Kake…or Death?

Many point-of-sale machines now are essentially just a smartphone with a card reader attached and the interface. The control layout can change at a moment's notice and there are no physical boundaries between buttons. With a keypad-style machine, the buttons are always in the same place and can be located by touch, especially since the middle button has a raised ridge on it.

Buttons can also be located by touch without activating them, which enables a "locate then press" style of interaction which is not possible on touchscreens, where even light touches will register as presses and the buttons must be located visually rather than by touch.

When elevator or door controls are replaced by touch screens, will existing accessibility features be preserved, or will some people no longer be able to use those controls?

Like, yes it's most bad for the disabled, but it's also wildly inconvenient for abled people, too

My car has literally got physical buttons or dials for EVERYTHING. I can do anything from turning the radio up to changing the aircon entirely by feel, in the dark, without looking

The electric car my dad leases has a huge incredibly bright touchscreen where the radio would be in a normal car. You HAVE to look at it to use it, and even though the car also has physical dials for the aircon, using them wakes up the touchscreen to display the changed settings. This is actively dangerous at night, because it's INCREDIBLY BRIGHT and fucks with your night vision. It also means you can't see the satnav for like a minute, which can be a long time in some circumstances.

My old MP3 player had a lil display I could choose playlists and tracks and stuff with but also physical buttons, so I could pause or skip or whatever without looking and without waking the screen, a godsend when I'm in bed trying to sleep or suddenly need to hear the real world. My phone doesn't have that, so in order to pause a song I have to wake the phone up, unlock the screen, and (if I'd remembered to lock the screen while on Spotify) pause the track. This both takes longer and, if I'm in bed trying to sleep - WHICH IS MY PRIMARY MUSIC TIME - stabs me in the eyeballs with bright light.

I tried to use a ticket machine a couple of weeks ago, because the touchscreen wouldn't register any inputs in an invisible area directly over the 'pay now' and 'cancel' buttons. I had to change to the only remaining 'old style' machine, which had buttons next to the screen like an ATM.

My friend has a camera with a touch sensitive display screen and keeps accidentally changing settings with her nose when she looks through the viewfinder.

Internet connectivity and Automatic Sensing are a plague growing ever more everywhere.

'Smart' fridges that need a WiFi connection to keep your food cold! Washing machines stopping mid-cycle because of a forced software update! Someone hacking your household WiFi by exploiting a security gap in your smart microwave's internet connection!

Public toilet 'more hygienic' sensor taps that regularly fail to sense Black hands or small hands or glitch and run all the time so they turn off the water so 'oops! No running water to wash your hands with at all!'

That one rented car that just Stopped in the middle of the mountains because it lost signal!

Automatic doors that don't register wheelchair users or children!

Car parks that require you to download a proprietary app to pay for! Concert venues you need a smartphone to enter because they use dynamic barcodes! Local mobile apps that require an internet connection to function even though they shouldn't!

that don’t register wheelchair

users or children!

Naturally everybody will think it's fake because of the date only to lose their minds (both positively and negatively based on their opinion of trump) when realizing it's real

There will be massive celebrations in the streets and on social media and lots of predictable "don't speak ill of the dead" discourse about those celebrations

Weird evangelicals will pull some weird number trick talking about how Jesus was conceived on April 1st and that makes Trump a sort of messiah and people will make fun of that

The Republicans (after they're done with the faux-sadness and faux-outrage) will stomp over each other to be his successor but none of them will succeed. They'll tear each other apart and have no single nominee for the November elections.

There will be discourse about if Biden and the living former presidents should go to his funeral (they won't, he was a traitor insurrectionist)

The Ukraine-Russia War immediately goes in favor of Ukraine as morale in the Kremlin is reduced. China similarly backs off from its threats on Taiwan.

Ten thousand new memes are made, some sticking around for years to come.

This post has way too many notes and they've been clogging up my notifs for a month, but these are the first ones I've seen that Get It. Thank you. This is exactly it.

I wasn't talking about the absurdity of companies trying to advertise cars or vacations that no one can afford, like everyone in the notes seems to think. There are plenty of people who can afford them. Fewer than there used to be, but corporations aren't starving.

I was talking about the invasive way advertisers have taken over every modicum of available space and how it's no longer possible to turn anywhere without advertising being pushed on you, despite the fact that most people don't have the kind of expendable income that these companies are trying to extract from them. The less money the average person has to throw around, the more aggressively they're hounded to hand it over. Where people used to be able to afford a new car and a vacation and still throw expendable income around, they now save up for one or another big purchase (those who can afford one, and that population has significantly dwindled). People limit their other spending, and in response companies descend on our consciousness, on every last bit of space they can squeeze their presence into, like pigeons onto a handful of seeds thrown on the ground.

You have to sit through advertisements to watch something on youtube only to realize the video is, itself, an ad in disguise. You can't pump gas without a little screen blaring at you wanting you to buy things. Billboards and bus benches weren't enough, they have to be energy gobbling screens now so five companies can sell you shit while you wait instead of just one. Every available surface is screaming at you to BUY THE THING. Where you used to be able to play a game on your phone, now you can't get through more than a round of any without having to sit through ads to keep playing. Ads that are pushing other games to you that have more ads. Games based on making working class jobs look fun. Be a barista and fulfill every order or the customers will be angry! Lolololol! Work at a hotel and don't fail, making the demanding customer angry is failing don't fail! Hahahahahahahaaahaaaaahaaaaaaaa it's fun! Run a farm and make money to buy more things to grow and sell to make money to buy more things to grow and sell to make more money to buy more things to grow and sell and and and! Even in your free time you should be thinking about your place in the market economy! Or worse, they're ads for predatory games, whether they're "play our game and win real money!" bullshit or "doctors want you to play this to avoid alzheimer's [if you're old play this game where we'll exploit your confusion about technology to sell you more things.]"

Every free moment you have, every free surface you come across is another opportunity to sell you something. We aren't able to get a break from it in our free time in our own home unless we constantly take steps and make effort to, like installing ad blockers - which youtube and other websites are constantly working against - but those don't even work on your phone or tablet. And the closer to home the advertisement, the more it targets you specifically, because your personal devices, that should be your personal, intimate, private property and space, are exploited to collect data on you to wrench every last cent from your wallet. They want to get to know you, not because they're curious about you, but because they want your money. They don't just see you as a wallet with thumbs, they do so unabashedly and brazenly and aggressively.

This post wasn't about the content of what's being advertised to us. It was about the relentless, instrusive aggression with which advertising invades our privacy and personal space and every inch of public space. We are exposed to hundreds of images daily, none of which are art or even remotely creative or inspiring, but instead demand our attention and our money while ignoring that both have been stripped bare by the mere need to exist from one day to the next.

"But you'll have more money!" does not completely put this to rest for me. Neither does "Buy care insurance!" Even if I can afford direct personal care, who is going to advocate for me to get it? Who is going to navigate bureaucracy for me when I'm 80?

"If you do have kids, there's no GUARANTEE that they'll take care of you when your old!" That's true, but doesn't solve my problem.

taller, shorter, slimmer, more muscular, purple hair, tattoos everywhere, tattoos nowhere, 

every single shoe would fit you every single time you tried it on, every single article of clothing would fit your perfectly, all you have to do is transform slightly, you’d never run out of ‘your size’ again

~cosplay

~Halloween costumes

~acting

~cosplay

~stretching to reach stuff and shrinking to fit through spaces

~cosplay

~cosplay

“Don’t antagonize the fae.”

Conservatives are not religious, they are theocrats. They have no virtues. They target the meek. They kill the peacemakers. They hate the poor. They refuse to help the hungry.

The idea is, when we count down and change slides, kids have to mimic one thing in the painting as best they can, whether it’s animate or inanimate. If there’s nothing in the shot for them to mimic (because I threw some contemporary abstract stuff in), they have to show me how the painting makes them feel. Easy enough, gets them excited to move around and vocal about their feelings regarding art, it’s very chaotic. I can tell pretty fast who’s got the emotional maturity to mimic things in a complex way, and who’s just enough of an abstract thinker to mimic inanimate objects early on in the game...

So the first picture is this:

Napoleon Crossing the Alps. My favorite reactions are usually the kids who pretend to be the freaked-out horse, but 2 memorable occasions were the one where a student immediately scrunched up to be the rock in the foreground, and the one where a pair of girls, without any communication on their parts, decided to be Napoleon riding the horse with one as Napoleon and one as the horse. Basically one of them fully tackled the other apropos of nothing, it was hilarious

In case you’ve forgotten, this is Persistence:

And I swear every time, there’s a beat right before everyone either becomes a tree by t-posing for their life, or goes boneless like some kind of child-shaped pancake over the nearest flat surface

In case you haven’t looked at it recently, this is The Scream:

My favorite guesses from the kids to Why Is He Screaming:

-those guys behind him are going to arrest him

-he missed his boat and it’s one of the ones in the background, he just noticed

-the sky’s all wiggly

-he just wanted to scream

-HE CAN SEE THE CLASS OF FIRST GRADERS LOOKING AT HIM AND HE DOESN’T LIKE IT

While the figure in The Scream appears to be depicted as screaming (and that's certainly a totally valid interpretation of the painting), Munch said that he was inspired when he took a walk at sunset and saw blood-red clouds, and "I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream." or in another statement, "I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

Of the multiple versions of The Scream that Munch created, the one shown here is the version on display at the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo. This version includes a tiny, barely discernible pencil inscription that was found to have been added by Munch after it was first exhibited in 1895 and first noticed while on exhibition in Copenhagen in 1904. The inscription reads "Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!" ("could only have been painted by a madman"), and is likely something said by a critic that Munch felt particularly hurt by, since mental illness was an issue in his family, his sister having been committed to a lunatic asylum shortly before he originally painted The Scream.

THANK YOU

You can read any implied text you see in this thing, even the book, that’s how detailed it is. Look at the painting on those letters!

jesus christ you’re just showing off now, Hans!

HANS OH MY GOD

UnitedHealthcare, the largest health insurance company in the US, is allegedly using a deeply flawed AI algorithm to override doctors' judgments and wrongfully deny critical health coverage to elderly patients. This has resulted in patients being kicked out of rehabilitation programs and care facilities far too early, forcing them to drain their life savings to obtain needed care that should be covered under their government-funded Medicare Advantage Plan.

It's not just flawed, it's flawed in UnitedHealthcare's favor.