I got this message from a bot, and honestly? If I was a bit younger and not such a jaded bitch with a career in tech, I might have given it an honest try. I spent plenty of time in a tough situation without access to any mental health resources as a teen, and would have been sucked right in.

Chatting right from your phone, and being connected with people who can help you? Sounds nice. Especially if you believe the testimonials they spam you with (tw suicide / self harm mention in below images)

But I was getting a weird feeling, so I went to read the legalese.

I couldn't even get through the fine-print it asked me to read and agree to, without it spamming the hell out of me. Almost like they expect people to just hit Yes? But I'm glad I stopped to read, because:

I was curious about their business model. They're a venture-capitol based tech startup, owned by Airbnb, the famous mental health professionals with a focus on ethical business practices./s They're also begging for donations despite having already been given 2.5 million dollars in research funding. (If you want a deep dive on why people throw crazy money at tech startups, see my other post here)

They also use the data they gather from users to conduct research and publish papers. I didn't find them too interesting - other than as a good case study of "People tend to find what they are financially incentivized to find". Predictably, Koko found that Kokobot was beneficial to its users.

So yeah, being a dumbass with too much curiosity, I decided to use the Airbnb-owned Data-Mining Mental Health Chatline anyway. And if you thought it was dangerous sounding from the disclaimers? Somehow it got worse.

(trigger warning / discussions of child abuse / sexual abuse / suicide / violence below the cut - please don't read if you're not in a good place to hear about negligence around pretty horrific topics.)

Kokobot is incredibly predatory and exploitative. I wrote a post about how it exploits minors' empathy and gamifies "giving mental health advice", resulting in an unregulated mess that can only do harm to teens' mental health in the long run.

There are young people on tumblr that actively seek support from KokoBot right now, if you check the tag for recent posts. Those people did not get paid to promote it, so do not harrass them. If you can, direct them towards resources about Kokobot (like this post) that are more transparent about what this company is up to.

This... is DEEPLY DISTURBING.

SIGNAL. BOOST.

More Enshitification of online life

There's always more and it's always worse

new public urinal unveiled

creature encounter at the hardware store

Your recovery is not erased because you had a setback. You are not starting over at 0. You already learned a lot. Keep going.

disability is just a way people can exist and a way people can be born and a thing that can happen to you. it's a fact of life. it's natural

it's not immoral or a punishment or a sign of evil or an "excuse to be lazy and unmotivated" or a way people use to make other people pity them and give them things. it's not sloth. it's not "impure" and it does not make someone an abomination or a mistake

disability is a normal, natural occurrence and not something people should be punished, starved, abused, abandoned, rejected, excluded, mocked, freak showed, gawked over, isolated, and murdered for

and the system we live in that does this to us is not normal or natural or ok. you don't deserve to be hurt. you don't deserve to have to feel ashamed or like you need to fix or hide yourself or "work harder". you are alive and you deserve to be alive. i'm glad you're alive. i'm glad you exist.

Rephotographing Route 66: Animated GIFs Showing 1930-1970 Scenes Compared to Today

Route 66 is a famous highway that crosses the United States, connecting Santa Monica, California on the west with Chicago, Illinois toward the east. It was one of the original highways of the US Highway System.

The route is also the subject of a project by photographer Natalie Slater, titled “The Mother Road Revisited.” Slater found old photos of the route from decades ago and rephotographed them as they appear today.

(Continue Reading)

Sometime in the near future I plan on driving the whole length of Route 66. I’ve driven portions of it here and there but never the whole length. I just need to come up with some new and creative idea that hasn’t been done before to photograph my journey.

Weirdly anti-millennial articles have scraped the bottom of the barrel so hard that they are now two feet down into the topsoil

its so wild like “this generation with no fucking money is learning to prioritize essentials” and all these chucklefucks can write is advertisements for these companies

at least our jeans won’t tear at the seams after two washes

FUCK FABRIC SOFTENER IT’S UTTERLY POINTLESS

AND FUCK DRYER SHEETS LITERALLY NOBODY EVER HAS ENOUGH OF A PROBLEM WITH STATIC TO WARRANT PAYING OUT THE ASS FOR THAT SHIT

DO YOU WANT CLEAN CLOTHES? YOU DON’T EVEN NEED TO BUY FUCKING DETERGENT JUST MAKE YOUR OWN* IT’S SO GODDAMN EASY AND 80X CHEAPER

FUCK THE ENTIRE LAUNDRY INDUSTRY *Fuck The Entire Laundry Industry Recipe

1 cup Washing Soda (not Baking Soda. Different things.)

1 cup Borax (not Boric Acid. Also a different thing.)

½ cup - 1 cup grated bar soap (you can use literally anything. I often use Ivory because it’s easy to get and I find it works well, a lot of people like Fels-Naptha, which is an actual laundry bar. Some people use Dr. Bronner’s. Really does not fucking matter.) After grating your soap, combine all ingredients. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Use maybe a ¼ cup per load.

^^^ I’ve done this for years now and it works as well as any store bought detergent

WHAT Thank you, tumblr user awfullydull! Your URL does no justice to the good advice you give!

Also you can MAKE your own washing soda very VERY cheaply.

Step one: acquire $5 bag of baking soda from Costco.

Step two: lay that motherfucking baking soda out on a baking tray.

Step three: bake the baking soda on a tray in an oven at 400° for 1 hour (to make the moisture evaporate, leaving washing soda)

Step four: revel in how easy and cheap it is to make your own washing soda, and maybe take a moment to be angry that the industry upcharges the fuck out of something that is so easy to make.

I see some of y'all complaining about static and/or wanting nice smelling laundry. Go to a craft store, find 100% wool yarn balls. If it doesn’t come in a ball, ask an employee to make it into a tight ball for you. Wash in the washing machine to make it felted. Remove from washer, add a few drops of essential oil to the ball, allow to seep in. Dry with clothing. Doesn’t need to be rewashed ever, and if it stops smelling, add few more drops of essential oil. Bam, reusable dryer sheets.

I love this post so much it’s filled with helpful advice, hatred, saving money, and fucking the system all in one

Kudos to all of this, but don’t ask a craft store employee at a chain craft store to make your wool yarn into a tight ball for you. I worked at JoAnn Fabrics for a year and a half. We literally have no resources or ability to do something like that. You could do a better job yourself at home. The chain craft store employee can’t look up a youtube tutorial for making yarn laundry balls on the clock, you can.

If someone had walked up to me while I was working at JoAnn and asked me to take a half hour or more out of my shift to try and fail in making some kind of tight yarn laundry contraption I probably would have burst into tears. And if my manager had come out and found me trying and failing to wind yarn when I was supposed to be running go backs I would have gotten a talking to. Craft store employees aren’t allowed, able, or willing to do your crafts for you. That’s why it’s a craft store.

Don’t hurt retail workers in your quest for overriding the capitalist system. For the love of everything beautiful please just look it up.

These are all great ways to reduce waste we produce from constantly buying detergent, softener, and dryer sheets.

Also 100% wool dryer balls are pretty dang cheap at Walmart for something you only need to buy once (they’re like 2 for $4, which is less than what you would probably pay for a box of dryer sheets anyway)

Image ID: a picture of a desert captioned ‘this is not a wasteland’ and a picture of an empty parking lot, captioned ‘this is’. End ID

Work takes me places and so I've been to the desert and also I've been to farms. There's more biodiversity in a literal desert than there is in any of the fucking farms I've been to

Exploded Console Posters made by Angerinet  

you are not immune to soundwave

fyi for people annoyed with this in windows 10 - go to settings/notifications & actions and uncheck the nag options