floof.org
UN report released on the UK government's violations of its human rights obligations towards disabled people. this is a follow up to the recent UN inquiry that the UK government was summoned to give evidence at. report finds the UK has made *no progress at all* after prior investigation a few years ago that found "grave and systematic" violation of disabled people's human rights by UK.
[CW for article text: abuse of disabled people, benefits system, suicides mention]
https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2024/04/24/uncrpd-report-april-2024/
The UNCRPD said the Tories had not even bothered to try and address 'grave' and 'systematic' human rights violationsRachel Charlton-Dailey (The Canary)
I beg of you, if toys aren't allowed inside, at least make sure I'm tied up to a stationary object outside. If you tie my leash to a car and it drives off, well...
This silliness is by @actionmartini
#ThrowbackThursday to Furpoc2014 when I snuck into a Canadian meeting w/ Nev v1.
Ft: @glacierhusky , @DolbyVixen , myself, and @ferrixxx
📸 - sniperwuff
#fursuit #fursuiter #fursuiting #mascot #furry #furries #furryfandom #fursuitphotography #foxfursuit #costume #cosplay
I've seen a number of writers remark on the fact that it's stupid to wait around for inspiration to try to writing something good. This is of course true, because often inspired writing is, in retrospect, terrible, while lines you suffered over are quite good.
BUT, there's this other thing, which is that as a project wears on, there's inevitably less inspiration, more just carrying out the initial vision. This is where, to my mind, the real craft often comes in.
Bigger wings for the ZDragon, now with more animations and flapping!
https://morghus.gumroad.com/l/zdragonwingsv2 For free!
Add a set of big (or small!) dragon wings to your ZDragon by Zephyxus in VRChat! Made from scratch, they are much larger than the wings that the base avatar comes with and they have several features, including:Toggleable with a nice animationSize cha…Gumroad
Filling this out, soon! . . . . Probably.. . . . Maybe.www.furaffinity.net
Before email, we had paper memos. Depending on your workplace, these were either dropped in a tray at your desk or delivered to a sorter somewhere not too far from your desk. These deliveries happened a few times a day. Likewise, you’d put reply memos in an outbox that was either collected or that you took to a drop off point. It was basically an internal mail system.
Email was intended to mimic this. You’d actively check it a few times a day and put responses in your outbox for a batch send.
We should go back. Email isn’t supposed to be an alerting system or handled near-real-time. The awareness of this is why chat platforms exist.
If your story has furry characters, be sure to put in bits of dialog acknowledging this, such as:
"Ow, you're standing on my tail!"
"It's so hot I wish I weren't covered in fur."
"Hey! Watch the antlers!"
"Where's the lightswitch?" "Hang on, I'll echolocate it. EEEK EEEK EEEK -- ah, there it is." *click*
"If you're a skunk, how come you don't stink?" "Because I bathe regularly. Whaddya think I am, am animal?"
"So what's it like having gills?" "Sorry, I can't hear you, I breathe underwater."
"I possess a dewlap and a row of elongated scales running from the midline of my neck down to my tail."
That know-it-all insect who keeps explaining things wrong in Pogo: 'Mark this day, young Fermont --- you'll rarely see two people suffering Spontaneous Between-Panel Transmogrification Syndrome like that!'
Young Fermont: 'Where?'
[ Our characters: 'Suffering?' ]
It's like "photos or it didn't happen", but in text. Shove it in our faces or it's not true! :p
(Actually I'm starting to write stories (or rather, starting to do it in a more organised fashion) and in one of them I've written the first scene and now need to go back through and add at least some references to fursuits and unusual body plans and stuff or no one will know the characters have those things!)
The eternal dilemma between
The main social conflict in Zootopia was never actually Predator vs Prey, y’all just got suckered into parroting the villain’s prejudices (and ultimately, the results of her evil plan) instead of actually examining what’s shown on-screen.
and
I don’t want to be perceived as defending the copaganda movie.
Like, y’all. Aside from Nick’s childhood bullying incident and the reason incidents triggered by Bellwether’s plan, literally every prejudice we see in Zootopia is Bigs vs Smalls, not Predators vs Prey.
Judy becoming a cop is notable because she’s the first Small cop, not (and by far) the first Prey cop. The program that got her in is literally called the Small Mammal Initiative. They don’t even have cars her size at first, leaving her with a toy car. The Initiative’s second success is Nick, a fox.
It’s literally shown that, before the Initiative, the police just outright gave up on policing the Small sections of the city because they have never had any officers smaller than a wolf or a sheep.
Nick is introduced by being bullied by an elephant then trusted by mice and lemmings.
Even Bellwether is vaguely aware that her abusive relationship with Lionheart is a Big bully vs Small victim thing, but she keeps persuading herself that it’s because he’s a predator.
See what I mean?
This was pretty deliberate on the part of the producers, too. The making-of explained that they made Nick a fox because he could have the pred-prey dynamic with Judy, but as a small predator, he could be endangered by the same situations as her.
I have a counter-point though: I think it's very easy to see the fox-and-rabbit prejudice and reactions as being a metaphor not for racism but for sexual violence. The way Bogo casually casts doubt on Judy's report of being attacked; the language of genetic throwbacks and innate, primitive behaviours; the resemblance of Judy's fox repeller to IRL mace; all these are pretty obvious parallels. I don't know if that was an intended interpretation, but I think it's an interesting lens through which to view the story either way.
Normalise them here in the UK too, please. In fact, why do they need to be associated with sports? Let's just have more animal mascots in general. Actually, when I'm out in public I just want to see furry characters mixed in with the humans, just doing normal stuff.
More aminal peoples pls.
There was no drone delivery future. There was never going to be a drone delivery future.
Just like there was never going to be self-driving Uber taxis. Or Amazon Go supermarkets on every corner. Or hyperloops. Or earth-to-earth space travel on SpaceX rockets. Or level-five full self driving Teslas.
Just like there will not be a general artificial intelligence ChatGPT in the next couple of years.
They were all scams designed to lure dollars from investors and generate good PR.
It was all bullshit. It was always bullshit.
Nothing more.
Amazon will shut down its Prime Air drone delivery service in Lockeford, California, which it opened in 2022. A new location is coming in Arizona for Phoenix metro residents.Umar Shakir (The Verge)
Every person has the right to wear a mask.
There are many good reasons for doing so: COVID, airborne pathogens, sickness, privacy, surveillance, allergies, work etc.
No one should ever have to explain or justify why they are wearing a mask — that’s none of your business.
No one should ever be harassed or attacked for wearing a mask and businesses should never prohibit employees from wearing a mask to protect themselves.
For public health, workers' rights, and human rights reasons, governments should implement laws that protect everyone's right to wear a mask.
How to terrify #capitalism
More than its economic success, though, Mondragón has become a beacon for the co-operative model, as a more humane and egalitarian way of doing business that puts “people over capital”. Every worker has a stake in the company’s fortunes and a say in how it is run, and receives a share of the profits. But the goal is more about creating “rich societies, not rich people”. That means looking after workers during not only the good times but the tough times, too.”
"The state of American attitudes towards COVID-19* in 2024."
* and immunocompromised people in general
"We're pretty much seeing everything we had hoped for, and that's always good news.”Ars Technica
The Cursor Pack is now available! It's a completely free (CC0) package which includes 110+ cursors in both PNG and SVG formats! #gameassets #assetwednesday
https://kenney.nl/assets/cursor-pack
Share with your fellow developers 💜
"UK ‘helping Russia pay for its war on Ukraine’ via loophole on refined oil imports"
"As long as Russian oil is refined in another country it is no longer considered to have originated in Russia, allowing it to evade the trade ban."
FFS.
#JustStopOil #JSO #Climate #ClimateCrisis
£2.2bn-worth of oil processed in China, India and Turkey – to whom Russia supplies crude – was imported in 2023, data showsGuardian staff reporter (The Guardian)
The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the globe’s largest industrial co-operative, with workers paying for the right to share in its profits – and its losses. In return for giving more to their employer, they expect more backOliver Balch (The Guardian)
offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).
Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it
The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.
Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.
Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.
So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.
I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.
And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.
That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem.Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)
An EU-wide #RightToRepair has been adopted by the EU parliament with 584 votes in favour, 3 against and 14 abstentions. The directive now goes to the council and after it is officially published, member states have 24 months to implement it in national law.
And yes, smartphones are included. #ThanksEU
Intentional Community and Capitalism
“Capitalism isn’t just an economic system we live inside. It is a culture that lives inside of us. It influences our psychology, how we design our communities, how we relate to each other, the kind of culture we create, and what’s possible for us to do together.”
— Blue Sky
#EconomicDemocracy #CooperativeCapital #IntentionalCommunity #SocialDemocracy
https://www.shareable.net/intentional-community-and-capitalism/
Challenges and strategies for anti-capitalist community design (part 1) Capitalism isn’t just an economic system we live inside. It is a culture thatSky Blue (Shareable)
