reminder that if you ever buy wool yarn secondhand you should put it in a plastic bag in the freezer for a week, let it thaw 24 hours, then refreeze another week. this makes sure that if there are any moths or pests they are killed by the first freeze, and the remaining eggs are lured to hatch by the thawing and then killed with the second freeze. until this process is complete you must keep the yarn isolated from your existing stash or you risk any infestation spreading. i buy a lot of wool yarn from thrift and antique shops and always do this and have never had a problem with moths or other bugs. if you buy wool sweaters or other wool things secondhand you should also do this just to be safe
I do this with all my secondhand wool fabrics, though with a week of thawing because that's how long my mother said to do it.
It also applies to feathers and especially fur!
In the hierarchy of moth tastiness vintage furs are very high on the list. They like fluffy things better than smooth tightly spun things, and they like dirty things better than material that's clean and full of sizing, so old furs are extremely edible as well as full of hiding places.
And they will eat feathers, I've seen it :(
I'm told that they will also eat silk but only if it's sufficiently dirty.
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just saw the new Superman and yknow what I keep thinking about?.. when heās fighting Luthorās diversion in Metropolis, Clark is making every effort to isolate it to a relatively open space (the park). damages are at a minimum. but that takes time, itās not efficient enough, so then the corporate-funded Justice Gang shows up - and oops, suddenly buildings are being swept off their foundations, civilians in direct line of fire, the city core is getting ripped apart. heās scrambling to save children, squirrels, people caught in the red zone while the others are more interested in punching the big monster. the story makes it absolutely clear that corporations donāt care about life or harm reduction, and in a world in which superheroes are already normalized, this kindness is what sets Superman apart
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.
I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life.
Oh sure, you can tinker in the margins, and you should! Get a repairable laptop, like the Framework, which is the greatest computer I've ever owned, and run Linux on it (I use Ubuntu, which is easy to install). You'll spend two weeks looking around the UI for the thing you need to click on and then you'll stop noticing it altogether, forever:
Access the internet via RSS, and avoid all the algorithmic twiddling and surveillance that subjects you and yours to the depredations of the worst people on earth and their feral algorithms:
https://www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-rss/
Give preference to high-security, private, open messaging tools like Signal. Open an account on a federated social media service, like Mastodon, and make it a first-class home for your online social life:
Do all this! Do more! You'll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better. But you're not going to fight enshittification this way. Enshittification is not the result of people making bad choices: it's the result of bad policies that produce bad systems.
Enshittification makes for a neat descriptive account, talking about how platforms go bad:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
But the most important part of enshittification is its causal hypothesis: the answer it proposes to why this degradation is happening everywhere, right now:
Here's why you're getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don't have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don't compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they've amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about "fighting for the user." Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.
You can take care to avoid enshittification, you can even make a fetish out of it, but without addressing these systemic failings, your individual actions will only get you so far. Sure, use privacy-enhancing tools like Signal to communicate with other people, but if the only way to get your kid to their little league game is to join the carpool group on Facebook, you're going to hemorrhage data about everything you do to Meta.
Likewise, you can use privacy-preserving adblockers in your browser, but the instant you've got to do business with a monopoly that requires you to use their app, you will be totally helpless before them, because anti-circumvention law felonizes modifying an app so it preserves your privacy. An app is just a webpage skinned with the right kind of IP law to make it a jailable offense to install an ad-blocker:
When all your friends are going to a festival, are you really going to opt out because the event requires you to use the Ticketmaster app (because Ticketmaster has a monopoly over event ticketing)? If so, you're not gonna have a lot of friends, which is a pretty shitty way to live.
If you turn your personal campaign to live an enshittification-free life into a set of rigid practices that isolate you from your community, you will be miserable ā and you will undermine your ability to address the systemic roots of enshittification.
That's because systemic problems have systemic solutions. They are addressed through mass movements, impact litigation, political action, street uprisings, mutual aid, and other forms of solidarity and community.
The monsters who benefit from the status quo don't want you to know this. They want to brainwash you with Margaret Thatcher's mantra, "There is no such thing as society." They want you to think that you are a pathetic, atomized individual. They want you to die in a heatwave while gasping out your profound regret for not recycling more diligently and taking more care with your "carbon footprint." They want you to drive around for hours looking for an independent cardboard seller to make your protest sign with, convinced that it's more important to avoid shopping on Amazon than it is to actually show up at the protest outside the Amazon warehouse. They want you to curse yourself for failing to cycle and take the bus in your city where there are no bike lanes and the buses run every 45 minutes and stop at 8PM. If you wanted a livable city, you should have made better consumption choices! Perhaps you could dig your own subway, ever think of that, hmmm?
You, me and everyone we know have all been subjected to a 40-year blitz of anti-solidaristic propaganda, aimed at convincing us that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals. Don't like your health care? Shop around! Don't like your boss? Quit your job! Under no circumstances should you advocate for either a union or socialized health-care. You're an individual, there is no such thing as society.
"There's no such thing as society" is what you say if you benefit from society (which absolutely exists) and don't want it to change.
To make changes, you have to exist in society. Yes, the Democratic Party is a weak and pathetic failed gerontocracy, but the Democratic Socialists, the Sunrise Movement, and other political groups that are independent of the Dems but still drag them into doing something good, sometimes, all deserve your support.
Yes, the union movement squandered the Biden years, refusing to spend its record-setting cash reserves on organizing, despite the millions of workers begging to join unions. But workplace democracy remains the only way that we ever have ā or ever will ā defeat capital, so join a union, form a union, support a union:
Yes, plastic recycling is a scam cooked up by the petrochemical industry and all the plastic you stick in your blue bin either goes to an incinerator or a landfill, but if you don't support (and join up with) real environmental activists, you're going to roast alive:
https://heated.world/cp/169762317
Yes, Israel is committing a genocide and Brown, Columbia, and other elite universities are capitulating to Trump, whose evangelical base believes that war in Israel will hasten the Second Coming, when all Jews will be cast into eternal damnation. But that doesn't relieve you of your responsibility to act to defend our Palestinian brothers and sisters from the death rained down on them with the weapons our governments send to Israel. That goes double for us Jews, in whose name the slaughter is being committed:
My book on Enshittification is coming out in a couple of months, and the early reviews are already coming in, and they are gratifyingly glowing. But there's a trend in these reviews, a caveat that reviewer after reviewer has raised: my book is "short on individual solutions."
You're goddamned right it is. Because this isn't an individual problem, it's a systemic one.
Sure, live the best life you can, making the best choices you can. But don't kid yourself that this is fighting enshittification.
The reason corporations spy on you isn't because you're too cheap to pay for media, so they must resort to surveillance advertising. Whether or not you pay a tech company, they will absolutely spy on you:
The reason they can spy on you is that the US hasn't had a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you took home. This is the last technological threat to our privacy that Congress has addressed. The reason you are spied upon is because there are no systemic consequences for this surveillance:
The reason gig work companies misclassify their workers as contractors in order to abuse them, steal their wages, and deny them workplace protections is because they can ā not because workers are insufficiently choosy about their employment arrangements.
To fight systemic problems you need to be part of a systemic solution.
For 23 and a half years, I've worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the most enshittification-fighting organization in the world:
https://eff.org
EFF is a member-supported nonprofit. We rely on donors like you, and we squeeze our budget hard. For as long as I've been with EFF, I've heard smears about how we're secretly shills for Big Tech and dependent on them for our funding (hilariously I once heard that EFF's reps to a meeting were transported to it in a stretch limo paid for by Intel ā except I was the rep at that meeting, and I took the bus). Here's all of our financial disclosures, see for yourself:
Donating to EFF is one way to fund the systemic rejection of enshittification. But if you want to join the fight ā if you want to be part of a community that fights back ā then you need to know about the Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA):
https://efa.eff.org/allies
EFA is a network of independent community groups that EFF helps coordinate and advise. When one group is in trouble, we connect it with other groups that have overcome the same troubles. When one group scores a victory, held other groups replicate its successes in their towns. Our organizers also help people in communities that don't have EFA affiliates start groups and join the network.
I get it: this is harder work than changing your consumption habits. But it's infinitely more rewarding. You're more than a consumer. You can aspire to more dignity than is afforded to an ambulatory wallet:
You can't fight enshittification. But together, we can.
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
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:
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just saw a 'comments' tab on someones blog you know where the following and likes tabs would be if enabled and it was just showing all the replies theyve made on peoples posts. this is fascinating when did this feature come out
if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.
if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to
PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply
figured i'd get the word out bc i have not seen a single mention of this and i'm sure there are plenty of people who maybe comment on things they don't want on display for everyone to see on their blog lol. you can still look at your replies with it toggled off just no one else can, like locking the following and likes list
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I honestly wonder if the Leverage crew couldāve coalesced without Alec Hardison, the one (1) member of the crew who doesnāt have mile-high-and-thick emotional walls.
See the thing about leverage is that Hardison, Eliot, and Parker are all somehow the lynchpin personality but Hardison is the lynchpin of that trio so like theyāre not wrong
We talk a lot about how in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children live full adult lives as kings and queens of narnia before stumbling out of the wardrobe by accident and being children again after like 15+ years. But Iāve never seen the same level of analysis devoted to how in Prince Caspian they return to Narnia and discover that over 1,000 years have passed in Narnia since their last visit.
Imagine undergoing the grief of losing an entire life you lived in another world, being forced back into the body of a child and to grow up all over again without the ability to even talk about what happened in the decades you lost. Every person you knew and loved, vanished, leaving no indication they were ever real and no guide for how to move on.
But returning to that world where you were a King or Queen and discovering that centuries have passed without you and that the people you lost are not only dead, but mostly arenāt even remembered? Thatās almost worse.
That series is really something for āworldbuilding threads picked up and never touched againā too like
in the silver chair itās confirmed that deep underneath the earth in narnia thereās a molten, fiery abyss world called Bism that is apparently populated and also apparently gemstones are living creatures that live there, and what we understand as diamonds, emeralds, rubies etc. are just the discarded husks of once living creatures
Jadis is actually not originally from Narnia, but accidentally gets sent there at its creation (making her one of the oldest beings in narnia) and she annihilated all life in her world of origin. she also very much does go to literal actual London and terrorize people. she is like 7 feet tall and can tear iron with her bare hands like itās taffy.
Jadis makes it āAlways winter and never Christmasāā¦what the FUCK is her beef with Father Christmas. I know itās supposed to be like a metaphor or some shit but Iām imagining what exactly the fuck must have happened between them for jadis to specifically want to prevent him from coming to narnia to the extent that her powerful seasonal-change-stopping magic also includes a āfuck that guy in particularā clause.
like think about it, Jesus is not a thing in narnia, heās just aslan. and aslan did not get born. ergo, the origin of such a concept as Christmas is the entity Father Christmas. Christmas is not a religious holiday to Narnians it has no symbolic meaning it is just specifically the time of year when Father Christmas fucks around across the landscape giving children gifts, such as very deadly real weapons. Thereās no reason for him to do this. Itās just what he does. And Jadis fucking hates it.
another thing from the magicians nephew that is never brought up again is that Polly and Digory donāt go directly to Narnia, they end up in this intermediate place between the worlds thatās like a forest full of pools leading to other worlds, potentially infinite other worlds, and they end up in Narnia pretty much at random.
I think itās also confirmed that Archenlanders were originally from Earth, and are the descendants of a small group of people who traveled to Narnia by accident and got stuck. One wonders why Aslan didnāt whisk them back out. Or why being too old wasnāt a problem for them.
I think this is early installment weirdness but there are Roman gods in narnia. ?????
stars are sentient???
narnia is flat. this is not actually an unresolved thread but I donāt think itās common knowledge even though in one of the books they literally sail to the edge of the world. caspian specifically thinks itās super cool that the earth is round
I LOVE the whole concept of Bism. Like Lewis really just said oh yeah thereās a whole world under Narnia where people live and jewels are alive too actually you wear dead ones in your jewellery and then no one ever spoke about it again, not even the fandom
No wonder this series infuriated Tolkien so much. Lewis just threw paint at a wall and jokingly asked the man whoād spent a decade on a single painting if he liked it.
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we as a fandom underutilize just how funny it is that miranda pieced shepard back together over the course of two years. like imagine having someone out there who knows more about your own body than you do. and having that someone be miranda.
shepard: shit, it's asking for exact measurements. i just need to buy a new-
miranda, from across the room, not even looking up from her book: you're approximately 170 centimeters tall. bust is 87 centimeters, waist is 73, and hips are 91. your measurements might have changed over the last six months while you were on house arrest, so i'd recommend taking that into consideration.
