Its fascinating that the way advertizing and apps work right now is simply how computer viruses, adware, spyware, and all manners of malware has ALWAYS worked. Growing up as a teen in the 2000s there used to be a program called Weatherbug that was pretty much considered unthinkable to ever have installed because of the way it knew your location and essentially EVERY adware, spyware, and antivirus software flagged it for removal immediately. It was considered best practice to never install anything. Never install toolbars, mever install anything without consulting a professional or unless you were ad advanced user. I was trained in Comptia A+ for the windows xp era and the best practice as a repair tech was to never allow the customer to install anything themselves if it could be helped.
And now just. Everything does this. Your fucking calculator wants your location data and business ghouls want it to ve illegal to use a simple adblocker because not advertizing to you hurts their feelings.
And now we have generative AI filling the internet witg slop that can have SEO and more ads slapped on top of it? Google is breaking on purpose so you make more searches?
The viruses have won, everything is malware and everything is a scam. To use commercial tech is to be voluntarily mugged
Not feminist as in "women should be included in the draft" but feminist as in "being drafted is a violation of bodily autonomy for any gender".
The draft should not exist. Drafting people into the military is a violation of human rights. You should not be able to force someone to risk their life. If you can't find enough people who care about a conflict to keep it going then it simply shouldn't keep going. You can't even force someone to donate a kidney using government power, why the fuck can you force them to donate their whole body and life to a cause they don't agree with or don't care about?
today in "google AI is fucking useless because it hallucinates things that never happened", i bought a couple CVS thermometers that have both been acting up, tried to search if there had been a problem with the whole product line:
there is no record of this product recall. it did not happen. the date "feb 8 2024" is the date someone listed a thermometer for sale on ebay.
(Inspired by that one tumblr post I saw years ago suggesting that Twilight wouldn’t have ended the way it did if Bella were conscious of the type of story she was in.)
It could be a love story. It could be the dark, mysterious boy in her class setting his eyes on her. It could be her looking back. It could be the pounding of hearts, sweaty palms, secrets in all the dark corners this town has to offer.
It could be a lot of things, but it’s never going to be more than a “story.” Dressed up and sanitized so that people can parse it, learn from it, take from it. It will never be her history or her dreams, never be her life or her purpose. It will always be a tale, tall or small, and she can’t forget that.
No matter how much he wants her to.
He laces their fingers together, his cold palm to her human heat. “I love you.”
She wishes she could exist in her body and believe that. She’s still a teenager and she wants love, connection, and intimacy. Growing pains and bleeding hearts with the promise of happy endings and worthwhile lessons.
Her mind, however, is a little too old to let the surface appearance pass for reality.
“I’d spend forever with you if I could,” she tells him. She means it. She would spend forever in the cold embrace of his arms, in the sphere of his love, if it really existed all for her. He takes it differently than she means.
“Maybe that will be possible,” he says slowly. He lets go of her hand to slide his arm over her shoulders, pulling her against his strong chest. “One day.”
She can practically taste how the thought excites him. He wants to change her to be like him—immortal and timeless.
After two months, she still doesn’t know if this is a story she’s willing to let play out.