“For example, if you’re trying to convince people to boycott a segregated store, your object is to convince them that boycotting the store will have a strategic effect, not that desegregation is morally important. For whatever reason, on a cognitive level human beings have a really hard time with this. Smucker cites an example of a Lefty roleplaying session where people were tasked with selling an action to people who agreed with them on principle but didn’t see the strategic merit of the action. Surprisingly, the sellers couldn’t make the conceptual switch to sell strategic merit: instead, they doubled down on THIS ISSUE IS IMPORTANT — even though it had been stressed to them that the people they were selling to bought into the importance of the issue. People react poorly to “this is important, so do WHATEVER I SAY”; they want to be convinced that what you’re proposing will work.”
“Bob Wing, a grassroots organizer, explains this nicely: “If winning feels impossible, then righteousness can seem like the next best thing.” But righteousness is not conducive to getting normies to join your team if your team cannot demonstrate ability to, at least sometimes, win. Nor does righteousness help you make real inroads with regular people.”
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.
Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.
You can get and use windows 11 without logging in with a microsoft account, as of five days ago. I am a local user on my computer. Don't ask me how to do it, because my computer repair guy did it when he reinstalled windows, but there are tutorials out there. Refuse to connect to internet until you're set up and can use the computer freely.
The key to writing good fanfiction is to harbor a deeply humiliating desire, and the trick there is that even pretty basic and societally-accepted desires like “being held” and “being wanted” CAN and WILL be humiliating if they’re intense enough. Become so estranged from human connection that the idea of someone playing with your hair fills you with yearning so deep you feel like you’re going to throw up and you will write some banger fanfiction. It might have some other consequences too but idrk about that.
neopronouns are all well and good but as long as we're adding words to the english language there's much cooler things we could add too. lets add inclusive and exclusive "we." a variant of "we" that distinguishes between "we (including listener)" and "we (including the speaker but not the listener)". other languages have this. Let's add the obviative case to our third-person pronouns so that we can distinguish between two people of the same gender - a him-[salient] and a him-[less salient]. this would make it much easier to write sex scenes where two people use the same pronouns. why aren't our proud pronoun warriors working on this
Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.
He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"
"What?"
He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"
"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."
Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.
Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.
This one is targeting posts with ao3 links, and it’s creating AI-generated comments to pose as someone whos read your fic and totally wants to draw something for it
I went to this blog, and their actual blog is empty but their likes are public, and they’re leaving near-identical comments at break-neck speeds on any other posts with ao3 links where
~2 minutes between each of the comments above, and an endless slew of them, all extremely ChatGPT-intoned.
If you see this or any other puppet account show up doing this, block and report.
Listen to the voices of the Great Migration with JSTOR Daily.
In the 1970s, Johnetta Brazzell and her colleagues recorded Black residents of Pontiac, Michigan, as they recalled the journeys that brought their families north. Their stories preserve memories of work, discrimination, community life, and the decisions that shaped a new home. Many of these interviews now live on JSTOR as audio recordings with transcripts, allowing listeners to hear the pauses and emotion that written history can miss. They have been shared by Oakland University.
Explore an oral history archive built from the memories of everyday people.
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
I scheduled this in 2025 to give you all a week to make Moon Day Monday preparations! I think I will order a little rocket cake or bake some moon phase cookies!
ok thank god there's so many fucking videos showing you how to do a ladder stitch like it's some kind of magic trick but here's the actual use case for it: closing a seam you can't reach the inside of. in all other cases, if you're fixing a ripped seam on pants, or on a tshirt, the ladder stitch is a messy, glorified running stitch.
