Tattie

New music service, tell me what you think: a guaranteed advert free playlist of around an hour of a particular artist's works, carefully curated and mixed by the artist themself. It gets better: pay one flat fee up-front for unlimited replays, even when offline!

...you've probably spotted that I'm just describing albums, but it increasingly sounds like a really good deal, doesn't it?

Every couple of days the neighborhood tom cat will come round and jump up on my windowsill, looking in. And my cats will see him and get spitting mad, jumping up on the other side of the windowsill, scrabbling furiously at the glass and yowling at him while he scrabbles back.

And I will say: "boys! Boys! Calm down! He can't get at you, and you can't get at him. You're completely safe, so stop stressing out and just walk away. With all this noise you're distracting me from this vitally important argument I'm having with somebody online."

It's interesting that mainstream culture seems to be pulling towards "biological" to describe cis women. Like, I certainly have feelings about it, but my rational mind is fascinated.

It's interesting that I'm described as part of the "blue hair and pronouns" crowd. Such a "non-biological" colour! Even if you're cis, you get to reject your biological womanhood with a tub of Manic Panic.

It's interesting that so much of the same crowd seems to be neurodivergent. A lot of us are on medications, rejecting the "natural order" of our brains. Tut tut, say the biological women, and the men who love them.

And then those same women start going thru The Change, and they have to choose between the biologically ordained havoc of their bodies, or hormonal assistance, just like us non-biological transes. What will their doctors advise? What do they want?

The appeal to nature is strong in this country.

AI hype isn't so much about technology; it's a way of communicating within the oligopoly that they intend to drop product quality in concert. It's the same as how they used to collaborate to keep prices artificially high-- only now consumers have no money left, they're chasing a profit margin by reducing production costs and therefore product quality. The stuff AI produces is objectively bad and unmaintainable, and it's not that businesses don't see that, it's more that they've decided that producing this level of output is a good business strategy. Consumer choice has been an illusion for a long time. We can't take our money elsewhere because everywhere we might go is in on the conspiracy. (By which I simply mean "people conspiring". This isn't a conspiracy of dark smoke-filled rooms, but a bland one of coded language and tacit agreements). And this swing was happening well before AI became its favoured tool-- when was the last time you bought a piece of technology that Just Worked? AI is terrible in its own terms, yes. But it would have been just a stupid novelty had it not happened to coincide with the spiraling end stage of capitalism.