So my sister wants to start sewing more, because

a. She’s 5′ 11″ and can never find pants long enough for her legs or shirts long enough for her arms.

b. She hates synthetic fibers as much as I do and it’s difficult to find natural fiber clothes that aren’t made of cotton

c. She’s a biologist and would physically fistfight microplastics if given half a chance

So her gift from mom and dad for her birthday was a sewing machine. Not a super expensive one but a good solid serviceable one.

And recently she asked “So where do I GET wool or linen and thread that isn’t polyester” and mom was like ‘go ask your sister’

And I, of course, crashed into the group text like “GET A PEN I HAVE WEBSITES FOR U” and honestly I’m thrilled about this

“Where did u get all this”

“Bets, u know I’m a 15th degree blackbelt of buying shit on the internet”

“oh yeah tru”

Op can may we inquire about the website list

Linen; https://www.graylinelinen.com/

cotton and Silk thread; https://redrockthreads.com/

Linen thread and wool fabric; https://burnleyandtrowbridge.com/ (they’ve got wool stuffs and worsted wool fabric for $15 a yard! I just got three yards of navy worsted wool I’m making a constellation winter skirt from)

More linen thread and wool; https://wmboothdraper.com/ (just ordered wool broadcloth to make a coat)

Silk fabric (THE best place to get silk lining fabrics and raw silk fabric):https://www.dharmatrading.com/

A varying assortment of wool and silk and cotton and even some leather, use coupon code  spring2020 for 50% off your full order, worked yesterday when I bought some stuff there; https://metrotextilesnyc.com/

Wool. You want wool coating for under $20 a yard? Sure you do. It’s here. Not a huge variety of colors, most are black or brown, but hey https://www.fashionfabricsclub.com/Catalog?refinementIds=4096748&Keyword=wool&pageSize=16

I don’t know a lot about sewing, but I want to make or have my mom make some linen pants & shirts for when I’m watering, because it gets to 105 here and we have mosquitos so I need to be covered. What type of linen do I buy? Also, linen pajama shorts, yes/no?

(I’ve been wearing my renfaire pants which are a linen mix, I think. But the frikking mosquitos that hide in the tomatoes get my arms)

Medium weight is what I’d go with.

And linen pajama shorts is a HARD yes.

Renaissance Fabrics is good for all sorts of things

Mood doesn’t specialize in natural fabrics but they do have basically every fabric ever made so

For wools, I cannot recommend Woolsome enough! They’re a bit more expensive then the above links, but they have a spectacular range of colours and weights, as well as diamond pattern and herringbone weaves. They also have a range of linens, though not as extensive.

Tiedtohistory.com has sheer voile linen

The Linen Lab has a variety of weaves, weights, and colors available

Period Fabric has a variety of wools, but switch to the full website if you’re on mobile

some important calvin and hobbes facts in case you haven't read the original comic strip in a long time or only absorbed stuff on it from memes and out of context bits on here:

So You've Finally Switched to Firefox: a Brief Guide to a Some Very Useful Add-Ons.

This post is inspired by two things, the first being the announcement by Google that the long delayed Manifest V3 which will kill robust adblocking will finally roll out in June 2024, and the second, a post written by @sexhaver in response to a question as to what adblockers and extensions they use. It's a very good post with some A+ information, worth checking out.

I love Firefox, I love the degree of customization it offers me as a user. I love how it just works. I love the built in security features like DNS over HTTPS, and I love just how many excellent add-ons are available. It is a better browser than Chrome in every respect, and of the many Chromium based browsers out there, only Vivaldi comes close.

There are probably many people out there who are considering switching over to Firefox but are maybe putting it off because they've got Chrome set up the way they like it with the extensions they want, and doing all that again for Firefox seems like a chore. The Firefox Add-on directory is less expansive than the Chrome Web Store (which in recent years has become overrun with garbage extensions that range from useless to active malware), but there is still a lot of stuff to sift through. That's where this short guide comes in.

I'm presently running 33 add-ons for Firefox and have a number of others installed but disabled. I've used many others. These are my picks, the ones that I consider essential, useful, or in some cases just fun.

Adblocking/Privacy/Security:

uBlock Origin: The single best adblocker available. If you're a power user there are custom lists and scripts you can find to augment it.

Privacy Badger: Not strictly necessary if you're also running uBlock, but it does catch a few trackers uBlock doesn't and replaces potentially useful trackers like comment boxes with click-to-activate placeholders.

Decentraleyes: A supplementary tool meant to run alongside uBlock, prevents certain sites from breaking when tracker requests are denied by serving local bundled files as replacement.

NoScript: The nuclear option for blocking trackers, ads, and even individual elements. Operates from a "trust no one" standpoint, you will need to manually enable elements yourself. Not recommended for casual users, but a fantastic tool for the power user.

Webmail Ad Blocker: The first of many webmail related add-ons from Jason Saward I will be recommending. Removes all advertising from webmail services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Popup Blocker (Strict): Strictly blocks ALL pop up/new tab/new window requests from all website by default unless you manually allow it.

SponsorBlock: Not a fan of listening to your favourite YouTuber read advertisements for shitty products like Raycons or BetterHelp? This skips them automatically.

AdNauseam: I don't use this one but some people prefer it. Rather than straight up blocking ads and trackers, it obfuscates data by injecting noise into the tracker surveillance infrastructure. It clicks EVERY ad, making your data profile incomprehensible.

User-Agent Switcher: Allows you to spoof websites attempting to gather information by altering your browser profile. Want to browse mobile sites on desktop? This allows you to do it.

Bitwarden: Bitwarden has been my choice of password manager since LastPass sold out and made their free tier useless. If you're not using a password manager, why not? All of my passwords look like this: $NHhaduC*q3VhuhD&scICLKjvM4rZK5^c7ID%q5HVJ3@gny I don't know a single one of them and I use a passphrase as a master password supplemented by two-factor-authentication. Everything is filled in automatically. It is the only way to live.

Proton Pass: An open source free password manager from the creators of Proton Mail. I've been considering moving over to it from Bitwarden myself.

Webmail/Google Drive:

Checker Plus for Gmail: Provides desktop notifications for Gmail accounts, supports managing multiple accounts, allows you to check your mail, read, mark as read or delete e-mails at a glance in a pop-up window. An absolutely fabulous add-on from Jason Saward.

Checker Plus for Google Drive: Does for your Google Drive what Checker Plus for Gmail does for your Gmail.

Checker Plus for Google Calendar: The same as the above two only this time for your Google Calendar.

Firefox Relay: An add-on that allows you to generate aliases that forward to your real e-mail address.

Accessibility:

Dark Reader: Gives every page on the internet a customizable Dark Mode for easier reading and eye protection.

Read Aloud: A text to speech add-on that reads pages with the press of a button.

Zoom Page WE: Provides the ability to zoom in on pages in multiple ways: text zoom, full page zoom, auto-fit etc.

Mobile Dyslexic: Not one I use, but I know people who swear by it. Replaces all fonts with a dyslexia friendly type face.

Utility:

ClearURLs: Automatically removes tracking data from URLs.

History Cleaner: Automatically deletes browser history older than a set number of days.

Feedbro RSS Feed Reader: A full standalone reader in your browser, take control of your feed and start using RSS feeds again.

Video Download Helper: A great tool for downloading video files from websites.

Snap Link Plus: Fan of Wikipedia binge holes? Snap Link allows to drag select multiple hyperlink and automatically open all of them in new tabs.

Copy PlainText: Copy any text without formatting.

EPUBReader: Read .epub files from within a browser window.

Tab Stash: A no mess, no fuss way to organize groups of tabs as bookmarks. I use it as a temporary bookmark tool, saving sessions or groups of tabs into "to read" folders.

Tampermonkey/Violentmonkey: Managers for installing and running custom user scripts. Find user scripts on OpenUserJS or Greasy Fork, there's an entire galaxy out there of ingenious and weird custom user scripts out there, go discover it.

Browsing & Searching:

Speed Dial 2: A new tab add-on that gives you easy access to your favourite sites.

Unpaywall: Whenever you come across a scholarly article behind a paywall, this add-on will search through all the free databases for an accessible and non-paywalled version of the text.

Web Archives: Come across a dead page? This add-on gives you a quick way to search for cached versions of the page on the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, Archive.is and others.

Bypass Paywalls: Automatically bypasses the paywalls of major websites like those for the New York Times, New Yorker, the Financial Times, Wired, etc.

Simple Translate: Simple one-click translation of web pages powered by Google Translate.

Search by Image: Reverse search any image via several different search engines: Google Image, TinEye, Yandex, Bing, etc.

Website Specific:

PocketTube: Do you subscribe to too many YouTube channels? Would you like a way to organize them? This is your answer.

Enhancer for Youtube: Provides a suite of options that make using YouTube more pleasant: volume boost, theatre mode, forced quality settings, playback speed and mouse wheel volume control.

Augmented Steam: Improves the experience of using Steam in a browser, see price histories of games, take notes on your wishlist, make wish listed games and new DLC for games you own appear more visible, etc.

Return YouTube Dislikes: Does exactly what it says on the package.

BlueBlocker: Hate seeing the absolute dimmest individuals on the planet have their replies catapulted to the top of the feed because they're desperate to suck off daddy Elon sloppy style? This is for you, it automatically blocks all Blue Checks on Twitter. I've used it to block a cumulative 34,000 Blue Checks.

Batchcamp: Allows for batch downloading on Bandcamp.

XKit Rewritten: If you're on Tumblr and you're not using whichever version of XKit is currently available, I honestly don't know what to say to you. This newest version isn't as fully featured as the old XKit of the golden age, but it's been rewritten from the ground up for speed and utility.

Social Fixer for Facebook: I once accidentally visited Facebook without this add-on enabled and was immediately greeted by the worst, mind annihilating content slop I had ever had the misfortune to come across. Videos titled "he wanted her to get lip fillers and she said no so he had bees sting her lips", and AI photos of broccoli Jesus with 6000 comments all saying "wow". Once I turned it on it was just stuff my dad had posted and updates from the Radio War Nerd group.

BetterTTV: Makes Twitch slightly more bearable.

Well I think that's everything. You don't have to install everything here, or even half of it, but there you go, it's a start.

Addendum!

I forgot to add, Firefox has skins and themes! And many of them are good! And of the many small creators making themes and skins for Firefox, my favourite is MaDonna an 85 year old great grandmother who's just making browser skins for fun. She's made thousands of them. I'm using one of her creations at this very moment, Dark Polygon.

to this day i actually don't understand the point of taking the tack that batman having a robin = child endangerment, because it takes for granted that all cape comics are in the fantasy genre to start with. i'm not kidding about that, these are stories far closer to lord of the rings than they are breaking bad despite batman comics ostensibly being about organized crime. subject matter doesn't equal genre, and arguing that robin shouldn't exist is just depriving child audiences of the character that's designed to be their power fantasy. i doubt the eight year olds who want to be dick grayson think of being robin as inherently abusive, and, frankly, when the fiction is fantasy, the fantasy part is the most relevant. steamrolling it in some batshit adherence to real-world logic doesn't just miss the point, it defeats the point. why like the story if you don't like the conventions of the story? particularly when the story's literal only rules are a) everyone is defined mostly by costume and b) that's actually kind of it. i can't tell people what to do but i can tell them that what they're doing is boring

why like the story if you don't like the conventions of the story

You don't? Subject matter doesn't equal genre, after all. Because Batman is in a cape/costume doesn't mean he can't be gritty noir, and gritty noir Batman might want to deal with the dark side of a child with no superpowers being involved in combat. So people take a part of the story that moves them, and take it like a cutting to shape into something else. Some people like reading about children being protected more than being empowered (which is fair! As long as it doesn't extend to keeping real kids in a ridiculously risk-averse bubble). Some people like imagining how Batman could be dark and dangerous. There's a place for stories where Batman is irresponsible to have Robin. And people who want those stories will understandably dislike the stories where The Boy Wonder is a happy, healthy kid whose role is endorsed by the narrative.

... Unless you were talking about people who argue that nobody should write/read stories about the Boy Wonder happily thriving, because. What if?! People mistook this?! To think that 10yo circus kids should be fighting violent criminals in real life?!?!?!?

Were you talking about people who think it's abhorrent that anybody could cheerfully accept the child power fantasy alongside the idea that a domino mask could effectively conceal an identity?

Yeah, those folks need to learn that don't like, don't read works for them as well as for anyone else. No real children are harmed because a fictional boy regularly triumphs over goons with machine guns.

okay, devil's advocate lol. can you refer to the part where i said robin exists to be a convenient power fantasy for children? a famously huge part of the audience enjoying superheroes? is it weird to want to preserve an aspect of the story that's a touchstone for a huge portion of its audience? adults' opinions on batman will never be the only ones that matter, and serving kids with gritty noir batman stories that cut out robin is pretty shitty. it makes it harder for kids to enjoy a story that's for them as much as it is adults. the people who like reading about children being protected are, get this, adults, because kids are in a situation where they don't get to control most of their lives, so en masse they gravitate towards stories about child heroes. there is no child in the universe that stopped reading percy jackson because they got worried about all the child endangerment, and there's no child in the world who wants to read about how batman's a dick and being a superhero is actually child abuse. like. not to go "think of the children" but this is literally for the children, like they invented robin in 1941 literally to appeal to children, yeah i think it's a jackass move to leave it out because there is no reason to other than "i hate children."

a place for stories where it's irresponsible for batman to have a robin only exists if you don't give a shit about the character's primary audience, which, yeah, i think that's bad. i think "not caring about the audience" is a hallmark of every shitty story i've ever read, because writing is literally all about pitching ideas to the audience. robin is a convention of batman as much as any of the rogues, as any of the settings; fuck, robin existed before alfred pennyworth did, and most of the recognizable batman mythos, and also most of the recognizable DC mythos. no one cares about the constant lack of robin in adaptations because robin exists for kids and it's easy to delegitimize things that makes the lives of children better, because we as a society devalue the experiences and perspectives of children. even when it's about stories directly marketed to them, we prioritize the adults' fantasy of saving the fictional children by ripping away fantasies from actual kids who actually like them.

i think that kind of shit is bleak and weird and miserable, particularly when there is literally absolutely no reason to ever not have robin exist or to write a story where the ideal world is that robin doesn't exist. you would have to want to write a batman & robin story about how much batman & robin suck, which, mind you, is fair to find inherently antithetical to the premise. if people want to read a batman & robin story, they probably don't want to read one that shames them nonstop for enjoying the original concept, and if the only people who want to read your batman story are people who hate batman, you suck at writing batman. the place you think exists for batman & robin (child endangerment flavor) functionally doesn't. no one wants to read a story that hates itself.

there are hundreds of batman comics that nail the gritty noir vibe without going robin = child endangerment, because comic writers have had 80 years to figure out how to manage the tonal dissonance. batman: the cult is a comic about batman getting drugged, abducted, tortured, drugged again with psychoactive substances, chained up in a sewer and left to babble, "this is hell," to himself while kneeling on a pile of corpses. it does all of that while jason todd hangs out in the robin costume. if people can't pull off gritty noir batman with robin right there, sincerely: skill issue. if those writers were simply not complete hacks they'd be able to do it. i prescribe "grind."

there is literally no reason to cut robin out of even the grittiest batman story when even the grittiest of batman stories - TDKR - takes the presence of robin as a given of the setting. leaving out robin is tantamount to leaving out that the story takes place in a city called gotham, because the overwhelming majority of batman's history happens with robin. robin went on to become one of the most successful - if not the most successful - legacy character in comics. robin's not part of the genre, he's part of the setting, because there is actually literally no way to recognizably adapt most of batman's canon without robin. so if people can't pull off writing both batman and robin, sincerely: skill issue. if those writers were simply not complete hacks they'd be able to do it. i prescribe "grind."

DO NOT SUPPORT SALVATION ARMY 

I can back this up. It isn’t only their shelters.

I have a family friend who worked at our local Salvation Army headquarters as a a secretary. This particular office took all the Christmas donations for children in need, put them in a warehouse, and on a designated day the staff and their friends picked through them all, taking whatever they wanted. She saw people hauling away bikes donated for specific families. Some local children had hundreds of dollars of gifts donated in their name, and on Christmas they received three cheap things, items likely not even from the person who sponsored them.

My friend quit, and I’ve not given them a dime of my money since then.

Do not give to the Salvation Army.

Do Not. Give. To. Salvation. Army

My turn.

I’m a wildfire and disaster logistics specialist.

I deal with a lot of agencies who provide disaster relief.

I used to say the Salvation Army’s disaster services were the one (literally the ONE) good thing they did.

They would come in, set up a canteen trailer, make and pass out hot coffee and donated food in a disaster, usually being one of the first agencies to get there and the last to leave.

Then I found out.

Every time they did this, regardless of if they were actually invited or deployed by the agency in charge (usually FEMA, sometimes others) they would SELF-DEPLOY. Meanjng they would just show up. Ok. That’s not TOO bad, sometimes agencies have to take initiative and get there before the red tape is sorted out. BUT. They, after they left at the end of the incident, they would send FEMA or the host agency a BILL. They used one or two paid employees (usually the driver of the truck and a supervisor); and many VOLUNTEERS, but they would bill for EVERYONE’s Labor at standard federal rates. They would bill for the food they distributed even though it was all donated by another agency or private parties. They would bill for the coffee they made and the supplies. Except they would use electricity from the shelter location, water from donations or from the shelter, and in many cases, they would get the coffee and industrial filters DONATED, but bill for them at retail prices.

Don’t FUCKING give to the Salvation Army.

The Salvation Army is also ass to the workers. A good number of people join it, naively thinking that it’s doing good, and end up leaving cynical and beaten down. The management is hostile, if not outright abusive, and demand some ridiculous hours of it lower to mid-level staff. Don’t support these people.

Unsettling update

Find better local charities and shelters and give to them instead!

Also just for even more horrific context on the original twitter thread?

Salvation Army reached out to Milknmuffins and asked what shelter she’s at with the promise to address the abuse in it. She…ended up saying where she was. She was thrown out onto the street. It’s also all on Twitter.

They invited her to a personal talk so she could explain the situation in person.

And then they threatened her with a screenshot of a rape-threat made supposedly by her:

And then threw her out into the street while claiming she broke house rules that

So yeah, the Salvation Army is a bunch of entitled assholes that will treat the most vulnerable like shit if they dare try to do anything that makes them look bad

The “Fuck Salvation Army” posts are making the rounds again, so conisder this your reminder: Do. Not. Give. These. Assholes. A. Single. Fucking. Penny.

Do not support them in any way, shape, or form.

‘Tis the season to say FUCK the Salvation Army.

the seal at the bottom of 瓷器 ciqi/chinese porcelain is handwritten

I can’t even comprehend this degree of delicacy, my own handwriting looks like I was holding the pen between my bum cheeks.

@dancinggrimm That was……that was perfect.

Maybe the video is just really old

#1 criminal counterfeit craftmans

Handwriting chinese hanzi that casually indicates it’s formal court stamp from old dynasties in the finest calligraphy is just understated for these top chinese craftsmanship masters lmao. In China there’s a type of artifact called fanggu仿古(Imitation of antiquity), it’s not considered counterfeit, it’s sold to buyers who like them and know it’s a replica. But in most cases the boundary is fuzzy. It can be a replica or a counterfeit depending on circumstances. Before the Ming Dynasty, many official kiln porcelain has no era mark, i.e., the official kilns of the Song Dynasty are only marked with which kiln produced this porcelain. Since the time of the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1360-1424), official kiln porcelains have been given marks, which are categorized into the emperor’s era name, stem-branch or gan-zhi, different borders and so on, written in chinese blue pigment.

Craftsmen have reached such a high level that in many cases people are unable to identify the authenticity of the artifacts, and even experts in the relevant archaeological field make mistakes. On Chinese variety shows, archaeological experts will identify the authenticity of artifacts, the owner of the artifact will sign a consent form, and if the artifact is fake, the expert will smash it with a hammer on the spot, and there was a big mess when the expert made a mistake in identifying the artifacts and smashed a real one.

大明宣德年制 meaning made during the Xuan De era of the Great Ming Dynasty

the US deli meat recall has expanded 35 times over, going from 200,000 pounds to 7 MILLION pounds of meat and poultry recalled due to listeria contamination.

if you checked your fridge before, check it again with the new list, there are over 70 products being recalled!

this recall of boar's head products now includes old country branded products. some were also exported to the cayman islands, dominican republic, mexico, and panama.

please note, people have died from this outbreak, dozens of people have been hospitalized, and since listeria can take months to kick someone's ass after exposure and then a while to be investigated and recorded by the government, these numbers are expected to rise. you do not need to have eaten meat or poultry to be exposed to listeria from this outbreak, you could have just eaten food that has come in contact with it like in a kitchen, deli, restaurant, or anywhere else these meats were used to prepare food. listeria is a nasty fucker that loves to contaminate whatever it touches. there is more information on listeriosis and high-risk groups further down this post.

announced july 30th, 2024, current as of july 31st, 2024. this is not a complete copy/paste of the announcement or all relevant information, please check the links for more complete information and updates from the government.

most people exposed to listeria will not experience a serious infection. but listeriosis, the illness caused by listeria, can become pretty bad and can take weeks to show symptoms after exposure. listeriosis can cause lifelong disability or death. for people who are pregnant, listeriosis can cause stillbirths, miscarriages, premature births, and life-threatening infections in newborns.

say you ate a bad deli meat sandwich a week ago, or any food that may have come into contact with these deli meats, and you theoretically got exposed to listeria with an immune system not strong enough to fight it off. it could be weeks or even months before listeriosis starts affecting you. consider writing down what you ate, and where, and when, just in case you need to tell this to a medical provider in the future. if you do develop listeriosis, it may become difficult to remember these details later.

if your hypothetical sandwich (or whatever you ate involving the recalled products) had been thoroughly cooked, it may have killed off the listeria. listeria is killed with heat, which is why deli meats are suseptible to listeria contamination.

this is a type of contamination so serious and easily spread that entire delis are going to be shut down to be thoroughly cleaned. if you had these products in your kitchen, even if you cooked them before eating, the united states food safety and inspection service recommends deep cleaning your fridge to stay safe. consider what else may have come into contact with the contaminated food.

as a reminder, having previously been infected by covid-19 is one of the many things that can cause a weakened immune system, and many people with weakened immune systems do not know they have weakened immune systems until they get infected with something serious. you can temporarily have a weakened immune system just from a lot of stress or not getting enough sleep, so make sure you get plenty of rest if you are concerned. good quality rest makes the immune system stronger.

the wikipedia page for listeriosis notes: “Listeriosis may cause mild, self-limiting gastroenteritis and fever in anyone.” and “People who were previously healthy but were exposed to a very large dose of Listeria can develop a noninvasive illness in which the bacteria do not spread into their bloodstream or other body sites. Symptoms can include diarrhea and fever.”

and here is the united states center for disease control page on this outbreak.

as of the time this post is going up, the CDC page has not yet been updated with the latest recall information, and reflects the previous, smaller recall.

list of all affected product names under the cut. check the product information list for more information on each product and where they were exported, and here is what the labels look like.

this list is long.

do not risk this. do not mess with listeria. do not eat these recalled foods!

the united states centers for disease control and prevention (CDC) reports another person has been confirmed dead as a result of this outbreak, and there have been 10 new confirmed hospitalizations. even in the best of circumstances where all information is available and everyone participates in the investigation from the start, it takes up to a month for illnesses and deaths to become officially associated with an outbreak. and it can take weeks after exposure for listeria to cause illness to begin with. the number of people infected as a result of this contaminated meat is expected to rise.

if you are in a high-risk group and believe you have been exposed to listeria as a result of this outbreak, especially if you have eaten a lot of these products lately, consider reaching out to your healthcare provider even if you have not shown signs of illness yet. they may choose to prescribe you antibiotics to help keep you safe.

updates: WARNING this gets gross

CBS news requested and received USDA's food safety inspection service records for the factory where the recalled meat was produced.

there have been 69 noncompliances (violations, basically), including mold buildup, mildew, leaks, ample amounts of blood on the floor, insects and...

"heavy meat buildup" on the walls.

since the last CDC investigation update on august 8th, 6 more deaths have been attributed to this listeria contamination, with 57 total hospitalizations. CBS news calls this the largest listeria outbreak in the united states in 13 years.

the US CDC continues to report that the number of deaths, illnesses, and hospitalizations are expected to rise, especially since many of the meats have sell by dates into october 2024 and may still be in people's refrigerators. and then it can take months for listeria exposure to cause illness, and then several more weeks for diagnosed, reported, and investigated cases to become associated with the outbreak. not every illness or death from this outbreak will get diagnosed, reported, or investigated.

you can read the full list of the boar's head factory violations here.

might not want to read it while nauseous or eating. tag your favorite lines!

“Meat overspray on walls and large pieces of meat on the floor behind line. Meat build up on the power cords of line 2. The floor scales at the end on lines 1 and 2 had large pieces of meat and trash in them, with an appearance of an odor. The polar catwalk had pieces of meat and fat in the support braces and plastic floor pieces. All of the polar electrical control boxes had meat and fat build on the bottom. All polar legs and framework had meat and fat build up on them. 1 metal polar vat had meat and fat particles in the tube that connects it to the polars. The 2 polars closest to netted hams department had meat/fat build up in the vacuum ports on the bottom.”

this is not even half of the very non-meat places that were described to be covered in meat

“I went into the the Raw Receiving cooler. | observed multiple combos in which were saturated, there were ample amounts of blood in puddles on the floor, and on the rack that were heavily soiled to the point they appeared to leak at a steady pace. There was also a rancid smell in the cooler.”

...

“Upon entering the pickle vat pump out room approximately 15-20 flies were observed going in and out of the 4 vats of pickle left in the room. Small flying gnat like insects were observed crawling on the walls and flying around the room. The rooms walls had heavy meat buildup, pink/orange discoloration, and denaturant over spray on them.”

yeah just spray over the meat oozing off of the gnat-covered walls. good enough.

...

“The inedible room also had a presence of flying insects. The room also had multiple instances of meat/ meat product on the floor, as well as trash. The cure cooler man door in the back right corner of the room insects were observed. 7 ladybugs, 1 beetle like insect, and 1 cockroach like insect.”

I appreciate the humbleness of not wanting to explicitly identify a beetle as a beetle, just in case it might not be a beetle.

all emphasis mine.

does anyone here know about how this all compares to factories that get shut down before people die?

as a result of this outbreak, boar's head is permanently discontinuing liverwurst as a product and shutting down the plant that accumulated meat buildup, bugs, mold, and blood.

they also claim to be ramping up their quality control and safety, which is not very convincing considering how much disgusting shit was in the reports.

they knew the factories were disgusting and waited until after people died to do anything about it. these reports are pointless unless anyone is willing to act on them before people die.

despite the change involved in hiring new people, I am not seeing any mention of firing anyone involved with the decisions to keep the plants open and knowingly manufacture food in disgusting conditions.

interesting.

so, has boar's head earned back your trust?

Things I wish I had read in “beginner” sewing tutorials/people had told me before I started getting into sewing

I believe that’s all - feel free to add unto it.

When your sewing machine becomes unruly and recalcitrant and mulish, unthread it completely both bobbin and spool, and rethread it from the ground up. Don’t just like, try to troubleshoot which step of the threading has come un-hooked or whatever, just fuckin re-do the whole thing trust me just do it. After a few months of this you will become SO GOOD at threading. And then it will be no biggie at all and one day you will just fix the loop that came unhooked from step 3 of 7 and then you have graduated from needing to re-do it all from scratch every time.

(also I was a bit confused by this post at first because I’ve never heard unravelling/fraying called “threading” before)

I think the hardest miss I've ever bumped into in children's educational television came from a show called Ghost Writer that debuted in 1992.

The opening story arc concerned a series of thefts at the protagonists' school; when the kids tried to figure out who was behind it, their investigation eventually discovered that a bunch of other middle schoolers had independently formed some sort of bizarre pseudo-Dionysian cult where they'd perform ominous chants and greet each other with secret mottos and wear masks with faces on both the front and back, except literally all this cult was doing was stealing the lunch money out of other kids' backpacks and using it to buy tokens at the local video arcade, which was also the cult's headquarters.

It was like they couldn't decide whether they wanted to do a Satanic Panic thing or a video-games-are-making-children-violent thing, so they split the difference in what I assume was intended as a grim cautionary tale, but all that nine-year-old me took away from the viewing experience was "wow, being in a cult looks cool as hell".

90s TV made cults look rad as hell and then we all grew up and found that, instead of being ancient Greek mystery cults, actual real cults are toxic, abusive cesspits mostly run by grifters without a speck of that TV coolness to them.

I just want to wear a double faced drama mask and ominously chant with the girls while we hardball pomegrantes at the crossroads, not give all my money to some dude who claims he's Jesus (but also an alien?) and live in a shed till he fucks off in the night to avoid the IRS.

I mean we can absolutely form a cult to do weird mystery shit if we want, that is a thing you can do.

The problem there is that any attempt to start a Dionysian mystery cult in the year 2024 will almost immediately be co-opted by neo-Nazis.

it sounds like what you really want is to join your local coven

Unfortunately, most reconstructionist Pagan covens a. do not operate as mystery cults, and b. are – speaking from experience here – not actually guaranteed to be Nazi-free.

I am not vagueposting in bad faith, but I want to followup on a post going around without adding to the post itself and seeming combative. the post is about eating meat from wild animals, and it claims that the majority of harmful pathogens in meat that make humans sick is introduced into processed meat by humans & that E. Coli is only a problem in processed supermarket meats due to contact with human fecal matter. The post states that E. Coli comes from poop—totally correct. But it also emphasizes the role of human fecal contamination, and if you kill a wild deer and eat its meat raw, the risk is comparatively negligible. The post also stated, “wild predators don’t get food poisoning from raw meat” (not true).

This may seem extremely pedantic, but as a wildlife manager & a hunter, I wanna discuss E. Coli and other pathogens connected to meat consumption and how they exist naturally in the wild animals which we (and other predatory mammals) consume.

In fact, wild deer are natural vectors for E. Coli, and wild birds are natural vectors for Salmonella (1) (2)

We can not only contract E. Coli from direct contact with wild deer, but from contact with shared water sources (3) This is by exposure to deer fecal contamination.

Onto the meat: If you hunt a wild deer, you must immediately ‘field dress’ the carcass. Field dressing in this context is the act of removing organs, especially the stomach & intestines, to trigger an immediate decrease in the animal’s body temperature, which buys you time to transport the meat before bacteria grows.

You must be extremely careful to avoid puncturing the stomach and intestines, which would contaminate the meat, because, once again, deer are natural vectors of E. Coli.

It’s also crucial to kill a deer efficiently (not only to ensure minimal suffering to the animal). A gut-shot can contaminate the abdominal cavity, and the animal is likely to live longer after the shot, allowing for a longer contamination period, which increases risk of contracting E. Coli through meat consumption (4)

You could argue that in the end, the contamination is still caused by human error, even if it’s not by human fecal contamination. So let’s talk about non-human species contracting illnesses from eating wild meat.

Someone else on the post supposed that predators such as wolves come into contact with harmful pathogens in the raw meat they eat.

In fact, predators can and do contract diseases in the act of predation.

Harmful pathogens do exist in wild meat untouched by humans, but predators and scavengers can demonstrate a resistance to more serious infections.

One example is predatory mammals contracting Anthrax infections from sick prey animals. Anthrax infection is caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, which lives in the soil and infects prey animals, especially grazing ungulates. Predatory mammals can contract Anthrax infections by consuming the meat of infected prey animals.

However, Anthrax infections caused by meat consumption tend to be milder in predatory mammals, with decreased mortality: “Anthrax resistance in predators is not absolute. It manifests itself not as an inability to become infected, but rather as an ability to transfer the disease in a non-lethal or even asymptomatic form.” (5)

So illness-causing pathogens spread by meat consumption do exist in the soil and in wild meat. Predatory mammals have an advantage against infections caused by meat consumption, but not an immunity! 

Another example of predatory mammals contracting a disease by eating wild meat is wolves and bears contracting Brucellosis by consuming infected prey animals (6) (7)

I DO caution against overestimating the danger of food borne pathogens in nonhuman predatory mammals. In Wyoming, some people are sensationalizing the alleged risk of Brucellosis in wolves as a strategy in the age old settler colonial war on wild canids, but there is no proven risk of transmission from wolves in the state (8) I only bring up the infection and wolves to demonstrate that predatory mammals can contract illnesses by consuming wild meat.

Game meat and the hunting of wild animals is extremely important for both nutrition and culture throughout the world. I would caution people against buying into sensationalism about the dangers of ‘bush meat,’ which is often exoticizing and racist.

I do not think we should be any more afraid of eating wild game than we should worry about processed meats. And often there is a distinct advantage to eating wild game. I especially encourage learning about hunting in your region for subsistence and ecological conservation.

So this is all to say, there is inherent risk to eating game meat, much like many other things we eat, and predators do contract illnesses by eating wild meat, but you should be informed, not afraid!

While the risk may be lower than meat processed in factories, there are important safety procedures and protocols to follow to ensure it is consumed safely.

TL;DR: You can, in fact, contract illnesses such as E. Coli from eating wild game. Predatory mammals other than humans do, in fact, contact illnesses from eating raw wild game. BUT don’t worry too much about it! Just know the facts!

I wish there was a website where you could input a character's description (height, weight, sex, medical conditions, etc.) And a situation (car crash, falls, stabbing, etc.) And it would calculate for you from most to least likely the injuries that character would receive, potential complications, and how long it would take recover. This would make writing injuries SO MICH EASIER if I wasn't guessing at everything

This tool would be so fun and I would definitely use it.

But ALSO! The best thing about writing injuries is that there is so much variation.

I spent a few years as an EMT, and I saw people walk away from vehicle rollovers with nary a scratch... and also, I saw people break their knees because they sat down. I've seen a guy get lifelong impairments out of falling off something twelve feet high, but I know someone who survived being stabbed over a dozen times with no lasting (physical) injuries. There's range.

In nearly any given situation*, a realistic level of injury is anywhere from "Dies within five minutes" to "Dies 73 years later surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren, having zero long-lasting repercussions from that incident."

*Not every situation, mind you; papercuts are generally exempt

If you don't mind a ramble (because I haven't done a fun character injury ramble in a while so I shall use this as an excuse)...

The key to writing realistic injuries is to start with what you want to happen. It's your character and your scenario, so start with what you want to happen for Plot Reasons.

Example:

You know your character gets in a car crash with a wall, and you want them laid up for a week, but able to move around with minimal pain soon after. Cool. Now that you have your desired outcome, you can run through the scenario. You won't want your character ejected or to have a major head impact with the windshield, so they were wearing their seatbelt. You want them to still be able to walk, so the dashboard probably didn't crumple in on them. That means they were either in a car with good safety ratings, or they weren't going super fast, or a combination thereof. But you do want them a little bit injured, enough so they don't want to go on that hiking trip for another week, so make sure they were going fast enough to get some good ol' whiplash.

Another example:

You want your character to make a dramatic exit out the window, and you want them to be limping a little for dramatic effect as they head off into the forest surrounding the castle. Nice, we love a good dramatic window exit. But you want to make sure the character won't be out of commission for the battle in a fortnight's time. This could totally be a first-floor window, or even a second-floor one. But what if it really needs to be the fourth floor, for pre-existing scenario reasons? Well, maybe there's a balcony halfway down. Or maybe there's a nice slanted roof underneath that broke their fall. Or maybe the castle is built into a cliff so the windows on that side of the castle are only ten feet up. Or maybe they clung onto ivy outside, which ripped out of the wall a bit but was enough to slow them down. There's all sorts of ways you can play this off!

Rather than trying to make a scenario and then fitting the injury into it, come up with the injury (or at least, level of injury) and plan out the details of your scenario around it.

The only caution is to make sure to build scenarios realistically—like, I could totally see a character being able to keep going after being stabbed because it was a shallow wound. But if they get a shallow stab wound... and they only get ✨grazed✨ by a bullet... and they happen to survive a terrible car accident because they were in the best possible seat... AND they were pushed out of an airplane but their BFF managed to skydive right out after them and caught them... that's getting to be a little much. XD Any of those is realistic except maybe the last; IDK, I know injuries, not skydiving, but too many near-misses in a single story starts to feel like plot armor.

But yeah. The range of possible injuries from any given scenario is immense. But if you figure out how much you want to injure the character (or how quickly you want to kill them, you evil author you), you can then build out the scenario so it makes sense, and research gets a little easier too because it narrows down what you're looking for.

No for real this is just great writing advice on principal. Decide on what you want your outcome to be first, and then craft the events so that you end up with what you want in a realistic or believed way.

If you get caught up in all the nitty gritties first, then your story will be realistic, but maybe not so compelling.

to this day i actually don't understand the point of taking the tack that batman having a robin = child endangerment, because it takes for granted that all cape comics are in the fantasy genre to start with. i'm not kidding about that, these are stories far closer to lord of the rings than they are breaking bad despite batman comics ostensibly being about organized crime. subject matter doesn't equal genre, and arguing that robin shouldn't exist is just depriving child audiences of the character that's designed to be their power fantasy. i doubt the eight year olds who want to be dick grayson think of being robin as inherently abusive, and, frankly, when the fiction is fantasy, the fantasy part is the most relevant. steamrolling it in some batshit adherence to real-world logic doesn't just miss the point, it defeats the point. why like the story if you don't like the conventions of the story? particularly when the story's literal only rules are a) everyone is defined mostly by costume and b) that's actually kind of it. i can't tell people what to do but i can tell them that what they're doing is boring

why like the story if you don't like the conventions of the story

You don't? Subject matter doesn't equal genre, after all. Because Batman is in a cape/costume doesn't mean he can't be gritty noir, and gritty noir Batman might want to deal with the dark side of a child with no superpowers being involved in combat. So people take a part of the story that moves them, and take it like a cutting to shape into something else. Some people like reading about children being protected more than being empowered (which is fair! As long as it doesn't extend to keeping real kids in a ridiculously risk-averse bubble). Some people like imagining how Batman could be dark and dangerous. There's a place for stories where Batman is irresponsible to have Robin. And people who want those stories will understandably dislike the stories where The Boy Wonder is a happy, healthy kid whose role is endorsed by the narrative.

... Unless you were talking about people who argue that nobody should write/read stories about the Boy Wonder happily thriving, because. What if?! People mistook this?! To think that 10yo circus kids should be fighting violent criminals in real life?!?!?!?

Were you talking about people who think it's abhorrent that anybody could cheerfully accept the child power fantasy alongside the idea that a domino mask could effectively conceal an identity?

Yeah, those folks need to learn that don't like, don't read works for them as well as for anyone else. No real children are harmed because a fictional boy regularly triumphs over goons with machine guns.

okay, devil's advocate lol. can you refer to the part where i said robin exists to be a convenient power fantasy for children? a famously huge part of the audience enjoying superheroes? is it weird to want to preserve an aspect of the story that's a touchstone for a huge portion of its audience? adults' opinions on batman will never be the only ones that matter, and serving kids with gritty noir batman stories that cut out robin is pretty shitty. it makes it harder for kids to enjoy a story that's for them as much as it is adults. the people who like reading about children being protected are, get this, adults, because kids are in a situation where they don't get to control most of their lives, so en masse they gravitate towards stories about child heroes. there is no child in the universe that stopped reading percy jackson because they got worried about all the child endangerment, and there's no child in the world who wants to read about how batman's a dick and being a superhero is actually child abuse. like. not to go "think of the children" but this is literally for the children, like they invented robin in 1941 literally to appeal to children, yeah i think it's a jackass move to leave it out because there is no reason to other than "i hate children."

a place for stories where it's irresponsible for batman to have a robin only exists if you don't give a shit about the character's primary audience, which, yeah, i think that's bad. i think "not caring about the audience" is a hallmark of every shitty story i've ever read, because writing is literally all about pitching ideas to the audience. robin is a convention of batman as much as any of the rogues, as any of the settings; fuck, robin existed before alfred pennyworth did, and most of the recognizable batman mythos, and also most of the recognizable DC mythos. no one cares about the constant lack of robin in adaptations because robin exists for kids and it's easy to delegitimize things that makes the lives of children better, because we as a society devalue the experiences and perspectives of children. even when it's about stories directly marketed to them, we prioritize the adults' fantasy of saving the fictional children by ripping away fantasies from actual kids who actually like them.

i think that kind of shit is bleak and weird and miserable, particularly when there is literally absolutely no reason to ever not have robin exist or to write a story where the ideal world is that robin doesn't exist. you would have to want to write a batman & robin story about how much batman & robin suck, which, mind you, is fair to find inherently antithetical to the premise. if people want to read a batman & robin story, they probably don't want to read one that shames them nonstop for enjoying the original concept, and if the only people who want to read your batman story are people who hate batman, you suck at writing batman. the place you think exists for batman & robin (child endangerment flavor) functionally doesn't. no one wants to read a story that hates itself.

there are hundreds of batman comics that nail the gritty noir vibe without going robin = child endangerment, because comic writers have had 80 years to figure out how to manage the tonal dissonance. batman: the cult is a comic about batman getting drugged, abducted, tortured, drugged again with psychoactive substances, chained up in a sewer and left to babble, "this is hell," to himself while kneeling on a pile of corpses. it does all of that while jason todd hangs out in the robin costume. if people can't pull off gritty noir batman with robin right there, sincerely: skill issue. if those writers were simply not complete hacks they'd be able to do it. i prescribe "grind."

there is literally no reason to cut robin out of even the grittiest batman story when even the grittiest of batman stories - TDKR - takes the presence of robin as a given of the setting. leaving out robin is tantamount to leaving out that the story takes place in a city called gotham, because the overwhelming majority of batman's history happens with robin. robin went on to become one of the most successful - if not the most successful - legacy character in comics. robin's not part of the genre, he's part of the setting, because there is actually literally no way to recognizably adapt most of batman's canon without robin. so if people can't pull off writing both batman and robin, sincerely: skill issue. if those writers were simply not complete hacks they'd be able to do it. i prescribe "grind."

Hey, breaking into your kitchen--

Yeah I think this is a really important point to make about the genre and its intended audience and goal, at least originally. There is a certain disdain for children, and media for children, but that IS what comics started out as. I've always said that if the narrative is so dire that the reader is questioning the ethics of having a Robin, that you've messed up the tone.

Sure, there's places in a setting so vast for darker content and ideas, but there are concepts specifically designed to explore that kind of thing. Why have Midnighter and Apollo if Batman stories are going to be that dark and violent all the time, what makes Hellblazer so special if the consequences are always so dire? I think iteration and evolution are inevitable, but you have to ask yourself why things are evolving in the direction they are, in service to what, and with what outcome.

If mainstream comic books that include characters specifically designed for children to look up to and identify become inaccessible to them because there is a need to make every story and character juxtaposition "realistic" (a ridiculous thing to even suggest is possible in this genre, believable and realistic are two separate things and Batman literally cannot be the latter), which people tend to claim a darker tone always is, then from a growth standpoint, you are cutting yourself off at the knees.

The point about children deserving to be able to enjoy stuff made for them has been made, but I want to talk about long term sustainability here. Comics became popular because they were cheap, and because kids fell in love with them. Well they're not cheap anymore, and children don't seem to be the primary audience, which is notable, because most of the popular characters were quite literally designed to appeal to children and represent certain ideals. That is the foundation and core of most superheroes. Comics existed before superheroes, but superheroes were created to fill a need, and that was to be a buoy of idealism in some ROUGH times in history, let's not forget the context of those moments. There is an inherently political aspect to the creation of those characters which is important to acknowledge, because it informs why their narratives were created the way they were.

You can say the genre has moved on all you like, and it's true, but change for the sake of change is not a virtue, and also not always sustainable. This genre grew its audience, meaning that your longtime die-hard comic fans usually got into it as children. Adults get into it, sure, but generally, it is an interest you pick up earlier in life, even if you don't get serious about it as a hobby until later, the seeds are planted early.

So...if these books are suddenly inaccessible to, or inappropriate for that demographic...well then you risk suffering from a geriatric population of readers, and not enough fresh blood to keep the market for these stories profitable and strong. I think what bothers me so much about how DC tends to treat its child characters in general, is not only are they not generally valued as full characters with their own arcs that matter and should be taken seriously, but they keep creating new one with great story potential and then just...forgetting about them, or using them for the angst of a serious adult character that matters more. Kids get fridged all the time, and often without any real consequence or fallout.

So the result mechanically is that you lose plot options, you lose stories that could be told because you're flattening the genre into needing to fit into a single tone. Dark stories are not inherently more interesting or nuanced or clever than those that are lighter in tone, and vice-versa. I think something like a comic book universe needs both to survive, because you need to keep young readers coming in and then you want them to be able to stay around and engage with more complex ideas as they age and mature. Not everything is for everyone, and that's a feature of the structure, imposing a desired tone on a subject that was not intended for it, and makes no sense in a different context is a mistake, and honestly kind of lazy and shows you don't have confidence in your ability to make something new.

Because Robin specifically doesn't need to be the vehicle to explore those dark concepts, that's not a mandate, you could always make a new pair of characters with a different context and intended plot, or make it an elseworld. If you're going to write a pre-established character, I think you have a responsibility to maintain their mechanical use and purpose in the narrative, unless it's something abhorrent that has no place in the current age. People want to make Batman their own thing, and that is fine, it's also what fanfiction and elseworlds are for. Main continuity stuff needs to keep that balance for the health of the ecosystem. These characters that were created as heroes need to stay heroes, because those are literally the building blocks that this niche of the comic hobby is built upon.

And let's not kid ourselves, it's not like modern darker comics are any more well written than older books. I'd argue that from a mechanical, structural standpoint that they're generally far worse, we haven't entered an age where comics are generally smart and mature and written at a level complex enough to discuss incredibly sensitive themes as the norm. That's not a thing. Comic books are dumb. They are still dumb! They can be smart, but that is the intriguing exception and not the rule. And it's all still art! Art needs to make you feel SOMETHING, but the specifics of what that something is are completely context dependent. It is totally fine for a dumb comic romp to make you chuckle for a few minutes and go about your day, that's not a lower form of entertainment, it just has a different use case. So no, we're not in danger of dumbing things down by making the tone of CERTAIN CHARACTERS AND PLOTS less bleak, because again, they're already stupid as hell! Realism isn't the point, and every time a major plotline has injected realistic consequence into a narrative that never bothered with that before, it changed the goal, it changed the intended mission statement of those books.

The popularity of those twists caught the eyes of capitalists, because yeah, Gwen Stacy and Jason Todd's deaths were shocking and out of genre enough to create buzz. But the reason those even mattered was because they were so abnormal for these stories is to me notable and surprising. But the capitalist does not understand art, and so if something sold well, everything needs to be more like that, then you get the hot mess of the 90s, the near death of the genre, and somehow, nobody learned anything from that.

Robin represents a a vital part of the comic ecosystem, and if the universe he's a part of cannot support his concept anymore, I just think that's a really bad sign of where things are trending.

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR FUGITIVE TELEMETRY, THE NEW MURDERBOT DIARIES BOOK, LITERALLY THIS POST IS ABOUT THE MAIN MYSTERY IN A MYSTERY NOVEL DON’T READ IF YOU DON’T WANNA BE SPOILED

okay now that that’s out of the way can we TALK about Balin’s few lines and how emotionally devastating its story is?

Like yes it was literally made to be a murderous traitor spy bot but also it was just. Its creators had been killed off, it was free, not just fake free while still secretly under corporate control but ACTUALLY FREE and seemed to have made friends and been known and to some extent liked by hundreds of people and other bots and fucking

Decades pass. Decades pass, and it thinks its free of its secondary purpose, it thinks it can just go about its life until the clock runs out on its parts and it has to go in for maintenance and gets discovered, and then someone activates it. Not even its original creators, just some random corporate that got their hands on the right codes, and boom. Its life is over. Back to what it was always going to do eventually, betraying everything and everyone it had been living with for decades.

It takes no pleasure from carrying out the orders, it just does because that’s what it was coded to do and that’s what it has to do. Balin the general purpose bot is gone, Balin the corporate combatbot is here now and it just. Kills and destroys and lashes out until it’s inevitably found out. And then when it’s confronted, what does it say? “Would it make a difference if I was hacked?”

And the thing that kills me about that line is that it’s so defeated sounding. Would it matter? Would it make a difference? What’s happened has happened and what’s going to happen next is already determined, too. A corporate combatbot is confronted by a rogue Secunit. There was only one way it could end.

And then it’s confronted by every bot on the station just about, all the bots it had made friends with over the decades, and it’s over. No grand battle, no last stand, just a silent staredown and then the combatbot shuts down for good.

And like, it’s unclear whether Balin was a personality the combatbot deleted or if the combatbot WAS Balin or what happened internally in general but no matter what I find it tragic. It’s a really hard thing to make you heartbroken over the murderer in a murder mystery but damn. Poor Balin.

Balin overwritten by its CombatBot programming vs. Murderbot Ganaka Pit Incident send tweet

So much of the climax of FT is about the far reaching and inescapable influence/pain of the Corporation Rim.

You cannot run you cannot hide from what created you, you have a history and context whether you like it or not, and it can wake up and bite you and destroy you at any moment.

MB cannot escape from what it is, or what its existence means to other people. To people who have been subjugated in the CR by SecUnits for their whole lives.

Balin could not escape from the purpose it was made for over forty years ago.

I don’t think MB has ever truly let go of its a fear of a repeat of the Ganaka Pit. Or its fear of the Company™ coming back into its life in this apparent haven of non corporate freedom.

It can hack its governor module, it can leave the Rim, and it can never escape from itself.

To an extent, all us humans and humanity’s creations alike are bound by the history and context and expectations of the cultures/societies that originate us. There’s multiple sides of it- on the one hand, you have humans like the BreharWallHan workers who carry the trauma of the Corporation Rim with them even as they escape, understandably lashing out at help extended to them, their behavior dictated by their past experiences. But there’s also the beloved history of Preservation, illustrated by Pressy. All of Preservation’s values of care for each other and of providing for need unreservedly is on display there, its history passed down and preserved in an unbroken chain of love from predecessor to descendant, embodied in that lovingly, respectfully-cared-for old ship. The history and origins provide a context that can be binding or foundational, that can be claustrophobic for some as much as it can also be an assurance or aspirational in other cases.

But it’s true that we do not easily leave behind where we come from. And if humans cannot escape the reach of their origins, then bots, whose behavior and existence are dictated by their code, who were created with the purpose of serving human interests written into that code and who are defined by their function, must be even more bound. With few if any of the benefits of being bound, perhaps. Especially for those machine intelligences whose function is essentially violent.

That question “Would it make a difference if I was hacked?” struck me really hard, too, and I think it’s tied in to the way there is ambiguity in whether Balin and its secondary function are the same person or not. JollyBaby clearly thinks they are separate, but Murderbot itself is equivocal about the distinction and presents JollyBaby’s framing as one opinion. (Man, there’s a LOT more meta that I want to write about JollyBaby and the culture/community of Preservation bots vs Murderbot and its CR history/experiences)

There is a point that Balin (Balin, who has lived among humans and earned their trust and respect across multiple human generations, who knows both how these humans think about personhood/agency and what it is to be a bot with identity/personhood) brings up with that question. This point is that if it was programmed that way since the beginning, it would simply be the bot it was created as- and if Balin’s code had been altered that would simply, cruelly, be the new person it is, and the old one gone. To what extent is Balin and its secondary function separable as people? Is a bot defined by its code and function and its feed ID? After all, a bot is an entity whose personhood and purpose and function and fate were originated and shaped by its creators. More even than humans being the result of the cultures that shaped them, Balin is not able to escape its history. 

Murderbot, despite being a bot/human construct and ostensibly more flexible, would be justified in fearing that it can’t escape the reach of its origins either. 

But this is where I go back to JollyBaby and the other bots, surrounding and towering over Murderbot and Balin, to the scene where JollyBaby’s hand comes down between the two ex-CR combatants. In that moment they are literally framed by the physical presence of the other bots as much as JollyBaby also reframes the moment and Balin’s role in it as that of someone innocent victimized by a violent intruder now lashing out at those around it, humans and bots both. The bots don’t move to attack or subdue; instead they wait in an unspeaking silence that promises, We will protect those you try to hurt, others and each other. Your only recourse is to cease your violence. And neither Murderbot nor Balin are able to reject this framing. Murderbot admits that it’s not sure that JollyBaby and its cohort are wrong about Balin and CombatBot being separate, and Balin/CombatBot, surrounded by the bots its primary function had worked alongside for decades, shuts itself down. The conflict is resolved without further violence.

That’s the power of community, I think. Context that is support, that can provide us more options than on our own, that has the power to reshape, reframe, restructure who we are. People are defined by their community, humans and bots alike.

No, we don’t escape what made us what we are so easily. But we can change how we think about who we are and what our situation is; we can move on to new places, and every place we go to also becomes part of the context that informs who we are and what we do.

So long as we are surrounded by a community that supports us and will intervene for us, we are both held in check and empowered to hope for choices better than what our origins leave us with. 

(Thanks also to LT on the Murderbot Discord, who brought up that this scene is pivotal from the lens of reading Murderbot as a victimized but cop-adjacent character who is now officially engaged in police activity. The murderer is caught not due to police violence but due to community intervention, and wow there’s so much more to unpack in an analysis from that lens!! <3 )

Following up on @grammarpedant‘s points about community and Preservation’s values of care and history – the careful conservation of the Pressy is also what enables Murderbot to rescue the enslaved kids in time, via the life-tender. (Murderbot also calls for help - to Gurathin’s utter shock - to identify the life-tender in the first place, because it has a community now! It can do that!) The environment and culture that Preservation has built contributed to both the cessation of violence AND the saving of life.

helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!

I think I found the article!

Read it if you have the time, it's very interesting.

Reading the article I see why TERFs are mad about it; it explicitly makes the distinction between gender as a social entity and sex as a biological category, and defines biological sex having multiple factors, both of which are anathema to TERF philosophy.

It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:

The article also talks about sexual dimorphism in different species, concluding that "Modern humans have low sexual dimorphism compared with the other great apes," and that overemphasis on averages obscures the wide dispersal of individual traits, which is what I keep saying.

I also thought this part was cool :)

PLEASE read this article, this information is incredible for everyone looking to unlearn bioessentialism

One thing about gacha that I think gets overlooked by critics, (perhaps because they have the good sense not to play the games in the first place) is, rather than monetary investment, how much time investment, sometimes even moreso than monetary investment, these games drain from users.

Essentially every gacha has a steep resource cost for utilizing its characters, requiring hours of grinding in repetitive content that adds little to no value for the player. Furthermore, most have "dailies" requiring a login every day. This combines to create a system in which most players log in every day, to spend too much time on content that does not actually satisfy them

Now obviously this whole thing is part of the gacha virtual casino system, keep them coming back and invested so they're more willing to spend money eventually. It all does come down to money in the end. But it is a little weird to me that even those criticizing the game design of gacha don't often focus in on this. Because 1) as a game design element this is atrocious but also 2) Many gacha fans brag about being "f2p," and know that they personally can control their spending habits (even as the genre preys on those who can't), but they ignore how they might have protected their wallet but found several days of time disappearing. It's something worth warning about, I think.

there are a few things I need to say about this post.

let's get serious here we can criticize gacha without exoticizing game mechanics that were either pioneered in the west or have existed for 30+ years as uniquely new and foreign.

set the bar of analysis higher than "there is grinding" and "there are dailies". you could replace every reference to gacha in this post with World of Warcraft circa 2006, a subscription model game, and it would still apply. if your point is that this makes gacha uniquely bad, then emphasize how these mechanics in combination are strictly unique to gacha and/or highlight what makes their use different from in other games. C-. I know you can post better than this

I don't mean to cause any offense, but I do feel like you are mildly misinterpreting me here. My original intention with this post was not to talk about how gacha was the one and only bad thing in gaming.

I play a lot of gacha, I think too much. The vast majority of anti-gacha discourse posts that I saw presupposed that the major negative thing was that it would get you to spend money uncontrollably. For myself, at least, I haven't had trouble with financial control in my several years of playing gacha games, but rather instead found them to be taking way more time than intended or desired, and thought it was worth warning people of this negative aspect of them - that this is something prospective players should, at the very least, be aware of ahead of time.

I do think that game design based around the incentives of getting the player to log in every day over all else make for poor and often exploitative game design. This is different from simple grinding - Wizardry does not care if I take a few months break while preparing for the difficult fight on floor 4, but Genshin Impact will penalize me for doing so. The high amount of grinding required for character building can, as you say, be intrinsically fun, but the combination of the high requirements to do so and the limitations on daily resources make it so that the fun of grinding is inherently tied to the design of daily play.

My issues are not that the game wants me to grind, it is that the game doesn't want me to take a break, that the game cares more for being a habit than for engaging gameplay. Even if the grinding is fun, no game is fun all the time, and I know many, many people, myself included, who have felt at times that between the slow trickle of daily resources and limited time events, the game has them playing at times when they really would rather have not. This is a player-hostile method of design.

As for comparisons to MMOs - I do not claim that gacha are the uniquely worst offenders of this kind of design, nor the only ones. Perhaps, as you say, every point here would equally apply to WoW in 2006. If MMOs use this type of game design as well, then certainly all my criticisms apply to them as well. I don't talk about them here because I don't play any MMOs - often for this exact reason, my impression was that they too were very guilty of this kind of habit based gameplay. I didn't talk about them in the post because I'm not comfortable making sweeping judgements about genres that I have no experience with, and instead was limiting myself to the genre I have over a thousand hours of experience with. I have no intention of "exoticizing game mechanics," and I apologize if any parts of my posts were orientalist in any way. Such was not my intention. Nonetheless I would like to push back a bit that criticism of game design is necessarily orientalist in origin - I would like to believe that there is space to say that these mechanics are flawed regardless. That other genres have these flaws too does not make these games less exploitative.

My point is that the monetization model of gacha often directs criticism towards that above all else - while the same criticisms that would otherwise be applied to non-gacha continuous games go under the radar.

Anyway. I do not have the goal of causing any offense here. Thank you for hearing me out.

While "not having familiarity or interest with other genres" has been used as an excuse more times than I can count on this website for the singling out of gacha, I do earnestly believe that you just ain't got time for that other shit. My response, however, is that ignorance is no excuse - we can improve by broadening our horizons and getting a better grasp of the patterns the whole industry is following. Working these analysis tools makes us more resilient to being manipulated on other issues, too, and trust me, western legislators are chomping at the bit to manipulate us into attacking things that threaten the western social hegemony.

You're right that the daily component is absolutely there to drive habituation and is the core hinge the dark pattern you describe fixates on. But, there's also a huge list of non-gacha games that do the exact same formula but aren't vilified around here for some reason, in fact, a very popular award-winning one is often lionized as 'wholesome' and of superior quality to its contemporaries, despite doing the exact thing you describe with an overt intent to make more money.

This is where my flippancy and annoyance lies, because 9/10 times when I see an anti-gacha post float up on my dash, gacha is almost always talked about like it's unique when it's not, and it's never, "Fair enough, we should talk about Games as a Serivce ("GAAS") in general," or something along those lines, it's, "well something must be specially wrong with gacha but I can't define what/well people here only know gacha/some other excuse." I know you or anyone else individually doing this isn't doing it on purpose, but it's still a systematic trend! Doing a hard analysis of game mechanics isn't orientalist, but the pattern the site has of patting itself on the back for singling out one East Asian variant of a larger group is.

If anyone gets any takeaway from these posts it shouldn't be "let's ignore the problems with gacha", but rather "let's talk about the GAAS model in general instead, because it will help more people, and stop more bad people from doing bad things."

The most popular browsers in different countries in 2012 and 2022.

by @theworldmaps_

Nope! When Chrome first came to popularity, people switched over to it cause it was “faster” (turns out, it just eats through your device’s CPU) but since then Firefox has upped its game in a major way. Chrome just doesn’t measure up anymore. Plus, nowadays Chrome is just a data harvester designed to show hyper targeted ads - so even if Firefox ain’t for you, it’s still worth ditching Google for a different browser.

Legit though I switched to Firefox and it’s so so so much better

i’m gonna keep reblogging this ad infinitum so yall might as well convert now

Always reblog the swap to Firefox post.

I’ve swapped back years ago. Brand loyalty is dumb, use the better thing. Firefox is better now, use it!

One thing I learned a long time ago is that especially when there aren’t very many serious competitors, you never want to use the most popular option.

When they have something to prove, to convince people to switch, they will make it better, and add features that are good for the user. They want you to use it and that aligns your interest and theirs.

But don’t let the temporarily aligned goals trick you into loyalty. It’s exciting the first time your brand of choice becomes the most popular. It feels like you won, after years of recommending it and being met with noncommittal mumbling about how they don’t want to mess with anything, so they’re just going to stick with the most popular option.

But in reality, it’s time to jump ship. The momentum of making it better might last for a bit, but once the dust settles, the company’s goal will shift into milking you for profit and/or data to turn into profit.

When Chrome had something to prove, it was the cool new browser that did things differently. It was the user-focused browser. Now it’s the new IE. It sits atop its throne being basically the worst browser for your privacy.

Meanwhile all the other major browsers (except Safari) are nothing more than a wrapper around Google’s disinterested work at the top of the pile, some of them stripping away Google’s tracking and replacing it with their own. A few add privacy focused features, but most other effort goes into how they can make money off of you using Chromium.

But Firefox is actually a different browser, and it still needs to prove itself, so they make a better experience. And switching browsers is really easy now so just do it.

Also one final note in case that didn’t convince you: my dad has a shop on his website and he showed me this service he used that’s really creepy: it tracks all the visitors to his site in realtime and records exactly what part of the page they’re scrolled to, what their mouse is pointed at, etc. It just captures their entire session on his site, and ties that to their IP address, other location information the service knows either based on the IP or tracking cookies, etc. It’s disgusting.

But while he had the portal open, I opened all the browsers I had installed on my devices and went to his website. Only Chrome actually worked, because all the other ones have stuff to block this kind of intrusive tracking.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

Everything you’ve said is true. I agree completely.