kit 🦊🎲 @wlonk@dice.camp

The gender today is the smell of an old book and sound of dry leaves crunching underfoot.

Gonna stream some Sea of Thieves at https://www.twitch.tv/wlonk in maybe half an hour!

Today's gender is patience and the smell of fresh cut grass.

If I told you I'm going to go to a protest, and taking my kids, you might say (to me or to yourself) "That's crazy. That's dangerous."

Why would you say that?

What, in that situation, puts my kids in danger?

Obviously, it's the cops.

You know that, instinctively.

You know the risk of harm is there, and you know where it originates.

So maybe.

Just maybe...

Protests about dangerous and unnecessarily violent cops are happening for a good reason.

And maybe.

You know that too.

Bye, Amazon

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19....

-- Tim Bray

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon

#Amazon #TimBray #Whistleblowers #RetaliatoryFiring #JeffBezos

I need you to consider the possibility that describing people as heroes is a way of making their deaths look like a socially palatable choice that they made themselves, and not a systemic institutional failure in which survivors have been complicit.

Take half an hour out of your day and watch this, then get it in front of some friends, and change your social media watching habits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvqa8dsBtno

I read it more than a decade ago. This is a passage that has stuck with me, one of a handful of simple things he suggests late in the book that you can do to contribute to betterment in our collective endeavors (when it might not feel like you can contribute): count something.

So are we all ready to talk about how little work is actually required to operate our society yet or nah

"humans are the real virus" or "this is deserved' are eco-fascist slogans that urge and celebrate the suffering and death of the disabled, poor, and disenfranchised.

"The cleaner water and air demonstrates humans are the real vIRuS of this world!!"

No. Everything required to fight the spread of Covid-19 that's also helping the environment is not, in turn, harming humanity.

It's harming Capitalism.

THAT is the harmful virus.

They're ghouls.
---
RT @IndivisibleTeam@twitter.activitypub.actor
51 Republican senators just voted against an amendment to the #FamiliesFirst #Coronavirus Response Act that would have expanded paid leave to millions of Americans left out of the package. Let that sink in.
https://twitter.com/IndivisibleTeam/status/1240368111167168513

after this is all over, be sure to remind people, as often as they'll allow you to get away with it, that:

telecoms did not need data caps, had plenty of capacity to donate to low-income folks, and were never in danger of going bankrupt because of the lack of data caps or the additional usage

folks who work on computers all day can do that wherever computers are; most tech offices are merely trophies to show off to other tech offices.

the government wasn't concerned with helping people, it was concerned with helping business. it was people who were helping people and often the government merely got in the way of that.

trillions of dollars was found to allocate as soon as they wanted to; every time anyone asks how anything will be funded it's merely to shut down the conversation.

keep a running list of your favorite facts and get them in front of as many folk as you can, as often as you can, and maybe, just maybe, we can get more folks on board for change

it's gross and creepy to see patterns in sites like Netflix where I'll watch a few films in Spanish or watch a couple films with Black leads, or i'll watch a few LGBTQ romances, and then all of a sudden the whole site changes. film covers are changed to display BIPOC folx more often, i somehow unlock whole new categories of films, etc.

then i watch a couple of blockbusters one weekend and the site reverts to a homogenized safety bubble of middle class hetero white society

it's scary to think how many sites create these safe spaces for privileged people to erase everyone not like them, and no one even notices