Notices by Poloniousmonk (uair@autistics.life)

@br00t4c

The Dumbest Cabinet Members.

Like this is a bad thing? We want the trump presidency to fail, don't we?

@mekkaokereke

"People unwilling to endure social discomfort to oppose racism aren't bad people!"

--This sounds like the "white moderates" that King identified as the real barrier to progress.

@RickiTarr @coldfish

It's a psyche thing. Think of the Southern plutocrats, the slavers in the antebellum days. If they'd simply shut the fuck up about it, the rest of us probably would've let them keep their slaves, at least for a few more generations. But they insisted that we all validate their bullshit worldview that Black people weren't people. And they fucking attacked us over it. Reality only defends.

You can also say the same thing about WWII. The Nazis just couldn't tolerate the existence of neighbors who don't believe the same hateful bullshit they do.

I also see the US Civil War and WWII as the same kind of thinking that produces a mass shooter. It's people who chased their denial mechanism all the way to death. Rather than admit they are just full of shit, they lash out and try to take down the world.

Tangentially related: Christianity, to which both the Nazis and slavers subscribed, is a death cult. Never forget that. Once a death cult conquers its territory, it immediately schisms and attacks itself.

@GreenSkyOverMe

Thank you.

I just learned about this two minutes ago.

https://www.dw.com/en/halloween-origins-history-traditions-customs-religion-celebrated-explained-v2/a-36214983

#halloween

A question for non-Americans:

Is Halloween celebrated in your society? How? How about Day of the Dead?

I had a friend who treats me as an encyclopedia ask me about this and I didnae really know the answer. I'm under the impression that the former Spanish colonies generally do some kind of Dios los Muertos and the Western world imported American Halloween sometime in the past couple generations, but I have no hard facts.

Thanks in advance for anyone willing to share. Boosts appreciated.

@bmacDonald94

This is why they shouldn't have downgraded teachers from professionals to technicians.

It's a shame. I woulda made a good teacher, but it really wasn't a viable profession by my dy. Nor journalism, although that seems to be coming back.

#tech #banking

Hello all. I think my identity has been stolen, but the McMuffin on the other end of the phone at my bank was useless. My plan is to wait until Monday and go to the bricks and mortar office, but if anyone knows about this stuff I'd appreciate being less confused.

Last night, I got a confirmation text on my cheap flip phone with the verification code for my new Plaid service. Today I went to the library and discovered that Plaid is some kind of banking app. I was unable to communicate with them because, after filling out the contact form, the "submit" button was greyed out.

I called my bank's customer service and told the story, but all I could get out of the person on the other end was that something called BTB(?) means that the attacking entity would need to be in physical possession of my phone to steal my money. I do not understand this, and she didn't know what BTB was and got mad at me for going around and around trying to figure out wtf was actually going on.

I think I'm compromised. I think text messages aren't secure and just because it was delivered to my phone is no reassurance that the attacking entity, which was apparently able to create banking web services in my name, wasn't able to see it.

Does anyone know about this stuff? Is Plaid just a scam?
https://plaid.com/how-it-works-for-consumers/

@bmacDonald94

"We will need writers who can remember freedom."

Hi!

https://poloniousmonk.substack.com/p/here-lies-one-whose-name-was-writ?r=1xr9v7

#tech

Anyone have a good frontend for youtube? I need a new one. They don't seem to last long.

Thanks.

#politics

I love this sentence.

"The Lebanese Armed Forces, which since 2006 has received more than $3 billion in funding from the United States, for the first time this year opened fire on the Israeli Defense Forces, to which the U.S. agreed to give at least $3.8 billion per annum over the next four years; the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that at least 162 people killed during Israeli strikes in Lebanon were refugees from the ongoing civil war in Syria, where a CIA-funded militia group in the country’s northwest fought a Pentagon-funded militia group that was at times also backed by Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Iraq; and the United States warned Iraq, which it had publicly supplied with weapons during the Iran–Iraq War, that it would carry out strikes inside the country if Iraqi leaders didn’t put a stop to attacks on Israeli troops by militia groups funded by Iran, to which country the CIA had secretly sent weapons during the Iran–Iraq War."
--From this week's Harper's Magazine Weekly Review:

@youronlyone @autistics @actuallyautistic

Tl,Dr: Stephen King

Great Q, thanks for getting my mind thinking along these channels.

My characterization has always been by far my weak spot. I can churn plots and settings all day, but like you described, my characters are always two dimensional.

You know who excels at limning two dimensional characters? Stephen King. At least pre-1990. I haven't read much he wrote after that. He was so good at it that when I pumped gas for a living, my coworker and I would describe the occasional customer as a Stephen King character. Lots of truckers--they'd have one overpowering aspect to their personality, and it was enough to know them fairly well in the few minutes it took to fill their tank.

Hmmm...Heinlein also drew caricatures rather than people...Harry Harrison...a lot of the old timey sci fi was like that. Probably because all the authors were autistic :)

Kurt Vonnegut...

As far as video goes, I'm having trouble. I can think of actors that are spare with their emotion, but I really never notice characterization in video. It's too short a format for me to emotionally attach to the characters. Star Wars has cartoon characters and makes it work...The Matrix as well. I can think of two good series that might be useful. Altered Carbon does a pretty good job with the "nice guy being evil" trope, developing it with minimal wastage over the course of the first season. Again, though, a lot of that is credit to the actor. And American Vandal. I was really, really impressed by that one. It deals with teenagers. Teenagers are bipolar cartoon characters in real life, but that show managed to create extremely believable, well fleshed-out characters in an incredibly short format.

Hope this helps.

Edit: Autistic people generally have a good grasp of cPTSD. Traumatized people frequently have a flat affect and sparse emotion. Like Altered Carbon. You could build stories around people like that. Make the characterization a product of the plot and backstory. Just a thought.

#imnotsayingimoldbut

Before video games had save points, people tried harder to not make mistakes in the first place.

McLuhan had a point.

@burnoutqueen

Building things takes time. It's a lot easier to destroy than create. That's why the vile fuckers tend to run the show.

I'd like to disassemble the system, too, but how? How now? (brown cow) Like, America is still fucked because we weighted our constitution heavily toward the slave states to get them to sign on. In today's climate, I'm not so sure throwing out our beta test constitution and starting over is a good idea. Too many of our countrypersons are batshit crazy, and actively working to cause any harm they can. They want to tear it down and replace it with chaos because they think warlordism is a better bet for them to have a happy life. (I say we ship them all to Liberia and Sierra Leone.) I wouldn't be optimistic we could do significantly better than our current system in today's political climate. We need to reestablish consensus reality first.

I think there was a time that simply breaking things would have worked, but the window for that kind of thing has passed. That was the boomers' job. They had enough momentum, they could've tore it down in 1970, but the white ones took a buyout and piece of the middle class and let the nonwhite ones pay the price. Tearing it down now would just fuck everybody, methinks.

Watch the movie "Civil War". That's a world I'd rather avoid.

#politics

Good read:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/09/a-perceptual-black-hole

#actuallyautistic #sleep

I have a question about sleep medicine, and tech companies.

I'm finally trying to get help with my sleeping, and I was asked to fill out a sleep diary and wear an ActiGraph "watch" for two weeks. I looked into the ActiGraph and could find that it has an accelerometer in it. That's a two dollar part, and the doctor charges $1000 to replace it if I lose mine.

I asked the ActiGraph company, but they refused to communicate with me. They only talk to doctors.

I asked my doctor and he said it just tells whether I'm asleep or awake. This all sounds very suspicious to me. My guess is that this thing is a dataminer that throws off thousands of data points, one of which they give my doctor to use. That fits with the general exploitative, extractive, abusive nature of the tech world. But I don't actually know, and when I don't know and get the runaround trying to find out, I balk. I'm not wearing the thing.

Does anyone actually know anything about these devices?

@LadyDragonfly

"femoids"

Not my observation, but back before the repubs let themselves go full fash and quote hitler an' shit, they used to call uppity women "feminazis".

Funny how that worm turned...

@bmacDonald94

Rules are there to make you think before you break them.--Terry Pratchett

#books

I'm rereading "Pet Sematary" by Stephen King and there's a minor aside where the protagonist, a doctor, talks about his first roommate in med school. That guy took a lot of Tuinol, which he called the "Toonerville Trolley".

The Toonerville Trolley was the name of the railroad car upon which they deliberately caused an early nuclear rocket to fail and detonate as a test.

King knew some shit. "Firestarter" references MKUltra a long time before it was common knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rover#Cancelation

#politics #videogames

Somebody should fan mod a MAGA shirt and hat onto all the zombies in a game.

@jeffowski @actuallyautistic

I'm not allowed on Discord. Or anything but here. Even my email is mostly intercepted.

I gotta find some kind of atheist organization in meatspace.