Notices by Esther, an actual photographer (esther@strangeobject.space)

Ghost in the Shell (1995) remains a remarkable film.

Ever time I watch it I forget how short it actually is, just 1h22m. With it's fairly dense plot and a lot of stuff going on it still takes the time to be calm and deliberate, to linger on a single visual and some music, and even an extended audio-visual vibe intermission.

It does so much with so little.

Maybe more relevant today that ever: that scene when Kusanagi talks to Batou about how a lot of her employer's property forms parts of her body and her identity and she would loose those and become someone else if she ever quit.

That one really hits home now as so much of our online lives is controlled by some billionaire how doesn't care one but about us.

I wrote something I usually don't: a product review

It's about the fucking best vibrator for people who have had a vaginoplasty. (according to me)

https://www.selfawaresoup.com/notes/2023/08/30/funfactory-volta/

#sexToy #vibrator #trans

You go from Ruby 3.0 to 3.2, a minor version change that shouldn't break anything, and of course nokogiri breaks. :Blobhaj_Sad_Reach:

Rogue One becomes a so much stronger film after watching Andor. Suddenly the personal stakes are there, things matter to individual characters and not just as Star Wars lore pieces.

The cutest little light meter 💜

(Voigtländer VC Meter II, not sure how old it is)

I love how the ISO dial is really just a mechanical offset for rhe aperture dial.

“Collectively, we need to transform life online from a culture of rote consumption into a culture of person-to-person information distribution.

[…]

Creating this type of culture shift in the online information economy will not be easy, but we already have evidence it can work. The free and open internet of the 90’s that oldheads still wistfully recall was built like this, and if they did it on dial up modems, surely we can get there in our advanced online culture as well.”

Much appreciated and realistically hopeful post from @AnarchoNinaWrites on the future of the web that we can and need to shape.

https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2023/08/22/mini-theory-blog-escaping-the-garden-walls/

The "exclusive lists" feature in Mastodon 4.2 is also useful as a kind of soft-mute.

If you actually mute an account, you don't see anything from them anymore.

But maybe you just want to not have them on your home feed for a bit (e.g. because they post a lot about an event that you're not interested in or whatever) but you still want to get replies and DMs from them.

If you put them on a list and enable the "Hide these posts from home" option, it'll do exactly that. And you can always open the list if you want to read what regular posts are going on there. But it becomes and opt-in.

Nice one for shaping your default Fediverse experience.

Earlier today an ATM responded with an error when I tried to get cash. I immediately checked my account balance online to make sure my account wasn’t somehow empty.

There would have been no realistic way for my account balance being the cause here and indeed it was fine. It really was just an error of the ATM.

But the time of my live where the last ten days of every month could very well have been like “no grocery money, fuck you” has left such a mark that a failing ATM transaction for any reason still sends me into a short panic.

Poverty fucks you up permanently and nobody should have to go through that.

If you actually want people to read long-form stuff you write, don’t put it on Medium. Just don’t.

There’s a whole bunch of alternatives, like these WriteFreely instances that are part of the Fediverse (the network that Mastodon also in a part of)

https://writefreely.org/instances

There’s also WordPress.com which has a pretty good free tier. https://wordpress.com/

There’s GitHub Pages which works pretty well too, if you don’t mind a little technical involvement. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/quickstart

There’s tons of affordable paid providers too. You get a lot for the cost of one bubble tea per month.

And of course there’s the option to run your own site, which is probably easier and cheaper than you think. It’s worth giving it some thought.

But whatever you do: definitely keep a copy of your writing in a place you control, even if it’s just a bunch of text files. You never known when or for what you’ll need it.

#Writing

@Stefan_S_from_H @band that only ends up giving the debiers a platform by taking them seriously in the first place. I’d rather directly talk to people who are available to be convinced. I don’t need to give attention to denialism in order to do that.

“What’s your solution then?” Is one of those lazy rhetorical tricks to discredit any criticism of a complex problem.

Like, no, I will not come up with an easy solution to capitalism over a couple of social media posts. But expecting that any anti-capitalist must have a ready-to-use solution to everything they criticize is just a convenient method to shut down that criticism and cement capitalism and “inevitable” or even “natural”, to make even the idea of a different system seem impossible and not worth thinking about.

@noracodes better a non-journalist than nobody

“Demand drives up price” is such a ridiculous and hostile concept really (and also a lie), but we so often take it as some sort of universal truth.

An economy that serves the people would recognize high demand as an imperative to lower cost, and increase access, not as a chance to extract profit.

Demand doesn’t drive up prices, greed does.

Really funny when the free-market fans are coming from kolektiva.social 🙃

One of the best Wikipedia edits ever, on September 22nd 2006

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/77101181

I'm usually the only woman on these teams. I also am quite capable of doing most things on these bikes by myself. I've been fixing bikes since I was a teenager and I've been working on these cargo bikes for years now. I know my stuff.

That of course doesn't stop men, usually the ones who are new on the team and don't know me, to constantly give suggestions or far worse: to try and "help" without asking and not warning anyone.

So sometimes when I'm for example replacing a chain, where my hands are near the spokes of the wheel and close to the teeth of chainrings and such, some guy will just start moving things around, turning the wheel or the cranks, because he thinks he knows better how my work should be done. This has repeatedly led to close calls and actual injuries on my part as my finger get jammed between things that move unexpectedly, heavy and sharp/pointy stuff gets dropped on my hands, and so on.

This almost NEVER happens when a man is working on something by himself. 2/3

Just this season I've had 2 accidents with injuries and several near-accidents because of this. I've tried to talk to these guys and tell them how this is problem, how they create safety hazards. Usually my criticism is shrugged off and then stuff like this happens again.

I love this whole project and I think it's important work, but I'm just tired of this and honestly I don't know if I want to continue risking my safety and health with these guys.

Casual and unconscious sexism makes this work that should be fun, informative and fulfilling into something where my main thought is "How do I keep my hands safe today?", and all because some dudes just can't imagine that a woman actually does know what she's doing when fixing a bike.

3/3

Here's an example of how sexism, without any conscious bad intentions, leads to physical danger and harm:

I work as volunteer bike mechanic for a community project that offer free cargo bikes all over Berlin. Those bikes need maintenance because they get used (and sometimes abused) a lot. We do that in small teams cycling to a couple of bikes and fixing whatever needs fixing. Usually it's a tour taking us to 4 bikes over a couple of hours.

Then we split the work among ourselves, one checks the chain while another adjusts the brakes or sth. An important thing there is to nit get in each other's way, because that's potentially dangerous. There's moving parts, sharp tools, etc, and a hand can get caught in a wheel or brake disc very easily. So if one person works on one part of a bike and hasn't asked for help, others should move on to different parts that are safely away from there. And when someone does need a helping hand, they should be the one coordinating to avoid accidents. 1/3

Reminder that you should absolutely never use the website called “sci-hub dot st” to get free access to research papers instead of feeding the greed of for-profit publishers.

That’s basically communism, which is of course illegal. 👩🏻🏫