Drake's Rebuilt Thoughts

Every Tesla is a surveillance device. This is worth knowing regardless of whether you engage in protest activity.

This chart shows the locations and ranges of the cameras, presuming they have an unobstructed view.

Fashion tips for preserving your privacy around Teslas:

90% of the volunteers were wealthy retired neurotypical cishet white women. That meant that for basically every call these people received there was a pre-existing power dynamic where the caller was well below the call-handler, and the call was consequently handled totally paternalistically, never with any sense that the volunteer might actually have something to learn from the caller. The similarity to the typical patient-GP/PCP dynamic was really striking.

Most of the callers were prisoners, homeless, or people who had recently stopped taking anti-psychotic meds. I think many of the volunteers enjoyed the feeling of the power dynamic that was obvious in these calls. If you spend most of your social time with people of the same high social class as you, I guess you might find it refreshing to encounter people who remind you that you've actually done well out of life, only from a safe distance and through a phone ofc.

We also got a lot of trans callers. Hearing how the volunteers talked to these callers was a really radicalising experience. "Why do you think you're a woman?" "Why do you think you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Is there a sexual component to it? Maybe something that happened in your childhood?" "What do the other girls at school think about you calling yourself a boy?", plus the obvious constant misgendering and pronoun "mix-ups", saying, "Oh sorry, miss, your voice sounds like a man's so it's confusing."

People would say this stuff during training too, and the people training us would say it was correct. It's not like they were letting their bigotry cause them to deviate from policy, bigotry was the policy. I remember there was one senior volunteer who was a retired cis lesbian police officer, and I asked her about handling trans callers and she just repeated back all the same bigoted nonsense everyone else thought (at the time I put that down to her being a cop, not being aware back then that being a cis lesbian is no guarantee at all of an absence of transphobic views.)

It didn't take long for me to start getting reprimanded for having too much empathy for the callers. I was an unusual volunteer in that I had actually been in the same position as a lot of the callers. I was trans (albeit not out yet), I was frequently suicidal, I had been on anti-depressants (incredibly I was the only volunteer out of around 150 with that experience), I had experienced CSA and domestic abuse, I had lived through times when I had a zero bank balance, I had eaten food out of a bin because I had no money, I had been heavily addicted to alcohol and nicotine.

It meant I normally had some commonality with all the callers that I could use to make sure I was talking to them in the way I would've wanted to be talked to, i.e. as an equal. I would actually let the caller direct the conversation rather than directing it myself (which was the policy), I would show genuine interest in their story, I wouldn't tell them to hurry up because there were other callers with "real problems". After a while, I couldn't handle it and I just left, not because of the stress of dealing with the callers, but the stress of dealing with the other volunteers.

What Is the Name of That Sail?

Common Raven (Corvus corax) teasing a gull (Larus spp) - series by Sandra Gilchrist

For public libraries, one of the ways we secure funding year to year is lending. Governments don’t want to fund more books if they’re not being used and the way we measure use is by issues. Regardless of whether you read it or not, whether you have it for a day or a month, if you issue it to your library card, we get the stats! It makes the library look good!

Two limits! You can have a maximum of 4,096,000 characters in 1 [one] tumblr post. I would work out how many combinations this is, but 26^6,000 is already considered to be "Infinity" by most calculators, and a program I wrote threw an error code.

26^95,000 is already over 134,000 characters long - which would take 33 different text blocks to convey via tumblr. Whenever somebody says we're running out of posts, don't forget that tumblr is needlessly designed for MASSIVE amounts of information [no matter how detrimental it may be for mobile phones].

Though I'm not certain if that character count includes spaces, unfortunately, as I got that figure by googling "how many letters are in lord of the rings" and came upon a TikTok that counted the number of letter characters in LotR in order to figure out how many Spaghettios cans would be needed to re-write the entire thing, if one were to cut and paste each individual letter from the cans blackmail-letter style.

For those curious, the numbers are 2,261,081 letters in LotR, which calculates out to 8,795 cans of Spaghettios needed, which would cost about $12,225.

So, those are the theoretical limits, yeah. But in practice, the editor is not even close to be optimized to handle these kinds of huge posts: there is a point, far far away from the size of the lord of the rings, that your browser would just crash.

So if you are planning to post long fanfiction, or anything, you better work on something that's optimized for long form (locally, or some alternative to Google docs) and then post in chunks.

For the first post (first book only) there was no issue. Edit loaded, I could add the tag, press Save and done. Note: this was on a PC using Chrome

For the second post (all three books) it worked the same way as the API. I could load up the page and edit it, but when pressing save I'd get an error message. However the edit did go through actually and the tag is now there.

Haven't tried to edit the text itself, but don't think it would make a difference - if your browser can load it'd just work.

(On mobile on a low/mid-range Android the App could open up the post without problems, but haven't tried editing. Using a mobile browser - Firefox in my case - the page could load but it was super slow, and buggy, and it also did crash once)

Also as a public service announcement: if you want to filter the post out from your dash the tag is #full-lotr-test