I’ve Been Listening To The Power Broker By Robert Caro, And I Can’t Remember The Exact Quote But

The age of machines sneaked up on us. Steadily over the past century, the world has been increasingly shaped to the needs of machines. Farmland is designed for the tractor, millions of miles of road and acres of parking lots designed for cars, plus airports, shipping ports, distribution centers, factories, server farms... Everywhere we find spaces hostile to humans but welcoming to machines. Human beings relegate themselves mostly to apartment buildings, offices, and houses. We spend large amounts of time and energy powering and operating machinery. Meanwhile all over the planet the land, ocean, and sky is dominated by billions of metal and plastic amalgamations animated and set loose by human beings.

Our age of machines is not the classic Terminator apocalypse scenario, where an AI script gets out of control and destroys humanity. These machines are still physically operated by people, who are taking orders from other people. But it's pretty clear that the world is more welcoming to a person in a machine than one walking free on their own feet.

Batman: dystopian fascism

Superman: utopian fascism

Iron Man: techno-fascism

Captain America: nationalism

Spider-man: anarchism

Hot take: every ironic Internet post is also an unironic Internet post

I am glad that bee hummingbirds hatch nests of eggs each smaller than a pea. I am glad that there are oceans two miles deep where fishes unknown to science glow like fireflies.

I am glad that the crumbs taken from my bedroom are returned to tiny cities built by ants, and that the thunder of the storms rolling in from the north trembles in my chest when it is still a ways off. Hello, says the world, you are so little. Hello, says the world, you are so big.

My brain can be so exceptionally bad sometimes.

Endless short video feeds are completely inescapable for me; i can't use tiktok, i couldn't use vine, I can't watch youtube shorts. It's the same way I can't play video games - if I engage with them it is impossible to disengage until something physically forces me to look away. I sat for seven hours last night watching videos thinking to myself "I should go get my coffee that I left in the kitchen; I should go to bed; I should go to the bathroom" and I couldn't make myself move until tiny bastard had to go outside.

Anyway. uBlock origin is great because it blocks ads but you can also use it to totally block elements that are tar pits for your brain. The youtube shorts player has now been banished from my firefox.

This is yet another reason that I prefer stuff that can be used in-browser rather than in exclusively in-app. Way too easy to have a stream of content projected directly into my eyeballs with no action or choices needed on my part when I'm looking at the app passively instead of looking at a website where I have to choose the next video to watch.

Luminescent digital fish flickering in the server sea

ok i just got this thought out of nowhere but blog divers (people who scroll through a blog and reblog things that were posted YEARS AGO) are actually a super important part of the tumblr ecosystem

With people going inactive and deactivating, a lot of classic tumblr posts and also missed gems get lost because those connections get broken. Even on my own blog I forget about posts I made until I see someone in my activity reblog one of them- which then inspires me to reblog it myself because it was a good post and I want my new followers to see

do not feel bad about diving through someone's blog and reblogging shit from years ago, it keeps dashboards alive

(and if anyone has a problem with that, they can just block you or they can delete the root post ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, two things that have absolutely no effect on the grand scheme of our lives)

Happy 4th anniversary of the Ever Given Suez Canal Obstruction, to those who celebrate

sapphic saturday