Suddenly struck with a need to explain to you how boat pronouns work (I work in the marine industry).
When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".
When the boat is still being built, your say "it".
When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".
When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".
When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.
If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").
If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")
If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").
If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.
If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.
I hope this has cleared things up so that you may not be in danger of misgendering floating objects.
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
One of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for
a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept âcookiesâ, subscribe to a newsletter, install the websiteâs mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldnât give two shits about.
These are bad everywhere, but they are especially terrible in the UK and EU, where websites practice a form of malicious compliance to the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. Under the GDPR, websites are required to secure your affirmative consent to process your data. The obvious way that websites should respond to this is by not collecting your data unless there's a damned good reason for it, but the actual response is to repeatedly shove cookie-consent dialogs in your face before letting you use the site.
These are absolutely unnecessary. Your browser can be configured to transmit a "global privacy control signal" by default that tells websites you don't consent to be spied on while you look at their pages:
But many websites punish you by throwing up a "Global Privacy Control detected" dickover that forces you to click through to affirm their confirmation of your confirmation that you don't want to be spied on.
If you don't have the GPC set, websites will demand that you tell them whether you want to be spied on â and they'll do it again, every time you visit them. The website operators falsely claim that they have to do this under the terms of the GDPR (or other laws, like California's CCPA). This is a lie. Every privacy law contains an exception that allows websites to store data about you for a "legitimate interest," and that obviously includes setting a cookie that says, "don't ever spy on this user."
What's a legit interest? Well, I can tell you what it isn't. Facebook claimed that they had to spy on you, even if you opted out by laboriously clicking through one of their dickovers or by transmitting a GPC signal to their servers, because you had also clicked through their terms of service, which say, "Facebook is going to spy on you with every hour that god sends, from asshole to appetite, abandon hope all ye who enter here" (a direct quote). Facebook claims that this is a contract with you, whereby the company has promised to spy on you, and if they stop, they would be violating the contract, which might make you mad, so they are legally required to eavesdrop on every conversation you have and follow you everywhere you go:
This is bullshit, and the European Court of Justice affirmed it. But despite the fact that surveillance advertising companies are happy to stretch the definition of "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our ToS say we will," these same companies insist that "legitimate purpose" can't possibly include "remembering the fact that you told us not to spy on you the last time you were here," and so every time you click through to one of many popular websites, you get a dickover, and the only way to make it stop is to "consent" to being spied upon.
But it doesn't have to be this way. While the right answer to this kind of rampant lawlessness is stonking fines and even the corporate death penalty for repeat offenders, internet users have a myriad of options available to them for banishing dickovers to the scrapheap of history. These measures aren't difficult to avail yourself of, and using them will make your life infinitely better, so I'm going to tell you about some of them.
Before I start, one note: these measures only work on browsers, not apps. An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites:
What's more, these measures really only work on desktop browsers, because mobile browsers are apps, and are severely limited by law and mobile operating systems, making it hard-to-impossible to customize them so that they'll respect your rights. This is true of all mobile browsers, but it goes triple for iOS (iPhones and iPads):
Finally, this mostly only works on Firefox, and it works worst on Chrome, Google's monopolistic browser. When it comes to customizing your browsing experience to get rid of annoyances like dickovers and ads, Chrome is hands-down the worst choice, and Google is about to make it much, much worse, forcing a change that will kill the most popular blockers. Stop using Chrome, switch to Firefox:
So, once you're on your actual computer, using Firefox, how can you disenshittify your internet experience? The first thing to familiarize yourself with is Reader Mode, a built-in Firefox feature that switches any webpage to a black type/white background column of text. Just click the little "page view" icon next to the Firefox location bar or use the key combo "ctrl-alt-r."
Some power tips for Reader Mode: Firefox tries to guess whether a given page should have a Reader Mode option based on its layout. This sometimes blocks Reader Mode on pages that badly need it. You can force Firefox to always allow you to try Reader Mode by going to "about:config" in your location bar, then searching for "reader.parse-on-load.force-enabled" and toggling it to "true". If you switch to Reader Mode and the page breaks, you can switch back by hitting ctrl-alt-r again.
Many websites' "soft paywalls" (which allow you to read an article or two before getting a demand to register and/or pay) can be defeated with Reader Mode. Just hit ctrl-alt-r and see if the whole article appears. If it doesn't, try one or both of: a) reloading the page while still in Reader Mode, and/or; b) Clearing cookies for the page (click the shield next to the site's URL in Firefox's location bar, then click "Clear cookies and site data"), and then reload.
That's Reader Mode, and it comes built into Firefox, and can be installed via various extensions on other browsers. Now let's move on to more advanced techniques, starting with "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that deletes any "static" elements in a web-page you've loaded (broadly, this is anything that won't change position when you scroll your browser).
Just click the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet and all the static elements in the current tab go away. This includes things like navigation bars, which are often (but not always) useless annoyances. The original Kill Sticky, created by Alisdair McDiarmid, is 13 years old, and it still works great, but eight years ago, gala8y created a new version that caught some outliers that the original Kill Sticky missed. I've been running gala8y's version for a year now with no problems, and I recommend it as your second line of dickover defense (after Reader Mode):
https://github.com/gala8y/kill-stickyâforked
Kill Sticky is great for getting rid of the dickovers on a website you're not planning to visit more than once. But if you visit a dickover website regularly, you can permanently block its dickovers by using the Adblock Plus (ABP) browser extension:
https://adblockplus.org/
Once you have Adblock Plus installed, you can instruct your browser never to render a given website's dickover. Just load the website, hover your pointer over the dickover, and click your right mouse-button (Mac users need to ctrl-click). This will pop up a Firefox context menu, and at the bottom of that menu is "Block ElementâŠ".
Select "Block Element," then move your mouse around the screen. Different regions of the screen will glow pink, showing you which element (part of the page) ABP can access there. Once you've highlighted the dickover, click the "Preview" button on the ABP dialog in the bottom right corner. This will show you how the page looks after you've banished that element.
If it's an element you want to delete forever, click "Create" and ABP will create a new rule for that page that blocks that element. Note that many dickovers consist of several elements, each atop the other, and after you block one element, you might have to repeat the process to delete the element "behind" it, digging your way down to the actual webpage. Each element you block is listed in the top pane of the ABP dialog box. For example, here's Wired.com's UK dickover:
If you block an element by accident and want to restore it, just delete its corresponding line in the Block Element dialog. When websites change their layouts and their dickovers come back, just add the new one to the Block Element for that page. No need to delete the old entries.
Finally, if all else fails, there's Remove Paywall, a website that tries several different ways to load a page without its interrupters, nag screens, regwalls and paywalls:
https://www.removepaywall.com/
It's also available as a browser plugin, so you can just right-click on any page and select "Remove Paywall" from the pop-up menu. Remove Paywall often loads a page with all of its dickovers, and you can use all the techniques enumerated above â Reader Mode, Kill Sticky and Block Element â with Remove Paywall versions of pages.
Back in 2024, Ed Zitron tried an experiment: he bought Amazon's bestselling laptop and tried to use it, discovering it to be a horror-show of shovelware, including processor-devouring preinstalled spyware that rendered it all but unusable:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
Zitron's (excellent) point is that technically proficient people have better computers than most users, and these computers are configured in better ways, and as a result, we participate in a fundamentally different internet to the one that normies are forced to use.
It's an excellent observation, and Zitron's point â that these laptops were actively enshittified by hardware makers and OS vendors â is an important one (the essay is called "Never Forgive Them").
But to this point, I would like to add another: we have a duty and obligation to the people we love to show them how to seize the means of computation. The normies in your life need the tips and tricks I lay out in this article more than anyone. Sure, it takes some doing to install Firefox, Kill Sticky, Adblock Plus and Bypass Paywalls; it takes a minute to figure out Reader Mode.
But if you install these tools for the people you love and show them how to use them (or just reconfigure the sites they visit most frequently to block dickovers and other annoyances), you will permanently improve their internet experience, clawing back hours of annoyances every week, while also protecting their privacy.
Anyone who is confused by switching to Firefox is also going to be confused by the deceptive language and practices that go along with dickovers. By leaving your unsophisticated loved ones exposed to dickovers, you're not decreasing the amount of technological confusion they're likely to experience in a day â you're vastly increasing the amount of danger they face as a result of that confusion.
There's never been a better time to disenshittify your cherished normies' computers. The AI companies' illegal monopolization of the memory market has sent the price of new computers, RAM and storage skyrocketing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BORRBce5TGw
All of us â but especially normies â are having to do more with less. The best way to squeeze extra performance out of any computer (but especially an aged and underpowered computer) is by switching to a free/open operating system like GNU/Linux and replacing your proprietary, resource-gobbling apps with free/open alternatives:
Seizing the means of computation isn't theft, it's bargaining. Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it's a "market" where as soon as you stop to browse someone's wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In "markets," prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally and extracted from anyone unwise enough to cross the threshold.
Adblocking, dickover blocking and other customizations are a way for you to bargain back, to answer the opening bid of "How about you give me all of your data forever and let me do anything I want with it?" with "How about 'nah?'"
Dickovers are companies' illegal response to privacy laws. Privacy laws are the public response to companies' out-of-control data theft and weaponization. They call us thieves, but they're the ones who embarked upon a generation-long campaign of unrestricted data plunder. What they call "theft" is just self-defense.
A generation ago, publishers and advertisers fell in love with pop-up ads. Early pop-ups were virulent in ways that are hardly imaginable today: visiting a website summoned dozens of pop-ups, some of them employing dirty tricks like spawning as an invisible 1Ă1 pixel, or running away from your cursor when you tried to close them. They auto-played sound and music. They were Satanic.
We got rid of pop-ups by installing pop-up blockers. Browser vendors (starting with Opera, then Mozilla) blocked pop-ups by default. Soon, pop-ups simply ceased to exist for the majority of internet users, and at that point, the same companies who'd insisted that they would go out of business unless they could fill your screen with pop-ups quietly gave up on them and found another way to advertise.
No one should ever have to look at another dickover. If dickovers become invisible for everyone on the web, there won't be any dickovers. Companies claim they need dickovers to survive. It's bullshit. They want dickovers, but if dickovers cease to be rendered on their target audience's screens, they'll switch to less invasive tactics, just like they've always done.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Sorry I've been offline for a few days! Last week was the Ann Arbor Art Fair, and I was out on the street drawing alongside the most imaginative sidewalk chalk artists of southeast Michigan!
I'm hoping to have a similar turnout at the Berkley Street Fest this Saturday, July 25 in Berkley, Michigan! I'll be doing a demo 1:00-2:30 pm and selling/signing my books, prints, postcards, totes, and my brand new 2027 Street Art Calendar all day! Come say hi and maybe help make the world more colorful!
"Please meet Midori No Daichi. An original character of mine, shelled using sculpts by Ball Jointed Doll companies Volks and Fairyland. Midori would be the catalyst for my writing during a time of great strife. I purchased this Volks School A Sweet Dreams head (released 2007) back in 2020 during our global pandemic. She would later be put onto a Fairyland Feeple65 Body to truly flesh out who this character of mine might be. Being a medical professional I found the overwhelming nature of this world event to be unsurprisingly terrifying, difficult, and draining. Purchasing the doll that would eventually become my Midori was just a way for me to find joy. Buying dolls is what a life long doll collector does after all. Just a doll purchase. But she would be anything but just another purchase.
After painting, sewing, and wig making I found myself a muse. She would inspire a great deal of writing. A skill I love but hadnât ever expected to connect to my doll collecting practices. So please enjoy this entry as my earnest gift to the world."
-Joshua Crawford, Somerset
.joshybearhuggies on Instagram
To contribute your own story visit The Museum at FIT website!
I had another client today get confused and upset at how I labeled their final file.
(If you don't know already, I'm a graphic designer)
The filename was something like "ProjectnameFNL-BLEED-DIE.pdf"
I also named the email "Projectname Final File - Bleed & Die"
Now, for the non-designers out there, a bleed is how you get the picture to the edge of the page in a document. You can't just print an 8.5x11 page in that situation, you have to print a larger page, and trim it to 8.5x11, and that overprint that you cut down is called the "bleed".
Die is short for dieline. If you are printing something in a different shape than a cutter can make (basically anything without straight lines) then you need a die. A die also helps trim things a lot faster, some can do a hundred sheets at a time, as opposed to manually doing it (which I'm not even sure how you'd even do that)
In this situation, I was making a box. They are notoriously tricky, but I've done a bunch before. And the person I was dealing with was new, and she had to send along the final approval to her boss.
She wasn't rude, but was clearly uncomfortable in our meeting today. I really had to explain it to her, and said that these were industry standard things and her printer needs this info. I also have worked with her boss before and absolutely knew that they'd understand the terms.
This is a kind of sample of what I mean. The dieline is the pink line. It is where things will be cut. You can see that it is a special shape that can't just be cut out regularly.
Everything blue outside the pink line is the bleed. you won't see any of that in the final folded box.
And the white lines you see are just the fold lines. They are usually part of the die line, but have a different process to use them.
So yes. I had a client today assume I was telling her to bleed and die, and I had to explain that it was just print terminology and I'm not a psychopath.
Ben Seleb, then at the Georgia Institute of Technology, had seen clusters of these steps on a trip through the Swiss countryside.
Now a postdoctoral engineer at Rockefeller University in New York, he suspected the humble cow deserved more credit.
âThere has been increasing research in animals creating neat patterns in nature, from honeycombs to spider webs. It makes sense to me that cows can do it too,â Seleb said.
âSo I took it upon myself to defend the cowsâ agency.â
Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.
I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.
Non Ăš la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe perĂČ giĂ impegnata a bonificare i
Nolan's The Odyssey between "junk skeletons" and wrecks: Arpa [translator's note: Regional Environmental Protection Agency] is working in Sicily. What's happening?
It's not the first time that this production stirs up a hornet's nest in Sicily. In Lipari, divers are reportedly already working on cleaning the sea. Here is what we know.
[Translation of the article below the cut]
In recent weeks, some macabre discoveries made in the waters off Linosa, near the village of Pietra del Bagno, have caused quite a stir.
A number of fake skeletons and various props have been found on the seabed around the island. These are from the production of the film The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan, the Oscar-winning director of Oppenheimer, a film dedicated to the tragic figure of the man in charge of the Manhattan Project.
The skeletons, in particular, have caused worry among divers and swimmers who didn't know that some of the scenes of the movie had been shot on the island.
It's not the first time that the production of this movie stirs up a hornet's nest in Sicily. This past spring, some environmentalists accused the Wildside production of ruining some parts of Egadi, the other Sicilian archipelago in which some of the scenes are set. To ascertain whether any damage has occurred and, if so, the extent of it in these archipelagos, Giusi Savarino, the Councillor for Land and the Environment, decided a few days ago to carry out further inspections, in collaboration with ARPA Sicilia and on the basis of reports already submitted by the Port Capitancy, which had previously highlighted the failure to remove certain props from the seabed around these islands.
To make it worse, Egadi and Aeolian Islands are part of some of the countryâs most important marine protected areas and are amongst the archipelagos with the greatest tourist appeal in our country. âAlong with the authorisation to shoot the film in our region,â explained Councillor Savarino in a statement, âwe had also provided precise rules and guidelines to protect the environment of the areas involved in the filming. The discoveries of the last few days are a cause for serious concern and, for this reason, together with ARPA, we will take action to assess the potential impact of these materials on the habitat and marine species in this area of significant natural value.â
We are delighted to host international film projects and are always willing to support these productions, but no one should think they can take advantage of our generosity by showing a lack of respect for the beauty of our environment."
There has been no response yet from Christopher Nolan, but it is a known fact that the director's intention was to film in Sicily to make his âOdysseyâ as faithful as possible to the literary work.
Nolan had been planning to shoot this film in the Mediterranean for years and waited until he had obtained all the necessary permits to film at the various locations, which â in addition to Sicily â included Tunisia and some mountainous regions of Greece.
Furthermore, it is not the director himself who is under fire, but once again the film production company Wildside, which collaborated with him during shooting in the Aeolian Islands in May.
In Lipari, however, a team of divers is reportedly already working to clean up the seabed, precisely to defuse the controversy.
Sorry for the poor quality of the translation, I couldn't be bothered to polish it, hopefully it's understandable, but if it isn't please feel free to reach out and I'll clear up any doubts. If you want any more information about it I can try to find more articles in Italian and translate them for you. So far I haven't found any in English, only one in Dutch and a few in Italian but even in Italian news there isn't much, they aren't mentioning it on tv or anything (and I don't expect them to mention it when they are going to promote the movie on the national news). It's mostly on some local newspapers.
Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.
I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.
Non Ăš la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe perĂČ giĂ impegnata a bonificare i
They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government
Philip Prospero, Prince of Asturias, 1659 (aged 2) by Diego Velazquez
This is an example of boy dressed in gowns in the first few years of his life. The more formal of the gowns that children of both sexes wore were based on the fashionable gowns that grown women of the period wore. It can be tricky to tell the difference between girls and boys in portraits, but boys' gowns were often plainer and less decorated, and they might be shown with accessories, toys, or pets meant to declare their gender.
Wikipedia says, "the painting directly admits the little boy's precarious health: from strings criss-crossing his chest and waist hang metal bells and at least two protective lucky amulets, a cornicello, and on the string across his left shoulder hangs a black object, likely a fig-hand carved of jet. By contrast, nearly thirty years earlier, Velazquez painted a robust Balthasar Charles at age two or three with a staff, sword, exuberant sash and plumed hat." You can see Balthasar Charles's portrait here, and I would note that it also includes a gorget, a piece of armor that goes around the throat. Very masculine!
Here is another portrait of Philip Prosper after he was "breeched", or transitioned from skirts to breaches.
Hello, I work for a large moderately evil corporation and for at least five years now I have to sign a yearly thing to say I will never ever have one of these devices in the same room as me while I work.
My large moderately evil employer takes it for granted that these things are spying on me at all times, and you should too.
Les Modes parisiennes, no. 281, 16 juillet 1848, Paris. Robe de chambre et lingeries de Mme Colas, rue Vivienne, 47. Toilettes fournies par la Maison de Commission rue Louis le Grand No. 9. BibliothĂšque nationale de France
Dressing gown in jaconet with a Persian pattern; petticoat trimmed with two rufflesâeach topped by a smaller, piped ruffleâand a front panel trimmed with a ruffle that tapers in height along the sides.
Little girl's outfit: dress with eyelet embroidery, fichu tied at the back, and trousers edged with eyelet embroidery.
Little boy's outfit (aged three to four): nankeen coat embroidered on the front with white chain-stitch; white trousers with eyelet embroidery at the hem; plaid stockings; English-style shoes.
ok, SOMEONE might correct me on this fact (plz feel free to!) but I've always heard that in cases like the MilĂ and the BatllĂł families, who commissioned GaudĂ for their fanciful domiciles in the new fashionable avenue of Barcelona, some of the members of that upper class might resent a little living in a building that was a bit of a laughing stock.
Look for example, what the satirical magazine l'Esquella de la Torratxa made to mock the bizarre design of MilĂ 's house!
Like many architects of the time, GaudĂ designed everything that was supposed to be in the house. Outside, inside, furniture.
but perhaps tired of the curves of art nouveau (and of people whispering behind their back that their buildings looked like something a pastry chef could create), as soon as the fashion sensibilities changed and Art Nouveu was no longer in fashion, they renovated with great ardour and absolute indifference towards the works of art so unique and suitable for THEIR houses.
Just look at what they did to Casa BatllĂł... GaudĂ would be spinning so hard in his grave if he saw, he would screw right through his crypt of Sagrada Familia and straight into the metro.
So... lots of ladies had killer vanity tables like that one.
And sadly, LOTS of them threw them away like worthless trash when they were not considered fashionable any longer...
context for this: he didn't actually walk away, he broke his leg in four places and got knocked out, but his first question when he woke up was âis my grandson okay?â, because before the bison charged (some teenagers had been provoking it earlier), he and his grandson were taking videos and photos of it from a fair distance, they did not engage with the bison inappropriately, < prev tags are important!!, also saw someone elseâs reblog mention that he did get the bisons attention as it was charging at them so it wouldnât go for his grandson, mans actually a hero for that Iâm glad he survived with minimal harm for the hit he took, also they were hundreds of feet away taking pictures so they were being respectful of the animals, fuck the people who antagonized it and put him and his grandkid in danger like that
further context: there is no indication that anyone at all was antagonizing the bison; the teenage boys mentioned just "scattered when the bison charged." in fact the photographer "said every visitor he observed in the park Friday, including McDaniel and his grandson, were keeping a ârespectful distanceâ from the animal, and had done nothing to provoke it to charge." bison was probably agitated because of mating season. there is also no indication that the grandfather was playing hero - "The grandson was able to escape using some fancy footwork, but McDaniel was a sitting duck as the bison charged at him, hooking him with his left horn near his hip before flipping him some eight feet into the air."
source: the article linked in the original tweet (as of july 15, 2026 7:47pm utc-4)
