M-M-M-MULTIKILL!

DONT USE THE PIRATE BAY PLEASEEEE I BEG YOU.

Use 1337x.to rarbg or rutracker, highly moderated public torrent trackers, because Pirate Bay has long been shut down, unmoderated, and cloned by some shady actors AND use Mullvad VPN (or any other vpn but mullvad is the best definitely) to protect your ip address while you torrent, bind it to qbittorrent and do not use utorrent anymore either because it is littered with adware.

OR if you don’t want to pay for a VPN, use direct download or streaming sites. Please y’all just take one pass through on the r/piracy or r/freemediaheckyeah mega threads to find whatever you want for free and also not infect your computer with Trojan viruses.

^^^ yes!!! Thank you sm.

If any of those terms made you go ????? and you think pirating must be So Hard, I wrote a verbose but easy to follow guide a while back for total beginners!

They’re more deserving of the uniform than most generals.

Heroes

Society couldn’t function without them.

Society really couldn’t function without them. Anthropologist Robin Nagel did this fabulous ethnography of NYC sanitation workers called Picking Up where she actually became a sanitation worker herself. In NYC alone, there’s fewer than 10,000 sanitation workers dealing with a daily load of about 11,000 tons of garbage and 2,000 tons of recycling. It’s a more dangerous profession than firefighting or police work (cops and fire aren’t even in the top ten most dangerous jobs in the US), and if the sanitation workers aren’t able to do their jobs, cities become unlivable overnight.

(Also you should read that Robin Nagel book, it’s really fascinating. Even if you don’t live in a city, it’s a great read.)

god i love coming home and being at home and sitting inside my home and staying home

The fact that flu deaths decrease when measures are taken to concretely slow the spread of covid shows that "endemic" is effectively a political label rather than an epidemiological one

what's a tumblr influencer? what am i influencing? my mental illness? 😭

An influencer on the website where high note counts are used as threats.

alright since summers comin up what do u call these guys

(reblogs appreciated)

New 2023 discourse dropped, everyone prepare yourselves accordingly

you didn't even post the best ones

feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't post the most mask-off shit in all of this:

“you! conspiracy theorist, are you normal about-“

“jewish people control everything”

Oops! All Antisemitism!

Scratch the surface of basically any conspiracy theory hard enough and you’ll just find antisemitism.

URGENT: Congress about to pass a mass censorship and surveillance bill under the guise of "protecting children"

May 13 2023

The Senate has been in a "do something!" mode regarding children's online safety. They're using this as an excuse to push for widespread internet censorship and surveillance. The EARN IT Act, has a slimmer chance of passing with widespread opposition and some senators saying they won't vote for it. TLDR;The real threat is actually KOSA (s.1409), the Kid's Online Safety Act, which will mass censor and surveill the entire internet by giving all 50 state attorney generals the power to remove content that is "harmful" for kids, and force you to upload your govt ID online to access the internet. I'll explain how it works below the action items but it's absolutely urgent that anyone who likes having a free and open internet fights back. It's all hands on deck, because this has so much public support it's insane:

This is a link to the Senate Commerce Committee phone numbers and a call script to read off of. (202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline

Opposition is getting drowned, and these upcoming weeks will be heavy for lobbying and they're using young people to do it. We NEED to show these senators that young people are actually opposed to this and don't want it.

2. Sign these petitions

3. Spread the word.

The opposition is getting absolutely drowned online. Dove has nearly 100k signatures to push for KOSA. Influencers on tiktok are pushing for this without ever having read the bill. Fucking Lizzo is sponsoring it. If you have twitter, reddit, tiktok, are in any community, SPREAD THE WORD, PLEASE.

Here is a linktree with all the above petitions for easy shargin: Link to linktree

First, KOSA pressures platforms to install filters that would wipe the net of anything deemed “inappropriate” for minors. This means instructing platforms to censor. We saw how these filters impacted websites firsthand with tumblr in 2018, with not only blocking all adult content but also sfw queer content such as suicide hotlines, art archives, wiping out entire blogs because they had queer fandom related posts, etc. Places that already use content filters have restricted important information about suicide prevention and LGBTQ+ support groups. KOSA would spread this kind of censorship to every corner of the internet. And who gets to decide what is and isn't harmful for minors? Oh don't worry, just every single state attorney general and the FTC, which is appointed by the president. You know, the same attorney generals that just banned gender-affirming healthcare under the guise that it "ruins mental health" of minors. This is why the Heritage Foundation was one of the first to sponsor the bill because they can use it to censor trans content, and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee is it's co-author.

Second, KOSA would ramp up the online surveillance of all internet users by forcing websites to use age verification and parental monitoring tools. Yup, that's right. Now every single person who wants to access the internet has to upload their govt ID online to third party apps that get hacked all the time. You queer in a red state? You undocumented? You an activist? Have fun getting all your online activity and metadata attached to your govt ID.  

Over 90+ human and LGBT rights groups agree that KOSA is dangerous and updates to the 2023 version won’t and can’t address the big problems with the bill. This bill has MASSIVE bipartisan support, and the authors Blumenthal and Blackburn (yes, that Blumenthal that's pushing the EARN IT Act, and who also sponsored the RESTRICT Act and SOPA/PIPA if you remember) are using the tragedy of mothers who lost their kids to online harassment and young adults who've been traumatized online to lobby for it, and got Dove the company to use a bunch of influencers to push for this under the guise it prevents eating disorders...I wish I was lying. There are already 30 co-sponsors.

It is all hands on deck. I'm dead serious when I say if this bill is passed it is the beginning if not end of the open and free internet.

guide 4 teens

favorite thing ab chatgpt is that if it doesn’t know something it’ll just start fucking lying. like blatantly fucking lying.

my dad teaches english classes and he just got a final paper with this sentence: “In terms of style, both poets are known for their use of imagery, but O'Hara's tends to be more straightforward and concrete, while Stevens' is often more abstract and metaphorical — for example, in O'Hara's poem "The French / Window," he writes: "A cat walks along the garden wall / and the tree waves its branches / The French / windows are blah" (lines 1-4).”

the thing about “The French / Window” is that it is not a poem that exists. at all. like, it was literally just written by chatgpt then inexplicably named as a famous frank o’hara poem. and it’s so. fucking. funny. sooo basically heads up for finals season — those of you who use chatgpt, be warned, because you will quite literally be citing nonexistent texts and your professors will show it to their daughters and together they will laugh at you endlessly and you will deserve it

I work as a librarian in an academic library and one of my tasks is filling article and interlibrary loan requests for students and faculty that they need for papers and projects.

I have had three different requests for entire lists of resources, properly formatted and correctly cited, from real journals and real authors... with articles that just don't exist.

An article titled something like Nurses At Risk: The Growing Dangers to Public-Facing Medical Staff turns out to be written by a Chinese theoretical physicist and a German linguist. People who do exist, but never worked together and aren't even in the correct field. Journals that are real, but never published this article.

And it's not just scholarly articles; there were YouTube videos with hyperlinks that led to nothing. Books that had never been published. All generated nonsense.

Three. Whole. Lists. And these are from the good students who actually want to use the resources that they asked chatGPT to "find" for them. No telling how many students just tacked on a bibliography without checking to see if the sources were legit because let's be real: students list sources all the time that they never actually read.

We've alerted all our faculty to this and they know to be watching, so yeah -- if you're trying to use a chatbot to generate stuff for you, better check it twice before submitting. (or better yet, do the work for real, lol. It's less work in the long run. )

About a month ago (end of March 2023) I needed to transcribe a short audio clip. I'd seen that this was a thing ChatGPT might be able to do, and I have a free account, so I went to try it.

I asked ChatGPT if it could do this thing, and it replied Yes with a list of three ways to give it the audio file. One of them was, hilariously, to send it via email. I chose to upload to Google Drive, make the link public, and pasted the link to ChatGPT asking it to transcribe.

The audio in question was someone on a podcast talking about one of my steampunk short stories. This is what ChatGPT spit out:

I force stopped it there, confused. I told it that this was not a transcript of my recording. It said sorry, and that audio quality sometimes affects the transcript, and that it would try again. Okay...

I stopped it again and tried again.

Every time I tried to get it to transcribe my actual audio, ChatGPT made up an entirely fictitious transcription of non-existent audio. I realized that it was unable to read the information from the link I sent despite telling me it could.

I decided to start arguing with it, asking why it couldn't transcribe my audio. It kept saying it absolutely could. I finally said: Just admit that you cannot transcribe audio for me.

It would not admit to such a thing.

I bet it’s nice for finding a date too

I think this is a good example of a time when snarky progressives online know more about socialist buzzwords than actual socialism. The land owning peasantry is a distinct class from the proletariat, and materially its interests are quite different.

(This is not to say the peasantry is a wholly reactionary class. It need not be smashed outright, like the bourgeois, but must be carefully managed to avoid reactionary uprisings, and eventually converted to proletarians to make progress towards socialism)

So when right wingers talk about "going off the grid", they're not accidentally communist. They're aspiring to be independent landowners. And the reactionary nature of this sentiment is multiplied further by the context of the settler-colonial state. USAmerican western expansion built itself on small landowning farmers & small businesses, to further align the class interests of expansionist settlers with capitalists. The Wehrbauer, Nazi Germany's plan to settle Asia via communities of agricutural settler-soldier landowners (very openly based on USAmerican settler practices), is even more blatant if you'd like to read about it.

yesterday I was at gamestop and a man in full Data cosplay walked up to the front counter and I did a double take so hard I nearly broke my neck. So, he walks up and the cashier just casually smiles and goes “How’s it going, Data? What can I do for you?”  and Data goes, “I am doing quite well. I was just wondering when you guys would have Destiny 2 in stock.” This mans……literally did not smile or emote at all. He went all in. The cashier was totally non fazed. I, however, was completely shitting my pants cos ya’ll DO NOT understand how good this dude’s cosplay was. It really looked like fuckin data teleported into the middle of game stop in rural ohio to ask about motherfucking destiny 2.

The only time he broke character was when I was stealthily trying to stare at him and thinking about asking for a pic when he was walking out.This dude. Looked at me, completely expressionless. and WINKED at me. Someone collect ya mans he wildin lmfao

The wink isn’t even really ooc I think he would totally do that

I can’t believe Data violated the temporal directive just to buy Destiny 2

average marvel movies fan

Average American Liberal

"is this worker strike going to cause me unrest and discomfort as the labor i take for granted and do not respect is not being performed?"

update: 

One thing that Firefox can’t do is allow me to access my telehealth therapy appointments. Three different platforms now have rejected my use of Firefox. I use Safari instead bc that’s what works and at least it isn’t chrome, but for folks who rightfully use Firefox, be aware that many, if not all, telehealth platforms will not work on Firefox (something about the encryption/security not being up to their standard, I believe; if there are hacks that Firefox gurus know to bypass this, please share with the class?).

Any reason the developers of those sites give that is not 'we're too lazy to check compatibility so we're blocking Firefox' is false.

Wear a fake mustache and pretend to be Chrome.

i just wanna say that even if you have degenerative diseases, life can still get better with age. i don't know how long i have left and i just seem to keep getting sicker, but im steadier and happier and more secure in myself than ever.

i started my 20s healthy and my 30s deathly ill and i'm much happier now. i wouldn't even trade health for everything else i've gained since.

contrary to the popular misconception, health isn't everything or even the most important thing. it's good to have! but you can make a happy life as a sick person, in whatever time you have

really touched that this is starting to reach more people, and the replies and tags and comments are 💙

literally NO superhero actor/person/whatever will ever get on the level of ENLIGHTENED andrew garfield was on when he said “spiderman is bisexual and his boyfriend should be played by michael b jordan” they killed him for it but that was PEAK

Love these notes