This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database.
Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July.
Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. âNot all heroes wear capes.â âGive them a medal.â
Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check.
A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas.
She came into the sheriffâs office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head.
A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wifeâs plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April.
The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount.
And the cameras keep falling.
We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.
Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.
Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.
For thousands of years humanity has selectively bred chickens to have larger breasts and to have to lay eggs constantly. We did it to get more meat and per chicken, but from the perspective of the domesticated chickens theyâre sorta living in a very specific fetish scenario
i am trying to make some pants. many people #online are losing their gourd over how easy this pattern is and i'm contrarianfully a little peeved about the assumption of serger ownership, 3/8th topstitching that fails to enclose 1/2" turned over raw edges, general expected minor failure cases of a pattern you buy on etsy
BUT i got it all cut out from leftovers without buying any new fabric so that's my win
Overall review: it makes sense this patternmaker has been operating on Etsy for 2.5 years, this seems like a 2.5 years of operation quality pattern to me. It's very cleanly presented and produces a end result that I'm jazzed about! But it also seems incurious about seam finishes/attention to detail, and I feel that beginner sewists attempting this pattern might not know what they're missing out on.
What I like
Easy breezy fit with no fit mods (except turning the cuffs up 1.5" vs 1") - big fan of gusset and knee dart
Mega comfortable fabric choices using stash only (undyed slightly stretchy twill from Fabrics R Us, Rifle Paper Co Camont - Poppy Fields - Natural Unbleached Canvas off someone on etsy I don't have customer loyalty to)
Pleasant embedded links to Youtube tutorial
Really big fan of the carabiner loop
Cute!!!
What I changed
Hopelessly reliant on crayola washable markers + gluesticks for holding turned-over edges in place. Also got into banging on bulky seams with a hammer. PRO TIP: use oxyclean to guarantee washable markers wash out.
Oh my god the pattern doesn't recommend a denim needle for the many layers of midweight fabric? Denim needle was a huge QOL improvement.
Did not buy topstictching thread. Used regular thread.
To squeeze this out of limited fabric: shortened knee patches ~1", cut pocket facings off grain, bound edge of weird back pocket with selvedge instead of cutting out this shape of piece
Also extended the trapezoid with floral fabric to create a hidden lining for the pocket that layers on top of it (another fabric-saving measure)
Added a patch pocket for my phone on front right, inspired by the Jones Trousers
Skipped hammer loop (despite using a hammer while making this pattern)
Flat felled inside leg seams, butt curve. The instructions simply say "finish" for all seams btw :(. The gusset to inside leg seam join proved impossible to flat fell so I just zigzagged it right to hell.
Added a baste together and try on step while installing gusset before all the flat felling
Bias bound outside leg seams, tacked flat at points along leg. Kind of a Hong Kong seam attempt.
Reinforced outside leg seams at very thick joining points... otherwise pressing open as recommended means you will see daylight through your pants
Used a shorter zipper (the actual length of the fly) (already on hand). This nerfed me on the mandatory-pull-zipper-head-out-of-the-way-so-your-machine-foot-fits step
Hand basted down the waistband before machine sewing. God I hate waistbands.
Made a wretched buttonhole with my zigzag stitch. Could be worse! It's holding the button!
What I would do next time
Check front and back pocket dimensions against each other before sewing to pants; mark with washable marker to ensure topstitching lines up
Trim pocket foldover so it's fully encased in topstitching (it's fraying now in an annoying way)
Extra line of topstitching to completely secure down pocket facing
Either use a longer zipper or a different fly construction method that allows better checking on functionality as I go. I am not jazzed about trimming down a metal zipper (pattern doesn't mention what tools to use for that!) so probably the latter
Shorten legs/add contrast cuffs
Maybe add little darts in the back
Try to figure out a way to do the waistband that I hate less. Sew inside seam first?
Fix weird little gapping at top of zipper/grade in at waist a little?
The knee panel is bait for quilters and I might fall for it
I also don't think this is gender neutral unless you grade the bejesus out of it, as the pattern assumes a 10" waist-hip difference.
Girl this is not a tip. This is just something you have to do for the pattern to work.
Tiger found caged in abandoned home gets second chance at wildlife sanctuary: âHe seems to be so happyâ
The estimated 350-pound tiger was transported to the facility, an affiliate of the Humane Society of the United States, on Wednesday afternoon, and is settling in well, Almrud said. There, he will have the chance to roam in enclosures of up to three acres.
Almrud, who estimates him to be about 2 years old, described the moment he first walked onto the grass at the sanctuary as remarkable.
âIt was just amazing to see him walk out on grass and to see him explore and have that freedom of movement,â she said. âIt was just such a reward and fulfilling to us.â
Now, he spends his days rolling around the grass in glee, Almrud said.
âHe comes right up to the fence every time a staff member is present,â she said. âHe seems very amenable to our presence.â
The tiger is eating well â a combination of chicken, humanely raised non-processed beef and whole prey complete with organs and bones. It appears that he was being fed chicken, which is what owners of exotic cats often feed them, but chicken alone does not provide the complete nutrition they need to thrive, Almrud said.
In addition, caregivers are tasked with keeping the tiger mentally stimulated by creating âpretend huntingâ games and rotating him through different areas so he has access to new smells and environments to explore.
âHe seems to happy and content,â Almrud said. âOur staff is just falling in love with him.â
here's two articles about how JK Rowling just posted on X an upskirt photo of Freda Wallace, a transgender woman, after deadnaming her and misgendering her repeatedly online.
The wealthy author escalated a social media spat that resulted in posting a photo from a 2023 event at the Institute of Economic Affairs in
Rowling posted the picture taken from below because the trans woman, she said, was "refusing to debate me."
So in summation; Rowling demanded access to a womanâs time and when she couldnât get it she retaliated by posting an upskirt image of her and called her fat, and some of her fans even went âI think I can see her genitalsâ.
She literally went âdebate me! Debate me!â Over and over like the grifter she is and when she couldnât get what she wanted and when ânoâ wasnât enough she resorted to retaliatory sex-pestery, posting an image of somebodyâs body with intention to shame and embarrass and spawn more waspish tittering from her internet followers.
Rowling is trash and this is disgraceful behavior, in case anyone has forgotten.
She had also claimed Freda "deserved" this sexual harassment because of what she was wearing... You know... The same excuse used over and over to try and justify rape.
No person (trans or otherwise) is obliged to debate anyone for any reason. When they refuse to do so you should take it as a 'no.'
One would THINK that a 'figurehead of women's rights' would understand that 'no means no'... But according to JKR it apparently mean 'sexually harass and verbally abuse them on twatter.'
If my mom sees a significant amount of blood she gets lightheaded, and has fainted on some occasions. Once it happened when we were kids, I wasn't there to witness it but I heard the story from my dad. Basically my brothers, around 7 or 8 at the time, were playing outside while my mom was making their lunch, and she accidentally cut her finger. It wasn't anything serious, but it drew a fair bit of blood and she passed out. My dad saw this and rushed over, but he didn't really know what to do so he just sort of started slapping her to wake her up (not recommended, but he had no idea and panicked)
At that exact moment my brothers both came in from playing, and all they saw was our mom unconscious on the floor and our dad slapping her. So, like, without even saying a word to each other they both just INSTANTLY start whaling on him, like, full blown attack mode to defend our mom. Which obviously didn't help the situation, but she did wake up and everything was fine.
Now our dad says that he's actually really glad they attacked him over what they thought was going on, because it means he raised good boys. And I still think that's true, they're very good boys.
itâs actually wild how terrified of the general public most usamericans are. like you donât realize it if youâre someone who mostly walks and takes transit and spends a lot of time in populous public spaces but then you talk to one of the thousands of people that seemingly never set foot in any public space besides a parking garage or a starbucks and you suddenly understand why itâs so easy for fascist rhetoric about the dangerous alien to take root. this countryâs median voter pretty much never interacts with strangers who arenât their coworkers or people they met on dating apps
saw a post on instagram that was literally someone citing statistics saying public transit is one of the safest travel options out there and the comments were literally just âummmmm op this is so ableist and misogynistic of you :) donât you know the average public transit user is a dangerous violent criminal who wants to set you on fire :)))â
it must be so terrifying and sad to go through life convinced if you set foot outside your car in public or interact with people outside your nuclear family youâll instantly be raped and robbed by the Evil Poors no wonder so many of these people are reactionary tar pits
Eternally relevant read is True Crime is Rotting Our Brains by Emma Berquist, a woman who actually experienced a (rare!) stranger-attack while just walking outside, and thinks that people who panic about this shit need to chill the fuck ouuuuuutt and also recognize how much they're using it to launder their bigotries
Edit: I've attempted to add this link at least three times and Tumblr is being stubborn, so let me try posting it on its own:
Even outside of the news and true crime, people who live in the "nice" parts of a city constantly talk like this. In part because of the news but it's also an idea passed down from suburban family to suburban family. To keep them scared of Black people and poor people.
Constantly people talk about my city like it's a crime infested drug haven (god I fucking wish drugs were as easy to find here as people make it out to be) especially the people who live in the richer areas. People are terrified of the downtown area and the public transit because of this. I'm constantly being warned about going downtown at night or going ANYWHERE in this place alone. And yet. Nothing! My house got broken into once as a kid. ONCE. but everyone's acting like if you turn down one alleyway your life or your possessions will be taken from you.
And this is how they all talked BEFORE the true crime boom. In Canada. True crime just infected an already festering wound.
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk
amandla
stormborns
baratheonpilled
2087
prguitarman
