I started a new GFM to raise money for an updated eyeglasses prescription with FL-41 lenses. Details at GFM or here:
💬 0 🔁 7 ❤️ 1 · Donate to Migraine Relief and New Glasses Prescription, organized by Terry Wright · New Fundraiser: I'm raising funds for a
In addition I'm fundraising through Ko-fi for groceries, cat supplies, migraine meds, and bills. More migraines, more shifts missed at work, but expenses keep rolling in. I'm using Ko-fi for this because the money gets to me a bit faster than through GFM.
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i was tidepooling today and overheard someone say 'chatgpt it so we can figure out what it is' about some sort of creature. loser behavior. you're not in it for the love of the game. i have to do everything around here. let me see the creature. i'll tell you the real answer about what it is and i won't kill the environment. AND i'm literally nice.
it's funny because 5 minutes before that i was IDing something by using the search string "SEA SLUG GREEN STRIPED SMALL SEATTLE" which took me to a very badly designed, hauntingly non mobile optimized website that immediately gave me way more information about my creature than i needed or thought was possible. get good. bitch
In related news, there’s a great hack I recommend if you want art and want cool artists to be your friends, and it’s called ‘giving them their requested commission price for their art in money form’
It’s amazing how happy they are to do art for you after you send them the money they requested!
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The evacuation prep poster is done! This poster is designed primarily with wildfires in mind, but the tips can apply to preparing for any much any disaster.
If you share this image outside of tumblr, please link back to my website: www.Katy-L-Wood.com
[[Image ID: A poster including a layered graphic showing what items to have ready to prepare for evacuating your home based on how much warning you have that you need to evacuate. The inner, red, level is labeled “No Warning.” The next, orange, level is labeled “Less Than an Hour.” The next, yellow, level is labeled “More Than an Hour.” The final, green, level is labeled “General Preparedness.” The items associated with each level and the text are included below. /end ID.]]
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Evacuation Prep:
As the world changes, it is important to be prepared to safely and efficiently evacuate your home, potentially with little or no warning. Preparing ahead of time can help to reduce stress and anxiety, and help you evacuate safely if the time comes.
Red Level (No Warning): People | Pets | Keys. Human life matters most. If you can’t rescue your pets, let them out to give them their best chance. If evacuating by car, don’t forget your keys.
Orange Level (Less Than an Hour): Crucial Meds | Important Papers | Money | Paper Map | Pet Vaccination Records. Crucial meds and medical equipment. Papers including passports, birth certificates, medical records, etc.. Multiple forms of payment. Paper map with marked evac routes in case of signal loss. Phone. Most evac centers require vaccine records for pets to be allowed in.
Yellow Level (More Than an Hour): Photos | Hard Drives | Computers | Chargers | Irreplaceable Items | OTC Meds | Pet Supplies | Pet Food | Clothes | Weather Gear. Family photos. Hard drives and computers. Make digital backups ahead of time. Charging cords. Irreplaceable items such as collectibles and mementos. Over the counter medical supplies such as Aspirin and tampons. Pet supplies such as bowls, crates, toys, and litter. Pet food and treats. Clothes. If you are running out of time grab your laundry basket. Weather gear if needed.
Green Level (General Preparedness): Food | Water | Radio | N95 Masks | Multitool | Power Pack | Gas | Stove + Fuel | Flashlight | Toiletries | Emergency Contact Info | Bedding | First Aid | Can Opener. Easy prep, shelf-stable food. Water. Battery powered/rechargeable NOAA weather radio. N95 masks for smoke. A multitool. Rechargeable power pack for phones. Keep your car at least partially fueled at all times. Portable stove and fuel for cooking food without power. Flashlight and spare batteries. Toiletries including hair products, toothbrush and paste, etc.. Emergency contact info for friends and loved ones. Spare pillows and blankets. Dedicated first aid kit. Can opener.
Save yourself time and stress by preparing an evacuation bag ahead of time and keep it in an easy to access place. At the end of every season rotate out the perishable items within such as food, water, and medications. The more you can keep in the bag, the more time you’ll have to grab everything else. Remember, it is okay if you can’t do everything. Some preparation is better than no preparation.
If you are in the U.S.A. and experiencing disaster related anxiety call the Disaster Distress Hotline at 1-800-985-5990 for support and resources.
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If you share this image outside of tumblr, please link back to my website: www.Katy-L-Wood.comf
Sharing this bc I am actively using it. Evac orders are a street away so we started with orange and have moved to yellow. OP, I didn’t have this printed out but I remembered it existed and was able to easily find it. Thank you.
I kind of wish that the polarities of violence and sex in popular culture were reversed. Like, I wish that writers and filmmakers needed to justify up the wazoo their decisions to show a murder on screen when "they could have just done it tastefully in shadow or something," but no one even batted an eye at a sex scene. I kind of wish that erotic video games were the norm but FPSs were a considered a weird and loser-ish thing to play.
I mean, I really wish that you didn't have to justify either, but it bugs me that, of the two, killing is the one that you can use in wholesome family friendly entertainment but fucking is the one that you forever need to shield your children from even knowing about.
I don't think that this difference is innocent, either. Like, I think that sexual repression is a good means of control whereas the state always needs an army of young men who are willing to kill people.
listen. I understand if you dont want to see sex in a movie. But im begging you to think about how the prevalence of murder and acts of harm being portrayed in media vs. the censorship and hush-hush nature behind sex affects our relationships with it.
think about what this post is saying about the normalization of violence and demonization of eroticism. How sexual repression and the indulgence of violence lets a society be guided in a certain direction.
If you dont want to see a sex scene in a movie, thats fine. But this isnt about personal preferences. This is about how culture is shaped by what we choose to show. For the love of god.
I am a horror movie fan who loves gore and violence and murder, you know, a sicko, and I also think it is extremely weird and unsettling that violence is so much more accepted in media than sex. Compare the kind of violent content you can put in a PG-13 movie with the kind of sexual content allowed. It's fucked up!
Obviously I don't want anyone taking away my horror movies and replacing them with softcore porn or anything, that's not the point. Just... maybe we should be less worried about kids seeing a depiction of consensual sex and more worried about stuff like, idk, being taught that incredibly bloody revenge is a normal way to respond to being harmed, or that the right way to handle criminals is to explode them, or some of the things I think might do more lasting harm than the simple fact of violent imagery.
There was an episode of Deep Space Nine. Back in the... late 90s? I think? That featured a lesbian kiss. This being two or three decades ago now, they received many letters of complaint, a number of them claiming it meant the show was no longer Family-Friendly.
One of the writers responded to one of those letter, asking if it would have been more appropriate for the women to shoot each other with a phaser. He was answered in the affirmative, and his response was that if the person felt it was better for his children to see an act of violence than an act of affection, he might want to reconsider his definition of family-friendly.
I think the types of oppression that are the most intense are the ones that apply to me personally. For some reason they're just so much more visceral and personally affecting than the ones that don't affect me, which all seem distant and abstract and not as big a deal. If you don't restructure your worldview around this I will decide you're part of the problem.
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:
How I knew I was officially Old: I stopped being disoriented by the experience of meeting with grown-ass adults who wanted to thank me for the books of mine they'd read in their childhoods, which helped shape their lives. Instead of marveling that a book that felt to me like it was ten seconds old was a childhood favorite of this full-grown person, I was free to experience the intense gratification of knowing I'd helped this person find their way, and intense gratitude that they'd told me about it (including you, Sean – it was nice to meet you last night at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal!).
Now that I am Old, I find myself dwelling on key junctures from my life. It's not nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" – J. Hodgman) – rather, it's an attempt to figure out how I got here ("My god! What have I done?" – D. Byrne), and also, how the world got this way.
There's one incident I return to a lot, a moment that didn't feel momentous at the time, but which, on reflection, seems to have a lot to say about this moment – both for me, and for the world we live in.
Back in the late 1990s, I co-founded a dotcom company, Opencola. It was a "free/open, peer-to-peer search and recommendation system." The big idea was that we could combine early machine learning technology with Napster-style P2P file sharing and a web-crawler to help you find things that would interest you. The way it was gonna work was that you'd have a folder on your desktop and you could put things in it that you liked and the system would crawl other users' folders, and the open web, and copy things into your folder that it found that seemed related to the stuff you liked. You could refine the system's sensibilities by thumbs-up/thumbs-downing the suggestions, and it would refine its conception of your preferences over time. As with Napster and its successors, you could also talk to the people whose collections enriched your own, allowing you to connect with people who shared even your most esoteric interests.
Opencola didn't make it. Our VCs got greedy when Microsoft offered to buy us and tried to grab all the equity away from the founders. I quit and went to EFF, and my partners got very good jobs at Microsoft, and the company was bought for its tax-credits by Opentext, and that was that.
(Well, not quite – several of the programmers who worked on the project have rebooted it, which is very cool!)
https://opencola.io/
But back in the Opencola days, we three partners would have these regular meetings where we'd brainstorm ways that we could make money off of this extremely cool, but frankly very noncommercial idea. As with any good brainstorming session, there were "no bad ideas," so sometimes we would veer off into fanciful territory, or even very evil territory.
It's one of those evil ideas that I keep coming back to. Sometimes, during these money-making brainstorm sessions, we'd decompose the technology we were working on into its component parts to see if any subset of them might make money ("Be the first person to not do something no one has ever not done before" – B. Eno).
We had a (by contemporary standards, primitive) machine-learning system; we had a web crawler; and we had a keen sense of how the early web worked. In particular, we were really interested in a new, Linux-based search tool that used citation analysis – a close cousin to our own collaborative filter, harnessing latent clues about relevance implicit in the web's structure – to produce the best search results the web had ever seen. Like us, this company had no idea how to make money, so we were watching it very carefully. That company was called "Google."
That's where the evil part came in. We were pretty sure we could extract a list of the 100,000 most commonly searched terms from Google, and then we could use our web-crawler to capture the top 100 results for each. We could feed these to our Bayesian machine-learning tool to create statistical models of the semantic structure of these results, and then we could generate thousands of pages of word-salad for each of those keywords that matched those statistical models, along with interlinks that could trick Google's citation analysis model. Plaster those word-salad pages with ads, and voila – free cash flow!
Of course, we didn't do it. But even as we developed this idea, the room crackled with a kind of dark, excited dread. We weren't any smarter than many other rooms full of people who were engaged in exercises just like this one. The difference was, we loved the web. The idea of someone deliberately poisoning it this way churned our stomachs. The whole point of Opencola was to connect people with each other based on their shared interests. We loved Google and how it helped you find the people who wrote the web in ways that delighted and informed you. This kind of spam, aimed at wrecking Google's ability to help people make sense of the things we were all posting to the internet, was…grotesque.
I didn't know the term then, but what we were doing amounted to "red-teaming" – thinking through the ways that attackers could destroy something that we valued. Later, we tried "blue-teaming," trying to imagine how our tools might help us fight back if someone else got the same idea and went through with it.
I didn't know the term "blue-teaming" then, either. Once I learned these terms, they brought a lot of clarity to the world. Today, I have another term that I turn to when I am trying to rally other people who love the internet and want it to be good: "Tron-pilled." Tron "fought for the user." Lots of us technologists are Tron-pilled. Back in the early days, when it wasn't clear that there was ever going to be any money in this internet thing, being Tron-pilled was pretty much the only reason to get involved with it. Sure, there were a few monsters who fell into the early internet because it offered them a chance to torment strangers at a distance, but they were vastly outnumbered by the legion of Tron-pilled nerds who wanted to make the internet better because we wanted all our normie friends to have the same kind of good time we were having.
The point of this is that there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn't their genius – it was their callousness. When we brainstormed ways to break the internet, we felt scared and were inspired to try to save it. When they brainstormed ways to break the internet, they created pitch-decks.
And still: the old web was good in so many ways for so long. The Tron-pilled amongst us held the line. When we build a new, good, post-American internet, we're going to need a multitude of Tron-pilled technologists, old and young, who build, maintain – and, above all, defend it.
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Listen, I take thinly sliced turkey, all right? I pan-sear it with some sweet Maui onions, all right? Then I put a slice of dill Havarti cheese and another slice of an Heirloom tomato. All that goes on an everything bagel and I make my own garlic-and-green-onion cream-cheese spread. That's forgettable? I don't think so.
best feeling in the world is when you draw something and you’re so proud of it you have to stop and stare at it every few minutes to remind yourself of its beauty like narcissus with his reflection in the pond
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i just think they should leave starfleet alone and start making hbo rome esque political intrigue dramas about vulcan/romulus. like the idea that there are 50000 aliens and they just never use them on their own. when do i get the wire on ferenginar ?!?!! bajoran andor??!?!?!!!!
so I read the article and the story is both less and more insane than it sounds.
basically, there's been an ants' nest near a vent shaft of this abandoned Soviet bunker for decades. the nest spilled over into the bunker itself at some point once it was abandoned and there was no way for the ants to make their way back up to the nest, no queen but a constant supply of new colony members raining down from above, and no source of food in the bunker other than the corpses of their fellow ants.
fast forward to some scientists looking for bats that stumble on what's basically a post-apocalyptic ant society. they go "holy fuck" start studying, and observe that, all things considered, the ants still pretty much act like regular ants doing regular ant things.
fast forward some more, and the scientists feel like they have enough data from observing the colony as-is, so they decide to try an experiment. they put a little walkway between the bunker colony and the og colony in the vent shaft so the bunker colony members have the option of leaving and rejoining the og colony.
spoiler alert: every single ant in the bunker immediately nopes the fuck back to the colony in the vent shaft. within days the bunker is completely empty. the scientists leave the walkway in place so when more ants inevitably fall back down the vent shaft they can just climb back up instead of starting up the cycle anew.
tl;dr it's not "oh noes evil ants are on a rampage", it's "ants forced into a horrible situation to survive get to go home"
