and sixteen cupons but only two of them are for this store, and either on their phone or screaming at their children at the register instead of checking out.

The only reason managment dealth with them at all was  1. People would request PW by name, so managment maked it up a ridiculous percentage and made bank on brand loyalty 2. PW’s delivery trucks would actually show up when scheduled with what was actually ordered so they could be relied upon to deliver, unlike pretty much every other grower :/ 

So it’s fucking MOTHER’S DAY, aka Hell On Earth for greenhouse retailers, and we’re understaffed in Greenhouse because some popular band was playing at the local indie bar Saturday night and everyone but me and Kate called in “sick”, so it’s two of us and sometimes assistant manger craig dealing with literally 3K customers an hour. 

Fucking Elise decides it’s a good day to do a surprise inspection. 

I’m breaking up a fight over at tomatoes when this woman grabs my arm, physically pulls me away from the woman whose order I’m writng down and hisses like a rattler at me “I need to see your greenhouses.”

I winch my arm out and get gouged by her nails. “Sorry, our greenhouses aren’t open to the public, and I’m working with her now.” I’m seven hours into a twelve-hour shift so far after coming in at 5 to unload the trucks, I can’t hear myself think over the echo in the greenhouse, and my panic over crowds has reached such a frenzy that I think my heatbeat could rival a hummingbird’s. I’m dehydrated despite my best efforts, hallucinating smells and my forearms are bleeding profusely from moving roses earlier. I no longer expirience pain or fear from exhaustion, but this woman makes me uneasy.

“I’m with Proven Winners and I’m here for an inspection.”

“Proven Winners are over there by the fairy garden supplies.” I say, still not sure what she’s on about.  I don’t do faces at the best of times and in the current retail-induced feuge I barely register her as a human being. I go back to trying to write ‘amish paste’ for what feels like the fortieth time, and Elise grabs my arm again and DIGS HER NAILS IN, before physically pulling me out the back door and towards the greenhouses.  

The first of the Quanzat huts/greenhouses is filled with columbines, one of the few non-crop plants that’s grown on-site because they’re in such demand and grow well here. Elise points at the rows and shakes my arm.

“WHERE ARE THESE FROM?” she demands. 

“Here? Ma’am this place is off-limits for customers, if you have questions I can get the greenhouse manager-”  I fumble for my radio (we all got walkie-talkie type radios because yelling over a 13-acre property is impractical) , and try to call the manager.  “Radio Adam? There’s a lady who needs some questions answered in Greenhouse 1?”

“NO I NEED TO SPEAK TO JEFF.” she shrieks, name-dropping the owner. “TELL HIM ELISE [REDACTED] IS HERE FROM PROVEN WINNERS AND IF HE DOESN’T GET HERE FOR AN INSPECTION I’LL HAVE THE POLICE SHUT DOWN THIS ENTIRE FACILITY!” she howls at me.

This Woman, I decide, Is Out Of Her Goddamn Gourd.  The mangers are all up to their armpits today and even if they could hear me wouldn’t be able to physically wade through the crowds for a good 10 minutes.  I click my radio over to Channel 3.  Channel 1 is for directing delivery trucks. Channel 2 is for staff. Channel 3 doesn’t work- it doesn’t connect but it DOES make your radio make a very loud higher-than-most-people-can-hear EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE noise.

This summons The Dogs.

Jeff’s family is from West Texas where the land is vast, the coyotes are many and nobody fixes thier animals, which is how he found and adopted two of the strangest dogs I’ve ever worked with.  Teddy and Bob are Anatolian Shepherd/Rhodesian Ridgeback hybrids, which is to say they clock in at 125lbs each, with body-bulder like reddish gray bodies, black masks and mane of fur that tapers into a full-body mowhawk of long hair along thier backs.  Jeff had to dock thier ears and tails for health reasons which really only adds to the illusion that Jeff has a pair of hyenas.

I can hear the crowd outside shouting as they race out from thier hole under the potting shed and they barrel into the Quanzat hut and stand on either side of me, snarling and bristling like they were trained to, which makes Elise finally let go of my arm and back up.  In an impressive feat of teleportation, Jeff turns up three seconds later.

“YOU!”  Elise and Jeff mutually bellow at each other.  The Dogs snap at the air.

“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU STILL HAVE THOSE THINGS.”  Elise shrieks, picking up a potted columbine to throw.

“I’M SURE THAT YOU STILL HAVE A RESTRAINING ORDER.  GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE AND LEAVE MY STAFF ALONE.” counters jeff.

“oh shit i’m bleeding.” I say, belatedly realizing she’s gouged holes in my arm that have been freely bleeding for at least three minutes now.  Everyone takes a moment to stare at my arm which is looking like a prop from a Tarintino film.

“Actually, go have a seat in my office.” Says Jeff, suddenly, coldly calm. He takes out his cell phone and dials 911.

Elise screams, throws the potted columbine, and is promptly tackled by assitant manager Craig, who had gone around the back. Jeff ducks and the pot clips me in the face becuase that’s just how this day was going.

Anyway, I got a zillion pictures taken of my arm, had to give a statment and then went back to work because it was literally me and Kate covering the entire greenhouse on our busiest day of the year and as shit as that was I couldn’t abandon her to the Hordes.  Got double overtime and hazard pay for the full day so I wouldn’t narc to the labor board over it, and The Dogs refused to leave my side which really improved customer’s attitude towards me. 

Elise got charged with assault, trespass and violating her parole, Jeff got a warning from the sherrif about “you can’t sic large dogs on people in city limits even if they really, really deserve it”, so the dogs had a vacation out in the county for a fortnight until the cops stopped driving by, and that’s the story of how we stopped carrying Proven Winners.

[incyray]

every second of this is rollercoaster.

the, the plant police…

[dduane]

Another unexpected epic.

[animentality]

[jordanbolton]

To The Substitute Art Teacher - Jordan Bolton

[ladyaustringer]

From “Racing Hummingbirds” by Jeanann Verlee

I’m going to to thinking about this poem for a long time. Visceral. Elemental.

The authors website:

Jeanann Verlee

The official website of Jeanann Verlee. Poet. Performer. Former punk rocker. Author of PREY, SAID THE MANIC TO THE MUSE, and RACING HUMMINGB

[whitepeopletwitter]

[sindri42]

So I looked this up and the whole story is wild.

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.

[gailcarriger]

I knew pastry would save the world one day.

[rosalarian]

This is a good use of AI! Do the tedious work so the worker can socialize with the customer. And then use that same AI to fight cancer. This is fantastic! I hate AI “art” but not AI as a whole.

[ladyaustringer]

More this, less AI doing the tasks human beings should be enjoying

[marzipanandminutiae]

society's infantilization of decorated objects is honestly one of the greatest recent crimes against humans' innate desire for beauty

[marzipanandminutiae]

"the toothbrush/hairbrush/bike/vanity desk with flowers on it is For Kids! this plain beige one is For Adults!"

I am literally throwing you into a volcano

[they-in-a-village]

Everyone should decorate their shit.

No more "keep the house beige incase we decide to sell it someday"

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Oh god that's beautiful

[ladyaustringer]

I paint stuff I own because I like living around beautiful things, and I like when people compliment my art. It’s a one-two hit of dopamine for me that is irresistible.

[aetherial-boy]

shouldn’t have to be saying this, but if i’m having a medical episode in public i should NOT be being filmed or photographed by random strangers. I don’t care WHERE you saw me faint, I don’t care that you think it’s wrong to sit on the floor of a shop, I don’t care that my tics are ‘weird’ to you, and I don’t care that you don’t like me ‘staring’ at you when i’m having an absence seizure. I did not give you permission to document my disability. Don’t film people in general, but ESPECIALLY not vulnerable moments like someone fainting or seizing thank you.