#single point of failure

[itsusernotfound]

Greeeaaat.

[inkskinned]

the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Unpersoned

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Unpersoned." It's about the implications of putting critical infrastructure into the private, unaccountable hands of tech giants:

https://locusmag.com/2024/07/cory-doctorow-unpersoned/

The column opens with the story of romance writer K Renee, as reported by Madeline Ashby for Wired:

https://www.wired.com/story/what-happens-when-a-romance-author-gets-locked-out-of-google-docs/

Renee is a prolific writer who used Google Docs to compose her books, and share them among early readers for feedback and revisions. Last March, Renee's Google account was locked, and she was no longer able to access ten manuscripts for her unfinished books, totaling over 220,000 words. Google's famously opaque customer service – a mix of indifferently monitored forums, AI chatbots, and buck-passing subcontractors – would not explain to her what rule she had violated, merely that her work had been deemed "inappropriate."

Renee discovered that she wasn't being singled out. Many of her peers had also seen their accounts frozen and their documents locked, and none of them were able to get an explanation out of Google. Renee and her similarly situated victims of Google lockouts were reduced to developing folk-theories of what they had done to be expelled from Google's walled garden; Renee came to believe that she had tripped an anti-spam system by inviting her community of early readers to access the books she was working on.

There's a normal way that these stories resolve themselves: a reporter like Ashby, writing for a widely read publication like Wired, contacts the company and triggers a review by one of the vanishingly small number of people with the authority to undo the determinations of the Kafka-as-a-service systems that underpin the big platforms. The system's victim gets their data back and the company mouths a few empty phrases about how they take something-or-other "very seriously" and so forth.

But in this case, Google broke the script. When Ashby contacted Google about Renee's situation, Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson insisted that the policies for Google accounts were "clear": "we may review and take action on any content that violates our policies." If Renee believed that she'd been wrongly flagged, she could "request an appeal."

But Renee didn't even know what policy she was meant to have broken, and the "appeals" went nowhere.

This is an underappreciated aspect of "software as a service" and "the cloud." As companies from Microsoft to Adobe to Google withdraw the option to use software that runs on your own computer to create files that live on that computer, control over our own lives is quietly slipping away. Sure, it's great to have all your legal documents scanned, encrypted and hosted on GDrive, where they can't be burned up in a house-fire. But if a Google subcontractor decides you've broken some unwritten rule, you can lose access to those docs forever, without appeal or recourse.

That's what happened to "Mark," a San Francisco tech workers whose toddler developed a UTI during the early covid lockdowns. The pediatrician's office told Mark to take a picture of his son's infected penis and transmit it to the practice using a secure medical app. However, Mark's phone was also set up to synch all his pictures to Google Photos (this is a default setting), and when the picture of Mark's son's penis hit Google's cloud, it was automatically scanned and flagged as Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM, better known as "child porn"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches

Without contacting Mark, Google sent a copy of all of his data – searches, emails, photos, cloud files, location history and more – to the SFPD, and then terminated his account. Mark lost his phone number (he was a Google Fi customer), his email archives, all the household and professional files he kept on GDrive, his stored passwords, his two-factor authentication via Google Authenticator, and every photo he'd ever taken of his young son.

The SFPD concluded that Mark hadn't done anything wrong, but it was too late. Google had permanently deleted all of Mark's data. The SFPD had to mail a physical letter to Mark telling him he wasn't in trouble, because he had no email and no phone.

Mark's not the only person this happened to. Writing about Mark for the New York Times, Kashmir Hill described other parents, like a Houston father identified as "Cassio," who also lost their accounts and found themselves blocked from fundamental participation in modern life:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

Note that in none of these cases did the problem arise from the fact that Google services are advertising-supported, and because these people weren't paying for the product, they were the product. Buying a $800 Pixel phone or paying more than $100/year for a Google Drive account means that you're definitely paying for the product, and you're still the product.

What do we do about this? One answer would be to force the platforms to provide service to users who, in their judgment, might be engaged in fraud, or trafficking in CSAM, or arranging terrorist attacks. This is not my preferred solution, for reasons that I hope are obvious!

We can try to improve the decision-making processes at these giant platforms so that they catch fewer dolphins in their tuna-nets. The "first wave" of content moderation appeals focused on the establishment of oversight and review boards that wronged users could appeal their cases to. The idea was to establish these "paradigm cases" that would clarify the tricky aspects of content moderation decisions, like whether uploading a Nazi atrocity video in order to criticize it violated a rule against showing gore, Nazi paraphernalia, etc.

This hasn't worked very well. A proposal for "second wave" moderation oversight based on arms-length semi-employees at the platforms who gather and report statistics on moderation calls and complaints hasn't gelled either:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/12/move-slow-and-fix-things/#second-wave

Both the EU and California have privacy rules that allow users to demand their data back from platforms, but neither has proven very useful (yet) in situations where users have their accounts terminated because they are accused of committing gross violations of platform policy. You can see why this would be: if someone is accused of trafficking in child porn or running a pig-butchering scam, it would be perverse to shut down their account but give them all the data they need to go one committing these crimes elsewhere.

But even where you can invoke the EU's GDPR or California's CCPA to get your data, the platforms deliver that data in the most useless, complex blobs imaginable. For example, I recently used the CCPA to force Mailchimp to give me all the data they held on me. Mailchimp – a division of the monopolist and serial fraudster Intuit – is a favored platform for spammers, and I have been added to thousands of Mailchimp lists that bombard me with unsolicited press pitches and come-ons for scam products.

Mailchimp has spent a decade ignoring calls to allow users to see what mailing lists they've been added to, as a prelude to mass unsubscribing from those lists (for Mailchimp, the fact that spammers can pay it to send spam that users can't easily opt out of is a feature, not a bug). I thought that the CCPA might finally let me see the lists I'm on, but instead, Mailchimp sent me more than 5900 files, scattered through which were the internal serial numbers of the lists my name had been added to – but without the names of those lists any contact information for their owners. I can see that I'm on more than 1,000 mailing lists, but I can't do anything about it.

Mailchimp shows how a rule requiring platforms to furnish data-dumps can be easily subverted, and its conduct goes a long way to explaining why a decade of EU policy requiring these dumps has failed to make a dent in the market power of the Big Tech platforms.

The EU has a new solution to this problem. With its 2024 Digital Markets Act, the EU is requiring platforms to furnish APIs – programmatic ways for rivals to connect to their services. With the DMA, we might finally get something parallel to the cellular industry's "number portability" for other kinds of platforms.

If you've ever changed cellular platforms, you know how smooth this can be. When you get sick of your carrier, you set up an account with a new one and get a one-time code. Then you call your old carrier, endure their pathetic begging not to switch, give them that number and within a short time (sometimes only minutes), your phone is now on the new carrier's network, with your old phone-number intact.

This is a much better answer than forcing platforms to provide service to users whom they judge to be criminals or otherwise undesirable, but the platforms hate it. They say they hate it because it makes them complicit in crimes ("if we have to let an accused fraudster transfer their address book to a rival service, we abet the fraud"), but it's obvious that their objection is really about being forced to reduce the pain of switching to a rival.

There's a superficial reasonableness to the platforms' position, but only until you think about Mark, or K Renee, or the other people who've been "unpersonned" by the platforms with no explanation or appeal.

The platforms have rigged things so that you must have an account with them in order to function, but they also want to have the unilateral right to kick people off their systems. The combination of these demands represents more power than any company should have, and Big Tech has repeatedly demonstrated its unfitness to wield this kind of power.

This week, I lost an argument with my accountants about this. They provide me with my tax forms as links to a Microsoft Cloud file, and I need to have a Microsoft login in order to retrieve these files. This policy – and a prohibition on sending customer files as email attachments – came from their IT team, and it was in response to a requirement imposed by their insurer.

The problem here isn't merely that I must now enter into a contractual arrangement with Microsoft in order to do my taxes. It isn't just that Microsoft's terms of service are ghastly. It's not even that they could change those terms at any time, for example, to ingest my sensitive tax documents in order to train a large language model.

It's that Microsoft – like Google, Apple, Facebook and the other giants – routinely disconnects users for reasons it refuses to explain, and offers no meaningful appeal. Microsoft tells its business customers, "force your clients to get a Microsoft account in order to maintain communications security" but also reserves the right to unilaterally ban those clients from having a Microsoft account.

There are examples of this all over. Google recently flipped a switch so that you can't complete a Google Form without being logged into a Google account. Now, my ability to purse all kinds of matters both consequential and trivial turn on Google's good graces, which can change suddenly and arbitrarily. If I was like Mark, permanently banned from Google, I wouldn't have been able to complete Google Forms this week telling a conference organizer what sized t-shirt I wear, but also telling a friend that I could attend their wedding.

Now, perhaps some people really should be locked out of digital life. Maybe people who traffick in CSAM should be locked out of the cloud. But the entity that should make that determination is a court, not a Big Tech content moderator. It's fine for a platform to decide it doesn't want your business – but it shouldn't be up to the platform to decide that no one should be able to provide you with service.

This is especially salient in light of the chaos caused by Crowdstrike's catastrophic software update last week. Crowdstrike demonstrated what happens to users when a cloud provider accidentally terminates their account, but while we're thinking about reducing the likelihood of such accidents, we should really be thinking about what happens when you get Crowdstruck on purpose.

The wholesale chaos that Windows users and their clients, employees, users and stakeholders underwent last week could have been pieced out retail. It could have come as a court order (either by a US court or a foreign court) to disconnect a user and/or brick their computer. It could have come as an insider attack, undertaken by a vengeful employee, or one who was on the take from criminals or a foreign government. The ability to give anyone in the world a Blue Screen of Death could be a feature and not a bug.

It's not that companies are sadistic. When they mistreat us, it's nothing personal. They've just calculated that it would cost them more to run a good process than our business is worth to them. If they know we can't leave for a competitor, if they know we can't sue them, if they know that a tech rival can't give us a tool to get our data out of their silos, then the expected cost of mistreating us goes down. That makes it economically rational to seek out ever-more trivial sources of income that impose ever-more miserable conditions on us. When we can't leave without paying a very steep price, there's practically a fiduciary duty to find ways to upcharge, downgrade, scam, screw and enshittify us, right up to the point where we're so pissed that we quit.

Google could pay competent decision-makers to review every complaint about an account disconnection, but the cost of employing that large, skilled workforce vastly exceeds their expected lifetime revenue from a user like Mark. The fact that this results in the ruination of Mark's life isn't Google's problem – it's Mark's problem.

The cloud is many things, but most of all, it's a trap. When software is delivered as a service, when your data and the programs you use to read and write it live on computers that you don't control, your switching costs skyrocket. Think of Adobe, which no longer lets you buy programs at all, but instead insists that you run its software via the cloud. Adobe used the fact that you no longer own the tools you rely upon to cancel its Pantone color-matching license. One day, every Adobe customer in the world woke up to discover that the colors in their career-spanning file collections had all turned black, and would remain black until they paid an upcharge:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

The cloud allows the companies whose products you rely on to alter the functioning and cost of those products unilaterally. Like mobile apps – which can't be reverse-engineered and modified without risking legal liability – cloud apps are built for enshittification. They are designed to shift power away from users to software companies. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it. A cloud app is some Javascript wrapped in enough terms of service clickthroughs to make it a felony to restore old features that the company now wants to upcharge you for.

Google's defenstration of K Renee, Mark and Cassio may have been accidental, but Google's capacity to defenstrate all of us, and the enormous cost we all bear if Google does so, has been carefully engineered into the system. Same goes for Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and anyone else who traps us in their silos. The lesson of the Crowdstrike catastrophe isn't merely that our IT systems are brittle and riddled with single points of failure: it's that these failure-points can be tripped deliberately, and that doing so could be in a company's best interests, no matter how devastating it would be to you or me.

If you'd like an e ssay-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/2024/07/22/degoogled/#kafka-as-a-service

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

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

[marxalittle]

That diagram of all the places a plane can get shot and still make it back. Infrastructure is invisible until it breaks, and everyone just assumes that when it doesn't break, it's because it was never going to. This is the same thinking that leads you to stop taking your meds because you feel better. Idiots.

In 97 I was the baby face in the Y2K Management Planning Team at the local authority where I worked. I was the pleb on the team who actually "did stuff" and could therefore give input about what required IT and what didn't and what we could if it all fell over on midnight 31st, December, 1999.

In reality nothing happened because the worlds' IT specialists en masse worked their arses off to protect us.

And it worked. They solved a problem that could even then have brought so much to a grinding halt.

And got zero fucking thanks for it really.

Accused of making a mountain of a molehill when in reality they moved the entire mountain, teaspoon by teaspoon.

I just hope yesterday reminds the fuckwits in charge to do as their predecessors did and put fail safes, mechanical overrides and contingency plans in place for the day the IT doesn't fucking work so that next time they don't get smacked in the dick because they are overly reliant on Microsoft systems for everything from opening their fridge to running hospitals.

[mumblesplash]

still fully cannot comprehend haters of fictional misunderstandings. i love that shit so much it makes me look stupid. i will read fics about tropes i can’t stand in fandoms i’ve never even heard of just to see some guys with the combined emotional intelligence of a rock fuck up a conversation so bad they wish they were dead

[radiance1]

Little Burning Spice Cookie rant thing.

So, I've seen a bit about people thinking that Burning Spice Cookie's reason for going rouge was kind of... Not it, really? Which is fine and dandy, their opinion an all.

But to me, I think it's a pretty solid reason for Burning Spice Cookie and like... Characters like him, I suppose?

Okay so, Burning Spice Cookie held the Light of Change before it was taken from him and he was imprisoned and, like the other 4 Beasts before their fall, they represented and were practically the physical embodiments of those concepts (I think.)

To be honest, out of each of the Beasts I genuinely think that Burning Spice Cookie's concept was the most ironic, and the one most prone to, well, 'failure' for a lack of a better word.

(Though if I'm wrong, lemme know.)

Knowledge, Volition, Happiness, and Solidarity are all concepts that are prone to change.

Knowledge. Pretty self-explanatory, with anything new that is discovered, or prior knowledge viewed from a different angle, then that knowledge in itself would change.

Volition. Kind of difficult for me to explain but like, one's willpower could either crumble and fade or hardened and become stronger than ever. You could remain true to your own will, or submit to another's. Thus, change.

Happiness. Anything can make it happen, across various individuals the same or something different can make them happy. Or, the opposite, what once made them happy no longer does, thus changing.

Solidarity. People can no long believe in the same thing, what once brought them together in unity could no longer be enough to uphold it. A common interest that they no longer support, thus changing their views on the subject and no longer being in solidarity with others.

To me, all of the other Beasts before the fall where capable of changing, as the concepts they were meant to embody were all given the range to.

Except, Burning Spice Cookie.

He was the only one, the only Beast, that was supposed to be unchanging. Despite his very concept being that of change. Ironically, Burning Spice Cookie would have been the only one who was to remain steadfast, unchanging throughout history entirely despite everything else changing around him.

Stagnant.

The pure opposite of what he meant, made to embody.

So, of course, he got bored.

Burning Spice Cookie, despite representing change, was stagnant. Meant to always be stagnant if the Light of Change was always to remain true, to shine its light upon him and the entire world.

I do believe his boredom ran a bit deeper than surface level. As he did say in Episode 6:

"All this Change, and yet it's never changing."

Which, really, just supports my point that Burning Spice Cookie, the representation of Change itself. Was stagnant and unchanging despite change happening all around him.

So, when he was given the opportunity to Change. To no longer remain stagnant. I think it would have been expected that he would take it.

Burning Spice Cookie was baked to be a hero, a God-Like virtue that would be a beacon among Cookie Kind along with four others. To protect and allow them change, civilizations to rise and fall and yet, he, himself, would remain unchanging, should remain unchanging if his purpose was to be realized.

That, is why, I believe that Burning Spice Cookie, or any other Cookie baked to hold the Light of Change, was and would be doomed to fall. To fail.

[psychoticallytrans]

There are three main models of disability that are in common use. The moral model, the medical model, and the social model.

You may not have heard of the moral model before, but if you are disabled, you have felt the impact of it. The moral model is disability as a failure of character. It sources the problem of disability in the character of the disabled person. It's the people who insist that if you just tried harder, were better, had a better attitude, that you would no longer be disabled. It is a model that is used by ableists in order to conceptualize of disability as a failing of the individual. An extreme example of this mindset are the Christian Scientists, who believe that all illnesses and disabilities should be healed by the grace of their god and that if you are not healed, something is wrong with you. It is the the most cruel of the models, and the least successful at assisting disabled people.

The medical model is the model used by the medical establishment and by those who put their stock in medical authority. It sources the problem of disability in the body. It measures disability against a theoretical average person, and seeks to make disabled people match that average person more closely. This model works very well for disabled people with disabilities that can be measured, have a potential treatment plan, and want their disability gone. It does not work very well for people who do not match all three criteria. If they match the first and second but not the third, then strict adherents of the medical model often fall back on the moral model, stating that they are stupid, lazy, or selfish for not being interested in being cured. This also often happens if treatment fails to improve the condition of the disabled person.

The social model is a newer model, largely designed by disability activists and scholars and often defined in opposition to the medical model. It sources the problem of disability in the interaction between the disabled person and their physical and social environment. It argues that the solution of disability is to change the environment so that impairments are no longer an issue. This model works very well for disabled people who consider their disability not to be an issue when fully accommodated. It does not work well for people who consider their disability an inherent impairment and/or desire a cure. Strict adherents of the social model often fall back on the moral model when considering these people, stating that they are short-sighted or that they worship the medical model. These are the people who state things such as that depression would not exist in a world without capitalism.

When a disabled person fails to behave as expected by the model a person has of disability, the moral model is almost always the fallback position, because many people cannot conceive of why someone would disagree with them other than a lack of good character. This is a problem, because the moral model proposes no solution but to ignore or abuse the disabled person until they behave as expected.

Another notable interaction is that adherents of the medical model can often be persuaded to support the more traditional parts of the social model, such as providing large text resources to people with impaired vision, so long as there is empirical research backing it. However, they rarely support more radical arguments that challenge how we define disability and how society should be structured or restructured.

All three models have major failure points. The moral model fails every disabled person it is applied to. The medical and social models both fail different disabled people when adhered to strictly. The best approach at the moment seems to be hybridizing the social and medical models, so that they cover each other's weak points and fit the needs of the widest spectrum of disabled people. The main barrier to this is that they are often defined in opposition to each other.

[lost-carcosa]

Crash test of a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk.

[techmomma]

Oh! In addition to the charging station being down, my phone might be kaput!

Y'know what you need to find (and usually USE) other charging stations? A phone! With an online map! Because finding a new fucking charging station is a reverse russian roulette, where most of the chambers suck and only one out of so many won't kill you!

You know what you can't do when you're low on charge? Go driving around, wasting your charge trying to find a different station to charge at! Because if my car fully loses charge while I'm out on the road, then I gotta call a towtruck! Those ain't cheap!

The best analogy for gas cars is imagine you have a car that can hold about 10 miles of gas. It sucks, but so long as there's a gas station, it's fine. It's special gas that's about .10/gallon so who cares.

Your car needs a specific kind of nozzle to fill your tank. Not every gas station has your nozzle!

In theory, there's about 12 different gas stations every couple of miles. Great!

The reality is 11 of those 12 gas stations don't work. They're broken, they're shut down, they've been decomissioned, and sure, there is an app that can tell you, but has the station been updated in the app? No! So generally, you won't know which ones do and don't work, until you get there! (On your limited amount of gas, as a reminder.)

So, really, on your ten-mile tank, you have... like 2 gas stations that you can go to. Within 10 miles.

And for one of them, it means sitting in their parking lot for 2 hours.

Now the good news is you found a gas station within walking distance of your house. It's a 2-hour station, but since it's within walking distance, you can park your car, go home and hang out for 2 hours, and then go grab your car. Not ideal, but it works.

Today though, that gas station is down. You have no idea when it'll be back up. Maybe it'll be back up today! Maybe a week from now! Maybe the gas company will decide it doesn't care and will just leave it broken forever! Who knows~ But it's down and you've got about 2 or 3 miles in your gas tank left. Do you want to risk wasting those 2 or 3 miles you have left in your tank trying to find a station that works?

And all of these gas stations are moving to solely paying by phone. One of them might take card! Hope it's one that works!

So you need your phone to pay for gas. Your phone that is currently, probably dead and probably needs to be replaced.

So uh. Hey. If you have some money to spare. I might need some to buy a new phone. So. If you want to throw anything my way, I have a paypal. If you would like to toss some monies my way for the inevitable phone replacement I am going to have to make. And loss of income for today because I can't go to work today.

[swagging-back-to]

"A British retrospective prevalence study of 2669 young adults aged 18-24 (May-Chahal & Cawson, 2005) found that mothers were more likely than fathers to be responsible for physical abuse 49 per cent of incidents compared to 40 per cent).” "Other sites that are trying to raise awareness in this area will bombard you with statistics. Breaking the silence, for instance, says 71 per cent of children killed by one parent are killed by their mothers, 60 per cent of those victims are boys."

this is exactly why radblr needs to be talking more about female-on-female abuse and abusive mothers as a whole.

so many women on radblr have this 'women can do no wrong' mindset and will blatantly defend women killing random children and people for no reason.

'it's always the women choice' is a real talking point another radfem has tried to use against me when i was talking about a woman who murdered her 5yo step son and immediately gave birth to another child.

no; women are not raping, oppressing, and murdering people en masse. but women absolutely can do harm. women can be just as evil as males. women can commit crimes.

acting like they cant does nothing but harm other women and make people look at radblr like a delusional cult.

[phonification]

every time i think a bit more about cobs and 3gs i can feel myself losing it a little bit more

[crowrelli]

.

[achrilock-aether]

[…] “Musk began quietly subsidizing right-wing political organizations two years ago and only endorsed Trump in July. As a political player with practically unlimited resources and media influence, he’s just beginning to flex his influence. He may be a relative novice in this kind of political arena, but the people he deals with are not. And Putin, an experienced practitioner, seems to be getting something for his efforts.”

[study-core-101]

ONE (1) SINGLE POINT FROM GETTING A C1 CERTIFICATE??????

[blizardstar]

Dispite my best efforts I simply cannot stop thinking of the implications on the larger The Lion King canon of various sources that Mufasa has (a movie I have not seen and refuse to)

[rpfisfine]

im so pissed off i had planned to spend at least half a day in prague yesterday but i ended up being there for only like 10 minutes bc we had to wait like 2 hours for the guy selling the car in this piece of shit small town a couple of kilometers away from prague who then turned out to be a complete scumbag asshole bc he had lied abt the car being in tip top condition when actually almost every single moving part of the vehicle was in a horrible nearly falling-apart shape so then after telling him to fuck off my dad had to strike a deal with a different guy (who coincidentally and unbelievably was selling the exact same make and model of a car in the exact same town) which means my mom and i had to spend another hour or so waiting out in the insane cold in the town square which means i have a slight temperature and feel like shit rn