Doodles from the breakroom

Catmat! catmat! catmat! 🐈

I decided to design a play mat for myself for when I play the card game! I collect cat pokemon, so I wanted it to be cat themed!

Before I could even process that, another officer dropped the big surprise: they’d actually been tracking me around town for days via Flock cameras. But they kept losing the trail, so when a camera alerted them that the Range Rover had been spotted turning into Kohl’s that morning, they quickly set up their ambush and waited for me and my wife to walk out of the store and get into the SUV.

[…]

One of the officers pulled out his phone, opened the Flock app, and showed me two photos: a wide shot of the Range Rover going through the intersection and a zoomed-in shot of the New Jersey license plate, which clearly reads 34 10 DTM and says VEHICLE MFR along the bottom. Critically, the number 10 is in a much smaller font than the rest of the tag, which is the non-standard structure New Jersey uses for manufacturer plates.

[…]

The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.

As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure—34 ## DTM—and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.

Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I’d probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”

if i just started printing like, the shining, or the name of the rose or whatever, but changed only the title and said i wrote it, is that just… fine?

i mean, i don't think that's fine--because you are lying to people. the copying is not the morally fraught aspect of this--i think it is completely morally fine to print the shining and evne to make money off it; it's when you start lying about the authorship that you start causing harm. i think this sort of deception has three direct and evident harms:

you are denying the original author credit for their work. it is natural, when you have made something, to feel proud and want to be recognized for it--it is hurtful to see people enjoying your work without feeling credited. depending on the context, being denied credits in this way can also be a material harm; in many artistic industries, credits and reputation are crucial to finding jobs and opportunities

you are denying those who enjoy the work the opportunity to understand its actual context. if someone reads the shining, they can go on to find the rest of steven king's ouvre; they can see what he has cited as his influences and go back and read those. the circumstances of a work's production, its position in an artist's broader body of work--all this epitext is shorn off completely when you deceive someone about the origin of a work

you are committing an act of vandalism against the culture more completely; if your version of the work becomes more notable than the original, you build a false citation into the history of the medium. you create a dead end, a cul-de-sac of the rich interconnectness of culture where something is put into a position it doesn't actually occupy. in the worst cases, where this behaviour mixes with e.g. colonialism, racism, etc. you participate in actively writing oppressed peoples and their culture out of cultural memory

it would be a hundred times easier

If your doctor makes multiple documents confirming that you suffer from alopecia because of stress and the medicine you have to take for your epilepsy and that wearing a bonnet or something is recommended for your mental health as you’re not ready to go out bald in high school as a teenage girl, instead of admitting they are wrong the school will accuse the doctor of lying and report him to the Ordre des Médecins (equivalent of the General Medical council). Your doctor will find himself asking you for a document stating that you are not Muslim in order to defend himself and prove that no he wasn’t colluding with you so you could wear a substitute for hijab.

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In France if you are a North African nurse at a public hospital and wear a fabric surgical cap they will try to make you remove it because apparently it’s a hidden hijab. They will accuse you of going against secularism and when you’ll argue that they are discriminating you by assuming you’re Muslim for a surgical cap on your head they will change their angle and claim that you should wear nothing on your hair because you wear the same surgical cap in multiple bedroom which is unhygienic apparently (which is a bullshit argument cause you wear the same scrub/uniform in different bedrooms as well). They will go as far as claiming that disposable scrub caps (you know the thin papery ones?) are not okay to wear in a hospital even if you change it regularly. And then they will fire you for a lack of hygiene because you wear a surgical cap.

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All of that will be done in the name of secularism and women’s right despite having nothing do with either quite the opposite.

Esraa @ssave-baby-life is frightened at the prospect of something happening to her baby Qais, who needs specialised treatment, and she has had to contend with this agony every single day as a mother in Gaza. The doctors have said she could lose him in less than 12 hours and hospital administration has warned of expulsion as Esraa has been struggling to cover the medical costs even with fundraising. Donations have completely stopped.

The constant fear of losing your child is not something anyone should have to experience. Any money you send will help Esraa keep Qais on the life machines that he needs to survive.

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