SAVE OUR LIBRARIES 🫶

astonishing how good it can feel to get some chores done sometimes. you’ll be sitting there like damn i am some type of horrid little smeagol like creature who should be crushed to death. but then you do some laundry and you’re like wrow. im actually gods most fuckable soldier.

About ten, fifteen years ago I wrote a story about a guy living in a Capitalist dystopia. His walls, furniture, and tableware are all covered in smart displays. Basically animated wallpaper. It's sold as being able to turn your room or objects into anything - A nice forest view, outer space, a fantasy realm... but the companies that run this stuff keep sneaking ads in.

It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.

So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.

So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.

Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.

The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.

... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.

Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.

Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.

And google's going around freaking out about ad-blockers.

If you live in the US and want a way to follow good non-right wing news for free, consider:

Subscribing to PBS News on YouTube (they have a news hour every night/half hour on weekends, broken up into smaller consumable segments. Sometimes they live stream national events like the inauguration. You don't have to watch it all, but pick and choose what to watch & when. Like, say, only watching the half hour weekend segments).

Subscribing to NPR News on whatever podcast app you have (they do 5-minute news updates throughout the day; you usually only need to listen to it 1x/day to get highlights).

Subscribe to nonprofit investigative online news source ProPublica; you can sign up for either daily, weekly, or top news stories sent to your email. You can also follow them on sm.

Okay this one isn't free, but if you have any extra money, don't underestimate how important or endangered local newspapers are. Subscribe if you can. Some papers will also send you short summaries if you're a subscriber, and you can also follow local papers on social media.

Remember that just generally getting deluged with news on social media is not good for your mental health, and is much more susceptible to misinformation or propaganda. Getting news online works best when it's supplemental to verified news sources; usually as grassroots, on-the-ground info from people you know and trust who are living out a certain experience.

You can keep a particular online space "safe" from politics without hurting anything, provided you make routine space for good, responsible news in your schedule.

AND that you make sure to follow a diverse group of people and support their inclusion in that space, even if you're online for a niche interest (in almost any online hobby, there are lots of people who are not at all the same class, race, ethnicity, gender identity, from the same place, etc, etc). Honor, protect, and value a wide variety of voices even in your online hobbyist spaces, while also making regular time for real news? You'll find yourself with a decent snapshot of information from both the top down and the bottom up about how the world works and is impacting a wide variety of people.

Without feeling like you have to absorb/respond to everything happening every single moment of every day. For the next 4 years

MORRISSSSSSSS MY BOY I LOVE YOU

Offer to let other people go ahead of you in line, especially if you're approaching the line at the same time. This is double applicable if you're in a store and the other person has fewer items than you.

This is a small gesture of kindness that in most cases will cost you very little time or effort. It shows consideration for other people's time. Especially in the case of being in a store and letting someone with fewer items than you go first, there is no sense in making someone else wait for you who would otherwise be able to get in and out much quicker.

i'd rather see 1000 graffiti penises than 1 product billboard. i'd live in dick city if it meant i could avoid advertisements in my daily life.

This meme is inescapable on French insta so I'm posting it here for all to enjoy