GLE Grumbles

another fact is that 500 calories isn’t even enough for a new born.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/17/bush-torture-memos-commer_n_188190.html

In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.

“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”

Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).

And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.

Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call.  It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder.  The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.

So I made a tweet about how Maciej Ceglowski (aka Pinboard guy) should consult with fandom on how to build a new fandom platform inclusive of not just text, but images and multimedia. 

Comment chains at the post itself won’t do this. It will just sit there and never be seen by any of the multitudes of people that turn a photo of a piece of sheet music with four F’s on it to a string of band stories about conspiring tuba players, colossal foghorn noises, and the mustache of a man with nothing to lose.

Over the years I’ve had Tumblr I’ve reblogged about 47,000 things. Probably less than 100 of these have been my own original posts. But I have added to a lot of posts, and I will with absolutely no humility at all say that I have made some damn good additions.

And so has everyone else.

Tumblr is not everybody individually creating their own thing, though it has that. Tumblr is the Stone Soup of social media. Tumblr is lots of little humble things that get turned into grand and hilarious and heartwarming and wonderful things by people adding the little bits that they are in a position to add.

Here People Still Were Using Runes in the 20th Century

In Scandinavia, use of runes ended during the 13th century. In isolated Älvdalen in Sweden, however, inhabitants not only continued using runes but also developed their own language with many Norse elements.

People in Älvdalen (English: the River Valley) used runes as late as the 20th century, so-called Dalecarlian runes. Deep forests and high mountains isolate the valley located in Dalarna County in Central Sweden. The area also has its own language, Elfdalian, still spoken by locals.

In the Nordic countries, runes were the dominant written language before the introduction of Christianity and the Latin alphabet in the 800-900s.

It is know that some places in Gotland and Iceland used runes until the 1600s.

The runes in Älvdalen are found on houses, furniture and the like. They were also carved into wooden sticks that were sent as messages between farms.

Plume is an open-source, federated, user-run blogging platform. There are no ads, no data harvesting, posts come to you in chronological order, NSFW is and always will be allowed (depending on the instance), and it has a lot of tumblr-like features other sites lack: no character limit, a rich text editor with bold/italic/hyperlinks/etc, inline pictures, headers, tags at the bottom that can be used to organize posts on your blog, comments, likes, sideblogs, and so on. It’s still under very active development too, meaning more features are on their way!

But what about the userbase? You may ask. I’ve never even heard of Plume - is it completely dead? The answer is yes and no - there aren’t that many people on Plume, true, but that doesn’t matter. Plume uses ActivityPub, the same standard used by Mastodon and the other sites on the fediverse - what that means is people on Mastodon can follow you, see your posts, and like/comment them from Mastodon. Same with other platforms like WriteFreely, PixelFed, Hubzilla, Diaspora, Pleroma, Friendica, etc, etc. And I can tell you from experience, the fediverse is bumpin’; you won’t have to worry about your audience

The problems with tumblr are inherent with centralized corporate social media, and switching to another corporate master won’t solve them. What you need to do is stop giving power to profit-motivated companies to control your experience. Take that power back yourself on the fediverse! Join Plume!!!

No, it’s not decentralized. It has the “communities” feature, but that’s much closer to reddit’s subreddits than Mastodon’s instances

Now’s a good time to mention that you can never trust centralized social media. Pillowfort is currently ad-free, run by an attentive and cool set of devs, and has a lot of cool features, which is great. There’s no guarantee it’ll stay that way though. They might decide to sell, they might decide to include ads to get a little more money, they might just decide to fire the whole staff and go in a completely different direction. Remember, we thought tumblr was different too

Pillowfort’s source code is closed-source, meaning we have nothing but their word to go on that it’s not harvesting and selling your data, and that there’s no vulnerability for hackers to harvest that data instead. And since it’s all hosted on one server, if there’s an attack, or a disastrous bug in an update, or just an update that sucks balls, the entire pillowfort community will have to suffer through it

Plus, pillowfort doesn’t use ActivityPub, the standard that allows the entire fediverse (from Mastodon to WriteFreely to PixelFed to PeerTube to FunkWhale) to interact, share, follow, and get notified from any federated site. Federation is a really cool concept that is still in its infancy, but is actively getting cooler

Difference between AO3 and pillowfort, is that AO3 is open source software developed and hosted by a non-profit organization. Pillowfort is closed source software by for-profit company.

“The first thing they’re doing is using the search function on the website to input their own name, or somebody they know, but who nobody else knows, in order to see if this website really works,” Ruch said, “to see if it’s really possible that we identified 1,500 people.”

The site received a traffic boost after a far-right website linked to it, Ruch said. ZPS built a map of names that appeared in the same users’ searches. From those searches, alone, they learned the names and associates of approximately 25 rioters they hadn’t previously identified.

“What we got was quite a network of who knows who, and who else was in Chemnitz,” Ruch said.

U.S. anti-fascists have pulled similar stunts. This summer, undercover activists cozied up to the organizers of a far-right march, and offered to make a website and coordinate T-shirt orders for the event. The website, which did not charge for T-shirts, asked participants for their names and addresses, supposedly to calculate shipping costs. Instead of sending free T-shirts, the activists behind the website published the names and addresses they received.

ZPS’s performances have previously landed it on far-right extremists’ hit lists. In April, German police arrested a soldier who was suspected of planning far-right terror attacks, which he allegedly wanted to blame on refugees. The man also reportedly kept a list of leftist figures he wanted to murder, among them ZPS affiliates.

A September investigation into the alleged would-be-terrorist revealed a larger ring of suspected extremism among Germany’s military elite. Germany’s FOCUS magazine reported that the criminal investigation had uncovered a network of far-right soldiers and officers planning for apocalyptic violence on “Day X,” when they would take over the country.

“It’s terrifying, but I don’t want to live in a country where I can’t do radical political art,” Ruch said. “We need to know who this is, who finances it, who the driving forces are.”

The rescue plan now has a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/rescueplan

It would be a good idea to follow it or make a note of it today

It’s a safety feature.  My intention is that every important announcement will be both here and on Twitter.  But if for any reason* my Tumblr account gets suspended or deactivated then further announcements will be on Twitter only 

Please be assured that people are currently working hard on making the rescue plan actually effective.  I will post with more information tomorrow and at the weekend.

Reblogs and retweets welcome.  But please do not send me any messages or questions on Twitter, I will not respond - all my time now needs to be spent helping the plan itself