I love the fandom lore that their horn cuffs are basically wedding rings.

I’m just going to leave this here

He really did.

Shoutout to the maned wolf, which is technically neither wolf nor fox but has its own genus called Chrysocyon! Why -

why are your legs so long?

I mean, intellectually, I understand that it’s because you live in grasslands and have evolved to be able to see over the grass, but emotionally… why? Are they?? Like that??? Surely there was a way to make your body more cohesive and proportional-looking?

i will never shut up about maned wolves

just look at it

look at this

one of the animals for sure

wretched beast

If it’s neither wolf nor fox, then it’s cat software running on giraffe hardware.

I think y'all should know that the closest relative to the maned wolf is the bush dog which looks like this.

I was not ready for corgi-bear.

you're definitely not ready for the maned wolf Front Angle then

Confirmed creature post

A WHOLESOME THREAD <3

definitely one of those critters that would be mistaken for a cryptid in the dark

I love this long looooooooong man <3

Kickstarting a new Martin Hench novel about the dawn of enshittification

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/07/weird-pcs/#a-mormon-bishop-an-orthodox-rabbi-and-a-catholic-priest-walk-into-a-personal-computing-revolution

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by @wilwheaton:

http://martinhench.com

This is the third Hench novel, following on from the nationally bestselling The Bezzle (2024) and Red Team Blues (2023). I wrote Red Team Blues with a funny conceit: what if I wrote the final volume of a beloved, long-running series, without writing the rest of the series? Turns out, the answer is: "Your editor will buy a whole bunch more books in the series!"

My solution to this happy conundrum? Write the Hench books out of chronological order. After all, Marty Hench is a financial hacker who's been in Silicon Valley since the days of the first PCs, so he's been there for all the weird scams tech bros have dreamed up since Jobs and Woz were laboring in their garage over the Apple I. He's the Zelig of high-tech fraud! Look hard at any computing-related scandal and you'll find Marty Hench in the picture, quietly and competently unraveling the scheme, dodging lawsuits and bullets with equal aplomb.

Which brings me to Picks and Shovels. In this volume, we travel back to Marty's first job, in the 1980s – the weird and heroic era of the PC. Marty ended up in the Bay Area after he flunked out of an MIT computer science degree (he was too busy programming computers to do his classwork), and earning his CPA at a community college.

Silicon Valley in the early eighties was wild: Reaganomics stalked the land, the AIDS crisis was in full swing, the Dead Kennedys played every weekend, and man were the PCs ever weird. This was before the industry crystalized into Mac vs PC, back when no one knew what they were supposed to look like, who was supposed to use them, and what they were for.

Marty's first job is working for one of the weirder companies: Fidelity Computing. They sound like a joke: a computer company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi. But the joke's on their customers, because Fidelity Computing is a scam: a pyramid sales cult that exploits religious affinities to sell junk PCs that are designed to lock customers in and squeeze them for every dime. A Fidelity printer only works with Fidelity printer paper (they've gimmicked the sprockets on the tractor-feed). A Fidelity floppy drive only accepts Fidelity floppies (every disk is sold with a single, scratched-out sector and the drives check for an error on that sector every time they run).

Marty figures out he's working for the bad guys when they ask him to destroy Computing Freedom, a scrappy rival startup founded by three women who've escaped from Fidelity Computing's cult: a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family; a radical nun who's thrown in with the Liberation Theology movement in opposing America's Dirty Wars; and a Mormon woman who's quit the church in disgust at its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. The women of Computing Freedom have a (ahem) holy mission: to free every Fidelity customer from the prison they were lured into.

Marty may be young and inexperienced, but he can spot a rebel alliance from a light year away and he knows what side he wants to be on. He joins the women in their mission, and we're deep into a computing war that quickly turns into a shooting war. Turns out the Reverend Sirs of Fidelity Computer aren't just scammers – they're mobbed up, and willing to turn to lethal violence to defend their racket.

This is a rollicking crime thriller, a science fiction novel about the dawn of the computing revolution. It's an archaeological expedition to uncover the fossil record of the first emergence of enshittification, a phenomenon that was born with the PC and its evil twin, the Reagan Revolution.

The book comes out on Feb 15 in hardcover and ebook from Macmillan (US/Canada) and Bloomsbury (UK), but neither publisher is doing the audiobook. That's my department.

Why? Well, I love audiobooks, and I especially love the audiobooks for this series, because they're read by the incredible Wil Wheaton, hands down my favorite audiobook narrator. But that's not why I retain my audiobook rights and produce my own audiobooks. I do that because Amazon's Audible service refuses to carry any of my audiobooks.

Here's how that works: Audible is a division of Amazon, and they've illegally obtained a monopoly over the audiobook market, controlling more than 90% of audiobook sales in many genres. That means that if your book isn't for sale on Audible, it might as well not exist.

But Amazon won't let you sell your books on Audible unless you let them wrap those books in "digital rights management," a kind of encryption that locks them to Audible's authorized players. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's a felony punishable with a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine to supply you with a tool to remove an audiobook from Audible and play it on a rival app. That applies even if the person who gives you the tool is the creator of the book!

You read that right: if I make an audiobook and then give you the tools to move it out of Amazon's walled garden, I could go to prison for five years! That's a stiffer sentence than you'd face if you were to just pirate the audiobook. It's a harsher penalty than you'd get for shoplifting the book on CD from a truck-stop. It's more draconian than the penalty for hijacking the truck that delivers the CDs!

learned how to use blenders film making tools

Did you know that Mastodon and BlueSky users can follow each other, using something called a "bridge"?

I wrote up how up above, at the link.

I'm talking about it here because it looks like Fuckerberg's decision to repeat Musk's successful Twitter experiment with Facebook, Insta, and Threads is going well enough before it even really starts that he's mad about it.

Good.

(If you missed it, Suckerberg basically carved LGBT people and women out of anti-harassment rules, giving the green light for mass abuse campaigns, and said no more fact checking, disinformation is fine, we'll use X's "community notes" system instead. The abuse bot armies will spin up _so fast_, holy shit. But, well, he's gone in on MAGA, so what do you expect?)

Anyway, if you're leaving Facebook or Insta or Threads for Mastodon or BlueSky, and so are your friends, you might want to know that you don't have to lose contact with people who go to the other one. You can just turn on the bridge and then follow each other just the same. It's pretty dang neat, really.

this website’s easy watch. *dangles a bunch of greek gods like keys*

i know what i’m doing dw

Keep in mind I only know like. Two Greek gods by name. Homer is one of them, and he was good friends with Odysseus I think?

Wait fuck Homer isn’t a god he wrote the fucking thing. Fuck

POST CANCELLED NO ONE LOOK

desperately google searching for “greek gods to pray to when people notice your online idiocy”

You're failing.

You don’t think I know that, God of Death? Can I pray to you so I can DIE ALREADY

Pluto is Roman, not Greek

?????

Short version is that Pluto is a later name for the god of death, which is often associated with the Roman era/Roman mythology. Hades is the earlier name.

I set up my own house made of sticks and it has promptly fallen on me

HE’S NOT EVEN REAL?????*

I made this post thinking I knew what kind of fire I was playing with. Hephaestus, God of Fire, looking upon me from his fuck off tower or whatever said “Oh you think you know? Check this shit” and promptly set my post ablaze for everyone to observe

Hephaestus doesn't have a tower, he lived in a volcano

FINE THEN. BIG FUCK OFF VOLCANO. WHATEVER

Achievement Unlocked:

Lightning Bait

You're basically doing the post equivalent of standing out in a field during a storm with a ten-foot copper pole, you better hope Zeus is busy hiding from Hera.

I need you to name every greek God you know and what they are for plz

For science

OKAY FINE HERE'S WHAT I'VE FOUND

ares is the god of war, not kratos

WHY THE FUCK DOES THE GAME CALL HIM GOD OF WAR THEN

I can't believe this post is less than 24 hours old, it feels like something out of classic tumblr lore

Friendly reminder as we head into tax season (for US Americans), that the major tax preparation companies are fully prepared to lie and mislead you into paying for their tax preparation software when you might qualify for free software through the IRS.

Don’t fall for their bullshit. Visit IRS Free File and see what services are available to you. The requirements vary depending on your household status and income, but if you make less than $79,000/year (which is nearly everyone I know), you probably qualify for something.

HR block also did this shit to me, fuck em

Shouldn't have put the new year in the middle of winter cause then everyone expects you to get your shit together in january. Of all times

"What's your new years resolution" Survive. Ask me again when I'm not vitamin d deficient

Celts had new years in the SPRING

stupid romans

How widespread is the knowledge that you should never say the words “overdose” or “drugs” or literally anything about suspected use in a call to 911? My fellow Americans, don’t say you’re seeing an overdose or suspect an overdose if you’re calling 911.

I’m glad you asked, genuinely, hope it’s okay to use this as a wider learning thing @andrewbelindo

When you call 911 you are going to be interacting with cops or cops adjacent machinery at least. Dispatches to 911, for instance, can and have been used by cops for evidence and charges against substance users. While you, the caller, may be covered by Good Samaritan laws, the person who used is not.

Furthermore, there have been studies that show that response times are longer for first responders in a suspected drug overdose, leading to a higher risk of death. These are the reasons that when you call 911 you should keep to symptoms (“there’s a person here who’s not responding” or “it doesn’t look like they’re breathing”) rather than bringing up what you might know or suspect they have used.

You could also, if you’re comfortable, clear the area of any materials they may have used, but that’s a topic for another day.