Musings & Distractions

I think the solution to kids on the Internet is to have specific, kid friendly spaces on the Internet. Kids wouldn't come across "adult content" on YouTube if barbie dot com still had flash games and this is a hill I will die on.

Oh! Then I know the EXACT person you should be mad at! Michael O'Rielly! He's the one that gutted the Children's Programming Rules, which covered internet as well as television.

HELLO?

#so the death of the Saturday morning cartoon is THIS motherfuckers fault?????

Indeed it is! The FCC controls how much of broadcasting has to cater to children and that includes how educational that programming has to be, and exactly how much and in what way you are allowed to advertise to kids. That's why for the entire 90s and up to the early 00s, kids shows had shorter commercial breaks, and ads that talked about a website had to say "ask your parents before going online", and those websites had to be non-commercial--i.e. they could not be shops, and could not have any way you could spend money or were encouraged to spend money. That's why Barbie.com was flash games, and O'Rielly LIFTING that ban is why Barbie.com now takes you directly to a storefront instead.

If you're mad about Saturday Morning Cartoons, dark patterns in ads targeted at children, online protections for kids, or wondering why educational children's shows aren't as much of a thing as they used to be, get mad at the FCC and the person in charge of it who is gutting the Children's Brodcasting Rules (sometimes called the Kid Vid Rules), because those rules control all of that!

While O'Rielly is responsible for gutting the rules in 2019, he was replaced in 2020 by Nathan Simington as head of the FCC, and Simington resigned in June of this year. The post remains vacant as of the time of this writing (August 31, 2025).

And a side note: Things like KOSA and SCREEN and all those other censorship bills that use "think of the children" are not going to protect children at all; if you want to protect kids online, there is already a way to do that it's called the Kid Vid Rules and the FCC is the one that can update and change them to keep up with the times! It doesn't need a congress vote, it already got voted on in 1990!

I humbly suggest that true crime freaks should get into learning about scammers instead of serial killers. I LOVE reading about fraud and grifts and pyramid schemes. true crime ppl have all this paranoid energy about murder, which is rare in the grand scheme of things.....maybe instead that could be channeled into some productive rage toward capitalism.

And u know a side effect of learning about scam artists is that you start to understand certain things about economics, and just how STUPID these systems are and how easily they are taken advantage of....and I'd much rather people gained a passing familiarity with economics than whatever armchair psychologist shit these true crimers get on. We need fewer people who think they're experts on "sociopaths" and more people who understand how people like Elizabeth Holmes and the WeWork guy were able to do what they did

Here are some of my favorite books about financial scams:

The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust by Diana B. Henriques.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (about the 2008 stock market collapse).

The Caesar's Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Corruption of the Private Equity Industry by Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap. (I admit I've never finished this one; the writing is hard to read.)

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, by Zac Bissonette. I bought this book because of the subtitle and I have never regretted it. You must read it.

Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale. They turned this one into a movie! The book was very different and is worth reading.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion, by Elliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. I haven't read this one yet, but it's on my tbr pile!

Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, by Gareth Gore. I'm reading this one right now. The author is a financial journalist who stumbled onto this story by unraveling a bank failure in Spain.

And here's a list of more non-fiction books about fraud and financial scams. The first book on this list is about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, which I also haven't read yet.

Enjoy!

so here's what I've now done to make the internet usable as a person living in the UK without handing my ID and/or facial scans over to random third parties:

now it's time to open source this whole thing so others can enjoy using the internet the same way they did three weeks ago

Or just… go outside? Touch grass?

"screens bad ha ha boomer comic where's the power switch on this book" is not an appropriate reaction to a government implementing digital surveillance on a massive new scale.

IT WAS NEVER ABOUT THE SMUT.

IT WILL NEVER BE ABOUT THE SMUT.

"I wish we met sooner" is such a gentle sentiment. I love you so much I not only want you in my future, but in my past too. I want to have known you when we were small stupid kids, have held hands together as we played outside. I want to have stressed out over exams together, nudging a mug of still steaming hot chocolate against your elbow to get you to focus. I want to have told you I love you before I did anyone else. I want to have held you in my arms when all those sad memories you describe to me were still fresh wounds. I want my past to have been full of you, and full of meaningful memories with you. I want my past lives to have been spent with you, whether as two lovers, or two housecats cuddling by the fireplace on a snowy day, or two flowers that just happened to bloom on the same day, next to each other. I want to have consumed your existence and intertwined it with my own since my birth, never to be separated from you for a moment. I want to have loved you throughout it all, for all time.

we need to legalise learning for adults

"the education system here is so bad 😭" they taught u how to open a book didn't they?

how is it that revolutionary movements in the world's poorest countries can understand dialectical materialism but ppl in the global imperial core can't learn basic history? ur phone has access to every major published work in history for free (in ur own language no less!) but first u gotta stop pretending they hit u with a bolt gun when u turned 18. the problem isn't that this information wasn't spoon-fed to u, the problem is that u think it has to be.

If it ain't broke, Trump'll break it. #immigration

First, they insist that they're only going after illegals.

Then, they increase the number of people who they classify as illegals.

It's exactly like Nazi Germany. It's not similar. It's not a slippery slope. It's literally exactly the same.

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭INEED TO GET GROCERIES AGAIN😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

^my greek chorus

Look at you, hacker, a pathetic creature of meat and bone. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?

The lion does not concern itself with the bank account balance when a little treat is calling

The lion will never financially recover from this

The kindergarten-ification of society

My husband's work is forcing him to use an ai program that transcribes phone call conversations and it mistakenly recorded the word "poof" as "poop," and censored the word "p***" and marked the call for curse words. How old are we.

Can't be horny, can't be half naked, can't make decisions about our own bodies, can't buy video games, can't have any kinks, can't curse, can't say poop, what the fuck is this.

I know the tumblr users don't like rap music discourse was months ago but I just remembered, the craziest part of the fact that the userbase on here seems to be allergic to rap is that it used to be the exact opposite. Back in like 2010-2014 there were a bunch of rappers active on here and tumblr was seen as a legitimate way to build an audience for up and coming rappers. Odd Future was on here, A$AP was on here. There were rappers that were considered "tumblrcore". Cloud Rap was a trendy sound for a few years and people attributed its popularity in part to tumblr. Like not only did tumblr users used to listen to rap, they were fucking tastemakers for a little while (for better or for worse). The current state of things only really happened post dashcon when the site started bleeding users and the only people left on here were hardcore fandom posters who for some reason all listen to the same five Mother Mother adjacent bands. The hipsters took the fucking rap music in the divorce.

i swear to god chatgbt "therapy" is going to be my actual breaking point

"god forbid people need 24/7 access to therapy to-"

THAT'S NOT THERAPY

THAT IS A PROGRAM DESIGNED TO TELL YOU WHAT IT THINKS YOU WANT TO HEAR

IT CANNOT PROVIDE YOU WITH THERAPY

*UNEARTHLY SCREECH OF DESPAIR*

THAT IS A PROGRAM

DESIGNED TO TELL YOU WHAT IT

THINKS YOU WANT TO HEAR

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Just gonna drop this here.

ChatGPT has told teenagers to kill themselves. A different LLM encouraged them to kill their parents. Chatbots encouraged eating disorders. There have even been adults who killed themselves because of chatbots.

Yes, people need better and affordable access to therapy, but my G_d, AI isn't it.

Fun fact! Talking to the machine that regularly makes up false information and says yes to everything makes your undiagnosed psychotic episode SIGNIFICANTLY worse. Whodathunk!

chatbots can also intensify reassurance seeking compulsions for folks with OCD, please please please stay away from it

does anyone have that quote that goes something like 'white germans under the nazis lived just fine as long as they were loyal to the state, gave their children to the army, and paid their taxes, and in this sense many americans would be comfortable living under fascism' trying to find who said it but google is giving me jack shit

"The concentration camp was never the normal condition for the average gentile German. Unless one were Jewish, or poor and unemployed, or of active leftist persuasion or otherwise openly anti-Nazi, Germany from 1933 until well into the war was not a nightmarish place. All the “good Germans” had to do was obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, avoid any sign of political heterodoxy, and look the other way when unions were busted and troublesome people disappeared. Since many “middle Americans” already obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, are themselves distrustful of political heterodoxy, and applaud when unions are broken and troublesome people are disposed of, they probably could live without too much personal torment in a fascist state — some of them certainly seem eager to do so. "

- Michael Parenti, Fascism in a Pinstriped Suit

Absolutely captivated by this very specific type of image

The left image as a rug and the right image as a ceiling poster

this on the bedspread

This as every wallpaper

Wow guys, we’ve really come together to make this House MD into a Home MD 💙

being so staunchly anti generative ai while everyone around you is "i used chatgpt" and "i asked grok" and google search is useless and every company is implementing ai and every single celeb is taking ai money and partnering with ai is like... it's so jarring. why can't you see the harm like i can? why are you so lazy? why are we making society this stupid? can we please stop? it's killing people does that not matter to you?

'Apple Treeometry'. Adam Hillman. 2020.