Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

The conflicts between cops and antifas here feel a bit like a game. A type of rugby, I suppose. If nothing happens until late into the protest someone will probably start something just because. I mean you went all the way up there, put on riot gear / black block, brought even an abused police horse / pyros, are you going to what, just go home quietly and not use any of your toys?

I mean it's not like the cop is going to grab me under a bridge, put me in a car trunk, bring me to a cemetery with other cops, draw their guns movie-like and tell me: "run". It's not like I am going to track the name and address of the cop, stalk his routine, get up to his car in a traffic jam at 9am in broad daylight with a shotgun and blow his brains on the spot. That's how they played cops and robbers back in latinomérica. Who wants to live like that?

I remember Lützerath moments before the eviction, everybody was so utterly terrified that somebody else was going to throw stones at cops. Nobody was planning to throw stones at cops, but some people wanted to philosophically defend the validity of throwing stones at cops. Others debated hotly on escalation to all without consent. This seemed to be the #1 topic of the emergency plenums. The fear that shit gets real.

The first time I was kesseled and kept on a sidewalk for 12 hours straight, I was let go past midnight and when the final bureaucracy cop filed the papers and declared me banned from the city for the rest of the weekend--there was some undertone of, how can I say this? Actors saying goodbye after a play? I kept having this intrusive thought of that Looney Tunes cartoon, the one with the wolf and the sheepdog. You know that one? Ralph and Sam? They spend the entire episode with the wolf trying to steal sheep, and the sheepdog beating him up for it. Suddenly a factory horn signals the end of the workday. They stop mid-beating, dust off their fur, and calmly head to an old-fashioned punching clock. "See you tomorrow, Ralph." "Goodbye, Sam." They get into their cars, drive to their homes. Fade out. Cheery tune. "That's all, folks."

Please, USAmericans, when you refer to this org or that org as being a 501(c)(whatever) please could you also give us the plain English version of what that means? There seem to be a lot of different designations and to those of us not familiar with the details of the Internal Revenue Code, they all look the same.

Hey #neuroscience folks, for some reason my university thought it was a wise idea to be put me in charge as director of our neuroscience institute for a little while. Those of you working in the trenches at all levels (e.g. students, RAs, postdocs, faculty) I'd like to hear from you.

What are specific things that a department/institute can do to either inject more joy in the work or make the process of research easier?

#academicchatter #science

We should make a law where if a piece of media becomes popular enough, it gets seized into public domain, including any potential source code.

how do you folks organise cables?

(deliberately left open. please boost)

If anyone has any resources on queer biker culture or history, please send it my way! I'm thinking about doing some worldbuilding relating to it for my writing projects!

I just learned that there is an app to simulate train inverter sounds and it's very sophisticated

I love it omg

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qtsoundlab.ototetsu

How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really? https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

A technical deep-dive, since people have been asking me for my thoughts. I'll expand a bit on some of the key points here in a thread. 🧵

How to defend yourself during a police interrogation

„An interrogation is not a harmonious exchange between two individuals. It’s a conflict.
And in this conflict, our ignorance is their strength. Ignorance of the meaning of police work, ignorance of the manipulative techniques used, ignorance of the legal framework and, last but not least, ignorance of our means of defence.
In response to this observation, this book is intended as a tool for self-defense against police interrogation practices of interrogation…“

Evasions-Project Releases English Translation of the #Book

PDF:
https://projet-evasions.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/How-the-police-interrogate_english_projet-evasions.pdf

Thanks to @unsalted
https://unsalted.noblogs.org/post/2024/11/21/evasions-project-releases-english-translation-of-how-to-defend-yourself-during-a-police-interrogation/

German and french Version 👆

#Police #Data #Privacy #Repression #Antireport #Zine #Distro

Here's some highly condensed pointers on building better user interfaces, in the form of a few rules of thumb:

1. Make things look like what they are. Buttons should look like buttons, checkboxes should look like checkboxes, and so on. Familiarity works.

2. Think about functionality in terms of 'tiers of need'. Make the most commonly needed features immediately visible at all times, hide less common features behind a predictable menu, really uncommon features in a *submenu*, and so on.

3. Present data in the form and context that someone is likely to want to see it, in the common case. This usually will not match the shape of your internal storage at all! Much of your UI work should be converting between these two representations.

4. Look at accessibility guidelines like the WCAG. This not only makes your UI more accessible for those using assistive tools, it also makes it more predictable for everyone else. Don't forget about contrast!

5. Make things immediate where possible, and avoid things jumping and changing too much. Loading indicators should only exist for fundamentally slow tasks, and as much as possible should be done/reflected locally without waiting for a server.

A lot goes into building good UIs, but these are the things that people most often get wrong. If you get these few things right, you are halfway there!

Good morning! I have thoughts about the internet.

https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/

its so absurd to me that humans have known the importance of ventilation and clean air for centuries or more, when now that it's more important than ever, when we have cheap and plentiful devices to objectively and easily measure air quality, and the technology to do so much better, is when the world decided to reject the idea altogether

Snow traffic calming tonight in Ravieres 🙂

Ed Zitron yelling abuse at CEOs for twenty-three minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Slib2bbMs4

the city shivers, like a giant beast, covered in snow and fog. lights in modern glass skyscrapers and decrepit soviet blocks alike make the air glow. cars move in circles, like rats racing against each other. music — fiery guitar solos of rock, punchy hip-hop kicks and snares, and butter smooth rhythms of jazz; vocals and rhymes in english, kazakh, russian — spill in the streets of almaty from cars, bars, night clubs, and instruments and mics of street musicians.

tonight, the city lives.

you know what's worse than "please see our discord for download links"

when you have a documentation site

that documents every other step of the process

apart from one absolutely critical step

In all my years on blackblogs I have never received a single comment. I don't think the overly complex apparatus of Wordpress is useful at all; a static HTTPS host with a bit of space for occasional illustrations and a blog generator on your Whonix laptop would do just as well. The hard part isn't the technology, it's the legal risk; very few hosts are willing to take anonymous users via tor and allow political content; for no money, even less.

It is difficult to reach people without the Internet nowadays, but the state of the Internet for activism is abysmal. In most of the North, any revolutionary position can now be framed as terrorism--in many cases, following the lead of the USA land of free speech, without due process. And even if you can find a stable, supportive host, any web search will only ever return the Platforms, anything not in a walled garden is now deep web. Most orgs around me have given up and risk doing it on Substack or (of all places) Instagram. Spicier things can still go onto indymedia or the library, but these are more like shared communiqués/archives, not places where your group has a presence, a territory.

There's also the fact that all URLs break whenever something like blackblogs gets taken down. The idea of a political *DNS* host seems even less likely to find, useful though it would be.

A hot girl thing to do would be to host solarweb-style, on a low-power device you own that you take steps to a) anonymise the uplink via some Tor or similar connection, and b) rig to self-destruct any data in case of cop (are there good ways to do this? shadow encrypted partition and if you boot into the decoy one, it safe-deletes the hidden one? but if I was tasked with doing a search like cops do, I would try to investigate the devices on the spot and still plugged.)