witch-without-gender
Malewitch of the Midwest
I’m Chazz || norse pagan witch || queer n trans || he/they || 25 || $5+ tarot readings (OPEN) || DNI: AFA, TERFs, proship, Nazis, pedos, pro-ana || picrew icon by @cozmicchu on Twitter & Instagram
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Lunar's Fantastical World of Art
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My grandma had brain surgery recently and I had to work while she was on the table. My favorite customer came in and we got to chatting a little. He’s a pastor and doesn’t know I’m pagan but he offered to pray for my grandma right there with me. It was really sweet of him and it brought me a lot of comfort that I needed in that moment :)
I know a lot of us Hellenist have problems being open with our religion, especially in the west. But even if I keep my practices to myself, I find it sweet in a way how I can connect to my friends with it, even if they don’t know.
Ive been pretty sick for a few days now, and my Christian friend told me she prayed for me to get better soon. She doesn’t know I’m a Hellenist, and I don’t plan on telling her, but when she’s sick I’ll pray for her too.
Even if it’s not the same, I feel connected to her in a way since we’re both so devoted to our own gods. I think that’s beautiful. :)
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The fact that this has 0 notes is CRAZY
Cue up Fruitcakes by Jimmy Buffett boys were going to have gay sex on the grand line and find the One Piece
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One Piece is what kept me alive for over half a year. Every time I thought about going through with it, I’d remember that I want to see how One Piece ends. I’m able to live for myself now but even still, if I’m having a rough time, I usually pull up a One Piece episode. I’ve had a lot of people poke fun at me for One Piece being one of my reasons to live, but there’s absolutely no shame and there’s nothing wrong with media being used as a reason to live.
As someone who has been living with severe suicidal ideation my entire life I wanna tell you all something, you don’t have to stay alive for yourself. People will say it’s a bad idea to live for external things because they’re temporary, and it’s true living for yourself is ideal but if you’re not to that point yet that’s ok too.
I’ve lived for my dog for the past 4 years, before that I lived for my snakes, before that I lived for my cat. You can live for whatever needs you and whatever matters to you. Live for your best friend, live for your plants, live for your pets, live for your animal crossing town. Live for whatever keeps you alive and the day will come when you can live for yourself.
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Cue up Fruitcakes by Jimmy Buffett boys were going to have gay sex on the grand line and find the One Piece
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We need shittable cities (actively maintained public restrooms).
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I am just a little man filled with whimsy and antidepressants
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And nausea now too for some reason
I am just a little man filled with whimsy and antidepressants
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I'm sorry for being so sappy, but I wanted to show you guys something.
When I first donated to PCRF in December 2023, it was barely 10% close to its goal. Now in March 2024, they're also 100%. Everyone of you has helped support a better future for Gaza.
They're so close to their goal. Please donate or share this post so that they can get to their goal🇵🇸
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If the right way is too hard, fuck it. Do it the wrong way.
Folding clothes keeps you from getting the laundry done? Stop folding clothes. Put a basket in your room and throw your unfolded clean stuff into it right out of the dryer, it's fine.
Rinsing dishes off keeps you from loading the dishwasher? Load them dirty and run it twice.
Chopping onions keeps you from making yourself dinner? Buy the freezer bags of chopped onions.
You forget to take your meds and don't want to get out of bed to get them? Start putting them next to the bed.
Can't keep up with the dishes? Get paper plates. Worried about environment impact? Order biodegradable ones online if your local store doesn't have one.
Make the task easier. Put things where you use them instead of where they "go." Eliminate the steps that keep you from finishing the task. Eliminate the task that is stressing you out.
Do it the "wrong" way. It's literally fine.
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I am just a little man filled with whimsy and antidepressants
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Sometimes you will have powerful moments that aren't signs and don't turn into anything.
Sometimes you'll encounter a hard "NO" and there won't be a way to turn it into a yes.
Sometimes you'll be very interested in a specific practice or method, you try it, and it just never really clicks the way you want it to.
Sometimes you'll click with a practice and can't find a community around it, or dislike who you do find.
Sometimes there aren't easy-digestible online resources for that thing you're curious about, and the only way to learn more is really digging to find old, dense books and scholarly papers.
Sometimes there's barely any information online and you'll have to do research "around" the subject and fill in the blanks yourself.
Sometimes you'll do a huge ritual and just not feel it like you'd hoped, or you don't get the results you wanted.
And that's all fine, that's life. That's normal. People love to talk online about the big powerful moments and the success stories because the everyday boring stuff or mildly disappointing stuff isn't very interesting to talk about. It's normal for your practice to not look as "exciting" as theirs because you see how the sausage gets made for your own but not theirs!
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I recently had surgery, and at the time I came home, I had both my cat and one of my grandma's cats staying with me.
- Within hours of surgery, I wake up from a nap to my cat gently sniffing at my incisions with great alarm.
- I was not allowed to shower the first day after surgery, and the cats, seeing that The Large Cat is not observing its cleaning ritual, decided I must be gravely disabled and compensated by licking all the exposed skin on my arms, face, and legs.
- I currently have to sleep with a pillow over my abdomen because my cat insists on climbing on top of me and covering my incisions with her body while I sleep (which is very sweet but not exactly comfortable without the pillow). She also lays across me facing my bedroom door, presumably on guard for attackers who may try to harm me while I'm sleeping and injured.
That's love. 🐈⬛🐈❤️
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It's gonna be such a funny mess when Donald Trump dies of a stroke on April 1st, 2024.
Naturally everybody will think it's fake because of the date only to lose their minds (both positively and negatively based on their opinion of trump) when realizing it's real
There will be massive celebrations in the streets and on social media and lots of predictable "don't speak ill of the dead" discourse about those celebrations
Weird evangelicals will pull some weird number trick talking about how Jesus was conceived on April 1st and that makes Trump a sort of messiah and people will make fun of that
The Republicans (after they're done with the faux-sadness and faux-outrage) will stomp over each other to be his successor but none of them will succeed. They'll tear each other apart and have no single nominee for the November elections.
There will be discourse about if Biden and the living former presidents should go to his funeral (they won't, he was a traitor insurrectionist)
The Ukraine-Russia War immediately goes in favor of Ukraine as morale in the Kremlin is reduced. China similarly backs off from its threats on Taiwan.
Ten thousand new memes are made, some sticking around for years to come.
Not a month later a bunch of unofficial biographies of Trump hit the bookshelves, many with new details about just how awful he was.
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“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”
20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html
I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:
https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/
I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:
WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.
Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.
But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.
This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war
Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:
https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453
Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/
20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.
But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remote, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification
But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process
Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.
These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.
This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).
Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:
https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership
Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!
But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.
The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.
Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over and anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.
Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":
https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n
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:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill
Image:
Alan Levine (modified)
https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way but Europe is kinda like a miniature America. All the landscapes and trees and stuff are SMALL, they're little versions of the stuff we got going on over here. Even your big things, like the alps, are so cute. You could put a fun roller coaster up there and make it a little ride for the kids.
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Also I bought
I bought an attorney’s badge replica
Oh my god btw I need everyone to know that I’m actually insane about Ace Attorney btw like I’m unhinged I’m
I can’t have a normal conversation anymore without
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