#Productivity and Profitability

[productiveandfree]

5 Tools to Boost Productivity and Profitability in Your Landscaping Business

The landscaping industry is huge, maintaining productivity and profitability are thus key elements to ensure business longevity and success. Thankfully technology has provided entrepreneurs with various tools to leverage to ensure success, productivity, and profitability.

Let’s delve into the 5 tools you need to ensure your business stays profitable and productive, setting you apart from the competition.

5 Tools for Productivity and Profitability

Having first-class landscaping tools enhances a business's ability to ensure top-notch project management, improves design accuracy, streamlines communication, and boosts productivity and revenue. Companies can deliver high-quality products increasing client satisfaction and client retention.

1.  Time-Tracking Tools

●     TimeCamp: This is a time-tracking software that helps companies monitor productivity. It also offers features such as timesheet generation, billing, and automated attendance tracking to name a few. It is a tool that can help improve productivity and profitability for your business immensely. TimeCamp can track hours worked accurately, and this tool also allows managers or business owners to allocate company resources effectively and optimize labor and day-to-day costs.  Another beneficial feature of this tool is that it can integrate with project management tools ensuring efficient task delegation.

The great thing about this tool is that it offers an easy-to-navigate interface. Offering powerful reporting features and easy integration with various other software and tools, it is also mobile-friendly.  However, the bad thing about this tool is that it offers little room for customization. So you are unable to set it up in a manner that will meet your business's specific needs.

●     Worksana: An excellent tool for your landscaping business. It offers streamlined and efficient tracking of your employees and ensures effective communication. It accurately monitors employee hours and the time it takes to complete a project. Allowing for improved resource allocation and utilization, as well as enhanced project productivity monitoring.

The pros of this tool are that it boasts accurate time tracking, offers easy reporting, ensures improved project visibility, and is also mobile-friendly. The cons are that its subscription fees are a bit steep, there is a long initial set-up time, there are limited opportunities for customization and it is not easy to integrate with other software.

It is vitally important for entrepreneurs to master time management. This enables them to nurture a working environment where employees understand that time is money and place great value on using their time productively. Moreover, being able to effectively track how employees make use of their time is essential for the success of your business. For the landscaping industry, time tracking is vital for managing multiple projects, and staff, and monitoring job sites with little to no hassle.

2.  Project Management Tools

●     Asana: Maintaining efficient and organized project management is vital for your business's success. At times, you may be busy with multiple projects and you need to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. Asana presents a myriad of benefits for your business in that regard. It enables you to track the progress of a project ensuring regular and accurate updates. Asana also boasts a bunch of automated features that make it very user-friendly, saving you time.

It is about ensuring accurate recording of worked hours, any overtime. Furthermore, it also helps business owners avoid falling into the trap of overpaying or underpaying employees. Time tracking tools are beneficial for enhancing productivity, monitoring the progress of a project, managing project costs, and providing business owners with the ability to ensure enhanced project management and better allocation of resources. It is ideal for your landscaping business ensuring effective task and project organization, effective team collaboration, and project tracking. Asana assists in improving productivity and profitability by ensuring enhanced resource management and allocation and ensuring your company projects have clear timelines.

Among its features, it boasts customizable project templates and offers teams the opportunity for real-time collaboration and accurate progress tracking.  However, it can become less user-friendly the bigger the projects are. To fully access Asana you would need to buy the pro version and there are limited integration options with other tools.

●     Jobber: This is a great tool that helps your business seamlessly schedule new jobs, and ensure employees have accurate project details, minimizing costly mistakes and also facilitating online payments. Jobber is a nifty tool that enables a company to monitor a crew's location for easy project or task assignments. It eliminates the need for tedious paperwork, as it is a great all-rounder tool. In addition, it also enables businesses to monitor productivity no matter where crew members are based. This is a vital tool for increasing revenue, and maintaining and boosting productivity, as it streamlines project management so you do not have to work long hours.

Finally, for your landscaping business, Jobber is an excellent project management tool that improves productivity through efficient scheduling, client management, and invoicing to mention some of its features. It comes with a user-friendly interface that assists companies to work more efficiently contributing to increased profits and that projects are completed on time. 

Project Management tools are great because they improve productivity by providing mechanisms for efficient scheduling. Ensuring that a business can meet project targets, and is great for maintaining organization and efficiency. It allows business owners to properly plan for a project and to allocate the necessary resources. Saving time and money. Having such a tool allows you as the business owner to plan for a project in advance and thus you are able for instance to order the needed supplies in advance without making costly blunders or having to pay more than you should.

1.  Financial Management Tools

●     Quickbooks; This is a robust financial management software that simplifies bookkeeping, invoicing, and expense tracking for your business. It boasts efficient reporting features to ease your decision-making process. A great tool for boosting productivity and profitability by ensuring accurate cash flow management.

The great thing about this tool is that it offers a user-friendly interface, and ensures comprehensive reporting and invoicing automation.  Some of the cons include its subscription costs, it can be rather complicated to navigate for new users and has a limited customer support community.

●     Freshbooks;  For your landscaping business, Freshbooks is the ideal solution. It is a great financial management tool that offers easy invoicing and expense tracking for efficient financial management. It is designed to help streamline financial management tasks. Ensuring better cash flow and client management to help boost profitability.

It is an ideal tool that offers simple invoicing options, effective expense tracking, and client collaboration elements. However, it offers limited reporting capabilities, and it can become costly due to its monthly subscription fees and required tech-savvy individuals because it may take a while to get the hang of the tool.

These tools help manage a business's finances effectively. Ensuring improved decision-making, and increasing profitability for your business. It is important to have financial tools in place that help to accurately estimate costs and to develop well-thought-out budgets to maintain profitability and ensure steady business growth. Financial tools are key for accurately monitoring your company’s financial performance and standing. As a business owner, it is important to be able to predict future costs and spending, to be able to identify areas where your business can reduce costs to maximize profits. Incorporating financial management tools allows you to be able to achieve all of this with ease.

2.  CRM Tools

●     Aspire; This is a tool designed with landscaping businesses in mind. It offers a robust set of tools to streamline, optimize, and automate business processes to ensure efficiency and productivity. It is a good tool for enhancing client management and for tracking ongoing projects. It enables the creation of a centralized client database offering automated client communication, so you do not miss a beat. It boosts productivity by ensuring client satisfaction by improving the rate of service delivery. It also guarantees a boost in profitability by helping your business maintain high client retention rates.

The pros of this tool include the fact that it is specifically tailored for the landscaping industry, it is a great tool for centralizing client data, and it offers automation, boosting efficiency. Unfortunately, the cons include expensive subscription costs, having a rather complex initial set-up, and it may prove costly and time-consuming because staff may need to be trained on how to use this tool.

 ●     Single-Ops; This is another tool that is great for streamlining a company's daily operations. It has a set of comprehensive features that enhance scheduling, invoicing, and the level of customer service and communication. A great tool for improving productivity, enhancing organizational efficiency, and ensuring highly effective client relationships. Leading to improved profitability.

Single-Ops is an all-in-one tool that offers enhanced flexibility to access the platform no matter where you are, whether using a phone or laptop. It also offers enhanced productivity tools to ensure that crew members have the right resources to improve productivity, and it offers different subscription plans to match the size of an   organization. However, it has extensive features that can make it difficult for some users to navigate, the more users that are added to the platform the more costly it becomes and it offers limited customization options.  

Having the right Customer Relationship Management tools for your landscaping business ensures that you have a knowledge base where employees can have immediate access to customer information. This helps to ensure that productivity is not hampered by employees struggling to find client information or even worse, accessing the wrong client information and costing your business. CRM tools improve collaboration and teamwork, they help build and maintain customer relationships. This tool improves productivity, ensuring that your business is uniquely positioned to attract and retain clients, guaranteeing profit.

Share in the comments below: Questions go here

[blueskittlesart]

i hope everyone in nintendo’s management department dies and goes to hell no matter what and i’m not kidding

[jomeimei421]

SO… ORVLA TRAILER CAME OUT THEY GAVE YJH A GUN

[uncanny-tranny]

The leftism/anticapitalism leaving people's bodies the zeptosecond you imply that disabled people who aren't "productive" still matter in society and need to be treated like intrinsic equals who have a place in this world:

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital

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 Wil Wheaton.

Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us wish we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.

It's lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services, or lack the perspective to understand why it's so urgent to get away from them, or that their "hacked dopamine loops" have addicted them to the zuckermusk algorithms. But if you actually listen to the people who've stayed behind, you'll learn that the main reason our friends stay on legacy platforms is that they care about the other people there more than they hate Zuck or Musk.

They rely on them because they're in a rare-disease support group; or they all coordinate their kids' little league carpools there; or that's where they stay in touch with family and friends they left behind when they emigrated; or they're customers or the audience for creative labor.

All those people might want to leave, too, but it's really hard to agree on where to go, when to go, and how to re-establish your groups when you get somewhere else. Economists call this the "collective action problem." This problem creates "switching costs" – a lot of stuff you'll have to live without if you switch from legacy platforms to new ones. The collective action problem is hard to solve and the switching costs are very high:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

That's why people stay behind – not because they lack perspective, or self-discipline, or because their dopamine loops have been hacked by evil techbro sorcerers who used Big Data to fashion history's first functional mind-control ray. They are locked in by real, material things.

Big Tech critics who attribute users' moral failings or platforms' technical prowess to the legacy platforms' "stickiness" are their own worst enemies. These critics have correctly identified that legacy platforms are a serious problem, but have totally failed to understand the nature of that problem or how to fix it. Thankfully, more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it.

But there's another major gap in the mainstream critique of social media. Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services. After all, the reason so many of us got on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is because they used to be a lot of fun. They were useful. They were even great at times.

When tech critics fail to ask why good services turn bad, that failure is just as severe as the failure to ask why people stay when the services rot.

Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a great way to form communities and make friends and find old friends is the same guy who who has turned Facebook into a hellscape. There's very good reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep, and he took investment capital very early on, long before he started fucking up the service. So what gives? Did Zuck get a brain parasite that turned him evil? Did his investors get more demanding in their clamor for dividends?

If that's what you think, you need to show your working. Again, by all accounts, Zuck was a monster from day one. Zuck's investors – both the VCs who backed him early and the gigantic institutional funds whose portfolios are stuffed with Meta stock today – are not patient sorts with a reputation for going easy on entrepreneurs who leave money on the table. They've demanded every nickel since the start.

What changed? What caused Zuck to enshittify his service? And, even more importantly for those of us who care about the people locked into Facebook's walled gardens: what stopped him from enshittifying his services in the "good old days?"

At its root, enshittification is a theory about constraints. Companies pursue profit at all costs, but while you may be tempted to focus on the "at all costs" part of that formulation, you musn't neglect the "profits" part. Companies don't pursue unprofitable actions at all costs – they only pursue the plans that they judge are likely to yield profits.

When companies face real competitors, then some enshittificatory gambits are unprofitable, because they'll drive your users to competing platforms. That's why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they swallowed the switching costs and defected to Instagram. In an ill-advised middle-of-the-night memo to his CFO, Zuck defended spending $1b on Instagram on the grounds that it would recapture those Facebook escapees:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

A company that neutralizes, buys or destroys its competitors can treat its users far worse – invade their privacy, cheap out on moderation and anti-spam, etc – without losing their business. That's why Zuck's motto is "it is better to buy than to compete":

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/zuckerberg-its-better-to-buy-than-compete-is-facebook-a-monopoly-42243

Of course, as a leftist, I know better than to count on markets as a reliable source of corporate discipline. Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured by GW Bush and Obama (and then Trump).

As cartels and monopolies took over our economy, most government regulators were neutered and captured. Public agencies were stripped of their powers or put in harness to attack small companies, customers, and suppliers who got in the way of monopolists' rent-extraction. That meant that as Facebook grew, Zuckerberg had less and less to fear from government enforcers who might punish him for enshittification where the markets failed to do so.

But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-party technology that might help users resist enshittification. IP law is why you can't make a privacy-protecting ad-blocker for an app (and why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web, and why apps are so dismally enshittified). IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP law's growth has coincided with Facebook's ascendancy – the bigger Facebook got, the more tempting it was to interoperators who might want to plug new code into it to protect Facebook users, and the more powers Facebook had to block even the most modest improvements to its service. That meant that Facebook could enshittify even more, without worrying that it would drive users to take unilateral, permanent action that would deprive it of revenue, like blocking ads. Once ad-blocking is illegal (as it is on apps), there's no reason not to make ads as obnoxious as you want.

Of course, many Facebook employees cared about their users, and for most of the 21st century, those workers were a key asset for Facebook. Tech workers were in short supply until just a couple years ago, when the platforms started round after round of brutal layoffs – 260,000 in 2023, another 150,000+ in 2024. Facebook workers may be furious about Zuckerberg killing content moderation, but he's not worried about them quitting – not with a half-million skilled tech workers out there, hunting for jobs. Fuck 'em. Let 'em quit:

https://www.404media.co/its-total-chaos-internally-at-meta-right-now-employees-protest-zuckerbergs-anti-lgbtq-changes/

This is what changed: the collapse of market, government, and labor constraints, and IP law's criminalization of disenshittifying, interoperable add-ons. This is why Zuck, an eternal creep, is now letting his creep flag fly so proudly today. Not because he's a worse person, but because he understands that he can hurt his users and workers to benefit his shareholders without facing any consequences. Zuckerberg 2025 isn't the most evil Zuck, he's the most unconstrained Zuck.

Same goes for Twitter. I mean, obviously, there's been a change in management at Twitter – the guy who's enshittifying it today isn't the guy who enshittified it prior to last year. Musk is speedrunning the enshittification curve, and yet Twitter isn't collapsing. Why not? Because Musk is insulated from consequences for fucking up – he's got a huge cushion of wealth, he's got advertisers who are desperate to reach his users, he's got users who can't afford to leave the service, he's got IP law that he can use to block interoperators who might make it easier to migrate to a better service. He was always a greedy, sadistic asshole. Now he's an unconstrained greedy, sadistic asshole. Musk 2025 isn't a worse person than Musk 2020. He's just more free to act on his evil impulses than he was in years gone by.

These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.

That's why we got Jack Welch and his acolytes when we did. There were always evil fuckers just like them hanging around, but they didn't get to run GM until Ronald Reagan took away the constraints that would have punished them for turning GE into a giant pile of shit. Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.

In other words, the profit motive itself is not sufficient to cause enshittification – not even when a for-profit firm has to answer to VCs who would shut down the company or fire its leadership in the face of unsatisfactory returns. For-profit companies chase profit. The enshittifying changes to Facebook and Twitter are cruel, but the cruelty isn't the point: the point is profits. If the fines – or criminal charges – Facebook faced for invading our privacy exceeded the ad-targeting revenue it makes by doing so, it would stop spying on us. Facebook wouldn't like it. Zuck would hate it. But he'd do it, because he spies on us to make money, not because he's a voyeur.

To stop enshittification, it is not necessary to eliminate the profit motive – it is only necessary to make enshittification unprofitable.

This is not to defend capitalism. I'm not saying there's a "real capitalism" that's good, and a "crony capitalism" or "monopoly capitalism" that's bad. All flavors of capitalism harm working people and seek to shift wealth and power from the public and democratic institutions to private interests. But that doesn't change the fact that there are, indeed, different flavors of capitalism, and they have different winners and losers. Capitalists who want to sell apps on the App Store or reach customers through Facebook are technofeudalism's losers, while Apple, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech companies are technofeudalism's great winners.

Smart leftism pays attention to these differences, because they represent the potential fault lines in capitalism's coalition. These people all call themselves capitalists, they all give money and support to political movements that seek to crush worker power and human rights – but when the platforms win, the platforms' business customers lose. They are irreconcilably on different sides of a capitalism-v-capitalism fight that is every bit as important to them as the capitalism-v-socialism fight.

I'm saying that it's good praxis to understand these divisions in capitalism, because then we can exploit those differences to make real, material gains for human thriving and worker rights. Lumping all for-profit businesses together as identical and irredeemable is bad tactics.

Legacy social media is at a turning point. Two new systems built on open standards have emerged as a credible threat to the zuckermuskian model: Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto). The former is far more mature, with a huge network of federated servers run by all different kinds of institutions, from hobbyists to corporations, and it's overseen by a nonprofit. The latter has far more users, and is a VC-backed corporate entity, and while it is hypothetically federatable, there are no Bluesky services apart from the main one that you can leave for if Bluesky starts to enshittify.

That means that Bluesky has a ton of captive users, and has the lack of constraint that characterizes the enshittified legacy platforms it has tempted tens of millions of users away from. This is not a good place to be in, because it means that if the current management choose to enshittify Bluesky, they can, and it will be profitable. It also means that the company's VCs understand that they could replace the current management and replace them with willing enshittifiers and make more money.

This is why Bluesky is in a dangerous place: not because it is backed by VCs, not because it is a for-profit entity, but because it has captive users and no constraints. It's a great party in a sealed building with no fire exits:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

Last week, I endorsed a project called Free Our Feeds, whose goals include hacking some fire exits into Bluesky by force majeure – that is, independently standing up an alternative Bluesky server that people can retreat to if Bluesky management changes, or has a change of heart:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

For some Mastodon users, Free Our Feeds is dead on arrival – why bother trying to make a for-profit project safer for its users when Mastodon is a perfectly good nonprofit alternative? Why waste millions developing a standalone Bluesky server rather than spending that money improving things in the Fediverse.

I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse – it's the defeat of enshtitification. My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet – and not just the Fediverse – then you should share this goal, too.

Many of the Fediverse's servers are operated by for-profit entities, after all. One of the Fediverse's largest servers (Threads) is owned by Meta. Threads users who feel the bite of Zuckerberg's decision to encourage homophobic, xenophobic and transphobic hate speech will find it easy to escape from Threads: they can set up on any Fediverse server that is federated with Threads and they'll be able to maintain their connections with everyone who stays behind.

The existence of for-profit servers in the Fediverse does not ruin the Fediverse (though I wouldn't personally use one of them). The fact that multiple neo-Nazi groups run their own Mastodon servers does not ruin the Fediverse (though I certainly won't use their servers). Not even the fact that Donald Trump's Truth Social is a Mastodon server does anything to ruin the Fediverse (not using that one, either).

This is the strength of federated, federatable social media – it disciplines enshittifiers by lowering switching costs, and if enshittifiers persist, it makes it easy for users to escape unshitted, because they don't have to solve the collective action problem. Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else.

Mastodon was born free: free code, with free federation as a priority. Bluesky was not: it was born within a for-profit public benefit corporation whose charter offers some defenses against enshittification, but lacks the most decisive one: the federation that would let users escape should escape become necessary.

The fact that Mastodon was born free is quite unusual in the annals of the fight for a free internet. Most of the internet was born proprietary and had freedom foisted upon it. Unix was born within Bell Labs, property of the convicted monopolist AT&T. The GNU/Linux project set it free.

SMB was born proprietary within corporate walls of Microsoft, another corporate monopolist. SAMBA set it free.

The Office file formats were also born proprietary within Microsoft's walled garden: they were set free by hacker-activists who fought through a thick bureaucratic morass and Microsoft fuckery (including literally refusing to allow chairs to be set for advocates for Open Document Format) to give us formats that underlie everything from LibreOffice to Google Docs, Office365 to your web browser.

There is nothing unusual, in other words, about hacking freedom into something that is proprietary or just insufficiently free. That's totally normal. It's how we got almost everything great about computers.

Mastodon's progenitors should be praised for ensuring their creation was born free – but the fact that Bluesky isn't free enough is no reason to turn our back on it. Our response to anything that locks in the people we care about must be to shatter those locks, not abandon the people bound by the locks because they didn't heed to our warnings.

Audre Lorde is far smarter than me, but when she wrote that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," she was wrong. There is no toolset better suited to conduct an orderly dismantling of a structure than the tools that built it. You can be sure it'll have all the right screwdriver bits, wrenches, hexkeys and sockets.

Bluesky is fine. It has features I significantly prefer to Mastodon's equivalent. Composable moderation is amazing, both a technical triumph and a triumph of human-centered design:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

I hope Mastodon adopts those features. If someone starts a project to copy all of Bluesky's best features over to Mastodon, I'll put my name to the crowdfunding campaign in a second.

But Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks – the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

[banji-effect]

This is one of the most horrifying things I've read lately, which unfortunately is truly saying something

When up and running, the bots based on Setzer featured bios and delivered automated messages to users such as: “Get out of my room, I’m talking to my AI girlfriend,” “his AI gf broke up with him,” and “help me.” The accounts and messages were reviewed by Fortune. ...“Our team discovered several chatbots on Character.AI’s platform displaying our client’s deceased son, Sewell Setzer III, in their profile pictures, attempting to imitate his personality and offering a call feature with a bot using his voice,” lawyers for Garcia said. ...It’s also not the first time chatbots based on the likeness of deceased young people have been hosted on the platform. Chatbots based on the British teenagers Molly Russell and Brianna Ghey have also been found on Character.ai’s platform, according to the BBC. Russell took her life after viewing suicide-related content online at the age of 14, while Ghey, 16, was murdered by two teenagers in 2023. A foundation set up in Molly Russell’s memory told the outlet in October, that the bots were “sickening” and an “utterly reprehensible failure of moderation.”

[unbossed]

Think of all the "durable goods" sitting on store shelves and in warehouses, still unpurchased, and all of the factories that still continue to make more of them. Think of the raw materials and the countless collective centuries of workers' lives that are wasted making things that will be buried in landfills without ever being used. Think of all of that life wasted when they could have enjoyed doing something meaningful and fulfilling with it instead.

[unbfacts]

[zeroannat]

Happy Star Days!

The lineart is available for free on my Ko-fi - this is a new thing I'm trying, please let me know how you like it! Details below:

(copied from my Bluesky post)

had an idea back in January which I'm thinking about again

I kinda want to put my Warframe lineart pngs on Ko-fi (for free/pay-what-you-want)

reason being, I got into digital art ages ago thanks to manga colouring, and I know how difficult it is to make art from scratch

having anything pre-made on the canvas makes it 100x less intimidating, and you can go wild trying all the different tools, blend modes, colour combinations etc.

and maybe there's a WF fan out there who wants to make art, but finds a completely blank canvas overwhelming, or there's an experienced artist who wants to practice their colouring skills/try a new colouring style without spending the time preparing their own lines

finding and working on a clean lineart which don't break any copyright rules can be difficult too – so in this case you wouldn't need any permission from me to colour to your heart's content

now I know that my lineart isn't exactly peak quality, but that's another reason for me to get better at it, if others are to use it

it would be lines of stuff I already posted/finished, and standard art etiquette rules would apply (crediting, no claiming as your own, no profiting etc.)

anyway, if this idea doesn't leave me, and I do decide to do this, I really need to continue with the Hex, so there's a nice Protoframe set for y'all

[cirque-dhomosexual]

Hey um? So you wavier (and other ship of the guy I can't remember) fans (if you exist???) Yall do realize if Netflix had an issue with the content of the book they would've a) not have employed the author or b) made them rewrite it, right? Like, are yall aware of the editorial and commission process????

[rockpaperscissuhs]

[tubbytarchia]

My MCYT stuff is available to buy now! (10EUR shipping worldwide)

I've never used Kofi to sell physical items before, so please feel free to tell me if anything is wrong with the formatting etc. It has a few less convenience features compared to Etsy, like shipping variation for the same location (eg tracked and untracked) and no discount code function built in. You'll just have to DM me for stuff like that. Kofi doesn't take like a third of my money like Etsy did though lol

I'll make a more formal post at a later date probably in case there's stuff to file out before then

haggling is acceptable if you buy a bunch of things cough

[yuwuta]

why is every single app becoming so insufferable to use. tumblr pauses music every 6 posts because of the audio on some ad even if it’s muted, 1/3 of the posts are suggested on your dash even though there’s a whole separate for you tab, instagram is also 80% suggested accounts and doesn’t show posts in chronological order, tiktok comment sections are the most insufferable display of willful ignorance, learned helplessness, and functional fixedness on the planet, substack is full of people who can’t write and want to charge subscription fees anyway, and i don’t even have to mention twitter like. do they even want people to enjoy using platforms 😭😭😭

[yesterdayiwrote]

So... quick update on the Eurovision situation

The EBU decided that Israel can compete despite their country being under an active Genocide investigation by the ICJ. Their delegation have gone on to antagonise other contestants by filming them for their social media without permission and refusing to remove it when asked, harass journalists who have questioned if their inclusion is appropriate, and their commentators have made horrendous comments about the Irish contestant... all without sanction.

Meanwhile the Dutch contestant got into an undisclosed 'incident' with a female member of the production crew and they've referred it to the police and flat out disqualified him from the contest with less than 12 hours notice...

Which seems like a tremendous act of double standards at an event that is already marred by serious controversy. Obviously the second is not acceptable, but very difficult to understand how the first somehow... is?

[thatneoncrisis]

really not loving the way intellectually and physically disabled people keep being used as shields against criticism of the way in which companies implement incomplete and dishonest ai

[saph-yells-into-the-void]

not gonna lie, I get pissed off when I see comments under clips of the bllk anime finale saying shit like "if only the entire season has this level of animation."

it just feels so.. purposely ignorant? the reason why s2 turned out the way it did is because of the executives not giving enough time to the animators. they were rushed for deadlines and overworked to hell. of course, I also want the production committee and the studio to have treated their animators better so that they could have created something they're proud of. but what's done is done.

those amazing moments in season 2 were done in SPITE of the working conditions. they are moments of victory during this hellish production.

yet it feels like ppl are downplaying or undermining these amazing scenes just because of the quality of the rest of the season. as if it is still the animators fault that those other moments looked bad too. they did the best they could with these conditions, and it is better to accept that and praise the good that this season DID have. bc while those bad moments were 100% on the time constraints, those good moments come from the skills of the anime team.

fuck the executives still. maybe in another universe, we could have gotten a season 2 with consistent good animation and a good schedule for the animators.

but for right now, you're not gonna catch me dragging a season that, despite the hellish production, so clearly had love and effort poured into it by everyone that worked on it.