Okay:

In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn’t want to deal with.

Palestine was not happy about this - the land was taken without their consent, a great chunk of their country just taken from them by decree, backed up by a still highly militarized Europe.

Over the following decades, Palestine tried several times to take their country back, and each time got slapped down (since Israel had vast backing from UK/USA/Europe, both from postwar guilt and because Israel had a lot of strategic value as a platform from which to project military power in the middle east).

Cut to today, and Israel has expanded to take virtually the entire area, apart from some tiny scattered patches of land, and the Gaza strip - a strip of land 40km by 10km, containing most of the Palestinian population, blockaded by sea and land by the Israeli military.

Israel also runs an apartheid regime very similar to the old South African one - Palestinians have very few human or civil rights, generally get no protection from the Israeli police or military, while being treated as hostile outsiders that can be assaulted or have their land ‘settled’ at will by Israelis.

It has been decades since Palestine has had any kind of organised military, and it’s also not recognised as its own country by most of the world, so there’s virtually no way for it to push back, or to call on assistance.

In a situation like that, the only recourse is guerilla warfare, which often descends into (and is exploited by bad actors as) terrorist attacks. It’s a damn good way to farm martyrs, and this hugely serves Israel’s ends, since it can keep pointing to terrorim as justification for their ongoing oppression. Israel in fact provided a great deal of ongoing funding for Hamas, while blocking more moderate groups.

Back in October, a small organised group raided across the border from Gaza into Israel, killing about 1200 people and taking a couple of hundred hostages.

In response, Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinans in Gaza - mainly women and children - systematically destroying the city’s infrastructure, water, power, food production and distribution, hospitals, universities and schools, bombing refugee camps and destroying the majority of all housing and shelter in the area. It’s also bombing humanitarian aid convoys, preventing food and medicine from reaching the people there. The death toll is expected to reach many hundreds of thousands, since people are already starving and there is no medical care available.

The rest of the world is wringing their hands about the ‘regrettable’ loss of life, while continuing to sell Israel all the weapons and bombs it needs to continue the genocide.

Fuck Israel.

NVIDIA RIVA 128

being alive

Yes, yes she is.

Someone once described her as machine girl’s furry alt account :D

Good lord, speak plainly.

That’s more of a swingers thing than a poly thing.

In the vast majority of poly relationships, people are in separate relationships with each of their partners.

Triads (and quads, etc) are hard-mode. They certainly exist, but they take skill and effort from everyone involved, and so are significantly more rare. And of those, probably only a minority are going to be into the whole group-sex thing in the first place so… not very often.

I spent about 20 years getting stuck in the past while the culture got away from me; I just hadn’t got into any bands since the early 2000s, and it was getting pretty sad.

I also have pretty bad ADHD - music fucks up my ability to concentrate on language-based tasks, so I can’t just play stuff in the background while I do something else - and sitting there staring through multiple songs in a row just isn’t going to happen.

So I had a great idea: turn it into a game.

I nuked my youtube data completely, started again from scratch, and set out, not so much to discover new music, but to train the algorithm to fetch me cool stuff. How well can I nudge the thing into a model of stuff I tend to like?

• Open the home feed, and start going through it
• Reaction videos, influencers, other garbage, hit don’t recommend channel.
• Any music videos, open in new tab
• Rinse and repeat until I have a ridiculous number of tabs open
• Go through each tab:
• Skip through representative chunks of song, get at least 20 seconds of music in before making a decision
• If you just don’t like it, close the tab and move on.
• If you do like it:
• If it’s not posted by the original artist account, go find the original instead if possible.
• Hit like
• Save to playlists for whatever genres it seems to fit, plus a catch-all list (set public, for reasons I’ll explain)
• Open a few new tabs off the sidebar
• If you find three solid bangers from one artist, subscribe.
• When you run out of tabs, refresh the home feed.

It’s adjustable to suit my attention span at the time - if I need the dopamine I just skim more, if I want to chill I let it play longer.

It fits into spare minutes of downtime at work etc.

I have discovered SO MUCH amazing new music, and my tastes have expanded in all kinds of directions. I’ve started not only recognizing but actually having opinions on bands I see on posters as I walk down the street, which is just plain ridiculous for me.

I have gone down some weird and amazing rabbit holes, from Armenian music to Femtanyl.

Probably the best thing I’ve ever done, srsly.

Sometimes the algorithm can get stale, and you end up with a streak of bland, safe stuff that all seems the same.

When this happens, find one of the many third-party playlist-shuffle sites (because the built-in shuffle is still horribly broken), and feed it either your main playlist or some of the genre-specific ones you feel aren’t getting enough love, and listen through a bunch of songs there to dredge up the silt. (you may need to open them in separate tabs; the embed doesn’t always update your watch history properly). And this is why the lists need to be public, so third-party sites can browse your playlists.