(via hornedchick)

Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.

this is ideology eating itself it's so amusing to me.

Like what kind of manufacturing base do you think America has right now? we're going to bring Factory Jobs back to Detroit, girlies. It's going to work, because we're Fighting Woke. Woke will Die and its death will usher in a new age of American Prosperity. By way of. Uh. Oh. Oh no. Is it supposed to do that?

"We're going to get companies to build factories in the US!! We're going to bring manufacturing back here!!" Are you?

Trump heard that Biden set money on fire with the CHIPS act and said. We can do that but with everything.

Most intelligent graduate of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

#this will be huge for all of the american steel mills that are functional and ready to go.#hold on im getting a phone call. huh. uh oh.

LMFAOOOOOOO YEAH

x

lmao are they upset over him breaking down over finally healing his comatose mom, which is basically the pillar of why he's been doing all of this in the first place

it kind of is funny that he became the template for the "stoic chad aura farmer" archetype but a lot of his copycats forget about this part of him (as well as the goofy bits)

"they ruined his aura by showing him crying"

lmaooooooooooooooooooo

There Were Always Enshittifiers

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in DC TONIGHT (Mar 4), and in RICHMOND TOMORROW (Mar 5). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

My latest Locus column is "There Were Always Enshittifiers." It's a history of personal computing and networked communications that traces the earliest days of the battle for computers as tools of liberation and computers as tools for surveillance, control and extraction:

https://locusmag.com/2025/03/commentary-cory-doctorow-there-were-always-enshittifiers/

The occasion for this piece is the publication of my latest Martin Hench novel, a standalone book set in the early 1980s called "Picks and Shovels":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

The MacGuffin of Picks and Shovels is a "weird PC" company called Fidelity Computing, owned by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. It sounds like the setup for a joke, but the punchline is deadly serious: Fidelity Computing is a pyramid selling cult that preys on the trust and fellowship of faith groups to sell the dreadful Fidelity 3000 PC and its ghastly peripherals.

You see, Fidelity's products are booby-trapped. It's not merely that they ship with programs whose data-files can't be read by apps on any other system – that's just table stakes. Fidelity's got a whole bag of tricks up its sleeve – for example, it deliberately damages a specific sector on every floppy disk it ships. The drivers for its floppy drive initialize any read or write operation by checking to see if that sector can be read. If it can, the computer refuses to recognize the disk. This lets the Reverend Sirs (as Fidelity's owners style themselves) run a racket where they sell these deliberately damaged floppies at a 500% markup, because regular floppies won't work on the systems they lure their parishioners into buying.

Or take the Fidelity printer: it's just a rebadged Oki­data ML-80, the workhorse tractor feed printer that led the market for years. But before Fidelity ships this printer to its customers, they fit it with new tractor feed sprockets whose pins are slightly more widely spaced than the standard 0.5" holes on the paper you can buy in any stationery store. That way, Fidelity can force its customers to buy the custom paper that they exclusively peddle – again, at a massive markup.

Needless to say, printing with these wider sprocket holes causes frequent jams and puts a serious strain on the printer's motors, causing them to burn out at a high rate. That's great news – for Fidelity Computing. It means they get to sell you more overpriced paper so you can reprint the jobs ruined by jams, and they can also sell you their high-priced, exclusive repair services when your printer's motors quit.

Perhaps you're thinking, "OK, but I can just buy a normal Okidata printer and use regular, cheap paper, right?" Sorry, the Reverend Sirs are way ahead of you: they've reversed the pinouts on their printers' serial ports, and a normal printer won't be able to talk to your Fidelity 3000.

If all of this sounds familiar, it's because these are the paleolithic ancestors of today's high-tech lock-in scams, from HP's $10,000/gallon ink to Apple and Google's mobile app stores, which cream a 30% commission off of every dollar collected by an app maker. What's more, these ancient, weird misfeatures have their origins in the true history of computing, which was obsessed with making the elusive, copy-proof floppy disk.

This Quixotic enterprise got started in earnest with Bill Gates' notorious 1976 "open letter to hobbyists" in which the young Gates furiously scolds the community of early computer hackers for its scientific ethic of publishing, sharing and improving the code that they all wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Gates had recently cloned the BASIC programming language for the popular Altair computer. For Gates, his act of copying was part of the legitimate progress of technology, while the copying of his colleagues, who duplicated Gates' Altair BASIC, was a shameless act of piracy, destined to destroy the nascent computing industry:

Needless to say, Gates didn't offer a royalty to John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, the programmers who'd invented BASIC at Dartmouth College in 1963. For Gates – and his intellectual progeny – the formula was simple: "When I copy you, that's progress. When you copy me, that's piracy." Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

(One of the echos of the DMCA is that Harper passed a law that included regional restrictions under "access control", meaning I cannot buy a DVD player for the DVDs I legally bought in the UK and legally brought with me when moved to Canada.)

human and bug relations will change by the end of the century

tfw your chat gpt generated tariffs accidentally acknowledge taiwanese independence

The Demon with the Matted Hair, from Indian Fairy Tales by John D. Batten (1892)

my favorite junji ito panel

this one liberal dude on twitter made the (correct) take that parents have overwhelming power over their kids and very often abuse it and restrict children's rights and he was ratio'd by conservatives, communists and liberals alike who made comments like "my kids will have rights when they pay the bills" to "aw are you upset mom and dad didn't you get you a lega set for christmas". way to prove his point lol! any criticism of the power dynamics adults and particularly parents have over kids and how it is often used to abuse kids or refuse to let them exist as themselves is drowned in mockery and the idea that parents have absolute authority over children and that any less than that is actually spoiling them.

i said it before: people only care about Children as an ideal. as property. as something that is Innocent and deserving protection From Evil Traffickers but also something Dumb that barely deserves the status of human with autonomy. and its fucking wild how even the staunchest communists think of this as normal, and how people refuse to understand that this dynamic is how kids are emotionally, physically and sexually abused, as well as robbed of their voices and too scared/ashamed to talk about it.

it's worth saying this dude is the parent of a now adult trans girl, and his reflections absolutely come from parenting as well as how he was expected to behave as the father of a trans daughter, how much power he had over her treatment and the refusal of doctors and teachers to listen to her and going over her head to him so they could misgender her and make him consent to conversion therapy.

he did not do these things, but the expectation and judgement that he as a parent was supposed to take away her rights and the sheer power he had over her as a minor made him reflect a lot. and now people are mocking him for sharing this reflection, even as black kids are killed or sent into the school to prison pipeline, as disabled kids are refused humanity, as parents kill their kids to spite their divorced spouses, as trans kids get their healthcare revoked, as migrant kids remain locked in cages. even as these same people panic over child trafficking and pedophile sex rings and refuse to admit how much csa and abuse is from family members.

The fact that this view is so rare despite also being, in my view, extremely obvious is I think a reflection of how strongly incentives mediate our beliefs. My experience growing up was that by six years old every single person I knew had developed a thorough class consciousness for the "child" class and as I've gotten older, everyone I know who's become a parent has forgotten it. Because ya know, it's not in their interests any more. The authoritarian structure of the parent/child relationship should also be the prototype for how sociological systems replicate, because parenting styles are so directly passed down generationally.

I SHOT THE HEAD OFF THE CPR MANNEQUIN WHAT THE HELL

IM GONNA PISS MYSELF JFC

ok so the last time i got cpr certified was when i was a tiny lil thing in high school to be a lifeguard for the kiddie swim lessons we taught. so its been a minute, yeah?

i am required to be cpr certified in my position at my job, smth that has not been brought up at ALL in the last 3 years ive been here, so i went to retake the course and all that. I went with a coworker, we partnered up and named our dummy Charles because we're cool like that. ended up having to use the table instead of the floor because of my bad knee and recently healed ankle, so we're above everyone else. We get charles ready, and i end up going first as the first responder, so i'm going over the process in my brain. 30 compressions at 100-120BPM, two respirations, AED, etc. etc. I was also remembering how hard it was to do proper compressions in my tiny little body at 14, so I knew it took more force than i thought to get the compressions deep enough, so i prepared to have to use my body weight and fucking send it. But! it turns out, since im not 4'11" anymore it was in fact Not Very Difficult to get past 2 inches, so it was fine and the instructor actually told me to ease up. I did awesome, compressions were deep and at proper rate, gold star for me.

however, my brain did not connect the dots that if the compressions would take less force, so would the respirations. Me at 14 had to use my full lung capacity to get the chest to rise at all, so I, with my full adult lung capacity and 10+ years of competitive swim, vocal training with breath support, and occasional dabble into brass instruments as I make my way around an orchestra, decide that I need to still full blast for the thing to work. i have to save charles, after all, so fucking send it ig. two very fast, very HARD breaths.

charles's chest plate lifts off and resettles incorrectly, i am none the wiser because i am (wrongly) focusing on the fucking little LEDs on the dummy being green instead of actually registering the movement of the chest like youre supposed to. My coworker, however, has noticed that charles might be A Little Fucked Right Now, and tries to get my attention, but i am FOCUSED because you gotta do the full two minutes and all that. so i switch back to the compression.

the chest plate, no longer in proper position to hold the head in place, clicks weirdly, and next thing i know the charles's head fucking LAUNCHES off into the fucking wall, nearly missing another person's head. his chest flipped up off his body and his head is gone and trailing that little plastic bag that the air you breathe into, completely deflated.

i fucking OVERINFLATED the bag to the point where when i did a compression it fucking POPPED and sent the head flying. the class had to stop for a full fucking 15 minutes to get itself together while i melted into my chair in embarassment i wanted to DIE

the instructor was fucking dying she was all like, 'ok you remember when i was giving the list of instances when you can stop cpr? you can stop now because he's dead' AND EVERYONE WAS LAUGHING AT ME AND MY COWORKER WAS FUCKING HEAVING AND WHEEZING HARD ENOUGH TO FALL OUT OF HIS CHAIR AND IM SO FUCKING MORTIFIED

I DECAPITATED CHARLES IN A CLASS ON HOW TO SAVE SOMEONES LIFE SOMEONE FUCKING KILL ME

my favorite genre of fictional character is like "i am terrifying to almost everyone, i'm very good at killing, i can endure anything, i've become exceptionally good at playing into my reputation, and if you try to give me positive social interaction i will react with confusion and cower in a corner like an abused animal. and i may try to shoot you. but there is also a chance i may imprint on you like a feral dog receiving its first loving touch! good luck."

Imagine owning a record so rare and sought after that when you go out to play DJ sets, people ask you to pull it out of your crate so that they can take a picture of it 😂.

And here's the song being referenced; a real Motown Northern Soul heater:

Source: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton

Time Travel Fix-It-Fic idea where a Bad Ending happens, but then one of the characters is magically sent to the beginning of the story. it seems like they're the only one who's been sent back in time and they're like "Huh, is this my second chance? I have to try my best to fix everything! I have to do it on my own though, if I tell anyone else that I've lived a future with [Bad Ending], they would never believe me" so they try to push things toward a better outcome while staying secretive about the time travel thing. but it turns out that every character was sent back in time and everyone is trying on their own to fix the situation, but all of them think they're the only one who was sent back in time and that they have to hide it from the others, so they're all being secretive from each other and trying to act normal while fixing everything and they all have different ideas of what "fixing everything" even means and all of them are stupid and it just devolves into everything being worse

like this

shared from twitter because it made me laugh

Mercurian science is the best in the world!

Miorine sure didn’t wait long XD “Hey Shitty Old Man! You’ll be a Shitty Grandpa soon!”