Why Is The Venn Diagram Of People Who Enjoyed/want To See She Ra Vs People Who Didnt/dont The Exact Same

Why is the venn diagram of people who enjoyed/want to see She Ra vs people who didn’t/don’t the exact same venn diagram as the people who are queer/out vs cishet?

Like. Am I really that intensely queer?

((don’t answer that))

Yes! This is also an excellent point! The issue here is not one inherent in smart devices, it’s created because of how they’re designed and built. It would be very possible (and in some ways easier) to build devices that did not suffer from these issues. If it’s not possible to connect to the device from outside your home network, there’s no way anyone else could get to it! I don’t do this kind of work personally, but my (semi-educated) guess is that the “phone-home” functionality is a substantive proportion of those devices software and it really doesn’t need to be (most of the time).

The issue is that it’s hard (on a technical level) to separate “bad” internet usage (i.e. to send usage data or to grant remote access) from “good” internet usage (i.e. sending a firmware update or re-ordering more soap). While there’s a certain degree that you can manage that on a personal level, at some point you simply have to trust the manufacturer to not be evil. Which... yeah they’re evil :(

So how do we fix this? Well, you can just not buy smart products (that’s what I do!), but what they’re huge quality of life improvements? Or maybe you just think they’re fun and want to play around without putting your privacy at risk.

The only really good solution to all these issues is that companies need to stop creating products that do these things. And the only way to force that to happen is through legislation. We need more legislation like the GDPR in the EU which explicitly describes your privacy rights on the internet (among many other excellent features).

So! Next time you see a call-to-action to “call your legislator” to “protect internet privacy” -- actually do it. It really does make a difference :)

hell world hell world hell world

WHY DOES YOUR SOAP NEED INTERNET

ok. so now that i have a tumblr blog. that means thAT I FINALLY HAVE A PLACE TO BE EXCITED ABOUT JAIDEN ANIMATIONS BEING AROACE OH MY GOD OH MY GOD

Okokok so I know this is old news to some of you and everyone else may not even know who JaidenAnimations is, but the tl;dr is they’re a youtube person who does animations about their little fun life stories. There are a bunch of people who do that sort of thing, but Jaiden has a real knack for telling engaging, fun, and relatable stories that I have fun watching. I don’t do youtube much, but I stumbled upon their videos a couple years ago and I ended up watching a bunch of their stuff and having a good time :]

ANYWAYS so pretty soon after I found them, Jaiden decided to livestream themselves playing a pokemon game that I played a ton when I was younger and have big nostalgia for. So obviously I gotta see this. No choice, I mean this is the most exciting thing since I discovered she-ra. While they’re playing, they just ramble a bit, and mention a few things that took me by surprise. Not just normal, “oh that’s new,” things. Things that were so unexpected that I even noted them down in a text file so I could save em for posterity. Here ya go:

06:30: Jaiden is technically gender neutral, but I never met any other girl jaiden so I always thought it was a boys name. I mean I don't mind / I like having a boys name / makes people forget that I'm a girl

30:03: I was able to identify more with guys than girls even as a younger kid, doesn't mean that I am a guy or like I identify as a guy that's just how it was when I was younger

And I was like woah! This person, who I already thought was pretty neat, ALSO has Feelings about Gender??? THATS AWESOME!! WOAH!!! LIKE ME!!!!

I sorta hoped they’d do that sort of thing again, but it didn’t really happen, and after a few weeks I thought they’d kinda moved on from this genre of content. I didn’t forget about it though, I mean aaaaaa they’re just like meeeeee and like how could I forget that :P

So, a year passes (nearly two actually), and then a new video appeared on their channel. “Being Not Straight“ by JaidenAnimations with a massive pride flag plastered across the background. oh shoot oH SHOOT OH SHOOT WHAT COULD IT BE. Push play. Some stuff about how respecting personal space is important. ‘Don’t read to much into anything’. ‘Don’t be creepy’. Ok go on.... ... ... ....and...and then “I’ve come to realize I’m aro/ace or ‘aromatic’ ‘asex--” ohmygodohmygod THEY’RE JUST LIKE ME. A COOL PERSON ON THE INTERNET WITH A MASSIVE PLATFORM IS JUST LIKE ME. AND THEY’RE NOW GOING TO BE TALKING ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ASPEC TO LITERALLY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE. MOST OF WHOM HAVE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF “”AROACE”” BEFORE. WHAT THE HECK THIS IS GOING TO MAKE SO MANY PEOPLE SO HAPPY :DDDDD

I just hit 100 followers, and I am truly grateful for all of you.

I would like to do a challenge.

For every interaction this post gets (from ANYONE) I will pick up 1 item of trash.

The earth has done so much for us, and I can’t think of a better way to give back

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Text Posts

Sometimes I think about the hobbies and skills I’ve picked up over the years and I wonder... why?? What about these specific things makes me happy? Is there some underlying idea that I really love that connects all the dots? Or is that just the pattern-finding part of my brain seeking commonalities?

Well, let’s take a step back: How do we pick up new skills anyways? Clearly, at some point we were exposed to them, and clearly we decide that they are enjoyable and it’d be fun to continue doing them, but what feeds into that decision? Is there something inherent in us that connects to specific skills? Or is there something special about the way we are exposed to them?

And why does it feel harder and harder to pick up new things the more entrenched we become in the old ones?

I don’t pretend to have the answers. Instead, I’ve got a mental vibe-check that makes sense in my head (which maybe is a skill in and of itself). To me it’s all about mental models -- the way we fit things into our brains. When I learn a skill, I feel like I’m connecting dots, figuring out some set of ideas, shortcuts, connections, and memories that I’ll be able to draw upon to do the skill better and faster.

But generating these models from scratch sure isn’t easy -- think about how long it takes kids to understand grammar or basic arithmetic when they have nothing to build off of. And they don’t have anything else to clog up their minds while they’re learning!

So once we’ve got a few skills modeled, suddenly some things start coming more easily! Different skills have some of the same dots and connects, and rather than building new models from scratch, I can perhaps take bits off of ones that already exist.

The more pre-built models we have to pull from, the less appealing working from scratch becomes and the more difficult it seems. So, if that’s what guides me when I learn new skills, it actually makes quite a lot of sense that there are commonalities between all the things I’ve gotten into over the years! I’ve been taking shortcuts and cheating to learn the things faster!

So wait, what does this mean about my skills? It’s not that they’re actually getting any harder to learn, it’s just that we have less time and mental capacity to learn them, and that we like shortcuts (I mean who doesn’t). But now that I realize there’s a scenic route I’m missing, perhaps I should try to take it one of these days. It suddenly doesn’t seem quite as bad :)