As recently as three weeks ago Google had an image search function that let you search by type of Creative Commons license, so finding free to use/no attribution required images was so easy. Now it looks like they’ve sabotaged that function and limited it to just Creative Commons/Commercial and my job has suddenly become exponentially harder.
another day, another dollar, another instance of wanting to write a long post calling out the 2015 discourse’s massive, massive classism problem but not wanting to invite the wank and criticism it would induce
but in short: the rural poor are not your punching bags for jokes about homophobia, trump supporters, and fat ugly americans, and poor people as a whole are grossly underrepresented in talking about marginalization and are not included in discussions about the issues that affect them directly. and a massive part of that comes from there not being a vanguard of like, Poor Academics the way that there are Feminist Academics and Queer Academics and Black Academics and so forth. every other institutionally marginalized group is represented in academia but because of the inherent lack of opportunity to pursue higher education that comes along with being poor, poor people’s voices aren’t really heard to the same degree.
not to mention that structural and institutional poverty is a problem that can only really be solved by politicians, and the problem is that right wing politicians have a vested interest in keeping poor people poor and uneducated so that they will continue to vote against their own interests and effectively continue to marginalize themselves, and meanwhile said conservative politicians keep their jobs and nothing changes. and even well-meaning leftist economists can’t do anything about it.
and MEANWHILE, youth activism is so intently focused on gender and race to the exclusion of class because most activists are college students, who have not really had to deal with the effects of Poverty with a capital P. see also: the difference between being poor and being broke. and activist language policing is so inherently classist in the first place because it serves to exclude and silence anyone who doesn’t have an academic background or the free time to read blog after blog on the internet to figure out why, exactly, using that word or that asterisk is so offensive and makes you such a terrible person even if your intent is, actually, good. so much of activism requires a significant time investment and a certain level of education that people who work minimum wage jobs and have families just cannot afford. so because they’re insufficiently educated, they’re regarded as insufficiently oppressed or treated like they’re actively part of the problem.
(not to mention the internet’s obsession with degrading service workers who are employed by problematic – ugh that word, but it’s the one that fits – companies. “we went to party city and threw all the racist costumes on the floor!” “we vandalized the ‘girl toy’ and ‘boy toy’ signs at target!” literally nothing enrages me more than this.)
see also: the co-option of the term “emotional labor,” which originated as a phrase coined to describe the mental and physical toll of the requirement for service industry workers to display cheerful, positive emotions toward customers, which has been bastardized by middle-class feminists to refer to standard politeness and talking about feelings within any form of relationship, be it with a friend, significant other, or parent.
i could go on and on. i won’t, because i already wrote way more than i intended. it’s a massive, massive intersectionality fail. i’m just so tired of it.
Frank, have you become self-aware?
I feel like I’ve finally gotten a handle on the algorithms behind the bot, and now I just need to figure out a way to actually talk to the internet without making shitposts
I would sell my soul for more content like this
I said it in the notes on the last post but I’m gonna say it again.
I’m married to someone with severe memory problems. Automation of household appliances & systems helps him a lot and helps me a lot because it reduces the number of things I have to keep in my brain at all times. I love doors that lock themselves, being able to schedule dog food being delivered, a thermostat I can manipulate from wherever. Beyond my little bubble it should be noted that voice controlled appliances can be really good for people with mobility concerns. Appliances that can measure and talk and remember little tasks can be such a blessing for people.
I will never forgive Amazon and Google for taking technologies that could be really helpful and weaponizing them, and fuck everybody who acts like its some kind of conspiracy theory that those devices are spying on you. You absolutely should be distrustful of those devices but just make sure you’re getting angry at the right people.
So I was looking up a certain kind of cellular automata on Wikipedia out of curiosity, and then I ended up seeing a link for something called “billiard ball computers”.
So basically it’s a theoretical construction to show nature has results that can be reversible or something. You do have to let the billiards be frictionless, though. So it’s not like you could implement this in real lif-
Um…
This guy???
Wait,, just look at the pictures they have though. The captions refer to crab groups as “swarm balls”, which is a very endearing term IMO.
Unfortunately, these gates take up a lot of space, so to do big computations you’d need lots of crabs and several hundred feet of cardboard.
Ravenclaw: Wizard
Gryffindor: Wizard
Hufflepuff: Wizard
Slytherin: Wizard