Holy Fucking Bingle

“As a chemical engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh who uses a power wheelchair, I figured it wouldn’t be long before I met one of these bots in a frustrating face-off on a narrow sidewalk. What I didn’t realize was how dangerous, and dehumanizing, that scenario might be.

The article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-19/why-tech-needs-more-designers-with-disabilities

[ID: three screenshots. The first is a perspective article by CityLab. It’s headline reads “My fight with a sidewalk robot.” The paragraph below reads “A life threatening encounter with AI technology convinced me that the needs of people with disabilities need to be engineered into our autonomous future.” Below the paragraph is a picture of a small rectangular sidewalk robot moving along a sidewalk.

The logic of these devices being "allowed" on the sidewalk, whether they've found a technical legal loophole for it or not, is complete nonsense.

Meanwhile in Denmark: My mom knitted a hat for my cat

The face of a woman who isn't disappointed that her only grandchild is a cat

Just one day later she sends me this... My cat in different homemade hat. The woman is unstoppable!!!

Taking over the world... One silly hat at a time...

The source of her power:

The most delicious little strawbebby...

Presenting the politest of little gentlemen

it’s funny how we’re getting to the point in the AI lifespan where you can feel the desperation from tech companies to have you use their AI features. instagram has moved their AI effects to the top of the menu when you’re creating a post for your story, exactly where the draw/edit button used to be. gmail is creating one-click AI-generated replies right before you open up the text box. spotify put a beta AI playlist generator on the front page that looks just like a search bar so all of their users accidentally click on it when they go to search for a song.

I had a sales woman in furniture store try and tell me not to buy a hot bubblegum pink loveseat because she wanted me to “think about the future”

when I first bought my house, I announced my decision to paint my bedroom purple. I had wanted a purple bedroom for thirty damn years, you fucking bet I was gonna have one now. My friends decided, for some reason, that I meant what one of them referred to as “14 year old girl purple” (through what’s wrong with the colors a 14 year old girl chooses, I don’t know, even if they’re not what I want as an adult). They didn’t believe me until they saw the color on the actual wall, even thought they helped me pick out paints. My mother, meanwhile, decided to get worried that if I painted my bedroom a “dark purple”, it would be “depressing”. As if, with an entire house to live in, I would spend all my time in the bedroom, which I wanted to be dark because I would be sleeping in there. In the damn dark.

I’m thirty and my first big furniture purchase was a custom coffin shaped coffee table that opens up and is lined with purple crushed velvet. I would have loved it at 13 and I love it now. Growing up doesn’t mean you have to abandon what makes you happy.

GROWING UP DOESN’T

I have told this story before, and I will tell it again, because I am An Old now and repeating stories forever is our prerogative:

This is the door to

I’m 35. I have been told my place looks like maybe a LP fan lives there.

When I first moved into my place, I painted the spare room, that eventually became my office, lime green, the kind of lime green that glows down the corridor when I open the door - The colour was only available as an “accent colour” in the section of paints intended for children’s playrooms, and in the shop I got a lot of “Oh your son will love this!” And from people I knew I got a lot of “Oh well, you’re 21 now, you’re basically a teenager, this is a terrible idea, you’ll hate it and need to pull out all the furniture to repaint it.” And I have to report that I am now in my forties and my office still looks like this, and it makes me smile every time I see it.

this is such a modern idea, too

The examples of decorated homes above are both either modern or upper class, which makes it easy to dismiss because “sure the rich people have beautiful homes” and “sure, modern middle-class people have lots of color in their homes.”

I am begging you. Please learn about stress/discomfort tolerance. Practice raising it. You need this to survive. If someone online can ruin your day with a throwaway comment, you desperately need to understand discomfort tolerance and consciously, systematically build that shit.

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.