img

I spent a month on the sofa watching TV with a broken wrist, while the rest of the country was plastering the countryin poorly drawn flags and persecuting human rights.

Diary

Wrist

It’s funny how the pain became located more where the x-ray shows the break is, once I saw the x-ray.

Before that it was more in the heel of the hand and across the wrist.

Could be the plaster going on I suppose.

More likely that extra knowledge of the location of the damage affects where I feel the pain in my brain.

I usually spend my time faffing about not doing anything because I’m lazy but now I’m faffing about not doing anything because I can’t because of a broken wrist.

Definitely more frustrating.

The Hospital were are pleased with the progress of the bone healing at first appointment but I guess not so pleased they would take off the cast and let me drive.

They did replace it with a cleaner smaller sleeker much bluer one but expect this one to stay on until October.

😦

There goes the rest of the summer’s plans.

Palestine

Protests against the banning of Palestine Action saw more than 500 people arrested. Highest of any protest since the poll tax.

“They’re not completely non violent you know, they did some violence against our genocidal war machine. The worst kind of violence.”

– Government are Pathetic.

The government looks ridiculous, petty, authoritarian,out of their depth, supporting a genocide with no way out, floundering and gaslighting and trying to cover up their own crimes.

They will fail.

Emily Thornberry’s did give a formberry reply:

Human rights

In order to maximize the number of faces eaten by leopards Farage’s party will exit international face-eating prevention conventions.

“We have to get back the ability to decide, can we really feed faces to leopards? Whose faces can be eaten?..> You know what? I think three quarters of the country would cheer to the rafters as the leopards ate faces"said Farage.

No sign of any promise to improve the lives of anyone in the UK at all, just a promise to make life harder and more difficult and even impossible here for some hated minorities.

What a horrible man and what a terrible party.

Flags

People are disrespecting the flag of Saint George by spraying it on roads and graffitiing it on houses and plastering cheap tacky ones on lampposts.

The prime minister was on the radio asked about flags. He’s always been a flag-shagger. He said he’s very proud of the flag.

Proud of a flag?

What does this even mean? How can you be proud of a pattern on a cloth that you didn’t even design or print yourself?

Proud of your badges? What? It isn’t even one you picked, it’s one you were born under.

We don’t need no stinking badges.

It’s because people mistake the symbol for the thing itsymbolizes. They think in magic. The flag isn’t just asymbol with a referent, it IS the country. They feel attachment and pride to the symbol, because they feelattachment and pride for the country.

In England you can choose between two flags:

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 The flag of the crusades, when marauding Christians fought across Europe to murder Muslims.

🇬🇧 The flag of the empire, when the island’s nobility violently enslaved and pillaged a third of the world.

🤔

And people say they are proud of the flag, mistaking the symbol for those acts which they symbolize.

Proud of this?

The people who paint roundabouts claim to think theyare being patriotic somehow, but painting the flag of the crusades on a mosque isn’t patriotic. It’s just aggressive and deliberately threatening.

These people aren’t my people.

Think the country needs a new flag really. Maybe something with more rainbow in it. 🌈

Greens

Well Zack’s won, convincingly, 20k votes to 3k votes for the others.

So that’s good.

Now lets see if he can make the media actually reflect the message like they reflect Farage constantly.

Gonna be harder for anti-capitalists than pro-capitalists, what with the media all being owned by the capital.

Look, he’s not afraid to swear, calls a shit a shit. Go Zack.

Android

Oh, Android updated and has gone all chunky and bold.

That’s a change.

Wonder what Ai features I should be turning off now?

Their future plans include throwing away their advantage over Apple’s iOS and banning side-loading.

Starting to look more and more like I should be ditching Android for some de-googled OS is in my future. Wonder how all those linux-phones are coming along.

Meanwhile Apple are fighting the EU trying to demand they allow sideloading.

Could end up in an interesting situation where Android sideloading becomes banned and Apple ability for sideloading becomes legally mandated.

That is about the only situation I can imagine where I’d switch to iOS.

Watching

Being stuck with a broken wrist so unable to really do much of the things, I have spend a lot of this month watching TV.

Andor

I’m not all that up on Star Wars, so when I watched Season One of Andor I didn’t know it was about a man called Andor, I had that name confused with Endor, and so I was distracted by the lack of Ewoks.

No such distraction for season two though, now I know it’s about a rebel mercenary and his adventures leadingup to him being in Rogue One delivering details about how to blow up a death star.

They all live in the Empire, which is relentless and authoritarian and evil just like the real life empire taking over western civilization now. They persecute and harass poor Andor and his buddies so much that they cause the rebellion against their authority that they intend to suppress.

Great show.

Wonder if all the people arrested wrongfully for doing no real crime in the US and UK and around the west will end up fighting the empire here too?

Still wish there was a series about ewoks though.

Sandman

Watched Sandman S2

The lord of the dream and his siblings rebuild the dreaming, nearly take over hell, search for missing brothers and kills his decapitated son.

Looks beautiful, with a nearly nonsensical plot. I never really read the comics but sounds like this is about the end.

Obviously it’s all very dream-like, with faeries and the grim reaper and all really forgotten just as easily.

South park

TWENTY SEVEN series!

Man. South Park continues to be pretty cool too.

Still both fresh and yet familiar. I remain in awe of the consistency of the show over more than half my whole life now.

Stupid cock and fart jokes with an absurd setup which on a second level is mentioning and mocking the true absurdity and violence of real life.

Satan being Trump’s lover in a rehash of the Sadam Hussainskit is lovely.

They seem determined to try and get cancelled, but haven’t managed that in 27 years. Maybe it’s a small-dick joke that’ll finally do them in?

Still got half of this season to watch. Seems like it’s mostly bi-weekly now? Or every episode is delayed.

Always Sunny

Seventeen seasons is a very long run too.

Another eight episodes of the gang all being mean to each other and talking over each other and getting into farcicalscrapes.

The dinner party rehearsals were the funniest bit. Slowly A/B testing and audience reaction tests, that’s how to make art. 😆

Not sure I’d say the show is mostly funny these days, but their bitching meanness to each other is comfortingly familiar.

Wednesday

Watched Wednesday S2

The family moves to Wednesday’s school after being mind-controlled into organising the gala in a plot for money. So it’s almost just an Adams Family series really, other than being at Wednesday’s school.

The Hyde monsters and werewolves look great, big cgi animals with absolutely massive round eyes.

Wednesday now has a little redhead mini-me stalking her with a crush and eyes nearly asbig as a Hyde.

Wednesday is somehow portrayed as both an outcast and also the hero who saves the day and the school every episode. Which is a problem with hero outcasts.

Tim Burton’s magical style suits the Adams Family well. Inspired him probably. Goths look cool. The Addams Family is cool.

Nice they way they wove in a story of how Gomez lost his powers. And link Thing to the big bad, meaning Thing can save the day.

Enjoyed the show a lot.

Buffy

But mostly I have re-watched Buffy.

If you include Angel, and surely you must, then there’smore than 250 episodes in Buffy’s world and they’re all great. Actual best TV show ever made. Haven’t rewatched it since the naughties.

Watched about 150 episodes in the last 3 weeks. 😆

It starts well, reaches a good stride in season two and then gets entirely great around the end of S3 when Ayna turns up and creates the Bored Vampire Willow. Buffy S5 with Glory is the absolute peak. Glory is magnificent.

All the main characters are amazing all the way through, and evolve and grow instead of sticking the same as with most TV. They aren’t static caricatures.

The plots story and writing is brilliant, the special effects mostly just rubber masks which age better than any CGI does.

There’s vampires and slayers and witches in my dreams and I am loving it.

Nothing since has touched it.

The 16x9 cut of the first two seasons is badly framed though. Watch the 4x3 original TV frame size for sure.

Links

Some cool things on the web:

Online safety

The online safety act continues to bea menace for the small and independentweb. They regulate for giant platformspro ducting legislation impossible forthe small web to satisfy.

So, since July 25th most porn is now either age-gated or blocked to UK users entirely. You might think this is good, because isn’t that the point of the law? Ehhhh. Kind of. But also not really. The sites that child safety campaigners are usually thinking of when they make these arguments are the big, flash, video-based tube sites which offer porn for free. Those sites have the money and tech expertise to implement age verification without trouble, so they aren’t going anywhere any time soon. At the other end of the scale, though, smaller sites and hobby sites which don’t make a profit are more likely to struggle. As mentioned above, many of them are already shutting down or blocking UK users from some or all of the content, meaning those who are looking for erotic material will end up turning to the exact sites that anti-porn crusaders are so up in arms about.

“Age verification is an impossibility, and an impossibly terrible idea with impossibly vast consequences for privacy and the open web, as my EFF colleague Jason Kelley explained on the Malwarebytes podcast:”

Another interesting platform in all of this is, of course, Mastodon. Unlike Bluesky, Mastodon is actually decentralized. There is no one person that can make a decision on how the whole platform operates (which is what is happening on Bluesky right now). Servers are independently operated and run and spread throughout the world. So, first of all, who does the government sue when they believe there is non-compliance?

Palestine

The reason Yvette Cooper has proscribed Palestine Action is that she is a member of Labour Friends of Israel and has received £215,000 from the zionist lobby – which is £215,000 more than Palestine Action ever received on behalf of a foreign power. —Ministers are lying to you. I have provided a little antiseptic daylight.

This is the key point: economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core. To avoid this, the core states must constantly intervene to prevent or crush any movement or government in the periphery that seeks national liberation and economic sovereignty.

Human rights

Talk of mass deportation is Nazi fucking bullshit. You can pretend otherwise, but that’s what it is. In order to even countenance it, you must reach a point of hatred towards a minority group which is reminiscent of the very worst moments of human history. In order to implement it, you would need a system of control and surveillance which goes well beyond any traditional notion of what this country, or indeed any free society, is about. In order to enact it, you need to split people into valid and invalid categories, round them up and concentrate them in advance of deportation, necessitating the use of camps. And yes, if you’re going to land those planes at their destination, you will need to do deals with tyrannical governments so that they can murder the people who tried to escape them.

Austin comedy is a cult

Love it, the film-noir monotone voice over, the mood music,the thesis, the surreal otherwordly description. Great hourof radio. How Joe Roegan destroyed comedy and reality.

Altruism

“Take the UK’s richest citizen, Jim Ratcliffe. What is the basis of his wealth? Did he invent something? Did he pioneer a new form of management? Did he build vast new industrial plants that employed tens of thousands of people?No, he did none of those things, and indeed arguably he did the very opposite of those things. All he did was acoounting tricks with digitised currency units, and then indulge himself in football clubs and LandRover nostalgia.”

Fedi

The big platforms own and use your data against you,they own your very digital self. But it is possibleto break free.

Fediverse

writes about the social web foundation’s connection to Facebook

We already know that the Social Web Foundation and SWICG leadership will ignore the latest news of Meta’s mass datacrime against the fediverse and continue enabling the parasitic Zuckerberg entity to influence the future of ActivityPub development by facilitating its presence on the W3C working group overseeing AP. This is not a sustainable arrangement.

There is absolutely no basis of trust whatsoever between the fediverse network of communities and Meta. The idea that representatives of this slimy fascist operation are insinuated into the organization shaping the next generation of the protocol underlying our network, while they simultaneously inflict nonconsenual predatory “AI” extractivism against us, is ludicrous and intolerable. This right here is the destruction of every single value the fediverse claims to stand for in one fell swoop.

🧵 1/3

Has a blog post on why Facebook is so difficult to kill

As promised a week ago, hot off the press, here’s a new #Disintermedia post on why it’s so difficult to replace FarceBook with ethical services;

https://disintermedia.substack.com/p/farcebook-one-thing-to-rule-them

Can you actually fork off Bluesky?

Famously, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has repeatedly told the media if people don’t like what the company is doing they can “fork off”. That is, they can “leave [and] take their followers with them”

But, now that #Bluesky has done something their users overwhelmingly don’t like by changing their Terms Of Service to require binding arbitration, can users actually leave Bluesky for another server on the Bluesky network?

Read on…

Art

Rachel Neumeier’s character-and-social-code based fantasies don’t always quite work, but when they do, they become books you never want to stop reading.

I’m not sure what it is she does - it’s not suspense. You know our heroes will be alright and true love win through. It’s not the adolescent sexual suspense that gets called romantasy, though it’s usually about feelings - romance or deep friendship, or professional admiration and loyalty, and in fantasy settings.

A working QR code in the style of Piet Mondrian.

Is making toys:

If you want to sell a toy at a us based big box retailer, it pretty much has to be a licensed product.

Either you are hasbro and target reserves multiple shelves for you, or you are making Disney characters into rubber ducks or sponge bob character keshis.

Beyond that, there’s a pay to play option. Roblox and Mr. Beast (I assume, I do not have insider knowledge despite having worked for onr of those entities) go the pay-to-play route, paying for placement on store shelves and breaking even on sales in order to cement a brand.

If a brand operating under that model does well enough for long enough, they might graduate to the normal licensed toy model, or get bought by hasbro.

The toy isles at most big box retailers are sad. They are devoid of joy.

Online safety

In order to please the requests a large publisher (Axel Springer), #Germany may be on the verge of making ad-blockers illegal - and, worse, anything that modifies a Web page before or after rendering.

It goes against everything that HTTP and HTML have always been.

Economics

We’ve also got a new economics explainer video up. This one is about enshittification and the mechanisms by which the current economy is collapsing.

Subscribe

It may be long but hopefully it’s easily skimmable

❤👍👎😆😢😮
Un/SubscribeSharechat