Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

Being a venture capitalist is about giving entrepreneurs other people’s money to create businesses you think are good ideas. Most of the ideas will fail because they were actually bad ideas but the good ones will be so successful that no one remembers the bad ideas.

It’s a remarkable feat of self delusion that an industry of people who by definition are wrong most of the time, became a subclass of Twitter influencers who lecture everyone about how right they are all the time.

I am in this comic and I am resigned to it.

#CatsOfMastadon #Cats

Brave Browser was founded by a notorious homophobe who funded anti-gay laws and lobbies and it also doing crypto scams with their bullshit token. It also furthers the hegemony of Google's web browser engine Blink and their monopoly over the internet. Stop using Brave, stop recommending it.

Use Firefox with uBlock origin.

The Paradox of HS2 is that the primary engineering works have all been made cheaper than they were expected to be, and it established a new industrial base for future construction.

But the justification for the Conservative party canceling most of the planned HS2 is it went over budget.

It went over budget because of delays, demanded alterations, and legal costs of defending against court cases.

Those court cases were brought by-- Conservative party district and county councils in the shires.

Howdy to everyone interested in participating in the #auralIsle project.

(That is, our community run #bandcamp alternative, which is in it's very earliest phases. See https://ajroach42.com/the-uncertain-future-of-bandcamp/ for more info)

I *think* I've sent out all the matrix room invites that I needed to send. If you're interested in participating and haven't received your matrix invite, I am @ajroach42:talk.ellijaymakerspace.org and you should message me there directly.

He is taking a course on Marxist ideology.
He says, “The only real solution is to smash the system and start again.”
His thumb is caressing the most bourgeois copy of the communist manifesto that I have ever seen,
He bought it at Barnes and Noble for twenty-nine U.S. American dollars and ninety-nine cents,
Its hard cover shows a dark man with a scarved face
Waving a gigantic red flag against a fictional smoky background.
The matte finish is fucking gorgeous.
He wants to be congratulated for paying Harvard sixty thousand dollars
To teach him that the system is unfair.
He pulls his iPhone from his imported Marino wool jacket, and leaves.

What people can’t possibly tell from the footage on TV
Is that the water cannon feels like getting whipped with a burning switch.
Where I come from, they fill it with sewer water and hope that they get you in the face with your mouth open
So that the hepatitis will keep you in bed for the next protest.
What you can’t tell from Harvard square,
Is that when the tear gas bursts from nowhere to everywhere all at once,
It scrapes your insides like barbed wire, sawing at your lungs.
Tear gas is such a benign term for it,
If you have never breathed it in you would think it was a nostalgic experience.
What you can’t learn at Barnes and Noble,
Is that when they rush you, survival is to run,
I am never as fast as when the police are chasing me.
I know what happens to women in the holding cells down there and yet…
We still do it.

I inherited my communist manifesto,
It has no cover—
Because my mother ripped it off when she hid it in the dust jacket of “Don Quixote”
The day before the soldiers destroyed her apartment,
Looking for subversive propaganda.
She burned the cover, could not bring herself to burn the pages,
Hoped to God the soldiers couldn’t read,
They never found it.
So she was not killed for it, but her body bore the scars of the torture chamber,
For wanting her children to have a better life than she did,
Don’t talk to me about revolution.

I know what the price of smashing the system really is, my people already tried that.
The price of uprise is paid in blood,
And not Harvard blood.
The blood that ran through the streets of Santiago,
The blood thrown alive from Argentine helicopters into the Atlantic.

It is easy to say “revolution” from the comfort of a New England library.

It is easy to offer flesh to the cause,
When it is not yours to give.

— Catalina Ferro, “Manifesto”

#Communist #Socialist #anarchism #revolution #SomeOfYouHereReallyNeedToThinkOnThis

Over time, it grew. I happened to acquire some clothing that made me look more androgynous. I realised I enjoyed playing around with these expectations, messing with people. As it turns out… what I really liked is looking more like how I feel.

I never considered that I might be trans because my experience was so different from those around me. I convinced myself I was just pretending. But I'm pretty confident now I'm actually NB.

I've used they/them pronouns wherever I can online for years. This started in an IRC chatroom. There was a custom where everyone would copy a short intro about themselves for new people. Mine happened to not identify my gender.

One person went crazy. Demanded I tell them. Looked up my picture, still couldn't tell. Left in a rage when I refused. It made me consider: why should it matter? How would you treat me differently?

So I opted out, even though I was cis.

ur mentions when u say something bad about elon musk

what the fuck, 7-zip can open ELF files and show you all the sections??

death to songtradr https://www.404media.co/bandcamps-entire-union-bargaining-team-was-laid-off/

It's funny: Both Bandcamp and Patreon had the easiest and most straightforwardly long-term profitable business models imaginable: Sit between indie creatives and their fans, provide some basic services for mediation (comment sections, media posts, semi-global payment) and take enough of a cut of any payments to cover the costs and then some.

But because that business model wouldn't scale forever, they are instead being gutted, because ever _increasing_ growth is the only model capital accepts

You are probably going to run into a lot of people who tell you that your tactics/arguments/whatever do not convince them, and maybe they'll even tell you some specific way in which you should do it differently.

Don't waste your time on these people.

With that, I don't mean that you shouldn't develop an insight into the concerns of the broader population - you should *especially* learn about the concerns of people who are not in your direct social circles, because tunnel vision is a very real thing.

What I mean is that *these specific people* are not trying to be helpful - they are being *entitled*. They are defining (their perception of) your success by whether you are catering to *them, specifically, individually*. And they have already made up their mind that they don't agree with you, no matter what you do.

They are not activists, and even if they may have some notion of concerns among their social circles, they do not have the expertise in activism to turn that into the right solutions and tactics. They are not qualified advisors.

And usually you'll find that whatever tactic or argument they propose, it's something that allows them to more easily dismiss it - a tactic that is less disruptive, an argument that is a "compromise". Because they were never trying to help you make your activism a success; they were just trying to get rid of something that bothered them.

Activism is *supposed* to bother people - that is how things get changed. And contrary to apparently popular belief, it doesn't work by rationally convincing people (if only it were that easy...); it's a long-term process that involves steering public discourse, emotional responses, and so on. Often in ways that seem ineffective or counterproductive at first, but that have far-reaching and difficult-to-measure long-term effects.

You should of course find the tactics that work best for your cause; there is no universally effective strategy. But resist the temptation to follow the guidance of the least qualified and least engaged people in the room, however helpful it may sound on the surface.

Learn from experienced activists instead, inside and outside of your own cause.

#Accessibility in tech is overlaying so many UI elements it becomes impossible to read the captions.

Remember when companies sold goods and services rather than selling the ability to not be harassed by them as much for a monthly fee