Faerievicious

cats when you step on their tail: i'll admit that was rather ouchie, but given the lifetime of goodwill and trust between us, one must conclude this booboo is but a fluke.

He didn’t. He was making an observation of the surveillance state that already existed in his present, and exaggerated it to make the metaphor obvious.

Learning and discussing these works in terms of them being predictions and having test questions like “do you think his prediction came true?” is not only pointless, but actively counterintuitive. When you frame these works as being ‘people from the past knew that the future would be terrible’ you shift the entire perspective to one of some kind of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. 

Fuck. That.

Fuck their specialized Apple screwdrivers

And their bullshit expensive replacement parts.

Two weeks ago I added RAM to my new laptop and it took about four minutes.

I just now replaced the fan on my old laptop while I was on a call with a vendor.

Both of those things used the same phillips-head screwdriver that I got in a pack of three for a dollar fifty at daiso. And I didn't have to *use a hairdryer to soften the adhesive on my speakers* to access either of those parts, let alone a part as basic and as likely to fail as a fucking battery. Hell, I opened up my new laptop and found out that there's a spot for me to put in a second SSD with a similarly small amount of effort.

But while I'm here:

Fuck modern cars. Fuck the engine covers with breakable pins that make it a pain in the ass to do anything more than checking the oil. Fuck the use of tablets as an interface for dealing with the car. Fuck proprietary RFID key fobs and fuck tire monitoring systems that'll make you fail a smog check.

Fuck cheaply made clothing that won't last more than a couple dozen wears but is so thin and flimsy that it also can't handle being mended.

Fuck printers that require a subscription for ink every three months even if you aren't out of ink, because they'll say you're out of ink because they disable the cartridges after a certain time no matter how much or how little you've printed.

Fuck printers generally, they're such cheap and horrible pieces of garbage at the consumer level that it's usually less expensive to buy a new printer than it is to replace cartridges, and it's usually cheap to replace the rollers but the printer is such shit that your odds of snapping off some fiddly piece of plastic garbage are about 50/50 even if you do know what you're doing.

Fuck all of this shit. You should be able to fix what you own, and if you can't or don't want to learn how to, you should at least have the option to try without becoming a professional.

I keep seeing that post about wanting packaged delivered slower by happier, safer, better-paid workers and first of all: Fuck yes. But also: I want clunkier, heavier technology that is easier to fix.

If I needed a laptop that could fit into a manila envelope I would get a fucking tablet, what I need is a laptop that has some actual computing power and that I can swap the hard drive on in less than forty minutes.

The cellphone I had five years ago had a smaller screen and a thicker case, but I could replace the battery with my thumb as the only tool, and with some effort (less than it would require now) I could replace the whole screen. I don't need a seven inch screen and four cameras on the back and a thin, lightweight case, the phone that was the size of my palm and half an inch thick was fine and LOOK I know a lot of the components have become smaller; why did we move to slimmer cases instead of keeping the thicker ones that anyone could crack open to swap in a SIM or replace the battery? You could have BIGGER batteries, with longer lifespans if you still had thicker cases and smaller screens and then maybe this piece of shit phone would fit in any single pocket on my clothing instead of hanging halfway out and trying to make a dive onto the ground every time I stand up.

I don't like the attitude of "stuff in the old days used to just WORK" - in some ways it's true, in some ways it isn't. Cars in the old days certainly did NOT just used to work. But it used to be a fuck of a lot easier to get into an engine and *fix it* without having to get an entire collection of vehicle-specific tools and half a computer science degree. Printers have never, in the existence of printers, "just worked" but they didn't stop printing because of a programmed date on a chip in the fucking cartridge.

A lot of hardware from today is fine. SSDs are pretty great, and there are new manufactured hard drives that I know are going to last thirty years, just like the 40MB drive from 1987 that a customer brought into my shop a few years ago.

There are people out there who are making good stuff.

"Oh man I hate taking walks next to bodies of water, I always want to jump in and it's really hard to resist the urge and either I jump into the water and people get weirded out, or I have to spend the entire time resisting the urge to go into the water, so I'm distracted from the conversation, and people get annoyed with me."

"That's because you're a duck."

"The what."

"You want to be in the water because you're a duck. People don't get an urge to go into any random body of water every time they see one. That's a duck urge. You have it because you're a duck."

"Wait other people aren't just better at resisting the urge, they literally don't even have it in the first place."

"Yes."

1. The law doesn’t care how long your parents and family have been out of your life

2. The law doesn’t care about your long term friends or “found family”

If you don’t have legal documents that say otherwise, your biological family calls all the shots.