I really don’t understand anyone who still posts selfies at this point like. we’re all fully aware that the feds are monitoring us and using our photos to build a surprise database that will help them later it’s just not fucking worth it anymore
Human brain: security culture
Monkey brain: validation nice
I will Not be cockblocked by spy nimrod fucks
I haven’t ever really talked about this before but I’d like to introduce a concept that I’m going to call “security nihilism.”
Here’s the deal: You’re already burned.
It’s over! There’s no going back! Your face is in a database and your DNA is in a database and your social profile is in a database and there’s nothing you can do about it. Even if you didn’t put it there somebody else did. Congrats, we’re all fucked!
Automated license plate readers track your drive. Do you commute? Do you drive the same way every day? Why the sudden change to your routine? What were you doing that you needed to park your car and wander away suddenly? What are you hiding?
I had to track down a guy who didn’t have facebook or social media profiles, didn’t have a listing in the phonebook, didn’t have a linkedin. I started with his first and last name and ended with his supervisor’s phone number, a ten year history of his income, and his home address. I got to it through his son’s little league team.
And I’m fucking J. Random Nobody. I don’t even have shiny databases full of tracking data.
So you’re already burned. There’s no going back, we passed the tipping point. Even if you threw out your computer and shut down all your accounts and smashed your cell phone and lived in the woods there’d be video of you walking out of town for the last time and satellite images of wherever you ended up setting up camp.
I was never going to be able to hide from the cameras on the streets and the data in my cell phone and the scanners that look at the license plate of my car and the information that my school sold about my age and income and interests. So fuck it. Share a selfie.
[fyi the secret to actual opsec is to trust no one and to have no discernible patterns – being in a facial recognition database doesn’t matter if you make a point of not showing your face when you’re doing whatever you’re doing that you want to keep quiet; your goal isn’t to evade the facial recognition software as you’re on the run from the government, your goal is to never even show up on their radar]
Sorry folks, all of this is right. Getting judgmental at other people’s selfies and masking it as an opsec fail is just ignorant 😀
You know what fantasy writing needs? Working class wizards.
A crew of enchanters maintaining the perpetual flames that run the turbines that generate electricity, covered in ash and grime and stinking of hot chilies and rare mushrooms used for the enchantments
A wizard specializing in construction, casting feather fall on every worker, and enchanting every hammer to drive nails in straight, animating the living clay that makes up the core of the crane
An elderly wizard and her apprentice who transmute fragile broken objects. From furniture, to rotten wood beams, to delicate jewelry
A battle magician, trained with only a few rudimentary spells to solve a shortage of trained wizards on the front who uses his healing spells to help folks around town
Wizarding shops where cheery little mages enchant wooden blocks to be hammered into the sides of homes. Hammer this into the attic and it will scare off termites, toss this in the fire and clean your chimney, throw this in the air and all dust in the room gets sucked up
Wizard loggers who transmute cut trees into solid, square beams, reducing waste, and casting spells to speed up regrowth. The forest, they know, will not be too harsh on them if the lost tree’s children may grow in its place
Wizard farmers who grow their crops in arcane sigils to increase yield, or produce healthier fruit
Factory wizards who control a dozen little constructs that keep machines cleaned and operational, who cast armor to protect the hands of workers, and who, when the factory strikes for better wages, freeze the machines in place to ensure their bosses can’t bring anyone new in.
Anyway, think about it.
Construction wizards to turn back time to root out wood worm and strengthen old buildings.
A wizard tailors who transmutes cloth into fully made clothes without seems and leaving behind no scraps
A wizard who works in public transit, timing out teleports with detailed schedules, time magic, and enchanted communications, sending dozens of people to far away cities for a day or work or leisure
A team of wizard gardeners tend to trees grown far outside their native range, and ideal climate, encircled with runes and fed potions to grow none the less
A wizard sits in their office in the aqueduct, re-casting the spells that allow its precious water to flow to the city uphill
A wizard fisher casts water repelling spells on the sailors and the stairs, keeps the hoist on the anchor from rusting, casts balls of heat that keep everyone warm below decks. Their real job is to herd fish together so they can be caught in single huge nets, and keep them cold as the boat returns to land.
There are so many possibilities outside of “stodgy academic who wears ugly robes” and “Very good holy man who helps everyone and the fact they’ve never had a job is never brought up” and “evil wizard toiling away on great evils in his evil tower in the evil country.”
Wizards who come out and ward your home for you, like the magical equivalent of a home security system.
This is not only incredible voice acting and delicately crafted background noise, it is vibrating with energy and spirit. I am blown away by the power and talent here and hope that everyone can enjoy it as much as I did.
David A Kessler, author of The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,
is a doctor and lawyer, med school dean and former FDA commissioner.
He’s also someone whose weight has yo-yoed back and forth all his life,
someone who is plagued with insatiable junk-food cravings. His new book
– grounded in research that included dumpster-diving chain restaurants
to read the ingredient labels on the foods whose makeup they wouldn’t
discuss, tries to answer the neurological question of why we crave
shitty junk food:
The labels showed the foods were bathed in salt, fat and sugars, beyond
what a diner might expect by reading the menu, Kessler said. The
ingredient list for Southwestern Eggrolls mentioned salt eight different
times; sugars showed up five times. The “egg rolls,” which are
deep-fried in fat, contain chicken that has been chopped up like
meatloaf to give it a “melt in the mouth” quality that also makes it
faster to eat. By the time a diner has finished this appetizer, she has
consumed 910 calories, 57 grams of fat and 1,960 milligrams of sodium.
Instead of satisfying hunger, the salt-fat-sugar combination will
stimulate that diner’s brain to crave more, Kessler said. For many, the
come-on offered by Lay’s Potato Chips – “Betcha can’t eat just one” –
is scientifically accurate. And the food industry manipulates this
neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than
they should or even want, Kessler found…
“The food the industry is selling is much more powerful than we
realized,” he said. “I used to think I ate to feel full. Now I know, we
have the science that shows, we’re eating to stimulate ourselves. And so
the question is what are we going to do about it?”
So much respect for Yashar Ali sharing this. This conversation goes well beyond ADHD, but how we talk
about mental health in general. Thank you for bursting open the door for
others to be seen.
This hurt my heart to read. I struggled with ADHD for years with absolutely no idea that was why I found so many “simple” things so hard. It got really awful in college where I would be sobbing because I had an essay due and I just couldn’t make myself do it. I wanted to do it! Why was I such a stupid and lazy person?! I hated doing everything so last minute.
I’m angry at myself for not getting help when I was younger. It really sucks placing so much self-loathing and hate on yourself because neither you nor anyone else considered the possibility that maybe there was something wrong.
I was diagnosed last week. I’m 31. A lot of this thread resonates with me, especially the slipping part. I honestly thought the fact that I could manage some things in the past until I let them slip meant my inability to do them was laziness and not my ADD. The under diagnosis of adults, especially in the UK is a real thing. Up until very recently it was nearly impossible for adults to seek diagnosis and now there are posters up everywhere saying what amounts to gosh, so many undiagnosed adults! A terrible mystery, come in and get checked! Which is a bit infuriating really.
Though actually a lot of ADD people read a shit lot (I’m one of them and so are my other diagnosed friends). Just often not the things they should be reading. Hyperfocus on things that you enjoy is a thing.
