#according to your ability

[greenhorizonblog]

Homeless Care Package

Some things I'll be buying to make a care package for my local homeless person:

Socks, t- shirt, maybe underwear if it's not too weird, he probably needs it though

Dried foods; jerky, granola bars and dried fruit etc

Tasty sweet treat like a chocolate bar

Instant coffee

Thermos bottle

2 hot water bottles

Multivitamins

Bottled waters

Hand sanitiser and wet wipes

Bar of soap

Nail clipper

Small first aid kit

Gift card to a grocery store

Rain poncho

Sunscreen

Thermal blanket

Personal note letting him know that his situation is not his fault because the government and society is supposed to take care of people, but they don't because of greed and short sightedness

Feel free to take inspiration and make a care package for a homeless person in your city/town. You don't have to show your face, you can wear a face mask and sunglasses, and go with a friend if you're nervous.

It's a small gesture that can go a long way in giving a person hope. Even just cash or a grocery store gift card is a good thing to give. Life is unpredictable. It can take a turn for the worse and suddenly become very hard for anyone

We were never meant to go it alone.

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 203

Another Hydra prompt! Because I am enjoying the designs I’ve made lol. And perhaps it’s a bit inspired by @radiance1 ‘s different dragon prompts too. 

So they’ve succeeded! They’ve managed to combine their powers- with a bit of shapeshifting helped along by so many ghost allies- and become a giant duck-you dragon! Well, originally they were going to do something else, but they couldn’t agree on an animal, so dragon it was! 

And how mighty they are! They’re giant, absolutely massive- dwarfing the couple of skyscrapers still in Amity. Damages via ghost attacks and general sparring made it where people really didn’t want to rebuild those types of buildings. 

But anyway, dragon! Them! They’re absolutely stunning! And did they mention powerful? Because boy oh boy, are they powerful. The GIW’s guns do practically nothing against their combined might, and barriers shatter before them! 

The uh, issue is that they erm… can’t turn back. Which is fine, they’ve all sort of outlived most of their generation- thank you possessions and ecto-contamination, it’s just a tiny bit of an adjustment. But really it’s not too bad, and someone needs to stop the GIW from trying to poke their heads into Amity. Like it’s been a solid couple of generations, it’s time to stop, thanks. 

Actually they’ve been a bit quiet. Meh, that surely isn’t a problem. Probably. Honestly they’re all going to use the opportunity to sprawl out where the school yard once was, their favorite place to sun their scales. Huh. Usually more people are around now that they think about it- or really, as Paulina points out, sharpening her fangs on one of the rocks. 

…

How long had they been sleeping, because it couldn’t have been that long. One of them was always awake, they slept in shifts after all! Yet there are things missing now as they patrol the skies, both Wes and Tucker pointing out specific buildings that the others didn’t particularly notice usually that now lay empty. 

Hm. 

Oh. That is a… strong barrier there. A really strong barrier actually. Pfft, they can take it! They’ve shredded every barrier together before- Ow. 

…

Okay this might be a bit of a problem. Shit. 

You want a general size reference? :P

[goldkirk]

Disclaimer for everyone: I need to avoid a lot of the unhelpful noise about recent events so I’m not going to be online for more than a couple minutes at a time here and there for several days.

My main priority with political and world event topics is the hard and careful discussions about them I have with specific people I have ongoing inroads with who are still in high control situations. I don’t have time and energy to engage with anyone about leftist moral superiority and bickering. Full stop. I’m donating money I can spare and I’m actively and constantly working with people still in the same high-control/cult groups I came out of.

Don’t come into my inbox again with more claims I’m supporting evil by not trying to bring about an immediate revolution against colonialism and capitalism while I’m just trying to keep some people alive and critically thinking long enough to get out of high control groups and actually vote, volunteer, and change policy. I hear you. I understand your anger. I’m not your real target though. Please focus somewhere else.

Thank you.

[st-peculiar]

Thinking about Ted singular from midnight burger podcast.. what a guy

[iniziare]

Now these are some serious thoughts that I'm having, and I'm also having them for specific reasons that I'll note at the end of this post (or its own separate one, we'll see):

— I don't see how Jing Yuan wouldn't know about the deal that Jingliu made (which I still firmly believe to have been with Lan), because otherwise I don't see how he would blindly trust her to go about the Luofu. Because ultimately, he could trust her as much as he wants to because of their past, but he also witnessed how she lost all control, and subsequently fell to the mara. The trust in this scenario isn't in her, it's in whatever it is that’s restraining the mara. — On that note, I don't see how he would trust anything tied to that, unless it was tied to someone or something that he trusts: Lan. Yes, Jing Yuan himself is another reason why I believe it's the Lan, the Aeon that opposes Yaoshi. — Keeping this in mind, it makes this final sentence to Jingliu extra interesting in my opinion: 'Then I will see this gamble through.'

On that note, as a treat to myself because I'm so close to signing my lease, and because I desperately crave to write the male muse in this franchise that I love the very most (listen, I'm happy to see my two big favorites in Genshin written well, but I just want to write my actual male favorite in HSR myself as well on top of seeing great portrayals)— no matter how popular he too, is. Jing Yuan, welcome home.

[beardedmrbean]

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are bleeding cash and facing a $2 million deficit, and Representative Ritchie Torres is celebrating.

Torres, a New York Democrat who has been staunchly pro-Israel amid its war with Hamas, expressed his content with recent reports that suggest the DSA's debts have reached the seven-figure mark.

"The DSA is collapsing in real time under the weight of its own antisemitism and extremism," he told The Sun on Monday. "It is fair to say that I will not be mourning its death or attending its funeral."

Newsweek reached out to the DSA via email for comment.

Over the weekend, a report emerged that the DSA—which has led pro-Palestinian protests against the U.S. response to the war—is facing financial headwinds that could result in layoffs. The Bread and Roses caucus in the DSA published a blog post on Thursday confirming those reports and saying while no one wanted to consider such drastic measures, staff costs would have to be reduced given the "great crisis for capital."

The January 18 post said that the DSA is projecting $5 million in income for 2024, but $7 million in expenses.

"That means we eventually need to come up with $2 million to break even," said Alex Pellitteri, Kristin Schall and Laura Wadlin—members of the 2023-2025 DSA National Political Committee from the Bread and Roses caucus.

The DSA leaders said that while the current sociopolitical climate should be a "really favorable time for DSA"—citing the growing support for Palestinians and for labor groups across the nation—the group has "still been treading water, and things are going to get more challenging before they get better."

A November poll from Quinnipiac University found that the number of U.S. voters who sympathize with Palestinians more than Israelis has grown in the wake of the war, although the majority still have more sympathy for Israelis.

"Biden's disastrous policy of fueling Israel's genocide in Gaza has created the kind of space for an independent alternative from the Democratic Party that has not existed since [independent Vermont Senator] Bernie [Sanders]," they said, but Pellitteri, Schall and Wadlin admitted: "We have not had strong figures at the top of the organization to lead with a political vision that inspires people to become committed socialists."

"Working people are inspired to transform the world, but they are doing it elsewhere," the post said.

Torres, whose office has been vandalized by pro-Palestinian protesters, has previously tussled with the DSA over the Middle East. The congressman, who represents the South Bronx, has accused DSA members of promoting antisemitism by supporting a Manhattan rally that was held in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. "The NYC-DSA is revealing itself for what it truly is—a deep rot of antisemitism," Torres said in an October 8 statement. "The DSA should be universally condemned for its genocidal celebration of Israel's destruction in the wake of Israel's deadliest terrorist attack." In response, the DSA has held several protests outside his office.

Torres is not the only Democrat at odds with the organization since the fighting broke out in the Gaza Strip.

Representative Shri Thanedar, a Michigan Democrat, renounced his membership in the DSA after the October rally, saying: "I can no longer associate with an organization unwilling to call out terrorism in its form." The DSA has emphasized that it did not organize the rally but acknowledged that the New York City chapter promoted the event "in anticipation of escalatory violence to come" after October 7.

In the Hamas attack that triggered the war, some 1,200 people were killed and Hamas and other militants abducted about 250 people, according to the Associated Press. Israel subsequently launched its heaviest-ever air strikes on Gaza. As of Monday, at least 25,295 people have been killed in Gaza and more than 60,000 wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, the AP said.

While Torres blamed the gap in funding on the DSA's outspoken position on the Israel-Hamas war, the Bread and Roses members pointed to mismanagement from top directors in the organization.

In Thursday's blog post, the DSA leaders said that senior staffers had withheld essential information from elected leaders and imposed their own political objectives that hindered the DSA from achieving its ultimate goal of "a rupture with capitalism."

"As a result, we are now left holding the bag and tasked with cutting expenses just to keep the organization afloat," they said. "It's our responsibility now to learn from our mistakes: not reckoning soon enough with a downturn in enthusiasm, and failing to understand that as a sign that we were not serving our role to champion independent politics as a socialist organization in a time of great crisis for capital."

[vv-ispy]

If decarabian was a gamer he would have the most decked out setup imaginable. 2000+ dollar custom keyboard where nearly everything but the internal components are made of solid gold. Top-of-the-line pc entirely encased in various ornately decorated gemstones. He would have at least five monitors (bonus points if they also double as surveillance monitors.) His gaming chair would in fact be a literal throne. At times he thinks that video game logic must surely apply to real life mortal human logic as well and vastly overestimates how durable most humans are.

Someone save her

[syxnewt]

okay this is my valorant oc her name is accord and she is a menace to society :3

i tried something new with the shading here so i hope it looks good

[esterigermaine]

You learn about the damage to durge's brain and cranium from an easy to miss NPC in the underdark that examines them. Specifically that the cranium has suffered severe trauma and that it is a miracle that their brain functions at all.

Could you imagine the reactions you'd get if other characters discovered this damage sooner in the story?

[nimblermortal]

The more sci fi I read the more pissed off I get about Bujold's uterine replicators. That stuff is not standard in every setting? You have people in Star Trek who are carrying babies to term inside their bodies? What sort of barbaric nonsense is this. It's non-optional? They're not just doing it as some sort of hippie nonsense? Do you have any idea how many health risks there are? What sort of complications? The lasting effect on the body? And you're just. Speculating. That in your highly advanced society. People choose to do this.

It just seems to me that in a reasonable world, uterine replicators would be interesting because of the way their impact on Barrayar is explored.

[rinarin-karimel]

I have many questions about the age of life of the heads of the Guard and the issues of their sexual treatment...

Kahaku mentioned that Fushi is older than Messar by at least 233 years, Messar is not old, he is somewhere the same age as the princess, let's say for good measure he is 27, let's say the Guardians counted Fushi's age from the time Hayase saw him: minus about six months in prison, minus 4 years with Gugu, how much time he spent with Pioran and a couple of months on Janada, when he met Hisame she was 9, it turns out that in 240-45 years 12 generations were born and managed to grow up. Hisame herself gave birth at the age of 17. We don’t know exactly Kahaku’s age (I don’t believe the fandom wiki, the whole article is some kind of cringe), let’s say he is 18 years old on Renril. Let’s say Hayase gave birth to a daughter right after Fushi left her. 260 - 5 (wanderings), - a year for pregnancy, - 30 years old (gave birth to Hisame's mother) -17 (gave birth to Hisame) - 18 years old Kahaku. 189 : 11 (we have already subtracted Hisame and her mother) it turns out that on average they gave birth at 17 years old ...

Considering that they had women, Fushi who did not seduce, were already considered substandard, as if they had to kill themselves at the onset of puberty in order to pass on their soul further in order to seduce him sooner...🤐😨

Аnother thing the heads of the Guardians were thinking about when they sent very young children to seduce Fushi, there was a girl even shorter than Hisame...

PS

-How were they supposed to "teach him about love"? And in general, the Keepers have been sending their god for more than two hundred years exactly the same women, with the same behavior, the same face, the same type, and they still think why nothing works out for them. This reader / viewer knows that Fushi has a libido like a pebble from the taiga, which he is, but they? They could at least assume that he likes blondes or redheads there ... What did they think when Fushi, who had refused all their girls for two hundred years, dumped with the first kid? From the side there should be a feeling that he looked, looked, exclaimed:

- Well, FINALLY AT LEAST WHAT variety, otherwise 200 years of absolutely identical women were unbearable!

and drove off..

[orchideae]

The way I wish I could hide subtitles indefinitely during cutscenes, as a GIF-maker this would be invaluable. I'm making an icon for this reply and /shakes fist, even just for icons, ugh, mercy on my soul, mhy.

/rattles the bars of my cage, I want to gif mannerisms like I need air (literally, still), dang it.

[llumimoon]

thinking abt dot and sobbing AUGGHHH CRIES I LOVE THEM SO MUCH

[mangled-by-disuse]

in a "when class-robbery is abolished every man will reap the fruits of their labour" way

Not socialist in a “I won’t have to work” type of way but socialist in a “I’ll still be working but I won’t be worried I won’t make the rent” type of way. In a “billions won’t be hoarded by one person” type of way. In a “janitors, fast-food workers, child care workers, preschool teachers, hotel clerks, personal care and home health aides, and grocery store cashiers, will live comfortably” type of way. In a “the sick and elderly will be cared for” type of way. In a “no child should work” type of way.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“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/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/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 remotely, 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 an 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/

[youlookkindadead]

i've seen quite a bit of confusion about this, so let me attempt to clear things up :

empathy is the ability to feel somebody's emotions as though they are affecting you personally. for example, somebody tells you "my dog died last night!" -> you now feel as though you've lost a pet personally -> you feel grief and sadness just like the other person. not everyone has empathy. it's a trait some people develop and others don't. some have high empathy, some have low empathy, some (like me) have none.

sympathy is the ability to understand and care about somebody else's struggles, even if you don't feel them yourself. so, somebody tells you their dog died -> you realize how this affects them emotionally -> you care about this person, and are upset that they are suffering. not everyone has sympathy either! it's a scale, just like empathy.

compassion is doing something to relieve another person's suffering or make them feel better. somebody tells you their dog died -> you don't want them to remain upset -> you come up with ways to help them feel better, like offering comfort and distractions, or other forms of support. compassion is a learned trait, not something you can be born with like empathy or sympathy. anyone can learn to be compassionate, although some may struggle more with it than others; it's a skill, just like anything else.

however, none of these are required to be a good person. that's a choice you make on your own accord. i hope this clears things up!