McCamish and Friends Bakery of Bad Ideas

If you're not American and you live in the global south where libraries are not well funded, it's morally okay to sign up for American public libraries digital memberships using fake addresses to access their Libby/Overdrive.

I could dedicate my entire life to studying how to interact with people and I'd still never master the social skills that young children are expected to have on command.

i updated it due to current happenings

The functions are incredibly standard, and if you (like me) grew up with office 98-2003, it's virtually identical.

And you absolutely should care. Because while it’s scraping your data, it’s scraping millions of other people’s data, and then showing it to you. The suggestions, the autocorrections, those are all the result of people’s documents, fanfics, life’s works, journals, diaries, legal documents, testaments to their abuse. And the second biggest company in the world is taking all of that and using it to make itself richer and more powerful.

Like, here's the thing: a lot of us think of Gdocs and Libre Office as serving the similar niche of "word processing," but that doesn't really encompass all that people rely on Gdocs for.

Gdocs is also: a free cloud storage service. Users can work seamlessly across multiple devices, and backups are handled transparently. Many users aren't even *aware* of what a "cloud storage service" means or how to replace it. We need to promote alternative free cloud storage services like Dropbox and teach people how to back up their documents as a separate step.

Gdocs is also: a publishing platform. With a tap of a button, you can share a WIP or a finished document with anyone. I've seen whole writing communities that (depressingly) revolve around passing Gdocs links to each other! We need to talk about publishing to other platforms, (like WordPress, AO3, or even Tumblr) as, again, a separate step.

Apps like Gdocs intentionally blur the line between composing and storage. They blur the lines between "on your device," "on the internet (private)," and "on the internet (public)." It's to Google's benefit that people stay ignorant about the differences, so that the average user thinks it sounds way harder to replace one app that automatically does everything with three apps/services that you have to manually coordinate.

“It’s so convenient tho!”

“They’re just fanfics!”

“No ethical consumption under capitalism”

Me: