the fact that dune opens with a witch appearing in paul’s bedroom in the middle of the night to go “nyeh heh heh… nighty night late bloomer, you need to sleep well before your scary test tomorrow” and he’s just like. huh. okay. I trust that all will be explained to me later.
she’s so impressed by paul guessing that the bene gesserit meddle in politics lmfao. girl what else would the mysterious order strategically placed within every echelon of the landsraad be doing other than politics. also. what other possible conclusion could he come to as to why his mom knows secret mind control techniques.
the degree to which bene gesserit powers and agendas are actually secret is so ambiguous lol. the harkonnens know about the voice via yueh but after neutralizing jessica it never comes up again. you’d think that information would be more valuable even than control of arrakis but then a couple years later they just invite bene gesserit to feyd’s birthday party and he’s not even warned against fucking her. all these people are stupid as hell every last one of them. I love this stupid book.
Everything about this damn post is so funny to me. The lighting of the arm from the flash. The posing of the arm like a dramatic death from a novella. The fact the photo somehow got taken still and looks this good. The subreddit name. The fact this guy really is built like crash bandicoot
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.
The human body's response to HRT is actually admirable in the sheer indifference. Just pure I Don't Give A Shit, I Just Fucking Work Here compliance to the new instructions. You can get testosterone injected straight into your body and it doesn't even question where that shit came from, coming back from a coffee break and just going
"Okay, everything seems to be in ord- oh fuck now what? Oh huh. Alright fine. New orders came in, cancel the menstrual cycle. Dig up the genetic balding patterns from somewhere, I don't fucking know they're buried somewhere in the dna. I'm greenlighting the growing-hair-on-your-toes thing. Yeah just cancel the ongoing maintenance processes, new orders came in so this is apparently what we're doing now."
genuinely i think a big problem with science education is we spend too much time in high school telling students DNA is like, the Magical Essence of an Organism.
dna is mostly just instructions for building proteins, and not very persuasive ones at that. it sits in the nucleus of the cell, and what happens after RNA transcription isn't any of its business. this is a good thing! it means we can override it sometimes when we need to (and when we know how). but a lot of rhetoric around DNA (and therefore gender and sex and morphological freedom in general) treats it like this Platonic sorcery that must be obeyed, lest we incur the wrath of the gods. and it's nothing so special!
I think about The Man of the Hole so often. 27 years alone. 27 years with no one to speak to but strangers to wave to. Survived a genocide, a massacre that killed everyone he had ever known and later, an assassination attempt. He still tried to warn researches about the traps he built. He was only about 60 when he died in 2022. The people who tormented him in life later desecrated his grave.
I do think it is important to share the stories of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island and Ishi and the countless other indigenous people who experienced the profound trauma of being the last survivor but it is important to remember that the last Aboriginal families in Australia to be contacted by Europeans were resettled in the 1980s and the Indian government has proposed a plan that will mean total genocide for the Shompen people. The total eradication of indigenous peoples, their cultures, their languages, their ways of life, is not something which occurred in a distant ugly past but an ongoing progress.
