Melting Metal

it would be so awesome

it would be so cool

(The best of this post and its reblogs, but with links that work)

Here is a website where you can scroll down to all the different levels of the ocean 

Here is a website where you can see the future of the universe

Here is a website where you can press a ‘make everything okay’ button, over and over, until things really are okay

Here is a website that you can read if you feel like a burden

Here is a website where you can look at strobe illusions (TW strobe/flashing)

Here is a website where you can cut stuff up (TW blood/sh)

Here and here are websites where you can play with sand

Here is a website where you can draw with macaroni and other fun foods

Here is a website where you can paint someone’s nails

Here is a website where you can grow a garden with emojis

Here is a website with hundreds of videos of people hugging you (rightfully dubbed ‘the nicest place on the internet’ because it really is, y’all, it made me cry)

Here is a website that will take you to other useless websites

Here is a website where you can make a tiny cat play bongo drums (and other instruments!)

Here is a website to help give you gentle reminders <3

Here is a website where you can grow a tiny farm

Here is a website where you can take a bunch of scientific personality tests

Here is a website of calm rain noise

AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

Authors have until March 30th, 2026 (That is just 9 days as of this reblog, which I am posting on March 21st, 2026) to file their claim against Anthropic to be reimbursed up to $3,000 per work found in the list.

Unfortunately, that experience isn't always available. If you're in a country at war, or an undocumented migrant in the current US, for example, feeling genuinely safe is not going to be on the table and the cause of that unsafety is beyond your control.

In such situations, you can trick your nervous system a bit to give it some of those experiences anyway.

For experiences of safety: try to cover your basic physical needs if possible (food, drink, warmth, rest, caring for physical injuries) and try to build routine, rhythm and familiarity into your life if possible. That could be making tea every morning, or praying at set times, or playing your favorite song every evening before bed. Whatever fits your situation: routines are gonna help your nervous system feel stable and less constantly unsafe.

For experiences of control and capableness: try to regularly do little things that affirm your sense of accomplishment. Fixing your bike, doing a crossword puzzle, learning to play a new song on your guitar, putting on make-up in a way that makes you feel stunning, finish a level of a video game. Again: whatever is available to you. Little moments of 'fuck yeah i did this' help your nervous system feel like you are capable of things and less constantly powerless.

I much prefer them personally

As long as people are around, we are going to have paths of some kind, and if we want to stay with streets as we currently have them why not line them with food?

Canopies to provide shade and color, with vines like ivy or grapes or beans growing up the sides.

Espalied fruit trees as fences and shrubs so you can grab bassket full of fruit and a handful of berries on the way to the park or neighbors house.

Root crops and ground cover filling in the gaps. Compost bins where we have garbage bins now.

Not only does it sound pretty, it also would be more efficent for food harvesting and distribution. Plus think of how much lower the heat of any given street would be!

It's so much more efficient than traditional agriculture. More food can be grown in much less space, and with much more variation. A food forest can be set up to feed people year-round, whereas conventional farming typically runs on a monoculture system, so only one or two harvests a year. Food forests are also much better for the soil, with most farms having to grow a cover crop to replenish the nutrients of the soil, and even then there's so much less biodiversity there (there are so many microbes and bugs in healthy soil, but constant tilling and pesticide use drastically reduces that). In a food forest, that kind of disturbance to the soil wouldn't happen, meaning a much healthier environment.

On top of that, there's the community benefits of having this kind of space. It fosters a better connection with the environment and with food, and it can also provide the kind of third space that's so lacking currently.

A healthy food forest can take a few years to set up, to give everything time to settle in, but after that point they mostly maintain themselves, since they're mimicking a natural ecosystem in their structure. Genuinely one of the best ways to improve a community in my opinion. They help with food insecurity, environmental awareness, ecosystem health, community building, and just overall mental health!

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.

It's hard to overstate how badly the labels behaved. Like, there was the Swarthmore student who was the maintainer of a free/open source search engine that indexed files available in public sharepoints on the LAN. The labels sued him for millions and millions (the statutory damages for digital copyright infringement runs to $150,000 per file) and, when he begged for a settlement, said that they would accept his life's savings, but only if he changed majors and stopped studying Computer Science.

No, really.

What's more, none of the money the labels extracted from teenagers, grandparents (and the dead) went to artists. The labels just kept it all, while continuing to insist that they were doing all this because they wanted to "protect artists."

One thing everyone agreed on was how disgusted we all were with the labels. What we didn't agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.

Another group – call them the "individualists" – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels. Every dollar you spend with a label is being used to fund a campaign of legal terror. Merely enjoying popular music makes you part of the problem.

You can probably guess which group I was in. Leaving aside the futility of "voting with your wallet" (a rigged ballot that's always won by the people with the thickest wallet), I just thought this was bad tactics.

Here's what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: "If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won't be very popular."

We weren't going to make political change by creating an impossible purity test ("Ew, you listen to music from a major label? God, what's wrong with you?"). I mean, for one thing, a lot of popular music is legitimately fantastic and makes peoples' lives better. Popular movements should strive to increase their members' joy, not demand their deprivation. Again, not merely because this is a nice thing to do for people, but also because it's good tactics to make participation in the thing you're trying to do as joyous as possible.

Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the "switching costs" of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid's little league game.

Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the "collective action problem" of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on – it's why they know they can enshittify their services without losing users. So long as the pain of using the service is lower than the pain of leaving it, the companies can turn the screws on users to make their lives worse in order to extract more profit from them. This is why Musk killed the block button and why Zuck fired all his moderators. Why bear the expense of doing something nice for users if they'll still stick around even if you cut a ton of headcount and/or expensive compute?

There's a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is federated, then you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell-phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book and you keep your friends, who won't even know you switched networks unless you tell them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

There's no reason social media couldn't work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

It's urgent !!

Help Us survive the devastating GazaWar

✅ Verified campaign – please check vetteing section below 🔍

My husband Mohanad and I both worked as administrators at the Palace of Justice in Gaza.

We got engaged just two months before the war,

bought an apartment, and began dreaming of a new life together. But the war changed everything. Our workplace and apartment were destroyed, and we lost our jobs. Despite it all, we chose to move forward and got married in the middle of the war, with no wedding ceremony—just a simple union that symbolized resilience amid the devastation.

We’ve been displaced multiple times, each time facing a new eviction order and starting over again. We were forced to leave everything behind and flee with only a few belongings. The displacement was devastating, as we had to leave behind the life we built and the dreams we held for our future.

Today, we live in a small home in Al-Nuseirat, struggling to cover basic needs like food, water, and alternative electricity, facing monthly expenses we can hardly bear. Recently, a new eviction notice was issued for our area, and we don’t know what lies ahead. We’re searching for online work and have skills we can utilize, but finding opportunities has been very challenging under these conditions.

After renting the apartment in Nuseirat, we thought we had found a safe haven from the horrors of war. But on the night of 3-11-2024, explosions erupted nearby, and we never imagined one would hit our apartment. Suddenly, a missile struck; walls shook, parts collapsed, and windows shattered, leaving the room we had just been in destroyed.

We miraculously survived, but the place that once felt like a refuge had become a scene of chaos and destruction. With heavy hearts, we gathered what little remained and moved on once again, hoping to find shelter far from this endless devastation.

Vetted by Butterfly project, Number (#1184) on this list

Vetted by @gazavetters, Number (#42) on this list

Vetted by @90-ghost in this post

Vetted by association in this post

To donate:

Any support would be a new source of hope for us.

Mohanad & farah

Update

On 28-11-2024, our home was shelled for the second time and struck by an artillery shell. We were trying to rebuild our lives amidst all the challenges, but today, our home has turned into rubble once again. 🥺🥺 The dream of safety is fading, and the suffering continues to grow. We need your support to stand on our feet again 💔💔

I'm team pie 🥧 my favorite is pumpkin 🎃

And while we are here, please share, donate, and follow to help Amir, a sick boy in need of treatment, and his family. They have been fundraising for months, and aren't even at $10k CAD.

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