we're deep into the rabbit hole bitches.
i'm grave. 28, queer, & trans (he/him.) i'm usually either reading fanfiction or writing it. love u lawxieđ
about me
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last night someone left the door open and none of us could figure out who did it. not a huge deal but itâs important to keep the animals in, if they were to get out of their room into the main space. since we all swore we shut it behind us we decided to look back at the motion sensor game cam to see if it bounced open or something so we could fix it so it wouldnât do that.
i was like âit had to have somehow bounced open. itâs not like anyone out here would be breaking in.â
my friend joked, âthere were a few deer in the pasture last night that looked shifty.â
I even thought to myself âmaybe it was me?â because of my ADHD. but shutting doors and gates is one of my ONLY reliable habits because iâve been on farms my whole life.
Iâm never second-guessing myself again after this, frankly. from now on when I misplace my keys Iâm gonna be like, well maybe they were taken by a wild animal.
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I promise when I say "live a life that feels worthwhile to you" it's always intended exactly as said. I want everyone to find what *they* find important and seek that out. And reevaluate every once in a while, maybe what you found worthwhile in your 20s isn't the same thing you'll want in your 30's or later.
What I found worth it in my early 20s (career, being at the top of the group, achievement) is not worth it for me anymore and I consider them pretty negative for my mental health nowadays. I'm more interested in being a part of my community and making sure everyone has had enough to eat and slept recently. Knowing and being known by my neighbors. Planting flowers so I can have flowers later. That sort of thing. I don't want to be at the top, I want to finish and eat orange slices with my fellow competitors and tell them how good we all did.
literally nothing and i genuinely mean absolutely nothing in this world quite encompasses corporate detachment from the consumer quite like peggle_2_ode_to_joy.gif
upon its release to the xbox live arcade in 2009, peggle was THE top selling game for two solid weeks. within a month, more than 100,000 players were on the leaderboards. before it got to live arcade, it had been downloaded 50 million times.
and when it released for ios? holy fuck were they DROWNING in money. when they took a weekend to put the game on sale for a dollar, down from five, a couple months after release, they made as much in that one weekend as they did since its release. it was among the top paid apps for weeks.
with critics, peggle was among some of the top downloadable, mobile, and general best games of all time at the time of its release in 2007 and onwards, and it only shot up in popularity as they made it more accessible to more people. and this was in a time before candy crush.
the thing about simple addictive puzzle games is that they make you feel competent, confident, smart, and cool for being good at them. not everybody can learn how to aim in a shooter or the best strategy in an rpg. but anybodys grandmother or baby brother can play a simple puzzle game, and the nature of these games and the way they make you feel only makes you want to play more and more.
however very very fucking few people who play simple puzzle games that you can master on the toilet would be going to E3 in the early 2010s. remember in 2012 when every ~hardcore gamer~ would screech about âfake gamersâ who only play candy crush? thats what peggle was. it was THE crack mobile game from the pre-candycrush era.
no one who was excited about peggle was going to E3. the hundreds of thousands of people who played peggle were not the type of people who would consider going to (or even giving a shit about) E3.
but it sold like hot cakes, and candy crush was churning out content like a madman, and EA owned popcap now, so because the game sold amazingly, and because they wanted to keep cashing in on it, and because corporate drones who controlled the scripts didnt comprehend that their consumerbase isnt one homogeneous mass, they decided to announce peggle 2 at E3 2013.
but not just âoh by the way peggle 2â, no. peggle sold like skyrim, it sold like black ops, clearly they should be saving the best for last, they should announce it like it was the craziest most incredible announcement of the night!
thus:
but in all honesty it doesnt quite have the same impact without hearing ode to joy overtop of the deafening silence of the crowd. so heres a link too. timeless.
people will say âtheyâre only friendsâ and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each otherâs coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each otherâs houses as ghosts. be serious.
Just an FYIâthe original intention of this post was to challenge the way people say only friends, as though friendship is somehow lesser than other forms of love. As if being deeply known, cherished, and chosen by another person could ever be a small thing. Normalize profound platonic love. Some of the most fulfilling, transformative, and enduring relationships we will ever have are friendships. đŤśđź
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we need to periodically remind everyone that a headline not including a person's name isn't an attempt to erase their identity from the narrative, it's just not good practice to put someone's name in a headline unless the reader can be expected to already know who they are
Hello howdy hi! Iâve maybe mentioned it before, but I have congenital hyposmia! That means I have an extremely reduced ability to smell things (basically nonexistent except for once in a blue moon) and have been like this for as long as I can remember. For reference, having no sense of smell is called anosmia. Smell disorders gained some publicity during the height of the COVID 19 pandemic, but anosmic characters are still pretty rare. I reached out to @cripplecharacters and they encouraged me to write out some of my own experiences for folks interested in writing anosmic characters, so here we are!
As a caveat, I am but one person with one perspective and can only talk about my own experiences. For more information, you can also visit the r/anosmia community on reddit; though, as of writing, the latest post was published a year ago. If you have any other questions, feel free to shoot them my way, I'd be happy to take a crack at them (though I am in no way a medical expert, haha)!
Growing Up
Ah yes, a sense of smell, a thing we all definitely haveâŚ
I fully just accepted that everyone was exaggerating about being able to smell things. Entirely convinced we were all just in on the same lie. Haha, right, sure, you âsmelledâ that.Â
In my defense, I also thought everyone was already exaggerating about things like âhaving a gender identity that aligns with their assigned sex,â âgetting crushes,â âmentally picturing things,â ânot being in pain after standing too long,â or âliking meatloafâ (turns out Iâm transgender, arospec, and have aphantasia and high arches. Thereâs no reason for the meatloaf one, I just hated it so much that I genuinely thought people were lying about liking it). Adding âbeing able to smell thingsâ to the list of things that weâre all pretending to do/be/have wasnât too big of a leap in logic for me.
âWait, you guys are actually smelling things?â
Eventually it became apparent that other people genuinely were smelling the things they said they were smelling, and that I was the odd one out. Some of the things that tipped me off were when my family was able to tell our dog had pooped somewhere in the house, that something in the oven was burning, or that someone had silently farted, which all seemed like some sort of witchcraft to me. I donât remember the exact conversation I had with my parents about it, but I do remember finding out they had already been fighting an uphill battle against my body odor for me for my whole life ^^â
Safety Concerns
Gas leaks
Typically, oderants are added to natural gas lines, so if there is a leak, then people will be able to smell it and evacuate the area. This is, obviously, useless if you donât have a sense of smell. There are gas detectors that function like smoke detectors, but they are less widespread, and generally, unless I have been explicitly told otherwise, I assume any given building has none. Being alone in a building can be a bit nerve-racking.
Kitchen Mishaps
Being able to smell what youâre cooking is pretty handy when it comes to not burning dinner. My smoke detectors, for example, will trigger if there is actually a fire, but food can start letting off smoke well before that point, which I donât always notice. Some recipes will specifically say to âdo [x] until it gives off a(n) [adjective] odor,â which is basically useless. Additionally, because of the impact smell has on taste, itâs entirely possible for me to make a dish that I think tastes fine, and everyone else thinks tastes terrible.
Spoiled Food
There are some foods, such as milk, that develop bad odors when they start to spoil. Unless the flavor, texture, or appearance also clearly changes, there is a very real possibility that I will not notice and eat it anyways. If something is suspect, then I usually have to get someone else to check if itâs still good or not. If thereâs nobody there to check for me, then I have to toss it, or risk food poisoning. I have accidentally eaten a lot of spoiled food before learning this lesson.
Hygiene Concerns
"Do I smell okay?"
I cannot smell my own body odor. As a kid, this meant skipping showers and not doing anything about my bad breath. Now that I know other people actually can smell me, it means I have to do my best to maintain an undetectable standard with no idea how well Iâm doing, or risk social isolation. As a result I often have to ask people I trust if I smell okay. Most people will default to the polite answer, which is nice, but if Iâm asking it is because I genuinely cannot tell and need to know if I have to go shower.
Overcompensating
I know there are some garments that can be worn multiple times between washes without starting to stink too bad, but since I canât tell, I assume everything I wear becomes stinky after being worn once. As a result, my options are either âdo laundry more oftenâ or âown more clothesâ in order to not run out of clean things to wear, each option coming with its own drawbacks.Â
Common Questions
Flavor versus Taste
Scent plays a huge role in the flavor of food, so sometimes people will ask if Iâm able to taste what Iâm eating. The answer is... kinda? Flavor IS heavily reliant on scent, but the taste buds on the tongue can detect sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and savoriness with no smelling needed. So, I can tell if something is sweet, or sour, or savory, etc, but I canât really differentiate similar-tasting thingsâplain chocolate ice cream is more or less the same as plain vanilla ice cream. As a result, texture is a big part in what makes a food "distinct." (Fun fact, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerryâs ice cream is anosmic, which is why their ice creams are so full of mix-ins!)
When do I tell people I can't smell?
Well, itâs not something I usually bring up in casual conversation with strangers. For new friends, I might bring it up in conversation if it's relevant to an anecdote I'm sharing or, more often, when they ask me to smell something and I have to explain that's not a thing I can do. However, if I'm going to be in close proximity with someone for a while, I usually have to bring it up sooner than I'd like. When I lived in campus housing, Iâd usually let my new dormmate(s) know early on, because I needed them to tell me ASAP if there was a smell, either because I needed to clean something or because there was a leak in our building. Thatâs a lot of trust to put in a near-stranger.
"No, it's not COVID-19 related"
When I do mention that I donât have a sense of smell to someone that didnât already know, I usually have to clarify right away that itâs not because of COVID-19, because thatâs become most peopleâs first reaction. I donât really blame them, and itâs nice that more people are aware that smell disabilities are A Thing, but itâs not fun that most people first associate anosmia with the pandemic.
"What do you mean [thing] has a smell??"
Logically, I understand most, if not all, things have a smell. However, I am still regularly caught off guard when someone says âit smells like [thing].â Like, what do you mean, a âcucumberâ smell?? A cucumber is like 99% water. What next, water has a smell???? And you expect me to believe this isnât all some big scam?? âŚI mean, I do still ask my family to describe scents for me. Mostly because it's funny to watch them try to come up with comparisons that don't rely on other scents or flavors.
(Hyposmia-specific) Once in a Blue Moon...
VERY occasionally, for seemingly no rhyme or reason, I am able to actually smell something. I'm sure I'd be able to find a common thread if I really tried, but it happens rarely enough that I haven't bothered to.
Anyways. When I can smell something, it is basically guaranteed to be an unpleasant experience. I have had to leave rooms before because a sudden scent (which didn't bother anyone else) overwhelmed me to the point that it felt painful. I've yet to experience a "good" scent.
Thanks for reading! Again, feel free to send me any questions you may have, and I'll take a shot at it.
i may have talked about this before but from what i understand and have observed the overall change in lighting and color timing in film/tv these past 15 years or so isnât because of some systemic brain drain in the field of gaffers (âno one knows how to light a film anymoreâ). part of the perceived change in lighting is just because people are comparing footage shot on digital to footage shot on 35mm, but another major part is that this change in lighting technique is deliberate to make films and especially tv shows better-suited for viewing on phones rather than tvs or movie screens. phones need cooler tones and sharper contrast, a more clinical look, for footage to look good. something lit and timed for the big screen often looks either piss filtered or way too dim on a phone screen, especially if itâs depicting food or human bodies, and just like how mise-en-scene is evolving in really careful and creative ways in the tv world to be easily pan-and-scanned for a vertical format, gaffers are in fact working hard and consciously to adapt from a 16x9 to a 9x16 viewing experience
let me be clear i do not like the new end result. iâm a big screener all the way, and weâre losing so much potential for artistry with these new restrictions just like how film lost so much potential for artistry when they switched from nimble silent cameras to unwieldy sound film setups. however i do want us all to know that this isnât something that came out of nowhere, and itâs unlikely to vanish from the mainstream film and especially tv world independent of some massive shift in how people engage with the moving picture
My grandmother tells me that she thinks I drink too much water but that woman also seems to live off of half a cup of water and a can of Diet Coke a day and just sucks on hard candy when she feels thirsty so idk if itâs growing up in the 40s and 50s that made her like that or if thatâs just how she is but Iâm pretty sure sheâs been dehydrated for the past 70 years or so
Sheâs also like âwhy do you drink so much water? Do you have a medical condition?â and Iâm like âGrandma, both of us have type 2 diabetes we need to be drinking water constantlyâ and then she goes âoh thatâs rightâ and keeps sucking on hard candy.
Like lady if you wanna stay dehydrated thatâs your business but why are you judging me for my water consumption habits
I spend basically all of my waking hours constantly sipping on water, tea, or coffee and aside from all the pee itâs pretty great and I enjoy doing it but my wonderful grandma who I love very much keeps trying to get me to take up her hard candy instead of water routine and Iâve never fully understood why. Itâs one thing for her to enjoy being dehydrated but why try to get me to do it?
Okay so my grandparents have a lady from the VA who comes a few days a week to help them clean and prep food and stuff and my grandma needed help from us with something today and their caregiver was leaving as we arrived and she was like âshe refuses to drink water no matter what I do. Is she sick or something?â and we were like âno sheâs always been like thatâ
We just got her daughter on the phone who lives all the way in Europe to tell her to drink more water and I dunno if thatâs gonna work but sheâs certainly been thoroughly lectured
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My brother died of a sudden heart attack, which meant I had to drop everything and get on a plane to go be with my mom for a month. While I was gone, my cat Smyrtle had to be put to sleep (14 years old, had been sick and going downhill for a few months). I came back and a couple weeks later my eight month old kitten Newt managed to break her leg in the middle of the night leading to 4AM ER vet, and the difficult decision to amputate her leg rather than put her through long surgery and longer recovery that might or might not actually work. She's still recovering, but I'm confident we made the right decision based on how ready she is to be done with restrictions and cone after two weeks. I've been on 24 hour caring for her and not getting a lot of sleep/only sleeping in little bits on her schedule. And then our dryer just died and since it's 15 years old it's better to replace it with a cheap one than repair it.
And in a month I'm going back to my mom's to be with her because she's not coping well at all. I get to be a daily grief counselor for her and listen to her sobbing.
On top of all of this, I'm trying to get her to move back to Texas, buy a house for us all to live together. And that also means us moving. So there's a LOT to do and stress about.
So, yeah it's a lot and I'm just barely surviving day to day honestly. And financially, we've taken on a lot of credit card debt/care credit debt to pay for all this. But my husband's doctor just wanted to do a test that would have cost us $800 (we can't figure out why it's so expensive when we have good insurance) and we had to tell them yeah we can't. Like, sorry, we are fucking TAPPED OUT.
It's also partly that at the beginning of the year we committed to a vacation with friends because we thought this year was gonna be light on obligations and because we had some savings. So we spent the money we had on travel and then all this happened. Something something can't live in fear of the worst or you never do anything ....something something.
So anyway, we're getting by, barely. I'm eating a lot of beans, lol.
And absolutely do not take this as pressure or something to consider if you're also struggling. But if anyone feels inclined and can afford it, I do have a Ko-fi and it would help to start paying back some of this debt.
We're also supposed to be getting bonuses from my husband's work but they are like months late in paying them, which doesn't freaking help, grr. And I've had to basically pause my own business because I'm traveling so much and then this stuff with Newt happened taking all my time.
Hey guys I just want to say thank you to everyone who sent me something on Ko-fi. Because of you I was able to pay off $200 of the vet bills from my carecredit card. We also had another $100 vet visit yesterday, so....yeah.
(Newt's doing okay but they had to put in some staples to her incision and give her another week to let it heal.)
Iâm on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaurâs Guide to Life After AI. Catch me in LA TOMORROW (Jun 19) at Skylight Books, and on SUNDAY (Jun 21) at Keplerâs in Menlo Park. After that, itâs Toronto, NYC, Philly and Chicago.
Back at the height of the blockchain bubble, I made a hobby of pointing out that crypto weirdos were palming a card. I used this formulation:
if: problem + blockchain = problem â blockchain
then: blockchain = 0
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
You see, blockchain weirdos kept insisting that they could solve problems related to trust and institutional design with "smart contracts." Rather than having to trust a board of directors to steer an organization, you could just have a self-executing institution, the "distributed autonomous organization" or DAO.
So for example, if you want to buy a copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby's auction, you could set up a DAO to raise and pool the funds, eliminating the need to find trustworthy people to receive, hold and deploy these funds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConstitutionDAO
However â and here's where the palmed card comes in â the DAO can't go to Sotheby's and place a bid on the Constitution. Instead, the members of the DAO have to elect a guy to receive all that cash, walk into Sotheby's, get one of those little ping-pong paddles last seen at the State of the Union in Chuck Schumer's withered claw (emblazoned with the brave slogan "You're hurting my fee-fees") and raise the paddle during the bidding.
That guy doesn't have to go to Sotheby's. That guy can simply walk away with all the money. Members of the DAO are trusting this guy with their entire collective treasury. Indeed, since the DAO has no corresponding legal entity, it might even be that members of the DAO can't sue this guy if he steals all their money â and even worse, without a limited liability structure, it might mean that everyone in the DAO can be sued for anything bad this guy does with the money.
Which raises the question: what's the point of building this insanely complex hairball of blockchain-based smart contracts to raise and hold the money if you're just going to hand it to this guy and trust him without limit? Why not just have that guy set up a Zelle account and a Whatsapp group? In other words: the problem that the DAO is trying to solve is the difficulty of trusting people with the keys to the kingdom, but no matter how much blockchain you sprinkle on this DAO, it ends with this one guy walking around with all your money, which he can steal with impunity if he so chooses.
Or, put more succinctly:
if: problem + blockchain = problem â blockchain
then: blockchain = 0
This turns out to be a really good way of assessing policy prescriptions for their soundness and foundation in reality, because â as the blockchain swindle shows us â it's possible to come up with entirely fictitious solutions to entirely real problems. The problem of designing a trustworthy institution that can't be betrayed by its leaders and whose operations don't consume all its resources is a real problem â it's quite possibly the real problem â but adding a DAO does nothing to solve the core problems of institutional design, and actually makes some of those problems worse.
There's another real problem with a fictitious solution that is â surprise! â tied to another tech bubble: digital sovereignty.
It's a genuine problem that everyone in the world (outside of China's sphere of influence) is glued to America's tech platforms. These platforms steal everyone's money and data, and every country has signed a trade deal with the USA promising not to let its own technologists and entrepreneurs go into business making add-ons and complementary goods that remediate the defects in America's tech exports:
What's more, Trump's response to finding himself in this poker game that's rigged entirely in his favor is to flip over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all (as November Kelly so aptly put it). His incontinent belligerence on the world stage sees him making bids to steal whole countries and he's recruited American tech giants to help him in this chaotic program of lunatic imperialism. When other countries' public officials make decisions that Trump dislikes, he gets companies like Microsoft to disconnect whole institutions from the internet, deleting their files, email archives, calendars and address books, and depriving them of the ability to connect to any service tied to their Outlook accounts:
Which means that if Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't have to roll tanks into Nuuk â he can just brick the country of Denmark. He can shut down all their ministries, every large firm, every household. He can shut down their iPhones and Android devices. He can kill their smart-speakers. He can hormuz the world's supply of Ozempic, Lego and ferociously strong licorice:
This is the digital sovereignty risk. It's also the digital sovereignty opportunity. If countries repeal the laws that the US bullied them into accepting, laws that protect US tech giants from local competitors who block their plunder of data and money, they can turn America's tech trillions into their own tech billions. As Jeff Bezos likes to say, "your margin is my opportunity":
Meanwhile, repealing these US-protecting laws would enable countries to extract their data from US platforms so they can move it into domestic alternatives, and bypass the software locks that block them from updating phones, cars, tractors and ventilators to protect them from remote killswitches:
The digital sovereignty risk is having your country's government, businesses and industries terminated by Trump. The digital sovereignty opportunity is making billions of dollars by producing and exporting products that defend people from Big Tech plunder and Trumpian killswitches. That is the real world.
But many "digital sovereignty" advocates are living in an imaginary world, in which the digital sovereignty risk is that Trump will shut off their country's access to AI.
This is where the "if problem + blockchain" formulation comes in handy. If Trump shut off Canada's access to Chatgpt, Claude and Grok tomorrow, nothing would happen. No significant business, no federal or provincial ministry, no municipal government depends on these products for anything essential. And if Canada were to build their own local AI to sub in for Chatgpt, Claude and Grok, it would lose tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Worst of all, a national AI strategy does nothing â not one solitary thing â to protect Canada from Trump shutting down our ministries, our companies, or our tractors.
In other words:
If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty â AI
Then: AI = 0
If you think AI tools are nifty and want Canada to invest in AI, then first, please stop pretending that this has anything to do with "digital sovereignty." Not only is this a transparent bit of nonsense, it's a dangerous one, because digital sovereignty is a real problem, and AI does nothing to solve it.
If you want a good "national AI strategy," try this: save your money until the bubble bursts, and then buy your GPUs and hire your talent at 10 cents on the dollar and put them to work refining open source models:
Buying AI at the top of the market is nuts. That would be like shopping for Aeron chairs and foosball tables in March 2000. If you just sit tight for a couple months, you'll be able to find bankrupt dotcom entrepreneurs selling these at knock-down prices out front of their formerly overpriced office space in the Mission, in the time-honored tradition of former Wall Street millionaires selling apples out of their Rolls Royces:
https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/323794
(Literally: I bought a "dining room set" of six $1500 Steelcase Leap chairs in the summer of 2000 from a failed dotcom CEO on Van Ness for $25 a piece â still in the original plastic!)
And in the meantime, please let's stop pretending that digital sovereignty has anything to do with "national AI." If Trump takes away your AI, everything is fine. If Trump takes away your iPhones, Office 365 and tractors, your country grinds to a halt. This is just not that complicated:
If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty â AI
Then: AI = 0
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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