Notices by My camera shoots fascists (mikal@sfba.social)

Seaplane lands on lake.

Okay, so either there are many of these creatures, i.e. a breeding population, or the single one has lived for the last 10,000 years since the glaciers retreated.

#monsterdon

"Why don't you two [men] get out of here and let me get to work." -female pathologist.

Was this movie progressive for it's 1970s time?

#monsterdon

Explosive places in lake surrounded by hardwood trees. Detonates in open lake surrounded by conifers.

#monsterdon

I held my nose and checked into Facebook. This image has been making the rounds, so I added some corrective text. I figured I might as well do my part to annoy people here as well :-)

#NoKings #NoKingsDay

The funny thing about this is that I'm pretty sure if I were to go spend more time on Facebook, the algorithm will go "oh, you interacted with this post. You must want to see more like this!"

A decade or so ago, when I first started souring on FB and getting disgusted with all the dis/misinformation that supposedly smart people where mindlessly sharing, I decided to "truth-troll": scrolling for misinformation and then providing links or explanations showing they'd been suckered.

No one liked that. Can't imagine why 🤔

But the algorithm really liked it and pretty quickly my feed was all conspiracy, all the time. 🤦♂️

Just fuck that whole company.

@rebeccawatson

Since we're talking about tear gas,, the most effective technique for neutralize canisters that I've seen was in Hong Kong in 2019. People worked in groups of two. Both had either respirators and goggles or full face respirators.

One person had heavy welder's gloves for picking up the hot canisters. The second person had one of those heavy duty rubberized dry bags like you use for river rafting, the kind with the Ziploc-type quick closure. You can get these at any REI, outdoor supply or river rafting supply store. The bag would be 1/3 filled with water.

The team would run toward a canister that had hit the ground, open up the bag, throw the canister in the water and quickly seal the bag until the canister was extinguished in the water.

This takes some planning and logistics, but it was incredibly effective.

(The second most effective was in Quebec city during the FTAA protests in '02 where people dumped buckets of snow on top of tear gas canisters.).

I signed up on #iNaturalist about 5 years ago and did a few postings/observations. Then, more recently I spoke with enough biologists who said they used the data and it was quite important and encouraged me to contribute to it, especially since I go to out-of-the-way places a lot (look at my observations map).

But, first, I took the time to read through their data/surveillance policy and, while I assumed bots would be *nonconsensually* scraping the data, contributing seemed useful enough to science that I could hold my nose and accept that. But direct, unmediated collaboration with Google and AI-anything is off the table for me.

Bummer, really.

#iNaturalist #iNat #enshittification #FuckAI #KillItWithFire

Great. I just finally take up posting on #iNaturalist as a new hobby and its leadership goes in on the enshittification cycle with Google and AI. There seems to still be quite a bit of ambiguity about what this will mean, but for me it means no more posting until this gets resolved. If they continue with Google anything, I'll delete my account and demand they delete the data.

Can't we, for just fucking once, have nice Internet things? This is why I like the fedi so much 🥰

Here's a point I made on my iNaturalist profile bio:

Google jumped into action when Mango Mussolini told them to change the name to "Gulf of America".

Recently, the American Ornithological Society has started renaming birds with eponymous English names to names that are more descriptive of the animal or place. So, if Orange Julius decides this is "woke", will Google comply if he tells them to revert to the English names? What will that mean for iNatualist's database and image recognition algorithm when someone searches for a bird or uploads a bird pic for ID?

Any science-minded project should run fast and run far from any partnership of any sort with the words "Google" and "AI" in the name.

#iNaturalist #enshittification

Honestly, even if iNaturalist walks the deal back, I don't really think I can trust them to not try something else in the future, or to just do it on the sly and hope they don't get found out.

@evan

Presumably you mean any meme, as opposed to original ones.

@blogdiva

Good for NYT for quoting people describing ICE tactics as "fascist" twice in the article. Now, had they been a little more proactive in using that term over the last eight years, we may not be here today.
Archive version no paywall:
https://archive.is/gzWpa

@alsutton

*tears out hair, screams into the void*

About 30 years ago, before the internet as we know it, a friend went way off the conspiracy deep end. UFOs, being followed by the FBI, lizard people, the whole bit.

Those pictures of Bill Clinton with aliens on the cover of National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout stand? They were in fact REAL. See, too many people were finding out the truth, so by putting those pictures on the cover of tabloids, it discredited those who saw through the government's coverup.

Airtight logic.

So, of course, the video showing a government official pulling his human skinsuit off to reveal the lizard person underneath is totally real. They just want you to *think* it's AI. This video is just another sophisticated op to discredit those who know the truth.
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️

We are so fucking doomed.

At this point, I think these Big National Day of Protest(tm) events are nearly pointless. They really need tactical evolution and to become more disruptive. Combine them with small affinity group blockades, set-ins, etc. Shut down a port or a freeway or mass-occupy federal buildings or sit in at collaborationist Democratic politicians' offices... anything but a repeat of the same thing with this month's stick-on label.

I'm very well aware of the many values of large, inclusive mass demonstrations. But if that is all you ever do, the movement will be a scheduled spectacle and never challenge power or be able to make change in any real way.

My nursery has weed plants you can buy and we're delivering to the East Bay if you want to grow your own and say fuck corporate weed. https://planthumboldt.com/delivery

#cannabis #GrowYourOwn

edit to add photo

Imagine running a business for 10 years that can be shut down at any point by any random bureaucratic inspector who decides they don't like something. That's the reality of the Dept. of Cannabis Control's "provisional license" system. Any time, for any reason, they can shut you down with no recourse. As of this year, no new provisional licenses can be issued and everyone has to transition to "annual" license status. But we can't do that until Humboldt County gets through their convoluted process and gives us our CEQA (CA Environmental Quality Act) clearance. They've only had 10 years to figure this out. WTF?

If that doesn't happen by July 2nd, when our provisional license expires. We'd have to shut down and then start the entire annual license application process over again. After 10 years.

I don't want to do that. But then I'm torn between what I want for my life and how all the employees here and our customers feel about this place continuing.

The CW was somewhat joking, but I generally like to keep my @PlantHumboldt promotional posts separate from my regular online life.

We have a mailing list that we send out to notify people about things like East Bay deliveries, sales and so on. I've taken to adding "editorials" this season. Mostly about the Brazil-the-movie-level bureaucratic insanity of trying to run a simple cannabis plant nursery in California. But yesterday's was about how much our customers and employees love this place.

It's true! We have so many people who come here year after year to get their plants and think it's the coolest place ever. (They're right!)

Many of them say things to me like they hope we can survive and stay in business. I'm guessing they sense the tiredness in me when I'm writing about what a stupid and tiresome mess California cannabis is for anyone without millions of dollars in investor money to burn.

@kellyromanych

I have never liked this MF. He hated homeless people when he was mayor of San Francisco. Always a grease ball.

Just stopped at my old friend the Niland mud spring. It hasn't changed very much since I wrote the story about it on my blog, but it did move far enough westward that they rebuilt the train track in its original location. The old section of Highway 111 is slowly being undermined, but the spring seems to have slowed its advance for a while.

Here the long story (with photos and memes!) if you want to read it. I had fun with it.
https://www.mikaljakubal.com/the-meandering-mud-pot/

#Niland #MudSpring #Geology #SaltonSink

This is my favorite Arizona rest area warning sign.

Also, every time I see it, my inner pedant is like "Um, actually…"