mycatdoesntlikeyoublog

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Demon hunters featuring a half demon? Yeah close enough

Tumblr is making it blurry, go on the image to see it properly. This was mostly me having fun with outfits and shading

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AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

well…darn

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dash is dead im teleporting to the past

https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard?max_post_id=606474489540042752

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Just to clarify, there's a bill that would STOP credit card companies from controlling who's allowed to spend money on porn or "risque" (read: queer) content. If you don't think big business should be able to tell you what to spend your own damn money on, call your senators and reps to let them know! It's the Fair Access to Banking Act, H.R.987 in the House, S.410 in the Senate.

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Thinking about how wild it is that enshittification starts as a way for the rich to squeeze the populace for more money but ends up infecting everything so even luxury products decline in quality. They’ve got more money than fucking God now and for what? Literally they can’t even buy fun nice stuff for themselves because they killed craft.

Anyway this post is about Dhaka muslin but it’s also about everything.

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okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:

shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about

example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market

through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom

BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.

But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)

She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.

Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.

But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever

over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years

Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her

Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless

for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom

she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)

just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.

also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead

A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff

but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"

^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now

Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!

Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address

I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.

(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)

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I truly enjoy how much Animorphs is like “here are our young heroes, each with a distinctive trope to fill in the group!” And then it makes you watch how the pressure of each person’s role grinds them to dust. And also they have homework.

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THE ENTIRE WEST IS BEING PUT UP FOR SALE AND I AM BEGGING YOU TO CALL YOUR SENATORS

Trump’s budget bill has many, many things in it, but buried amongst it is the MILLIONS OF ACRES OF PUBLIC LAND FOR SALE.

This is the entirety of the Arizona state forests, the entire Cascades mountain range. Swathes of pristine desert around the national parks in Utah. On the doorstep of Jackson Hole.

THIS BILL IS BIG, BUT IT CAN BE AMENDED AND ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT PASS AS IS please.

If you have ever enjoyed the wilderness, we stand to lose it all forever.

CALLING your senators - NOT JUST IN THE WEST. ALL SENATORS, is CRUCIAL.

Outdoor alliance has a great resource for reaching out.

I don’t have a huge following but please, everywhere I have ever loved, the forests I grew up playing in, the land I got married on, is all at risk and I am begging.

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Well fucks? Get to it!

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>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

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Reblog to open a rail line from your blog to the person you reblogged this from

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Well shit, the Republicans brought a certain anti-online porn bill back to the table.

The Interstate Obscenity Definition Act.

This should alarm you guys.

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Literal definition of spyware:

Also From Microsoft’s own FAQ: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. 🤡

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I feel like in the rush of “throw out etiquette who cares what fork you use or who gets introduced first” we actually lost a lot of social scripts that the younger generations are floundering without.

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Download this easy DIY clothing repair guide (only 10 pages) from Uni of Kentucky

link to PDF

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Documenting the Damage: 100 Harmful Policies from the First 100 Days of Trump's Second Term

The second Trump administration has had the busiest first 100 days of any US presidency in nearly a century. Since January, I've been keeping a spreadsheet documenting 900+ policy changes and political developments. I then bundled many of the most important changes into 100 topics areas and wrote a summary of each of them, providing a semi-comprehensive account of the tremendous changes to US politics which have occurred.

PDF version of the full report

Website version of the full report

Medium versions:

Introduction + Part I: Democracy and Government

Part II: Civil Rights and Liberties

Part III: Economy and Public Services 

Part IV: Environment and Energy

Part V + Conclusion: Foreign Policy