"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

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Janaina Medeiros
Stranger Things
almost home

JVL
cherry valley forever
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

@theartofmadeline
Peter Solarz

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RMH
hello vonnie
Cosmic Funnies

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

shark vs the universe
DEAR READER

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Claire Keane
seen from United States
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seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia

seen from Russia

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seen from United States
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@timbru
Imitating generative AI videos
English added by me :)
So, I'm back on Facebook, for real.
I left because Meta proved really, really bad on every occasion. It's still really, really bad, but I accept I have to live with this evil in our live.
I'm back because I miss them guys, and there isn't still anything close to Facebook for bringing us back together.
Plus, fight the evil from inside.
I actually used and miss most of these.
AMZN jumps 6%+
Amazon.com, known for its predatory business practices and shittier buyer experience, announced financial results for Q3 2023:
revenue up 13% YoY to $143.1B,
net income up 244% to $9.9B,
operating income up 343% to $11.2B,
subscription revenue up 14% to $10.2B;
AMZN jumps 6%+
Such is life.
Source
Via Ars Technica
The enshittification of our world is run by people who read spreadsheets in bed and look at their smartphones to tell the weather instead of sticking their heads out of the window.
Erik Spiekermann - type designer, information designer https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7117593689652121601/
> If these names surprise you, they shouldn’t. Startup ecosystems outside the West have been churning out billion-dollar tech companies and radically innovative products for years. But their achievements are rarely celebrated or known here in the West. Today, not only are entrepreneurs in Buenos Aires, Lagos, and Jakarta building businesses that create huge economic opportunity and value, they’re also competing directly with Silicon Valley for users and growth in these markets. And they’re winning.
Erik Wernquist made his short film One Revolution Per Minute to explore his "fascination with artificial gravity in space". The film shows what it would be like to travel on a large, circular space station, 900 meters (0.56 miles) in diameter that rotates a 1 rpm. Even at that slow speed, which generates 0.5 g at the outermost shell, I was surprised to see how quickly the scenery (aka the Earth, Moon, etc.) was rotating and how disorienting it would be as a passenger.
Via Kottke.org
Import old Mac OS iPhoto library in modern macOS Photos
Our family photos were gathered in a Mac OS iPhoto library from around 2002, when iPhoto was launched. It was great for about 10 years, until the collection became too big to handle for the machine at the time. It had some 80GB of data with about 50 thousands photos and videos.
Things were getting slower and slower, so I started a new library and keept the old one separate, while it was still manageable. Ten years passed, so hardware, software and the cloud evolved. The previously “huge” iPhoto library is punny compared to me and my partner’s current ones, so time has come to import the old Mac OS iPhoto library in the modern macOS Photos.
Before you start, make sure you have backups of your current and old libraries!
It’s a straight easy thing. Simply use the File > Import feature in recent versions of Photos for macOS. If that works, great! Stop reading and go browse nostalgically your old photos.
But, you encounter some issues. Here are a few things I wished I knew and didn’t discover the hard way:
The Photos app will scan the old library and start listing the number of photos already imported vs ready to import. After a few seconds, the button “Import new photos” will become active! WAIT! Give it some more minutes, until you see the two numbers not longer increasing. I clicked the button without waiting and only part of the library was imported. Good thing I checked.
It’s possible, likely even, that Photos will complain that "The selected photo library must be repaired before it can be imported. Close Photos, then open that photo library in Finder to begin the repair process”. This appears to happen when there are files in old formats not recognized by Photos. For me, was some weird SonyEricsson videos made years before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye.
Open the old library in Photos. You do that by simply double clicking it. Or, you can hold the Alt key when opening Photos, to get to choose which library to use. While opening, Photos will do an “upgrade” of the library. Wait until it’s done, should be less than a minute.
Quit Photos, and reopen it while holding Alt. This time choose your regular, recent library.
Try again to use the File > Import feature in recent versions of Photos for macOS. If that works, great! Stop reading and go browse some old photos.
If you still get the dreaded message "The selected photo library must be repaired…”, well you actually need to repair it. See the simple instructions here.
Make sure you have enough free space on the drive where the library is. I tried a couple of times and it failed, until I moved it to another drive with plenty of room.
After the import, leave Photos open to scan all the new photos and identity the new (actually, old) faces. Then start playing with the People feature.
Everyone involved in my hiring process left the company before I started: is this a red flag?
How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth
It's a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.
The field of International Relations has studied the enemies of the Klept in detail: the Transnational Activist Network is a well-documented phenomenon. But far more poorly understood is the Transnational Uncivil Society Network, who will polish any turd of sufficient wealth to a high, professional gloss.
These TUSNs are the subject of a new, timely scholarly paper by Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw and Ricard Soares de Oliveira: "Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism," published in last month's European Journal of International Relations:
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5e5a3052-c693-4991-a7cc-bc2b47134467/download_file?file_format=application%2Fpdf&safe_filename=Cooley_et_al_2023_transnational_uncivil_society.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article
The authors document how a collection of institutions – some coercive, others organized around good works – allow kleptocrats to take power, keep power, and use power. This includes "wealth managers, company providers, accounting firms, and international bankers" who create the complex financial structures that obscure the klept's wealth. It also includes "second citizenship managers and lawyers" that facilitate the klept's transnational nature, both to provide access to un-looted, prosperous places to visit, and boltholes to escape to in the face of coup or reform. It includes the real-estate brokers and other asset facilitators, who turn whole precincts of the world's greatest cities into empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, while ensuring that footlose criminal elites always have a penthouse to perch in when they take a break from the desiccated husks they've drained dry back home.
#the aristocrats
Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision
Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision ‘This is a monumental decision,’ said a lawyer for the young plaintiffs. The ruling could influence how judges handle similar cases in other states. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/08/14/youths-win-montana-climate-trial/
Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it
My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation
Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.
That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:
https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10
Keep reading
DRM ON FUCKING BOOKS???
The publishing industry 100% loves DRM on books. Like the publishers themselves will often insist upon it because they think it stops piracy.
FUCK DRM!
Also, fantastic to hear Cory Doctorow’s got another book out! 😁
FYI, the Kickstarter includes your choice of audiobook, ebook, and/or hardcover copy of the new book!
You can buy DRM-free ebooks from ebooks.com. I don’t know anything about their ethics or how big a cut they take (feel free to milkshake duck them for me), but I have bought books from them just to avoid supporting Amazon and ebook DRM.
And audiobooks purchased through Libro.fm are also DRM free and a portion of the sale supports indie bookstores.
did you know before seeing this poll that New Zealand's actual name is Aotearoa?
yes! I knew this
no, I had no idea
(for clarification, aotearoa is the original māori name for new zealand and is used widely across the country. nz is also often referred to as "aotearoa new zealand" instead of one or the other!!!)
please reblog because I'm kiwi and I need this to get to people who don't follow me directly for less biased results!!!