This Witch Won't Burn

Grey witch with a nerdy streak. ADHD. Plural. He/She/They. Child of Aset. Do not talk to me about Christianity or karma ever, kthx 

[bludragongal]

you kids have fun

[bludragongal]

gentle reminder to everyone getting irrationally mad at me about this that i work for disney

[bludragongal]

PLEASE STOP YELLING AT ME

[parrishsrubberplant]

The last three digits of your current follower count is the Dewey Decimal Classification subject on which you must immediately give a 15-minute presentation.

How would you do?

[spellboundwitchcraft]

help, I’m wheezing, oh my god

I would fail so badly

[shirakum-owo-boro]

273 Doctrinal controversies and heresies in general church history

hoooboy 

[moved-to-midnightshade-deactiva]

I think I would actually enjoy that. I don’t know if it would be a very structured presentation, but I know a fair bit about demons

[hinduism101]

Can white Hindus wear saris?

Yes.

[zindabad]

no

[hinduism101]

YES. For the love of Jesus stop white knighting. 

From a historical website about the history of Saris, from a person WHO MAKES THEM FOR A LIVING 

“Visitors seduced by the vibrancy and mythology of saris can shop for one to take home. Unlike other traditional garments in some cultures, the sari isn’t reserved for people of one nationality or set of beliefs. “I don’t think it’s disrespectful for Westerners to wear a sari,” says Chishti. “It’s more of an honor.” There is nothing wrong with sewing a dazzling one into a skirt or displaying it like art on a wall, says Sethi.“

Website 2 - a website dedicated to asking “is wearing them disrepectful?”

Is it disrespectful to wear a sari? No, not at all. Based on any occasion, as a daily wear, when you are not Indian and irrespective of religion, it is never disrespectful to wear a sari. In fact, it enhances the situation particularly if you are attending an Indian wedding. In cases where a theme is already set and hosts do expect certain culture, check with hosts before wearing.

Website 3 - Google’s Arts and Culture website, dedicate to educating people about different things around the globe concerning art and culture

5. The sari is easy to wear – and can be worn by anyone Wearing a sari is more akin to making a sandwich or sending an email than making a soufflé or launching a rocket. It has the appearance and reputation of being difficult to wear, but ask any one of the millions of women who wear one every day – it’s not. The sari transcends socio-economic divisions and is seen as an egalitarian garment...It can’t speak on behalf of all India but 95% of our survey suggested that {people from India} are open to anyone wearing saris. 

(sari vs saree for reference sake is just a matter of preference for spelling).

Literally the only people fake outraged by this (I call it fake outrage because people only get “mad” about it when they see people online but totally forget aobut it in everyday life otherwise) are white girls on twitter, tumblr, and other social medias believing they are “coming in and saving the day on behalf of people from India”. STOP THE WHITE KNIGHTING.

For starters, Saris have over 100 different ways to wear them. To buy them traditionally tends to be very rare and expensive because of how hard it is to make these garments. Second, they’re becoming more common in areas close to India, like Sri Lanka. 

Also, also, according to Hinduism reincarnation beliefs, we have the ability to reincarnate into any person on this Earth, so any skin color. Some people wear them to show their pride in Hinduism. Some wear it to honor India ancestors. Some wear it just because it is a beautiful piece of fabric. 

Like anything, wear it with respect. Wear it with pride. 

[kyidyl]

Reminding people again that you cannot steal what is freely given. It's not appropriation if someone within the culture is like "here ya go, try this!". I get that wearing stuff like a sari feels like you're an impostor but the way to deal with that is to just do the thing that makes you uncomfortable.

[ankoku-jin]

I used to live in a city with a large Desi population, and loved going into the local shops to see the gorgeous clothing (and to buy silk fabric and ready-made trim!). I showed interest in a lehenga choli set and the ladies working there were. Thrilled. I ended up spending well over an hour trying on different ones because they were just bringing them over one after another, narrowing down the style and colors that would be flattering on me, showing me how to wear it properly.

I wore the one I chose to a convention, and encountered an Indian woman running a henna booth and selling some jewelry. At first I felt kind of embarrassed, like an imposter. (Should I (Latinx) be wearing this?) But she was also thrilled to see someone wearing clothing from her culture, and just... gave me a maang tikka, because it went so well with the outfit. (I ended up purchasing the necklace that went with it, so maybe it was a shrewd business move, ahaha)

It’s the same with kimono, people from Japan are so excited to see an American properly wearing one, even ‘just’ a yukata.

Appropriation is stealing cultural designs and motifs for your mass-produced fast fashion, taking money away from their artisans and devaluing their product. Appropriation is trying to divorce clothing from its cultural roots.

So long as it is common clothing (not sacred or having a special meaning), and as long as it is worn with respect (preferably sourced directly from the culture it comes from), we should be enjoying the beauty of other cultures by wearing it on our bodies. Sharing is not appropriation!

[saintemiliosandoz]

y’all really recommend books like: title, there are gay characters, enemies to lovers, young adult, written by poc

not once do i ever see a summary

[mycoolstoryworld]

What more info do you need?

[fakewant]

A SUMMARY

[starshine-honey-deactivated2023]

WHAT DO U MENA SUMMARY WHAT ELSE MATTERS ITS GAY POC AND ENEMIES TO LOVERS HOW OFTEN DO U CONE ACROSS THAT

[pollackpatrol]

i want to know what its about mainly. is it a romance? is there plot besides the romance? is it realistic fiction? sci fi? fantasy? historical? future? alternate history? whats the tone? what are the themes? what are the main characters’ NAMES?

[starshine-honey-deactivated2023]

I- it’s gay the gay

[pollackpatrol]

i value queer characters too. but i also want to know WHAT THE BOOK I’M READING IS ABOUT.

[leadrains]

actually im not leaving this in the tags

[ID: tags reading #i hate this website so much #some of yall are so devoted to fetishizing gay people that yall will completely disregard every other aspect of a work #to focus on the mere presence of homosexuality #it's degrading and insulting to the author and other queer people #and to the characters even though theyre fictional #to disregard every aspect of a work except for the presence of queer people is disgusting and fetishizing no matter what your identity is /End ID]

[moved-to-midnightshade-deactiva]

This, omg. I just want a summary, please. Like, yeah, cool, representation and stuff, but I'm not gonna read a book just for queer or PoC characters. It needs to actually be a good book first. If it sucks or I don't like the premise, I'm not really gonna care how good the representation is. The story and characters matter first and foremost.

[witchyrobot]

Hexes For Karens When You Can’t Talk Back

Inspired by the Karen who called me a Karen for politely doing my job. I hope you like these ideas!

May you...

...stub your pinky toe on the pointiest furniture corner in your house.

...you hit every red light on your way home.

...that single questionable post you share on social media be seen by your employer.

...your groceries fall straight through your bags as you struggle to carry them inside.

...you step on your child’s sharpest toy while they are away at school.

...get kicked out of your favourite store for mouthing off at an overworked, underpaid employee.

...encounter the same type of rude customer at your own work, and realize how you treat others in the same way.

Feel free to add your own!

Quick note, do not interact with this post talking about the ethics of using curses or hexes. I don’t care and neither does anyone sharing this post.

[anem0nesiac-deactivated20231104]

remembering what i was like in the past

[afronick-deactivated20180412]

using those memories to shape yourself into a better person

[anem0nesiac-deactivated20231104]

[hellsite-yano]

Good and relatable content

[brunhiddensmusings]

remember- if you are embarrassed about your past its because you are growing as a person and are now a better you. assholes dont introspect on how they used to be worse so youve already surpassed them

[queencatradora]

i went to the dentist today and my dentist honest to god said “can i ask you a question…….what the hell is in your mouth”

[queencatradora]

it was in awe lmao

then the hygienist and assistant all came over to look too and they were like “wooooow” and my ass was sitting there like

[queencatradora]

oh my god i posted this and then went to work, and

story time

okay so to preface this, my hometown where i’m originally from is a really fucking weird place. like from the outside it seems like a normal suburban town, but once you’re there for awhile you get the feeling that’s something’s not…quite all together. a lot of people are really fucking weird there — so much so that that was a running joke in school growing up, that people in the town were just like that. everyone knew not to go out to the farm lands surrounding the town especially at night, we called it “the cuts” and people used to disappear out there all the time or get shot at by the especially weird people that would live out there. the news was and still is truly a thing of horror. every time i come back i’m regaled with even more stories of crazy shit that has happened there.

to put it in perspective we generally never had “normal crime” like robbery or anything like that when i lived there, though that did happen sometimes. the news stories were always like, “a kid was kidnapped by local residents and tortured in a house around the corner,” “a random person was chased down and shot for sport in a really nice neighborhood,” “someone was gored to death by a bull while out car shopping,” etc. (these are all real, btw). everyone does drugs and the whole town is located really close to a government site where they test nuclear weapons and chemicals and shit. this is how i grew up, in this bizarre environment.

i need to preface it this way so that you get that it’s weird. it’s a fucking weird place. i used to listen to the welcome to night vale podcast and make comparisons from it to my hometown, that’s how weird it is.

i only say this so you know that this town is where i got my orthodontics from.

all the kids in my town went to this one particular orthodontist. i also used to go to a dentist in town that a lot of people went to as well. i had a permanent retainer put on my bottom teeth after braces and no one had ever said anything to me about the model of retainer itself or it being weird type of retainer at all. i saw a ton of other people (mostly other kids that were my age at the time) that had the same type of retainer as me too so i never thought about it.

so i kept my retainer in — it’s never caused me problems and it keeps my teeth straight, why not?

however i went to a dentist for the first time in a metropolitan area now, and when he saw it in my mouth his literal first reaction was to say “uh can i ask you a question….what the hell is that”

LITERALLY the words that he said

which in hindsight makes almost too much sense. of course my town of all towns would put these weird unnecessary contraptions in kids’ mouths, and of course it happened so much that everyone just thought it was normal. that sounds exactly, to a T, like my hometown.

my permanent bottom retainer is apparently this prototype that is so rare that he’s literally never seen it before in his life, not in dental school, nowhere. it’s not that it’s an outdated type, it’s just rare as fuck. they were still staring at pictures of it on my chart in wonder when i left the office.

so just know somewhere out there, in a weird ass suburban town where they test nuclear weapons and a good portion of the residents go fucking nuts, there’s probably hundreds of people still walking around with this same contraption in their mouth that exists nowhere else in the world thinking, “yeah, that’s cool. that makes sense. let me go drink the definitely not-contaminated water now and never move away from here.”

[bleachtrippin]

This sounds like an X-files episode

[ssunsh1nee]

Okay, so I looked into it and I think that the town is Tracy, California.

I looked up the bull-murder thing OP mentioned and Tracy seemed to be only town that came up with a matching case. Though the man didn’t actually die from his injuries everything else matches up one for one. So just to make sure that it was the right town I looked to see if there was any murder-torture of young people in Tracy, and unfortunately there was. It was a 17 year old boy who escaped and survived the torture. And just to solidify that it was in fact Tracy I looked up shootings in residential areas and there was one of a 20 year old man who was shot and killed in a nice neighborhood.

Okay, but I decided to look into Tracy more to find out more information about it and the town is super suspicious. There’s been a lot of murders and shooting in the town. Back in 2009 an 8 year old girl, Sandra Cantu, was kidnapped and murdered by a Sunday school teacher who said she had no idea why she killed Sandra. Another case happened in 2018 when four underage boys were shot and one was killed by four teenage boys. There’s a lot of news stories on shootings, homicides, and drug busts in that town. It’s a really cute town from the outside, if you just look up Tracy, California there’s a lot of really cute businesses and nice articles on sweet things that happen in the town, but if you actually look into it the town is really sketchy.

So yeah, this sketchy town with a military base, multiple homicides and shootings is maybe Tracy, California.

[queencatradora]

………………..yeah, you guys caught me

i grew up in tracy

also i have to add another person’s tags to this since it’s honesty hour because they’re hilarious and true

[what-even-is-thiss]

Honestly I wasn’t even surprised when I found out it was in California. Even less surprised when googled it and found out it was near the Bay Area. That sounds about right.

[lincoln--22]

Apparently the motto is “Think Inside the Triangle” and I’m not sure how to feel about that.

[sepulchritude]

I love seeing people’s picrew art styles because you can just look at them and be like

“You read homestuck and it was a big part of your life for a few years, you’re not into steven universe but you did watch it, and you had an intense black butler phase in middle school and doodled their eyes over and over again in your spiral notebooks”

[sepulchritude]

Art is the biggest snitch ever man like have you ever read a fanfic and been like “Oh the author is working through some trauma here”

Or when people rec songs/shows/fics and you suddenly know everything you need to know about who they are as a person?

Like I know art is inherently an attempt to make others understand what is going on inside our lonely little heads but sometimes the mortifying ordeal of being known just slips in there while you’re not looking

[bbluejoseph]

new ask game: tell me what u think u know about me based on my fics/art/etc

[witchyrobot]

I showed my art to one of my classmates in Tae Kwon Do a few years ago. He said “Your art style is very geometric, kinda reminds me of Yu-Gi-Oh!”

Not only is YGO the most influential piece of media in my life, but I also draw a lot of robots because the second most influential force in my life is Transformers.

[prguitarman]

I’m 35 now. Also here’s the original doodle

[i-wanna-be-cute]

i feel like i just walked past jesus in a hot topic

[greengay]

spiraling bc the world seems bad....here are some uplifting headlines

[plantyhamchuk]

Mr. Trash Wheel is gobbling up millions of pounds of trash

Trash interceptors are becoming more common in large cities, helping to stop garbage as it floats down waterways. Mr. Trash Wheel is the pride of Baltimore, helping to make a cleaner, more beautiful city waterfront.

“ Since its installation Mr. Trash Wheel has intercepted over 3 million pounds of trash, making the harbor not only cleaner and more beautiful, but also a nicer home for local wildlife as well as waterfront businesses. Four different wheels now sit in Baltimore’s rivers, and soon more will be helping clean other cities across the globe. “

…

“If you go to MrTrashWheel.com you can actually download a spreadsheet of every dumpster we’ve pulled out of the harbor over the past seven years, with an estimate of different types of trash that was in that dumpster,” Lindquist said. “We know that we’ve pulled out over a million styrofoam containers from the harbor, and that’s the sort of information, data and photos that we share with our elected officials to let them know just how big of a problem this is.”

…

“Mr. Trash Wheel has a few relatives in Baltimore, including Professor Trash Wheel, the first female Trash Wheel; Captain Trash Wheel, who’s nonbinary; and Gwynnda The Good Wheel of the West, who was recently the star of a ribbon cutting ceremony to mark her installation. They all have their own likes and dislikes on their public profiles online.

They’re also hungry, with a reputation for being able to gobble up larger pieces of trash, including a guitar, a full-size beer keg and on one occasion a ball python who escaped from its owner and made a home for itself on the warm battery casing of one of the Trash Wheels. Because the Trash Wheels don’t harm animals, they’ve become a kind of refuge for creatures seeking a safe place to nest. A mother duck once laid its eggs under the conveyor belt, and fish enjoy the oxygenated water that’s created as the wheel turns in the river during the summer.”

…

“ If you’re a city leader or official, you can adopt your own Trash Wheel at MrTrashWheel.com. “

ALRIGHT EVERYBODY TIME TO CONTACT YOUR LOCAL OFFICIALS

[sabertoothwalrus]

something a lot of traditional artists don’t realize is how important it is to store your art in something acid-free, and it’s something I didn’t think about until I started working in a frame shop and saw all the damaged artwork people bring in.

Acid burn can take a couple decades to become obvious (a lot of the things I receive with bad acid burn are from 10+ years ago), so it doesn’t seem like a big deal until suddenly all your art is permanently stained yellow/brown and brittle. The major culprits are tape, mats, frames, newsprint paper, and CARDBOARD. If they aren’t ph neutral, they’re going to leech acid into your paper and discolor it.

you will not believe the amount of times I’ve opened up someone’s old matted art to find nasty crusty tape that’s left dark rectangles:

or pictures that have orange margins from where the mat laid against it:

Storing your art in cardboard long-term is setting it up to be brittle and gross in the future. Scotch masking tape is your art’s enemy.

Cotton is naturally acid-free, so it’s good to work with cotton art paper and mats. Most plastic sleeves are also acid-free. Sometimes acid-free options cost a bit more, but considering how dramatically it can affect your artwork, it can be quite worth it.

[sabertoothwalrus]

thank you @handern for these tags!!!

[oldmanyellsatcloud]

Honestly, good advice for storing old books or paperwork in general. A lot of otherwise recoverage/resell books I worked with ended up needing to be pulped due to some of this damage.

[marauders4evr]

Abled Person: Hey man, can you hold this wad of $2,000 and this one penny for me while I open my wallet?

Disabled Person: YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER FOOL!

The United States Government:

(Watch how many people don’t get this.)

[marauders4evr]

#raises hand #i dont understand #please explain? 

In order for disabled people to receive any sort of financial assistant for their housing, food, bills, medical supplies, etc., they cannot ever have more than $2,000 of resources to their name. Ever.

It doesn’t matter what it’s for.

You’re saving up for a new wheelchair?

For college?

To put a downpayment on a house?

Hell man, you just happen to budget for once in your life so that you can have some extra money in case something bad happens?

Your benefits immediately get cut off if you’re a cent over $2,000.

And, even worse, you usually end up having to pay back every dollar the government gave you that month.

So say you get $400. If they find out you’re twenty dollars over the resource limit, you have to give them all $400 back and you undergo an investigation of your funds to see if you will continue getting money.

“What if I spend the money that day?”

Doesn’t matter. In fact, from what I can tell, people who do this are actually put under investigation for fraud.

And yes, this system literally kills people.

[locuas642]

Remember when “Guardians of the Galaxy” came out? one of Rocket Racoon’s creators, Bill Mantlo, suffered an accident in 1992 and has irreparable brain damage.

before the movie came out, Marvel gave him an exclusive preview screening. SOme people were upset because they felt if Marvel was really wanted to thank mantlo, they should have donated money to Mantlo’s family.

Bill Mantlo’s brother had to come out and explain: If Marvel gave them monetary aid, Bill Mantlo would lose his financial assistance.

[rootbeergoddess]

That’s so utterly depressing.

[sushinfood]

disgusting

[beeskeepony]

I have friends on welfare who won’t pick up a penny in the street because they’d risk the welfare they struggled to get for 10 years.

[raenboow]

oh look another fucked up thing in this world. let’s just add it to the list. number 63858b

[luvtonique]

My brother has been on California State SSI for autism for the last 10 years, and he absolutely has to (no joke, HAS TO) spend all 720 bucks of his SSI every month, because if he puts it in the bank he risks losing his SSI altogether.

Sometimes, at the end of the month, he has no idea what to do with his money because the whole month went by and he still has 400-ish bucks in his account, and he fucking panics because he doesn’t want to get anywhere near 2,000.

And here’s the funnest part of the story!

One day he did a huge commission on Second Life and wound up earning 1500 bucks off of it, and he told the guy to donate it 500 bucks at a time over 3 months. The guy didn’t want to, and just donated all 1500, which put my brother at 2,036 bucks.

The state IMMEDIATELY (I’m talking less than an hour) called him up to tell him over the phone that they were canceling his SSI, because they noticed he had gone over the 2,000 buck threshold. He had to tell them that someone had made a charitable donation to him and that this was not a common occurrence in any way shape or form, and upon not believing him, my mother had to call to talk to them as his legal caretaker and say basically the same thing until they called off the cancellation of his SSI money.

He also had to cancel his renter’s assistance because it put him to 1,062 a month, so if he went 30 days without spending any money they’d cancel his SSI altogether. Like, none of us in the family have any fucking clue why that regulation is in place and it’s the stupidest shit in human history.

Please, legal side of Tumblr, tell me what positive reasoning this law has?

[sodomymcscurvylegs]

Happy 4th of July everyone! This is what the “nation of opportunity” looks like.

[xfirecorex]

There’s something called an ABLE account that can help. If you are on SSI and were diagnosed as disabled before the age of 26 you can apply for an ABLE account that will allow you to save up to $99,000. More people need to know about this!

[strawbebbynya]

thank you so much for this information. i’m applying for an abled account right now

[viostormcaller]

THERES A WHAT

OH GOD BLESS THE SHIT OUTTA YOU YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW FREAKED OUT OVER THIS I WAS

[septic-dr-schneep]

I’ve been looking into SSI; I had no idea about this!

[perksofbeingdisabled]

Read till the end for the important info

[whatevercomestomymind]

Reblog to literally save a disabled person’s life

[victorywithseaandsun]

According to wiki, 39 states + DC have ABLE accounts, so check with your state

[grimprocrastinatrix]

This is so important.

[shrewreadings]

And even if your state does not have an ABLE account program, you can open an account in another state that accepts out of state deposits. Residency as a requirement to open an ABLE account was eliminated by Congress in 2015. (https://www.ablenrc.org/frequently-asked-questions/ )

One can also set up a Special Needs Trust (SNT) for things like inheritances of valuable objects (art, for example, or, say, massively valuable comic book collections), money given by other people, or royalties paid by massive multi-national conglomerates for IP created by the beneficiary. These can be managed by a trustee. A trustee can be a corporation that specializes in asset management - think the Bessemer Trust of recent news fame in Brittany Spears’ efforts to end the conservatorship - or can be a spouse, sibling, partner, etc. (https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-special-needs-trusts-work.html)

Individuals can have both an ABLE and an SNT: the main difference is that while the benefitting disabled individual CAN contribute to the ABLE, they cannot contribute to the SNT. Also, neither requires that a person receive SSI to set up either - just a medical doctor’s letter saying the individual qualifies as disabled as defined for SSI.

[dankmemeuniversity]

[explorerrowan]

They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.

[lynnafred]

They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.

[friedgengarz]

[fullhalalalchemist]

So its that easy huh

[sushinfood]

Of course it is

[witchyrobot]

Thanks for reminding me why I should pick Legos up again, Tumblr.

[autism-fucking-rocks]

If you're ever asking an autistic person to do something, be sure to explain why you want them to do it.

When I was a kid, I always kept the windows open when it rained. I saw no reason to close them even though my mom kept asking me to. She never gave a reason, so I never listened. She'd say it let the rain in and I'd think "no shit" and continue to keep them open. Eventually, she explained that it could cause mold. That made sense to me, so I started closing the windows. Simple as that.

When we first got cats, they kept jumping onto the counters. Once again, I saw no issue with this. My mom kept chasing them down and I couldn't figure out why. She'd get annoyed whenever I let them stay up there. Once she told me that it was unsanitary, I thought that made sense so I stopped letting them stay on the counter.

To an outsider (and probably to my mom at the time) it may have seemed like I didn't understand the instructions or was being intentionally difficult. But I can't just follow an order without a reason. I must decide for myself if the order makes sense before I follow it, and I need the logic behind it to do that.

So if you're asking an autistic person to do something, explain why it needs to be done. It's very hard for a lot of us to override that part of our brains.

[bogleech]

Not to detract from this being about autism but this is something everyone always should have practiced all the time with everybody. “Because I said so” isn’t a valid reason to listen to anyone; not a parent, not a partner, not a boss or a cop or a whole government.

[ianmalcolmptsd]

I think this is actually a good addition because you’re right, it should be an everybody thing! Allistic people are usually better at following instructions they don’t understand the necessity of for largely the same reasons they can pick up any social thing easier, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good practice. Everyone should be given instructions with the reason why, because that’s accessible to more people and because having more information is helpful!

To use op’s examples, it’s important that people know to close windows when it rains specifically because excess moisture can cause mold which can cause property damage and health issues. That also gives them the agency to apply that knowledge to other situations. If they know it’s not just “rain” that’s the problem, but specifically “things that get wet can become hazards” then they know to also be cautious of other things getting wet that shouldn’t. If you know your cat shouldn’t go on the counter specifically because their feet and body may have harmful germs on them, you also know to be cautious with letting your cats touch your food, dishes, toothbrush, etc.

Teaching kids it’s okay to ask follow up questions until they understand means that when they are adults, they’re less likely to accept that authority figures should just be trusted and obeyed automatically.

[thecultoflexithewulf]

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

Unfortunately, I do love you now that you can dance

[mishafletcher]

ok, but honestly, it is unfortunate. you know how we’re always passing around that ‘you are not immune to propaganda’ meme? this is the propaganda it’s talking about.

it’s cute dancing robots! they have a cute robot dog! it’s cute! it’s friendly!

well, the robot dog friend? cute little jumpy guy, does some careful ballet-esque steps, often between the humanoid robots? so far, both the boston police and the nypd (heads up: autoplaying video, with sound) have ‘deployed’ the cute dog friend. both departments say that the robots are being used as ‘observation devices’, sent into buildings with lights and a camera that sends a videofeed back to the cops. 

part of why i think this video (and others like it) is so interesting is because boston dynamics has defended police use of the robots, saying that there’s a clause that the robots can’t be used in a way that would ‘physically harm or intimidate people’. i don’t know about you, but if i were at, say, a protest, or honestly literally anywhere, and a robot dog started running towards me, i’d be pretty fucking intimidated. i’d assume that it was going to hurt me. if one of the humanoid robots were running towards me, i’d assume it was straight-up about to kill me. 

but these videos do a lot of work to erode that assumption. how can anyone claim that they’re intimidated by, say, a line of robot dogs at a protest? the robot dogs do funny dances online! the video above has been live for about two months, and it has thirty million views. people love them! they can dance!

so when they start being used as mobile security cameras, or when they start being used to maintain a perimeter or for crowd control or whatever, it’s not really a violation of the contract. the robots are friendly! my bet is that when they start setting them out to do security or whatever—and i don’t doubt that they’ll be used for security, etc—they might even do funny little dances and interact with people who stop to gawk at them. anything to normalize increasingly autonomous roboticized policing. get one of the humanoid ones out in the field, and it’s a remarkably short step to autonomous, mobile cctv—that can also detain you if it doesn’t like what you’re doing, or if there was a crime and you’re in the area, or if your face looks like someone from a database, or—

and all that assumes, of course, that the no-harm clause stays there forever, and that police departments, so famous for their love of doing things by the book, adhere to it. but just for fun, watch that video again, and imagine even one of those robots weaponized, outfitted with even ‘nonlethal’ crowd control. 

i’m not arguing that the robots are inherently bad, or that there’s no reasonable use for them, even by cops. but the time to get critical of them is now, not in five or ten years when their use has been largely normalized. this is cute propaganda, but it’s still propaganda, and we should acknowledge it for what it is.

[radicalurbanista]

anyway this is how to disable the Spot robo-dog that the NYPD just purchased

[wondersmith-and-sons]

also? the naming of “Spot the police dog” goes deliberately hand-in-hand with how the language of anti-protest policing deweaponises it from the actual harm caused. labels like “non-lethal” and “less lethal” guns, which fire “foam rounds”, “bean-bag rounds” and “rubber bullets” have taken out eyes and cracked open skulls, are deliberately named to make them sound more harmless than they are. 

foam bullets are solid metal and foam-tipped, bean-bag rounds are sacks of cloth filled with lead pellets and rubber bullets are metal bullets that have rubber-coating - it’s a deliberate trick of language to make writing and reporting about it diminish the violence they cause the victims. 

“police fired bean bag rounds and foam bullets at protestors” sounds like the cops are using kindergarden weapons and not shooting to kill. 

“police deployed spot the robot dog for crowd-control measures” (which is how it will inevitably be written) makes it sound like it’s some cutesy doctor who sidekick out there yelping at protestors, rather than a weaponised, mobile, agile hunk of metal that is designed to break your fucking arm. 

[antique-scarecrow]