#me right now in poland

[peridots-pixiwolf]

[Start ID. A dark, warm-toned drawing of Tundra, a robot with bladed legs and mechanical hands both lightened by frost, and a face like that of a fencing mask. She wears a blue jacket with a fluffy white ruff and pockets on the shoulders and chest, a long green skirt with tassels and pale wavy lines at the border, and a brown belt with a pouch at the side. She's shown from the right, leaning back on a stack of pillows and a wooden wall as she looks out to the left, disregarding the open book in her hand, her legs bent in front of her. Under her is a yellow and red rug which pads gritty flooring, over her are series of low, round string lights, providing soft lighting in a room that's partially open to the night sky.]

it's a friend's birthday today yet again... in honor of the occasion here's a Tundra for @automatonknight :]

[mango-ti]

All the amazing deals that Americans are getting on mh dolls right now on black week on Amazon make me so fucking jealous, like y'all are getting like 50% off on so many dolls, meanwhile the only thing with a discount in Poland is the Clawdeen bedroom playset god fucking damnit

[council-of-beetroot]

i know the prupol appeal is toxic yuri but do they perhaps like to,,,, cuddle sometimes? do u think one of them is particularly more cuddly than the other?

Feliks is like a mold in that he will latch himself onto anything and you can't get rid of him. Gil isn't excluded from this.

Also Feliks is kinda like a disgruntled cat in that sense where Gil can just be like "hey bitch you're mine, you can't escape my loving embrace." Then Feliks is like "wtf" but then like won't leave for a couple hours.

[fernlessbastard]

thank you fernless bastard for love perservering. good work you do here. really solid work. phenomenal artstyle and presence. can always count on you to give me back the feeling i got when i saw c!tntduo for the first time in 2021. please never stop

FUCK YEAH I'M CRINGE

(this is genuinely /pos, i aspire to be cringe and free and just draw/write about silly little gay people who refuse to admit they love each other more than they thought was possible)

Anyway you'll have to pry the pencil from my cold dead hands to make me stop. I don't think you guys realise: I've spent like 3 full years during a pretty formative period in human development hyperfixated on those two, and I share this specific mental illness (/j) with the love of my life and we constantly rile each other up. This obsession isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Tldr I'm happy you enjoy my art :]]

[worm-priest]

I feel torn and indecisive whether I should watch love in the big city right when it comes out to support it or if I should wait a little bit and hope that the book will get a bit more accessible for me because I actually feel like it would be better to read the book first 🤔

[pardonmydelays]

my top 5 artists this month are twenty one pilots, imagine dragons, ghost quartet, gracie abrams and dave malloy... interesting

[polish-nt-gifs]

[flores-desyatov]

Re: B/V getting a 3rd international. I think they definitely get a bye if they go to Denis Ten and SKAM. Then they’d only need one other Challenger and there are plenty of other late Challengers - Warsaw, Tallin, Zagreb

Sadly, Vanya can't go to Estonia or Poland at the moment (visa issues) and Golden Spin doesn't count for a bye.

More info here.

[aurora-van-van-vana]

you ever just. make art your not okay with? like, sure that’s cool bro but also man, maybe I should just not try something new today. i’m good at the other stuff. i will try more later. but for now, maybe don’t. guys don’t draw poland—

[arrgh-even-more-whatever]

mar gave me her eyeliner so today i'm emo

(realized that i could add these earrings but it's too late now 😔)

[gosoldier]

i should be allowed to own you.

[roguegona]

Reblogging for all those who think they're taking the moral high ground by withholding their vote this November to protest Biden.

Spoiler alert: the only person you're hurting is yourself and every single other marginalized group. You might as well vote for the fascist. That high ground won't seem so high when we're all rounded up and throw into camps.

Or worse.

I know the US government acts like a corporation but it’s not.

Not voting isn’t the same as a boycott. Because you can’t bankrupt a government by not voting. All you get by not voting is less control over what the money is doing.

The money comes from taxes, not voting. Abstaining from voting does nothing to reduce the governments ability to get money and spend it on shit.

So yes, sometimes you vote to reduce harm because not voting WILL NOT REDUCE HARM.

It’s not a boycot. Abstaining doesn’t take power from the government. It just reduces the number of people they feel answerable to.

[kindaeccentric]

How do you guys find jobs, I feel like I'm entirely useless and have no skills and a bachelor's in English is giving me jack shit in terms of prospects

[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/

[pardonmydelays]

my sister just told me she sent me something for my birthday and i genuinely started crying, i miss her so much sometimes

[aroacedavestrider]

oh no no motherfucker you dont get the last word. my post. i do. you pissed me off and now im gonna put down in detail everything that is wrong with you. are you ready? ohhh i dont give a shit!!! here we go!!!

firstly: nitpicking a three sentence post head ass. i wrote the post. i never intended for it to blow up. im op and i know what i meant. mental illness in and of itself is long term and i dont give a fuck whether you can fully recover or not. no matter how many stupid little *~+~*>£~idiot stars~¥*=*~* you put around your words to emphasize your sarcasm the fact of the matter is Yeah. Actually Sometimes You CANT Recover.

secondly im glad to know youre not interested in what anybody disabled has to say because im 100% certain nobody disabled mentally or otherwise is interested in what YOU have to say either, aside from laughing at how utterly fucking tone deaf you are. ohhhgh you Know Better than all us Crazy Idiot Short Bus Nutcases huh? nothing we say matters INHERENTLY because “we could always be trying harder NOT to be Crazy Idiot Short Bus Nutcases” huh? EVEN if we (your own wording)

“cant ever be completely treated” we could always spend our WHOLE LIVES trying to just do a LITTLE more because we all know the closer you are to neurotypical the more youre worth as a person, right?

thirdly. recovery from ANYTHING was NEVER even the point.

the POINT of the post is that (REGARDLESS OF AILMENT), saying that shit to anybody is

FUCKING RUDE.

and arguing that Actually WE are the problem because We Arent Trying Hard Enough is

ABLEIST.

and FOURTHLY, it is ALSO rude (and ableist!) as *•+^~~<FUCK<^*^•~* to act like our self-acceptance and self-worth is a PROBLEM that needs FIXING. like neurodiverse and mentally disabled people are WRONG for finding happiness in themselves. that we NEED to exert MORE time and MORE effort into fighting a losing war with our conditions rather than accept it, MANAGE IT AS BEST WE CAN, and live HAPPILY with it. i recall noting that before i came to terms with myself i was SUICIDAL? is that what youre looking for? would you rather me and everyone else be like that instead???

how Fucking Dare You call the way i live, the way i and millions of other people HAVE to live, a performance. i did not bust my ass for nearly a decade (UNMEDICATED) trying to figure out how to like myself enough not to kill myself just for your goofy ass to tell me IM NOT DOING ENOUGH.

I DID NOT SURVIVE THIS LONG JUST TO BE TOLD TO OUTTHINK IT.

THATS THE POINT OF THE POST.

disabled + neurodiverse people i love you. we deserve respect. we deserve pride. stay epic.

people will hear you talk about struggling with mental illness and say “you can do anything if you just put your mind to it”. brother what part of the body does the mental illness happen in. what do you think is the problem