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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months ago

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Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!

Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/

This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.

I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.

Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.

But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.

As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:

https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act

But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").

The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.

Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.

The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.

Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.

One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/

What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.

A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.

But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.

At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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physalian · 8 months ago

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You don’t have to pay for that fancy worldbuilding program

As mentioned in this post about writing with executive dysfunction, if one of your reasons to keep procrastinating on starting your book is not being able to afford something like World Anvil or Campfire, I’m here to tell you those programs are a luxury, not a necessity: Enter Google Suite (not sponsored but gosh I wish).

MS Office offers more processing power and more fine-tuning, but Office is expensive and only autosaves to OneDrive, and I have a perfectly healthy grudge against OneDrive for failing to sync and losing 19k words of a WIP that I never got back.

Google’s sync has never failed me, and the Google apps (at least for iPhone) aren’t nearly as buggy and clunky as Microsoft’s. So today I’m outlining the system I used for my upcoming fantasy novel with all the helpful pictures and diagrams. Maybe this won’t work for you, maybe you have something else, and that’s okay! I refuse to pay for what I can get legally for free and sometimes Google’s simplicity is to its benefit.

The biggest downside is that you have to manually input and update your data, but as someone who loves organizing and made all these willingly and for fun, I don’t mind.

So. Let’s start with Google Sheets.

The Character Cheat Sheet:

I organized it this way for several reasons:

I can easily see which characters belong to which factions and how many I have named and have to keep up with for each faction

All names are in alphabetical order so when I have to come up with a new name, I can look at my list and pick a letter or a string of sounds I haven’t used as often (and then ignore it and start 8 names with A).

The strikethrough feature lets me keep track of which characters I kill off (yes, I changed it, so this remains spoiler-free)

It’s an easy place to go instead of scrolling up and down an entire manuscript for names I’ve forgotten, with every named character, however minor their role, all in one spot

Also on this page are spare names I’ll see randomly in other media (commercials, movie end credits, etc) and can add easily from my phone before I forget

Also on this page are my summary, my elevator pitch, and important character beats I could otherwise easily mess up, it helps stay consistent

*I also have on here not pictured an age timeline for all my vampires so I keep track of who’s older than who and how well I’ve staggered their ages relative to important events, but it’s made in Photoshop and too much of a pain to censor and add here

On other tabs, I keep track of location names, deities, made-up vocabulary and definitions, and my chapter word count.

The Word Count Guide:

*3/30 Edit to update this chart to its full glory. Column 3 is a cumulative count. Most of what I write breaks 100k and it's fun watching the word count rise until it boils over.

This is the most frustrating to update manually, especially if you don’t have separate docs for each chapter, but it really helps me stay consistent with chapter lengths and the formula for calculating the average and rising totals is super basic.

Not that all your chapters have to be uniform, but if you care about that, this little chart is a fantastic visualizer.

If you have multiple narrators, and this book does, you can also keep track of how many POVs each narrator has, and how spread out they are. I didn’t do that for this book since it’s not an ensemble team and matters less, but I did for my sci-fi WIP, pictured below.

As I was writing that one, I had “scripted” the chapters before going back and writing out all the glorious narrative, and updated the symbols from “scripted” to “finished” accordingly.

I also have a pie chart that I had to make manually on a convoluted iPhone app to color coordinate specifically the way I wanted to easily tell who narrates the most out of the cast, and who needs more representation.

—

Google Docs

Can’t show you much here unfortunately but I’d like to take an aside to talk about my “scene bits” docs.

It’s what it says on the tin, an entire doc all labeled with different heading styles with blurbs for each scene I want to include at some point in the book so I can hop around easily. Whether they make it into the manuscript or not, all practice is good practice and I like to keep old ideas because they might be useful in unsuspecting ways later.

Separate from that, I keep most of my deleted scenes and scene chunks for, again, possible use later in a “deleted scenes” doc, all labeled accordingly.

When I designed my alien language for the sci-fi series, I created a Word doc dictionary and my own "translation" matrix, for easy look-up or word generation whenever I needed it (do y'all want a breakdown for creating foreign languages? It's so fun).

Normally, as with my sci-fi series, I have an entire doc filled with character sheets and important details, I just… didn’t do that for this book. But the point is—you can still make those for free on any word processing software, you don’t need fancy gadgets.

—

I hope this helps anyone struggling! It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Everything I made here, minus the aforementioned timeline and pie chart, was done with basic excel skills and the paint bucket tool. I imagine this can be applicable to games, comics, what have you, it knows no bounds!

Now you have one less excuse to sit down and start writing.

#writing advice #writing resources #writing tips #writing tools #writing a book #writing #writeblr #organizing your book #outlining #shut up and write the book #google sheets #google docs

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syntaxaero · 4 months ago

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man i hate it when anyone with an iPhone needs help like sending an email with an attachment because I only know how to do that on windows and android because those systems actually have file management and like. apps that are designed like a computer program Should. iPhone apps hide all the stuff thatd confuse an old person so they like. don't ever use them. which just makes it hell for literally everyone

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hystericalgynophobia · 2 months ago

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i'm no longer fearful. men are all seemingly rapidly becoming like this. if they can go full radical (extremist term) why can’t we go full radical (root term) too? check this blog for updates over the next coming day/weeks/month. a big change is coming. we are stronger together, by the way. let them be distracted by tearing each other down over race/class/sexuality etc and other minor differences. the old “die heretic!” joke has never been so accurate. let’s focus on our commonality for now. that’s how resistance works, it cannot work in isolation. it needs community and solidarity. i’m considering a book, for free, online, drm free, no profit motive. donate if you want, it’ll go straight to the resistance. i’m making huge lists of recommendations (books, documentaries, etc. anything that isn’t PURELY fiction for the fiction website to read something else for a change). i’m making lists of links of terms and people to look up. if you don’t want to look, fine, it will still be there if/when you do. i’m turning off my privacy blockers and re-enabling search. i’m purging my blocklist, all 11 years of it. i’m making a community, maybe communities. join if you want. there will only be limited moderation to prevent predation and sadistic cruelty. it will be 18+, not for nsfw content, but because <18 need to socialize with their own. if they want to lie and sneak in like i used to, fine, but that’s up to and on them. maybe i’ll blaze them when it’s ready. 11 years with an account on here and 2 more before that and i still can’t pony up any money besides the monthly ad free fee? it’s given so much, why not? it’s under attack too, like the internet archive. why not?

in the meantime, i’ve switched to ecosia (both search engine and browser). go check it out. there’s an invite link at the bottom. it doesn’t do anything other than say how many people have signed up using it. it doesn’t cost or confer anything. all ad revenue supports the trees they plant after every whatever number of searches. your ad blockers don’t fully work anymore anyway. the privacy toggles are equivalent to duckduckgo and much better than chrome.

the link below will take you to the android or ios app or pc. whatever.

Check this out: Ecosia plants trees when you search the web! 🌳

Join me and 20M+ others and start planting today.

https://ecosia.co/app?referrer=friends-93lihr

If you’re using an iPhone or iPad, tap here to confirm you’ve joined:

ecosia://invite/friends-93lihr

/e/os is an os running on the android open source kit. no google, no apple, all functionality.

go get it on a freephone, the completely modular and right-to-repair smartphone made of ethically and sustainably sourced recycled materials.

all of this is the same functionality you already have but free, except for the fairphone obviously. think of the discontinued amazon smile program. speaking of. this third one (raiseright) even lets you buy an amazon giftcard and use between 6-20% of the money for the nonprofit of your choice with 100% same value, if you absolutely must purchase from amazon.

of course, bookshop is always better for books.

don’t see it there? older title? go check thriftbooks.

but first check your library. this extension will automatically check any and all libraries you choose for physical, ebook, and audiobook copies.

there are always alternatives. “no ethical consumption under capitalism” is true, but you still have a choice. you always do. a new world is possible. i hope to see you there. i’m pinning this, btw, because it is 4:30 am and i doubt many people will see this. maybe blaze it later without the top screenshot portion.

#ref #longposts #k #fav

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meme-loving-stuck · 1 year ago

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In case anyone else doesn't know how to turn this setting off:

Play Store > Account > Settings > Network Preferences > Auto-Update Apps. Uncheck that one.

if you have an iPhone rip indeed but you might be able to

#BLOGGING LOUDLY #this isnt about your consent lol its what you have programmed your app to do #but some newer phones have it set by default. there is always a way to turn it off #anyone who can touch an iphone without shattering the screen is welcome to share how to find this in the app store #go forth my friends and stop using unnecessary new features. take your technology back

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demilypyro · 9 months ago

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i think i vaguely remember you answering this question, but what do you use for your setup, like the facial tracking and such? i remember you mentioning an app that you then converted from your phone into a different program?

I have an iphone on a small tripod at eye level. I use an iphone because it has some of the best facial tracking tech on the market but it's proprietary software so you can't get it anywhere else. The iphone sends the tracking data to my PC through a USB cable, where a plugin called Vbridger converts it for use by Vtube studio, a vtuber program. I then capture the model and stream it from OBS.

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dollsahoy · 1 month ago

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Weather101 is a series of FREE interactive online classes to help the public learn about meteorology, forecasting and the National Weather Service in general. These classes will explore the concepts formally found in what was our Advanced SKYWARN spotter classes, plus MORE! Individuals or groups will be able to complete the courses in the comfort of their own home using the extremely user-friendly computer program, Go-To Meeting. The only requirement will be speakers to listen, if you're using a computer. If you want to ask questions, you will need to have a VOIP microphone (this is not a requirement). Each class can be viewed on a Mac or PC, as well as on your iPad, iPhone or Android device by simply downloading the FREE Go-To-Webinar app in the app store on your device (you'll need the Webinar ID number supplied in the registration email). To sign up for one of our online classes, simply click on the link beside the date/time you want to attend below, fill out the form and we will forward you a link to register on the Go-To Meeting website. Register, download the FREE software, and BAM! You can attend the one hour online class. Remember, if you're using the Go-To Meeting app on your iPad, iPhone or Android device, your Webinar ID number will be included in your registration email.

This series is out of the Nashville NWS office--there may be courses offered by other NWS offices on other dates

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trans-femme-fag-dyke · 2 months ago

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T4T sEggs Cracking

Sex changes when you transition as a t-girl. New realities come into focus. New turn-ons emerge. A world of novel psychological and physiological experiences are added to the mix, or replace it entirely. Hormones and their impact terraform the ecology into a mycelial divine feminine, replete with new pleasure pathways. In short, it is wild and beautiful, feral and oozing with potential.

What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was how transfiguring the experience of T4T sex would be. Not by a mile.

Degrading Glorification

(What follows is a dual narrative, embellished and made whole by my lover’s own description of our tryst, which may I tell you is really fucking hot. Anyone who finds discovery and meaning in the process of writing has my attention and, most likely, my lust).

Just another day on Grindr receiving unsolicited dick pic after dick pic from people who ignore my profile’s clear insistence on T4T only.

While I don’t avail myself of these opportunities, there is something to be said for the euphoria that comes from being seen by cishets as a girl. Even seeing me as an attractive t-girl, if they’re purely fetishizing that tribal identifier, doesn’t hurt. Having spent too many years in the closet as a boy-modular gay, I am immune to the aggression of those advances and treat it more like a research project, tagging each new appendage into its relevant mental taxonomy: thick, thin, black, white, clean, cum-covered, veiny, etc. Back in the day, these advances were perfectly acceptable — direct, to the point, like the hawking of wares in a saturated meat market. I was less interested in what they were attached to as I was in their function. Emotion and personality were cast aside.

As a t-girl, though, there is a crossing of the privilege divide into an East Berlin of fear and insecurity. Too often, and too unpublicized, are the examples of anti-trans violence that it’s simply not the same fuck economy that it used to be. And anyway, my orientation has changed.

Orientation shift in transition is a topic that could command an entire thesis, so I won’t go into it here. Suffice it to say that almost overnight, as the estrogen moved through my body, I lost my interest in gay or straight men. Perhaps because being with a gay guy, although still on the table before secondary sex characteristics set in and I could stealthily navigate those penetrations, would send a dysphoric signal deep into my programming.

I find myself attracted to trans energy mostly.

Grindr is a numbers game in Los Angeles. There’s so much flakiness you become accustomed to being ignored or conversations end abruptly. Not to mention that hooking up here is so governed by travel times which fluctuate wildly throughout the days asymmetrical commuting times, that the whole affair can be a non-started at the outset.

But she responded. Glorious brunette, with long wavy hair, small pursed lips and an aloofness that immediately activated my pathological desire of the emotionally unavailable. What can I say, my mother fucked me up.

She — let’s call her Adeline — lived about 10 minutes away, so in an abundance of well-heeled politeness cut with impatient lust, I went to pick her up.

Cue the usual slightly coy banter as we both worked each other out during the ride. The dissipation of fear which comes with these Grindr “dates” for traps, which always carry a soupçon of terror to them and see us scrambling to etch a last will and testament into our iPhone notes app and share location with friends as it plays out.

I emerged from the bathroom topless.

Oh fuck, she thought, nipple piercings. The most physical symbol of deviance there is.

We started making out on the sofa and immediately some force took a hold of me. I felt like our bodies were fusing inside a blacksmith’s forge. We were glitching like a hacked mainframe, opening up its secrets to Snowden’s deft digital lock-picking. We were like people who hadn’t eaten in days set loose on a Vegas buffet.

I ran my hands over her back and through her hair, interlocking my teeth around her neck and ears. Almost epileptic in spasms of uncontrollable, uncensored I searched for my frontal cortex and managed to articulate that we should move to the bedroom.

My friend S had told me to expect fireworks in my first T4T experience. Their look of both shock and empathetic excitement registered on their FaceTime framed face.

They hinted at the dynamic’s incendiary force with an elliptical smile, leaving me hanging like a teaser trailer.

“I can’t explain it, but there’s just something to that energy, that vibe. I’m so excited for you. Like fucking excited!”

And Jesus fucking christ, they were right. I can see why they held off on the detail. Language fails.

We made our way to the bedroom where I revealed my kink drawer. There’s a cornucopia of debauchery in this unassuming pine wood piece of furniture: masks, paddles, leashes, collars, nipple clamps and floggers.

We negotiated our limits, settling on consensual non-consent. In short, anything goes.

We couldn’t have been more perfectly matched. When she initially shared photos with me on the app she gave a trigger warning around the bruises I’d see. It just so happened that impact play and relishing in the blues, browns, yellows and purples of corporeal graffiti aftermath was something we shared.

“I don’t care if you draw blood,” I assured her.

“Well ok then, you pathetic little slut,” she hissed, “lay the fuck down.”

I hadn’t fully anticipated how rapidly she would turn on the sadistic domme energy and I didn’t question it. I couldn’t.

Mmmmmmmmm, mama’s hungry, I thought as my crotch began to throb.

I don’t need to pull my punches, she thought, I can really indulge this deeper cruelty in me.

“Yes, mistress!” I responded, getting into role as the slut spit dump I’d soon become.

I lay down.

“Open wide, slut,” she ordered as she spat on my face, all the while positioning her mouth over mine and dribbling long translucent threads of drool onto my tongue and down my throat. She lunged for my neck with lupine grace and hunger, digging her teeth in and unleashing eddies of dopamine and oxytocin. I could feel the fledgling bruises on my neck and knew they’d be difficult to hide but at this point she could have pushed a blade into my lungs and I’d have kissed her while the blood bubbled out of my mouth.

These were feelings I had never felt before.

It was like all my shame, low self-esteem, trauma, alienation, anxiety and isolation channeled a lightning strike turning sand into clear shards of luminescent glass.

It felt both individual and collective, all ruptures and salvation of minority stressed gender fuckery, raining down and being soaked up. An effervescent tribal alchemy of ecstatic release.

The power of consensual degradation cannot be underestimated. I took years of being trodden down by things beyond my control. The abuse of my mother, the deprivation of affection, the laundering of all currencies of love through a front of cold calculation. All of this turned to steam through the act of my submitting to it with someone who also made me vibrate with light. All of those times when I had no fucking say in what happened to me, as humanity depriving as it was and violently unfair, I now took back. I resignified it, reclaimed it, decolonized and liberated it.

She attached the leash to my collar and yanked me onto the floor.

“If you’re a good girl, you’ll get a treat.” She said sternly, with the consummate control of a well-etched domme.

Up until now, she’d only really experimented with this role but now, she leapt up into the saddle ready for battle. From where I crouched, lapping up her girl dick with such an eagerness to please, it felt like she’d been doing this all her life.

In the dawn of her 20s, this girl came with a level of sexual confidence and experience that can only be found in trans circles. It’s like our bodies are always searching for each other with odyssean ardor. Simultaneous electrons suspended in tandem states.

I clambered back onto the bed like a dog and she straddled me, our girl dicks entwined in her hand with a vibrator in between. Edging, foreplay, the beautiful mirage of the female orgasm which rises and falls, ebbs and flows, coming into focus then going blurry as the mind and the body speaks in foreign tongues.

It was the kind of sex you never want to end. Constant punishment, submission, bratty deliberate misbehavior, retaliation, good behavior and treats.

“You told me you were going to cum you fucking whore. Well, are you?!” she cursed.

“Fuck my pussy, mistress. I need something in me so I can cum for you.”

One, two, then three fingers entered me as she celebrated my gaping hole.

“I love how loose you are.”

Ugh, I felt so seen. I’ve been trying to make my ass loose for years. It’s been one of my sexual north stars. I want to be able to get entire cities inside me. Until my neo-puzzy arrives, my ass has been my pussy substitute and I’ve wanted her to stretch until my bud becomes labia and turns from circle into that canal like corridor of floral ingress.

It didn’t take long, with my ass full of her hand, and I reached that liquidless trap climax and lay there panting, dripping in spit, sweat, and a sense of sexed gender euphoria I had waited 39 years to feel.

Who knew that in order to feel my most beautiful, it would take this level of degradation.

We languished, dripping in sweat and overtaken by an exhaustion which was held in abeyance by the relentless motor of sex.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to do that again,” I said, with the last remaining energy and breath left in me.

“We might not be able to. I’m probably moving to Berlin in a few weeks,” she responded with a signature level of matter-of-factness and regret.

Afterword

This is a post from Threads that resonated with me.

@aspirationaltea I think this post is me realizing T4T lesbian is the full explanation of my sexuality at least?

That’s how I walked away from the experience with Adeline. Literally and figuratively changed forever. In one fell swoop a single lover had the power to make me feel seen for the first time in my life.

Now of course any first time has the potential to carry the hyperbole of its impact. But the water that slacks the thirst of the desert stranded is the exact same water we all drink. The difference, however, is life saving.

I would usually chalk up an experience without more penetration as fun but not fulfilling. In this scene I had a few fingers inside me for a few minutes. And yet I lost all sense of time and place, sinking into the experience like feet in clittoral sand.

It was pure T4T lesbian sex, as much connection, edging and build as it was a wham bam teleology. The purpose was communion and connection.

T4T sex transfigures and transubstantiates the entire experience into a physical act. Inside every bite, kiss, spit, yank, finger and curse, was a microcosm of the entire experience of trans identity. Eucharist anointed trap fantasy.

Our shared struggles, estrogen shortages, dirty glances turned our way, rejections. Our alignments, the joyful tears t-girls shed over the smallest things as their emotional synapses reinitiate, our first sports bra. Everything is there, unspoken but enacted ritualistically like the world is burning all around us and we carry on regardless. Which is, alas, what it feels like a lot of the time.

At the core of the experience was the abiding sense of safety which comes from being intimate with someone who knows how important it is to cultivate that in as many spaces, few though they may be, as possible.

In addition, the dimension of kink/BDSM brings its own magnetic locus of individuation and resignification. We find submission, abjectification, degradation, and pain paired up with consent, control, compassion, negotiation, communication, and transcendence. We recontextualize experiences which in every other life domain are precursors or consequences of socially aberrant behavior or undesirable hierarchical role playing.

Whether the sub is in control or the dom is, just as with tops and bottoms, is a question for the ages. The person under the thumb, in so allowing it, arguably possesses some power over the person they artificially and consensually elevate to that position. When you have nothing to lose because you have relinquished it, you can only be net positive existentially.

The point is the horizontal socialism of the trans lesbian experience. No one person controls. All are equal and the roleplay is merely an enactment of the end of dominion by external forces.

For what baits the enemy like getting back on your feet or smiling in their face? As blood streams out of your nostrils and you turn to face your captor ready for another beating, you demonstrate an unwavering faith in the ultimate form of the Golden Rule: if your enemy strikes you, turn the other cheek and ask, “Have I been a good girl, Mistress?”

#trans nsft #transfem #t4t nsft #t4t

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akkivee · 23 days ago

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HOW ARE YOU WATCHING THE DIVISION FANMEETINGS I’m a hypster member so that’s not a problem I just get an error when I click on the link and I lowkey need to watch mtcs or I may pass away

lol i’ll apologise upfront about this ask, this one is a monster topic

ight so the fan meetings are actually not at all streamed on hypster!!!! all lives, stage plays, and most hypmic extra content are streamed on abema. the fan meetings cost like, ¥4400 a ticket and i think???? they take international credit cards???? idk about that one actually, i usually just buy tickets on my phone 😭😭😭

thing is tho, abema has probably one of, if not thee strictest region blocking system on the planet i feel lmao, like you can’t watch a lot of content on that site if you’re located anywhere outside of japan. which means you’re going to need a ✨vpn✨

i use two different methods of watching abema content and they both lead back to vpn gate!!!!

the landing page is important if you’re on mobile, but i’ll get to that later. what you need for pc is to go to the download link at the top of the site, and hit the first option

on the download page, download the first option

and install!!!!! or i think it’s run application after you extract the files lol

i highly recommend you follow the instructions on the site to get connected lol, but once you run the app, let it do its installation thing and once it’s done, let the program open up and it should look sumn like this

double click the option that’s boxed in the pic and it’ll bring up a BUNCH of vpns to use!!!! double click on any one that says japan, hit yes until it starts connecting and once it does, you’re in, you’ve done it, you’ve learned basic vpn connecting lmao

except i meant it when i said abema has the strictest region blocking on the planet 😌

a lot of the vpns on the app are pretty old, and the first couple dozen or so (they have the ip 219) are actually blocked by abema. the older the vpn, the more likely it will not work on abema. try to aim for any that’s been up for a few hours, two days at max and it should circumvent the block. the host tho may close the connection at any time so sometimes you may get disconnected mid stream (or that you’ve been relying on that one connection for a very long while only to discover you can’t connect anymore either bc of the host or abema themselves blocking the ip but i don’t think you’ll have to worry about this specific problem lol). if you get disconnected, just find a new one as quickly as you can so you don’t miss anything lol

if you’re on mobile, i can only help with iphone stuff!!! but you’ll need to have these things:

the openvpn app

the abema app

a jp itunes account LOL and jp itunes gift cards bc apple won’t let you add an international card iirc

the abema app is only available in jp itunes so if you don’t want to google how to make one real quick, feel free to stick to pc lol. but if you already have one download the two apps 😌

to run a vpn on your phone, i again recommend you follow the instructions on the site lmao (tho it was made using ios ‘old as dirt’ so the interface looks a liiiittle outdated lol. should be the same tho) but go back to the previously linked landing page and click on the link in the boxed section of your chosen vpn

on that page, there’s typically four links; you’ll want to choose either of the bottom two, but i’ve found tcp links works more frequently. click the link and it’ll download the file. once it’s downloaded, pull it up and it should offer to open via openvpn. the app will redirect you to a tab that looks like this in the app

hit add, then hit connect, and it’ll go back to the connections tab in app and start connecting. if it connects, it’ll be all green and you’re good to go!!!!

more times than not tho, it’ll fail LOL just repeat the steps until you find one that works 😭😭😭

my hot vee tip is that sometimes when you’re connected, videos might pause mid connection. idk what’s causing it, but my gut says it’s likely bc of the ping you see in the line quality section (or the ping section on pc). go for a high mbps and very low ping if possible for less interruptions on both pc and mobile!!!!

that’s all i got for ya lol good luck i’m sorry we have to fight everyday to enjoy and support this fcking franchise ✌️

#vee got an ask #this ask might self destruct in a day or two idk #it’s not like abema doesn’t know about it since they block ips all the time #but still i hate exposing access to stuff lol like what if they know how to block all of them but just don’t know the site lol????#i’m always fearful of that 😭😭😭😭😭😭#but it is a struggle to stay in the know in this franchise lol #like i think a sizeable reason i’m so attached to hypmic is actually the stolkholm syndrome from trying to keep up with it 😃😃😃

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