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What is up with lefty types pushing to learn practical skills (sewing/gardening/etc whatever) as like "you'll need to know this after The Revolution:tm:" and not, like, "this is a useful skill to help yourself & others in your communities Right Now". You all sound like doomsday preppers and it's weirding me out. We don't have to prep for communist rapture maybe thee revolution starts with helping your neighbors
A thing I see happen a lot when we get into discussions of natural fibers vs synthetics on this hellsite and elsewhere is a conflation of when the topic is about Fiber Properties and when the topic is about Environmental Impact.
Like more than once Iāve seen posts be like, āyou should buy one $200 Real Wool Sweater instead of 4 $50 acrylic ones, trust me itās worth it.ā
And what the post means is, the wool sweater will feel nicer to wear, keep you warmer, and last longer than the 4 $50 ones combined.
(vimes boots theory obligatory mention)
And then someone comes on and replies, āyes this is probably a good idea but we must remember that industrially produced wool yarn has complex chemical treatment in the process, so the wool sweater is still not perfect environmentally speaking.ā
And itās like. Thatās not factually wrong. But it has no bearing on what OP was saying because even without it being outright spelled out itās pretty obvious OP was recommending real wool for properties, not impact. This is also where Iāve seen several different posts about rayon go off the rails, for obvious reasons.
Anyway itās a good thing to keep in mind when fiber posts go past. Most of the best reasons to wear linen/wool/silk instead of synthetic fibers have more to do with post-production interaction with the world and with your body than with environmental impact during production.
also there are places in the world where introducing merino sheep husbandry would be more destructive to the existing wilderness or the current sustainable agricultural practices than introducing linen or hemp or something into the crop-rotation. That doesn't mean people who live in those places should only ever wear plant fibres when they NEED wool for its properties. There are ALSO places where sheep husbandry is already practiced and introducing a slightly different breed/hybrid, or even just continuing to keep the Same animals but changing Something about the wool-processing practices,i s decidedly less destructive than introducing ANY fiber-plant. That what Trade is FOR.
Most clothing materials have a pretty negative environmental impact. According to some classes I took recently, hemp is by far the most environmentally sustainable fiber by a long shot. however, in the USA we have to import it from Eastern Europe because hemp, being the same plant as the Devil's Lettuce (ooooo scarey!) is regulated to the point where you can't really grow it here.
I don't think there's any intense industrial chemicals involved with wool production except if OP is thinking about Superwash wool, which is its own thing and involves dissolving off the outer texture of the wool fibers so they don't felt.
In terms of natural fibers could diversify quite a bit. There is also alpaca, llama, rabbit, goat, and camel in terms of natural animal fibers, and in the plant realm there's nettle, kudzu, dogbane, and a lot of others...
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
not posting the screenshots directly because this person made an otherwise good game design guide and posted it online for aspiring game designers to read for free so I don't want to be too mean here
but they included a whole section on inclusivity in games (fine) and why you should be inclusive of women and queer/trans people and race and religion and etc.
and then went "context matters" and then said that, for example, if your game is about people in the military, rules for wheelchair-accessible combat would break the suspension of disbelief, especially if the setting has fancy sci-fi technology to "correct" disability.
and like, context does matter, but also. hey. c'mon.
why is "obviously, nobody in this setting is using a wheelchair" your special example of a bridge too far? wheelchairs are technology just like everything else you listed. they just don't delete the difference from a person's body. and they're not a badass prosthetic.
also, I'm trying to avoid quoting because, again, I do not want to put this person on blast, they put good game design advice on the internet for free, but the specific example of unreasonable inclusion was
obviously, nobody expects "wheelchair-accessible HALO jumps or SCUBA infiltrations"
(HALO jumps are basically extreme skydiving)
hey, my friend? look at those two activities again. what do you notice about them?
wheelchair users are skydiving and doing SCUBA diving today. no science fiction involved. your two examples of activities that make it impossible for someone in the distant sci-fi future to be a soldier in a wheelchair would be possible for many wheelchair users literally today.
think with your brain for two seconds before you put a big asterisk next to disability in your inclusivity goals. there are wheelchair users in the TTRPG space.
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Section 219 of the 2027 NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] would authorize bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, and ā in the billās explicit language ā ānetwork integrationā and ādata fusionā between the U.S. and Israeli militaries. The provision covers AI, quantum technology, autonomous weapons systems, directed energy, cyber, and biotechnology. It would give Israel a level of military-industrial integration with the United States that no other country in the world possesses ā including NATO allies.
There is no classified annex. There is no sunset clause. There are no disclosed accountability mechanisms. The shift moves the relationship out of the visible annual appropriations process ā subject to congressional debate and public record ā into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal.
In other words: a covert arrangement, now statutory.
Analysts at the Arab Center DC note that as political pressure builds to reduce U.S. military assistance to Israel, Section 219 provides the framework for continuing and expanding U.S.-Israel military ties by entrenching Israeli technology within the U.S. defense supply chain in a way that would be nearly impossible for Congress ā or any future administration ā to uproot.
Individualism and imperialism define ruling class morality. Solidarity is the left's only answer.
...as capitalism developed, the ruling class figured out much more effective ways to use moral imperialism as a means of control.
...Like the early capitalist reformers, we increasingly understand our political participation as a way of signalling our personal moral rectitude to others. We think of ourselves as consumers ā not just of goods, but of political identities ā expressing who we are through what we buy and the language we use. Politics becomes a performance of individual ethics, rather than a process of coalition building and consciousness raising.
There is something seductive about this mode of politics. Moral conviction is real, and it matters. The desire to live consistently with oneās values is not trivial. But liberal individualism turns this desire into a trap. When politics is understood primarily as an expression of individual morality, collective action becomes extraordinarily difficult ā because a personās moral development is idiosyncratic and deeply shaped by their individual life circumstances.
...where solidarity supported the formation of broad-based political coalitions, individualistic moral politics tends toward fragmentation. Different understandings of what it means to act rightly become barriers to organising, rather than the basis for it.
āoh yeah i mean im not diabetic but i dont really know how insulin works and i think its kinda freaky that you gotta poke your finger all the time so im gonna go ahead and say insulin is illegalā
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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:
Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:
I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:
Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.
After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk":
The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."
Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:
This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.
If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools ā vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun ā that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.
The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" ā born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement ā asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!
This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:
The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do":
And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.
One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for, no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.
I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group ā a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:
https://github.com/wreccer
Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API ā but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.
But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources ā pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.
This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.
Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:
To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.
That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:
AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries":
Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties:
Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:
There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion."
More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:
History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things:
For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."
"This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation."
its so awkward when people ask me why i dropped out and i have to be like "inadequate disability support" bc no one wants to hear this. they're always like i thought they had to provide that though isn't it the law? girl you might want to sit down i have some bad news about the litigation-based enforcement of the americans with disabilities act
then if i do say that theyre like, couldnt you sue? well theoretically maybe but not without spending more money than i have and putting myself through absolute hell. so no. no i can't.
@creatingblackcharacters I found a doll line with natural hair! It's called Naturalistas, founded by DeeDee Wright-Ward. I thought it was really cool and wanted to share it with you. I ended up buying one (the Liya in pink) bc I like her and I wanted to support the business.
I didnt take a picture of them, but they sell more detailed outfits for the dolls too!
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Very generally speaking, when you see a black man in a piece of media, be it tv show, movie, video game, etc. thereās something you often see a lot of writers do. To go against the stereotype of black men (and black people in general) being dumb and lazy, youāll see this black male character being smart and an achiever. ļæ¼
The Black Nerd. A common character type, the nerd will always be very interested in all things nerdy: science, video games, mathematics, etc. In an continued effort to combat stereotypes, the Black Nerd will be lack athleticļæ¼ism, probably being asthmatic (the nerdiest of conditions). The Black Nerd will dress smartly, suspenders and bow ties. Theyāll always talk smart too, using proper English with complex words.
Now, I donāt have a problem with a black character being a nerd, indeed black people are a people; we arenāt all the same and we all have varying personalities. The problem I have is that too often we see a distinct disconnect between Blackness and the Black Nerd. The Black Nerd doesnāt listen to hip hop or rap, only classical music. The Black Nerd only has white friends, the only other black characters are into not nerdy stuff. The Black Nerd never ever uses AAVE at any time in any context.
And again I must say that Black people, not being a monolith, there are no hard fast rules to being Black. Iām more than sure there are Black people like what Iāve described above, Iām not saying itās impossible; what Iām getting at is that the only Black Nerd we see. There are Black Nerds that play basketball, that bump Kendrick Lamar, and use AAVE since itās an ever changing dialect. Iām just saying thereās no one way of being a nerd and no one way of being Black.
[waving] Hi, hello, it's me, the person in the OP's screenshot! Is this a thing we're doing now?
Let's talk about why you see those checkmarks and why I don't hide them.
Mostly, you can read it here.
I understand we like to hunt people who express cringe ideas for sport, because it's a great 30-second sop to mop away the powerlessness that we all feel in modern late stage capitalism. That's a fantastic way to end up bitter, alone, and hollow - I've sure seen that play out over the years.
The current owner of tumblr sure seems to me to be a slop-addled egomaniac who's increasing irrelevance in the world of tech is eroding the myth that most tech ceo's have propped their egos up with - which wouldn't matter if the fallout didn't happen to land on so many people (and so many of those disproportionately trans). The best damning endorsement I can give is that he's a social network CEO that isn't throwing nazi salutes at fascist rallies or gutting public policy that will kill millions more or inciting racist pogroms, all as part of trying to find relevance. It sure puts a dirty fucking smog over all of this.
But also, you don't have tumblr at home. You don't have it anywhere else. Separate from what you may think of the owner of this site, it's a fucking wonder and miracle that this weird funky garden still exists at all in the endless suburban hell of green monoculture lawns on all side. And when it gets paved over for shareholder reasons or some other bullshit, there's not gonna be anything on the sides or periphery that will re-seed it elsewhere.
The days where another social network site that will let even half the shit we yell about here, with any reasonable large group interaction, are over.
I haven't grabbed any new checkmarks in a couple of years. But I'm not deleting them either, because this is all we really have left. I remember the boxed in and narrow fucking world before the internet, before dial up BBS's. Nobody knew shit about fuck, and it sucked and that's where we're getting herded in the direction of.
Figure out the right direction to throw a punch, for fuck's sake.
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