elilla&, bara no duelista

https://pronouns.page/@elilla

Latina trans girl immigrant, corrupting Germany with hormones, easy sex, and talking to strangers. Travesti big boob futa milf gf. Silly airhead bimbo who believes in horoscope and gnomes, very harmless, not involved in any sort of antifa actions whatsoever

Major hobbies: kendō, shinobue flute, Japanology, girls.

(most toots are autodeleted)

Age: ≥40 ($year−1983)
Children: ≥ 2
Pronoun: she
Gender: trans woman / Latina travesti
Politics: anarchist
Marxists: are not comrades
sexual orientation: girls
sexual role: 🔝

Public Key

npub18zk7axp57m7lle8nq7dttg34kdm75x7wan27704zev4297jykm9swt45sm

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsr3t0wnq60dl0lunes0x445g6mxal2r08we400863vk24zlfztdjcprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnthxqruc

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub18zk7axp57m7lle8nq7dttg34kdm75x7wan27704zev4297jykm9swt45sm

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Last Notes

2026-04-23 19:59:31 GMT

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my favourite 7-note scale so far is the double harmonic/Byzantine. it jumps around more so it has more drama, and also is a palyndrome so it makes more sense

2026-04-23 19:53:50 GMT

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I kinda highly resent that of all the scales in the world the Western tradition settled on the 7-note diatonic though, with the result that piano keys are laid out to privilege it, with the results that all music education starts from walking up and down this scale. what a bad-sounding scale. if we have to use a 7-note scale at least pick the mixolydian mode or something

2026-04-23 18:27:08 GMT

the melodica book made me more invested than I though I'd ever be in learning to play music from scores

2026-04-14 06:38:11 GMT

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ah, not a police reversal but still just in time for Tuesday: "Oil price dips below $100 a barrel after Trump claims Iran wants deal"
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/13/oil-price-tops-100-dollars-barrel-us-blockade-strait-of-hormuz
to be clear when people talk about oil prices like this they're talking about futures—essentially a promise of how much they're willing to pay for hypothetical future oil. but the thing with oil as a commodity is that it's a physical thing that is actually used and must be transported, it's not symbolic like stashed gold. so it's good to keep an eye on the actual physical supply of oil:
> The last oil tankers to traverse the Strait of Hormuz before the outbreak of war will reach refineries in the coming days, in a pivotal moment analysts warn may herald physical shortages in Europe and the US within weeks.
> “It will hit the west in a month when all the Asian cargoes bought leave the Atlantic basin,” said Nic Dyer, an analyst at Energy Aspects. […] “Refineries in Europe and the US will also have to cut runs from next month to share the pain of the shortage.”
https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.ft.com/content/bcd72d2a-79cc-48db-a149-076cbca22a24

2026-03-05 08:48:47 GMT

is dying, apparently:
> DUOL shares have fallen more than 78% from their May 2025 high, and that’s before its nearly 25% fall in premarket trading today.
I've said before that one of the very few good things generative "AI" may do to the world is accelerating the enshittification cycle so much that it kills stuff that was already terrible and a drain on society (social media; platformization; curation algorithms…). Speaking as a linguist who speaks 4 languages and has read the literature on second language acquisition, it has always been my position that the Duolingo method is useless—it *feels* like you are learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours with it and gold a full tree and you'll still get nowhere, and if you put a fraction of the time in about any other method, including doing pen-and-paper drills with old-fashioned paper-based textbooks, you'd have progressed much faster.
And old-fashioned grammar drills suck, too. It's just that Duolingo *really*, really sucks.
(Methods that work better: 1) Find an intensive "conversation"-type course, or anything that is labelled as "natural" or "immersion" or "storytelling" methods; or get tandem partners; or online coaches such as in italki; failing that, join a conventional language course, the more "intensive" the better; work on these until you absorb basic grammar and vocabulary, focusing on spoken language not writing; 2) Once this bootstrap period is over, start talking to people, watching media, or reading stuf that interests you, in large quantities and every day; do not wait until you're "good" to move into the input stage, start actually using the language for things you wanted it for, as soon as possible, which is sooner than you think; partial comprehension is fine.)
Of course I hope Duolingo dies horribly in a fire after it backstabbed its workers with the "AI memo", but even if it didn't, the world is better off without it.
One lesson we can get from this: Consider that overnight 25% drop in investment, which may well prove to be the coup the grâce. It was not caused by Duo losing users or enshittifying with "AI", but by the opposite: investors mass panicked at the company setting its target revenue too low, as in a mere… 1.22 billion, rather than the 1.26 billion the investors wanted. Now the reason Duolingo is not chasing that higher goal is that they're seeing the writing on the wall, and went into damage control mode: they're pulling down a bit on squeezing their current paying users and trying to improve the experience of the free tier, in an attempt to reverse the bleed and bring in more customers.
In other words, Duolingo tried to slow down the slightest tiny bit on enshittification—3% less cash—and this already got swift punishment from the market gods. With capitalism, there is no long-term thinking: you're expected to provide the richest people on Earth with infinite growth of their ever-increasing profits squeezed from customers paying every month more and more, now and forever, or you'll be taken out and replaced by someone willing to try.

2026-03-01 08:04:05 GMT

Philomena Cunk is formally a boke

2026-02-01 12:53:00 GMT

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I have to stop looking up recipes in English, it's always such a pain to convert such things as "cups" or "tablespoons" into actual units. not just because they're nonstandard but because USA people keep measuring in volume stuff that should be measured in mass. "1 cup frozen strawberries" motherfucker that doesn't *mean* anything

2026-02-01 12:50:41 GMT

> As always, do make sure your sugar is actually vegan and hasn’t been manufactured using bone char.
the stuff USA people have to worry about

2026-01-30 13:38:11 GMT

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"dwarf what fortress?" exactly, I turned on the "more gay dwarves" mod. pun intended

2026-01-30 13:37:45 GMT

ok fuck this I'm not gonna do any of these bureaucracies, I'm sick, I'll deal with the consequences later. I'll spend this beautiful sunny day playng dwarf fucking fortress

2026-01-29 12:14:51 GMT

it's weird living in Europe or Japan because if your basis of comparison is Brazil or, gods forbid, the USA, it briefly feels like you got rid of carbrained cities and everything is so much better. but after a while you realise, nope, the place is still ruined by car-centric urbanism. it's just less car-centric than some of the absolute most dystopic urban hells in the world, but that doesn't mean it's good. the entire system still bends over backwards for cars and the cars still ruin everything

2026-01-27 21:31:20 GMT

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here's something that made me cry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppfFrlvaXgE
this is a clip that a woman from the USA took when the ICE banged on her door chasing after the delivery lady of her DoorDash order (a gig-economy food service).
in the space of 13 tense minutes we see her speedrun a political awakening like:
- why is this happening to me? I just ordered a DoorDash what's going on??
- I'm requested to bring this woman to police, she didn't do anything, this is so unfair why do I have to do this
- I'm so sorry I'm so sorry I'm going to post this on Tiktok ok, I have followers we're going to do something about it, there's nothing I can do what can I do, we'll protest ok
- omg I'm literally delivering a racial minority that is crying on my basement to a racist paramilitia right now, I'm delivering this woman to a concentration camp, protesting about it is not enough
and then as the immigrant cries in Spanish about not wanting to leave her little daughter alone, something clicks, and the houseowner has that moment that I call stepping up on the stage of history, where she understands exactly what's expected of her; she knows that ICE also kills people like her (this is post-Good), she knows that she might be marking herself and her residence as targets, that it's not off the table at all that she'll just get shot on the spot as a race traitor. nonetheless she steps up and yells at the armed ICE agents, to their faces, to "get off my fucking property, now!"
according to local forums the immigrant lady is safe and receiving community protection now.
when people ask me "what can I do?", this is the video I'll be sending them.

2026-01-27 13:22:12 GMT

Portuguese uses two different verbs for the copula "to be", ser and estar. ser is used for relatively permanent traits like "I am a Portuguese speaker", while estar is used for temporary traits like "I am sleepy right now".
however "to be dead" uses temporary "estar" and not permanent "ser". that's because Portuguese speakers are necromancers

2026-01-08 05:55:49 GMT

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ok after a year of disappearing people ICE has murdered a white woman for a change and *now* I see gringos finally talking about the necessity of shooting ICE agents. now it's real, eh.
it's hard not to feel bitter about this kind of thing. suddenly the point I've been making all this time, that y'all gringos are living among brownshirt stormtroopers whose ongoing ethnic cleansing project has cleansed over half a million subhumans already and sent tens of thousands of latinx to concentration camps, right now, and if *that* doesn't call for armed resistance than what the flying fuck does???—*now* this point doesn't sound as "out there" as when I made it in the distant past of three days ago, huh

2026-01-06 21:14:51 GMT

LaTeX is that kind of thing like the Linux/Unix command-line; it is godawful and has no sense of design whatsoever, no accessibility, horrible tech-centrism and Anglocentrism, etc. etc. but also it's the singleton, the only fleshed out implementation of its entire category of software.
so because for example there's so many advantages of a CLI over a GUI but Linux is the only useable CLI there is, all of the problems of the Linux CLI are assumed to be problems with CLIs in general, and everyone who came to understand the benefits of a CLI has to put up with Linux bullshit to get to use one, and eventually grows used to it. and so the Linux bullshit perpetuates. at some point an entire defensive/self-flagellating culture develops where the more pointless unnecessary bullshit you put up with, the bigger hacker you are.
LaTeX works exactly the same way in the text editing/typesetting world; it can in fact be seen less as a "markup" and more as "telling the computer commands about how to set the text", just like the general CLI is telling the computer commands for the general case.

2026-01-06 14:45:33 GMT

it's incredible how Anna's Archive has anti-design (forcing you to wait or slow downloads for free users, making you copy-paste URLs etc.) plus it's increasingly blocked by various providers, and it's *still* significantly easier for me to download a book there than through academic publishers, even when I have authorised access to the latter

2026-01-05 17:37:07 GMT

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so that's infuriating but still not *as* infuriating as the fact that we *already have* concentration camps, mass deportations, child kidnappings, thousands of people kidnapped and disappeared without explanation etc. and people still talk as if the USA is "on the way" to "become" a fascist authoritarian dictatorship. because disappearing 65 thousand people and ethnically cleansing over 600 thousand isn't "real" yet because these aren't real people, they're just latin americans.
of course back in the first round of fascism hitler was also targeting the non-people, which led to real people talking in the same way, what happens to Jewish Poles doesn't count. the difference is this time people have a model and should know better. the difference is that now the fascists make meme merch about the concentration camp to own the libs, one third of the inmates in the concentration camp disappeared without explanation and they make funny T-shirts about it, and the fully owned libs are *still* saying that e.g. they don't endorse political violence and that the assassination of one fascist was a bad thing somehow. murdering 01 (one) of the bastards who did this is somehow a line too far, they say, as his friends blow up another boatful of innocents. probably because the murdered fascist was a white gringo and therefore a real person, so his death unlike ours counts as violence and that's scary.
"I'm against MAGA but I don't know what to do" you're also the most heavily armed population in the world for fuckssake, you can probably buy a sniper rifle in Walmart or something. "if we shoot ICE agents they are going to crack down on us" us real people, right? cos for us subhumans they're already cracking down for a year

2026-01-05 17:24:00 GMT

it still feels infuriating how when one year ago when Trump started talking of invasion everyone was like "blustering", "impossible", "distraction from Epstein" etc. and I was like, this is war, this is how war happens, there's a process until you get a country to bomb and what he's doing *right now*, these statements, these are parts of the process, we're going to see war. and now that several ships have been blown up in violation of every norm and nobody did anything, now that he has bombed the capital of a lat-am country and kidnapped the president with the express purpose of appropriating resources and nobody did anything, *now* people act as if they never called me crazy/doomer/news-obsessed etc. for saying, this is war, we're going to war.
I guess at least *now* people aren't doubting anymore that Greenland and Canada are on the menu too, though you did call me crazy when I said "this is real" the very first time Trump started joking about Greenland and Canada. look, if the boyfriend of your friend starts joking about punching him if he runs his mouth again, you have to understand that his joking is already the process that leads to backhand slaps happening. the violence doesn't happen overnight. the violence is built, and the words is how you build it.

2025-12-29 09:52:53 GMT

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yes, but also as someone who actually did went and studied linguistics purely to be a more enlightened person: capitalism did ruin education, but education was always bad. there's always been some pointless bullshit like grades and certificates and hierarchies and these have always detracted from art and literature and science to no benefit. the capitalist pedestalisation of STEM is just the logical consequence of a system based on authority figures giving you grades.
like it took me a while in academia to realise that the academia I yearned for—one free of publish-or-perish and menial office politics, one where you don't have to work in precarious conditions and chase grant for contracts that last all of 2 years lest you starve, one where you don't have to pad your CV with spam articles and biosphere-burning conference trips to stand a chance of being allowed time to think, one where you could research dead languages for decades while working on a single actually meaningful study of the topic—the academia I was thinking of was called "being an independently wealthy nobleman and also not the first son so I'd have free time". pre-capitalist academia was for the Earl's secondborn. people like you and me never *got* to just study things just because they're worthy being studied.
we'll only have that when we build, with our own hands, a society where everyone else is on board with people who can just study things for their own sake. and in the meantime, all we can do is to prefigure it, anarchist style, by finding the nooks and cracks in the world where we can get research done. I consider my defunct Japanese Studies blogs, my countless hours late at night reading compulsively into some random topic that was "not my area" and I was not "supposed" to be working on, my poetry shouted in balaclava in the rain to an audience of twenty radicals in black bloc gear, my postorgasmic infodumps to lovers, my excessive-effort comments in random corners of the old web—I consider that kind of stuff to be more of my contribution to linguistics and literature than anything I have done in a citeably pulished format; I live by the standards of what I think a linguist should be. sometimes. when I have the space for it.
Helen de Witt:
> When I started college I thought I would now lead the life of the mind, rather than making good grades. It wasn't like that. I hated the intellectual mediocrity, I did not know how to find something better; I attempted suicide for the first time at 19. Afterwards I asked myself: Is there anything, anything at all, that would make it a good thing that I did not die? And I thought: If I could go to Oxford, where the life of the mind is taken seriously, that would make it a good thing. Years later a psychologist told me it was not necessary to commit suicide when alienated by intellectual mediocrity: He had gone to Cornell, with its frat culture, but he had found one friend and it had been all right. He asked me why dealing with my publishers had led to a suicide attempt, and I said, well, if a book is technically challenging it is hard to get it through the machine, but if you want to write a work of genius it is necessary to take risks. He said: Your sanity is more important than writing a work of genius. I thought: Nobody who thinks that will ever write a work of genius. I thought: We all die sooner or later.
> What I mean is. The Oxford of my imagination was not the Oxford of the actual world. But going to Oxford did transform me intellectually; it was the absolute impossibility of staying where I was, the ability to imagine something better, and the ability to work very hard for it, that took me there. In that sense the Oxford of my imagination was more powerful than the real university: I was trying to live by the standards of something that I had made up in my head, a place where > *everyone*> had read Proust in French, > *every classicist*> read the whole of Greek tragedy in the original....

2025-12-20 16:23:55 GMT

Dear Germans:
No, I did not send the letter
before the date you clearly said I had to
send the letter.
No, I did not call the clinic,
and when I did it was not Sprech
zeiten, and I started crying,
and I did not try again.
No, there is no particular reason why
I didn't read the part of the letter
that said the contract can only be cancelled
with three months of advance notice sent by
Post.
I was reading the glyphs carved by bore-bugs
on toadflax leaves by the rotting wood.
No, I did not do my tax declaration.
No, I did not floss since last visit.
I do not remember the difference between a Steuernummer and a Steuer
identifikationsnummer.
No, I did not lüft the räume five minutes every morning.
No, I did not kill the mold on the corner of the wall either,
the mold is there for so long that it feels like my friend.
I do not like to do it,
the killing.
The mold and me, we're the same,
I am mold hot and humid on perfect German walls,
and all the Germans are shopping for Schimmelentferner,
not the öko bio one that doesn't kill, the kind based on
bleach.
No, I still cannot speak German
no, after all these years I cannot speak German
I am not strong enough to speak German
I will never speak German
every time I try to speak German you don't understand my accent
and correct my genders and
I want to die.
No, I did not bring a Überweisung.
No, I do not know the name of my
Hausartzt.
No, I did not call in advance to make a Termin.
I only insisted five times for the Ausländerbehörde
to send me the PIN to my electronic Aufenthaltstitel
it's my fault I don't have one.
No, I did not deescalate the situation,
I could have deescalated the situation,
I chose to escalate the situation,
I did not act responsible like a mother should do
I punched that Nazi because I wanted to
and next time it happened I escalated it again and
when they ran away I was
disappointed.
No, I did not travel mid-pandemic every three months to swipe
the health insurance card that said
I'm a man.
No, when the police told us at Lützerath
that if we left now we would not be charged,
I did not leave.
No, I did not ask your consent first to shout Fuck you cop.
I did not build consensus in a plenum to have a mandate
to speak for everyone I just shouted
Fuck you cop.
No, we did not find another school yet
for the child who you failed at the school
where you said it was their imagination that
they struggled with
Ausländerfeindlichkeit.
No, I did not notice the part of the contract
where it said capital owners
are free from the flow of time
and can increase your bills a year ago
retroactively.
I was not responsible with money either I was not responsible
with anything
other than my children's feelings and
wild flowers and
homeless trans people.
No, these children do not have a Krankenkarte
or a Krankenkasse or a Krankenversicherung
if they have a Krankenkarte the police will come
and deport them
all we have is a Krank.
All we brought you doktor
is a Krank.
No, I did not
buy a
fucking
fax
maschine.
I did not do any of the things.
I did not want to do any of the things.
I failed to feel guilt for not doing any of the things,
I only cry and cry and cry, violating
Ruhezeiten.
It's all my fault.
I am not well-integrated.
I deserve all the fees and
punishments.
With piles of papers all over the room,
I am in Germany.
Outside in Germany the forests of folk-tales have fallen
to make paper, long ago.
Furry bumblebees come kiss
the flowers painted on my summer dress.
The sun sings to me softly.

2025-12-18 20:55:20 GMT

people from #NL / #Nederlande: a friend of a friend who's on T gel (Androgel) and love the results they're getting is currently unable to access it for 60 days due to medical cistem backstabbing. anyone knows an HRT network in the Netherlands to point them to, a currently active online pharmacy that could ship quick, or someone who has some gel to spare? :boosts_ok_gay:

2025-12-08 15:40:00 GMT

meanwhile calibre devs added "AI". someone made a fork removing the "AI" so naturally it's called clbre https://github.com/grimthorpe/clbre

2025-11-20 16:10:41 GMT

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that was anticlimatic. after so many years of bashing my head against this wall, I'm legally a girl now I guess :pinkgirl_shrug: like I paid my captors 40€ so they fix the "gender" column in my row of their database, who cares.
the name I submitted isn't even the name I use anymore for plural reasons, but I already have that name in some paperwork and putting my current name would generate more headaches, and who cares which name the government know me as anyway.
getting this appointment was a whole ordeal but the appointment itself was fine. I found out just today that apparently I was supposed to bring a certified translation of my Brazilian birth certificate so I was dreading the Termin, being pretty sure they'd reject the application on these grounds, but no, the clerk accepted my untranslated certificate without a hitch. they were quite nice to me, all in all, just like the Bürgerbüro, which is still something that makes me feel weird and paranoid after years of dealing with Ausländerbehörde treatment.
now I have a whole other pile of paperwork to solve, including getting the *Brazilian* govt to flip the relevant bit in their own database, handling this Vonovia lawsuit, ordering a new Personalausweis, and changing my name in two dozen contracts and services and registers of various types, basically every institution who didn't accept my DGTI

2025-11-20 11:44:32 GMT

btw this afternoon like, right now is when I finally do my legal name change. theoretically. I'm half expecting they'll create trouble over me not having a German birth certificate but eh, I don't even care very much at this point, I waited 8 years, what difference will it make.
anyway I also gave up being completely plastic-free because I need *some*thing to warm my legs when I'm out, so I got these plush leggings with stockings look from calcedonia. they're comfy and should layer well with something water-resistant on top when I get waxed pants or skirts, and they go great for OL days like today
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/115/581/843/144/111/666/original/4c85e74bb25dfad3.jpg

2025-11-20 11:03:41 GMT

> “$64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed amid local opposition: Local activism threatens to derail the U.S. data center boom.” > *Cooool.*
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/11/17/data-center-watch-worries-that-anti-ai-activism-is-working/
keep up the good work, folks! hit them where it hurts, make data centers unprofitable!

2025-11-19 13:24:31 GMT

my ex made me this super loving gift box with little drawings and multiple languages in different scripts and stuff so I don't want to throw it away but also I don't know what to use it for

2025-11-17 09:14:15 GMT

If you haven't cancelled #Mozilla yet, check out https://tabstack.ai/
yes that's a captcha-dodger scraper bot for "AIs". as a service. powered by the Mozilla Corporation. now you know how they're planning to make bank.
oddly under-the-cover project, isn't it? not even showing in search engines. I wonder why :thaenkin:

2025-11-17 00:49:58 GMT

also even the ~34% figure includes victimless "crimes" such as expired visas, document issues (the most common), and personal drug consumption.
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/115/562/258/830/198/268/original/88fc3dae46f6bfe0.jpeg

2025-11-13 15:06:53 GMT

I find it darkly funny that "Tintin in Congo" is so completely racist that to simply translate it as-is into Lingála counts as an artistic intervention / social commentary
https://ilanmanouach.com/work/tintinakeikongo/
because after 112 languages up until that point nobody bothered to even translate it into the language of the actual people being caricatured

2025-11-09 20:10:12 GMT

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I want a girlfriend who stands by me the way #keepassXC team stands by the use of bullshit generators to develop a password manager
https://keepassxc.org/blog/2025-11-09-about-keepassxcs-code-quality-control/

2025-11-09 17:32:14 GMT

tfw both KeePassXC and Bitwarden are now vibecoding-curious

2025-11-05 13:43:02 GMT

"no way to prevent this", says mastodon admin running instance in the only account creation mode where this regularly happens

2025-11-03 21:18:15 GMT

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there's always a reason for things in language.
in English, the reason for the distance between writing and spelling is 95% explained by the fact that words are written like they were pronounced 500 years ago, and modern English speakers refuse to acknowledge or engage with this fact and prefer to pretend the spelling is random or arbitrary, because the alternative would be to admit that the sounds of their language are pretty simple and could be trivially written in a simple way like anybody else.
it's like the thing where English speakers make a big deal of their language having mixed vocabulary from several sources, pretending it's a noteworthy vice or depreciative quirk of the language, as if that wasn't 1) just the way languages normally are and 2) the case for every widespread language in the world.
basically the general trend with English speakers' self-image about English is total exceptionalism thinly masked by a veneer of self-depreciation

2025-11-03 20:59:37 GMT

original: kakaw, kakawatl
Spanish: cacao
German: Kakao
Portuguese: cacao
French: cacao
Polish: kakao
Japanese: カカオ
Russian: Какао
Hungarian: Kakaó
Arabic: كَاكَاو
English: cocoa :thonking:
I never thought about that, why is English like, metathesised the vowels? it doesn't make sense phonetically either, you would expect something like "cackaw" or whatever if they were trying to imitate the sound. it feels as if at some point someone mixed up the letters rather than the sounds

2025-11-03 19:49:35 GMT

I know a poor soul who is in California right now and they still can't believe how car-centric everything is. I was like yeah cali is terrible and that's still one of the least bad ones, you should see Phoenix, by which I mean, definitely don't.
it's really kind of eerie and scary how thoroughly USA folk have normalised no public transport, no trains, and driving-required urbanism generally. it's like you move into a country where everyone can only get anywhere by swimming through channels of molasses and nobody thinks twice about it because they're so proud of their brand-name molassess-swimming trunks

2025-10-28 07:35:59 GMT

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"ranting about tech bullshit" is the only toots of mine that get boosted around, and also the only toots of mine I don't like and am not proud of. I deal with this by assuming that being boosted a lot is not a good thing actually

2025-10-21 07:48:47 GMT

" A German newspaper commissioned an article from me but then refused to publish it: Ai Weiwei, „Was ich gern früher über Deutschland gewusst hätte“ ':
> A society governed by regulations, yet lacking individual moral judgment, is more dangerous than one with none at all.
> A society that values obedience without questioning authority is destined to become corrupt.
> A society that admits to error but refuses to reflect on its origins possesses a mind as stubborn and dull as granite.
> Here, at a deserted street, people stop dutifully at a red light. Not a car in sight. This, I once thought, is the mark of a highly evolved society.
> At the heart of bureaucracy lies a collective endorsement of power’s legitimacy, and therefore, individuals surrender their moral judgment — or perhaps never developed one. They abandon challenge. They relinquish dispute.
> When conversation becomes avoidance, when topics must not be mentioned, we are already living under the quiet logic of authoritarianism…
https://hyperallergic.com/1050197/what-i-wish-i-had-known-about-germany-earlier/
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/115/411/047/159/767/737/original/de31a1707c64bbc9.webp

2025-10-17 08:57:32 GMT

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repost but on the difference between textbook language and real life language:
me when I was a beginner in German: „Guten Morgen! Ich möchte gerne ein, (no wait accusative, einen Tasse Kaffe. Aw fuck no „Kaffee“ is masculine but „Tasse“ is feminine,) entschuldigung, ich möchte *eine* Tasse Kaffee. Ähm, Bitte machen Sie es mit Zucker und ohne milch. (No er? ihn?, do you make the *cup*, or do you make the coffee? should have gone with „machen Sie ihn“… Also I’m pretty sure I’ve heard people say „kein Milch“. but you can’t use „kein“ adverbially?? maybe it was something like, ich möchte gerne Kaffee, pause, mit Zucker, period, new sentence, kein Milch? or keine Milch? Milch can’t possibly be feminine??)
me with advanced-level German:
(puts on the German face, like, 😐 )
(waits to be addressed)
"Was möchten Sie denn"
"Kaffee. Größ."
"Milch? Zucker?"
"Zucker."
"jawohl"

2025-10-17 08:37:45 GMT

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she was asking whether "tarjeta" exists in Portuguese. I explained that it does but it's not used for credit cards (however everyone will get what you mean cos people in Portugal are used to Spanish tourists). and that it's literally "small band", but also it sounds archaic or literary for us, we would now say "faixinha" rather than "tarjeta" for a small band. in Brazil "tarjeta" is still used for a type of horizontal door lock, I don't know if that's current in Portugal also.
me: there's a lot like that, like in Spanish you say ¡cierre la puerta! [close the door!] and in Portuguese we say "feche a porta!". but we do actually have a verb "cerrar", it just sounds like something out of a book. maybe with a connotation of emphasis now, like, "close really tight"
me: in a book you might see "a porta estava cerrada", but nobody talks like that, spoken Portuguese is "a porta tava fechada"
me: but that's sufficient that if a Spanish speaker says, cierre la puerta, we can get what they mean ("cerre a porta" is valid Portuguese, just archaic)
me: kinda like English vs. German
me: "My Chief in King's Winter giveth his Hounds Swine-flesh, but I hold that for unsound"
me: („Mein Chef in Königswinter gibt seinen Hunden Schweinefleisch, aber ich halte das für ungesund“)
me: almost every word has a direct equivalent in English, only it makes you sound like you're living in a fantasy novel

2025-10-17 08:20:40 GMT

my ex is about to travel to Portugal. ex: how do I say 'a table for two, please' and 'with card, please'?
me: in theory, 'mesa para dois, por favor' and 'com cartão'
me: in real life: pop two fingers and say "dois", or show your credit card and say "credit?". everyone gets what you mean x3

2025-10-13 08:45:08 GMT

If you did not stop using Spotify yet, you might want to know that Spotify is running ICE recruitment ads in the USA now.
I won't point fingers on people pirating it but you're literally platforming the brownshirts if you keep giving money to Spotify

2025-10-13 08:37:39 GMT

I guess part of the dynamics of "a bubble" is when everyone starts hyping the bubble, like, kinda the opposite of crypto scams, at some point investors' herd behaviour kicks in and everyone panics and disinvest from the thing, causing a crash.
the "AI bubble" is mainstream discourse now, and I am helping by reblogging that even Deutsche Bank is warning now of how the entire USA economy is ridiculously dependent on Big Tech at the moment, which in turn is fully hanging onto the "AI" economy, which so far has only generated any revenue at all for Nvidia and datacenters. Basically the entire finances of the USA is balanced on shovel sellers during a gold rush, with nary a nugget of gold to be seen.
https://www.techspot.com/news/109626-ai-bubble-only-thing-keeping-us-economy-together.html
Also investors are doing the math and realising that
> The industry is spending over $30 billion a month (approximately $400 billion for 2025) and only receiving a bit more than a billion a month back in revenue.
And it's probably a bad sign when you're sinking one Apollo space program per *month* on a piece of tech and all you get to show for it is universally despised slop.

2025-10-09 21:32:55 GMT

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skipped NixOS helping drones hunt immigrants for cash

2025-10-08 08:50:07 GMT

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I'm like the worst opsec in the history of sexy antifa girls and even I know better than discuss crimes online, come on Gen V rebels debating your high profile murder *while* recording an ad for Vough Corporation?? not that I've ever done any crimes of course

2025-10-08 08:35:43 GMT

my current pet peeve with movies/series: people routinely discuss crimes they've done right next to their smartphones, or even *in* their smartphones.
I'm like one step in paranoia away from thinking the CIA is putting this in movies on purpose

2025-09-24 08:17:00 GMT

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Catholics ≈ Orthodoxists > old-school, Euro-style Protestants > New Atheists, rats > Pentecostals
rating the aesthetic sensibilities of my enemies

2025-09-24 08:01:44 GMT

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"no you don't get it they're evil, yeah, but *our* Christians have *taste* ok"

2025-09-24 07:59:59 GMT

the non-Christian from Catholic country's urge to defend the Catholics whenever the criticism is coming from Protestants or lumping them with Pentecostals

2025-09-24 06:44:22 GMT

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@npub1lcf…ppjx
yes no you can't, not materially. the enemy doesn't just have lawyers, they have armies. but there's still a difference between having your stuff seized by the occupation, and being openly a collaborator.
put out source code that declares it cannot be used by corporations unless they're worker-owned cooperatives. corporations will undoubtedly use it anyway and there's nothing you can do about that. but at least you have declared an enemy, and the plundering is plain to see. now you have a nucleus to organise worker's unions and activist groups; you have, at a minimum, broken the illusion of detachment from reality that FOSS engineered.
the AI plunder was masks off, yes, but if you look around it utterly ruined any goodwill the tech sector used to have with the general public, everyone hates Silicon Valley now. help it get worse.
alternatively: do it old-fashionedly and distribute binaries. shareware. make your dev teams small and close-knit, say you'll share the source if someone is personally interested and talk to you and win your trust. make little bubbles in weird corners away from the mainstream Internet, resurrect BBSes, intranets, or host your homepage exclusively on gemini. distribute zine games in physical media by post. uphold permacomputing.

2025-09-24 06:19:34 GMT

https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
it's past time to kill Freedom 0 and stop making software that capital owners can use. corporate is the enemy, make software for the people (only).

2025-09-20 19:05:10 GMT

> Israel may defund own film awards after movie about Palestine wins top prize
> Under Israel's protocol, "The Sea", a film critiquing the country's occupation of Palestine, will automatically be put forth as its Oscar contender.
https://www.avclub.com/israel-defunding-ophir-awards-the-sea-palestine

2025-09-16 09:04:38 GMT

is forgefed alive / looking like it will work? what do cool people use instead of github these days, forgejo? (somebody should really hire some copywriters to workshop these names tbh)

2025-09-14 11:32:35 GMT

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egal, if any type of RISC had won over i386 the world would have been a better place. Trump would have lost the 2016 election and Bolsonaro died with the stabbing. all countries would have dropped gender markers from national documents

2025-09-14 08:17:19 GMT

alternate me from the timeline where they adopted MIPS processors, HATEOAS, ipv6, and actually implemented Unicode support like, for realsies, looking at this evil universe and shaking her head in dismay:

2025-09-12 14:58:31 GMT

there's a lot of liberal discourse right now about the assassination playing into the hands of the fascists as a pretext, and a worryingly large amount of conspiracy theories about false flags etc. this complete lack of confidence that our side is able to take any action at all, that we're defined as powerless and perpetual victims.
I wonder when the liberals are going to understand that the fascists are already in power and are going to escalate the oppression just the same whether you roll over or not. I wonder when it's going to register that they've already been months sending masses of people to concentration camps to work as slaves until death, and just because it's people who speak Spanish doesn't mean you're not next.
I would posit this question to liberals—imagine that your friend had the chance to shoot Hitler during a speech in 1935. would you tell your friend that he should not resort to political violence because something democracy due process guns bad? if you believe Trump is a modern day Hitler, and you should really examine your thoughts about that, then what would be the response to Trumpist leaders other than shooting them in the face?
every micro celebrity agitating for white supremacy should live in terror of being doxed, public assassinations of nazis during speeches should be more common than school shootings. nothing else is going to stop fascism. protests are not going to stop fascism, radical empathy isn't going to stop fascism, the police-carceral system isn't going to stop fascism, and voting in the next election (assuming you have one) is most definitely not going to stop fascism. all of that was done in the 20th century and failed to stop them, and failed so far in this century too, and is going to keep failing.
I *hope* the assassin is leftist, transgender, immigrant etc. yes they're going to use whatever to take away guns and whatnot, so what. they always were going to. but having people on our side take action, this can remind people that there is something we can do about it. we always knew there was, but it's hard to deny it when it's *demonstrated*.

2025-08-21 16:40:57 GMT

in my opinion every trans person should have a final fantasy victory pose sequence

2025-08-19 14:19:47 GMT

Call for participants: Sex workers' perspective on deepfakes:
> We are inviting sex workers who live and/or work in Europe (including the UK) and Central Asia to take part in a short online survey (approximately 15 minutes).
> Deepfakes are growing rapidly, yet sex workers’ voices are often excluded from research and policymaking on these issues.
by the European Sex Workers Rights Alliance :boosts_ok_gay: https://www.eswalliance.org/sw_on_deepfakes

2025-08-12 20:05:34 GMT

while the Internet trembles under the pressure of capitalist puritanism (itch.io the latest victim of porn ban, logingating and increasing ID-gating on youtube and reddit, ID-gating in the UK etc.) and some people in my replies continue to insist that "Christofascists aren't anti-porn", the Project 2025 goal of criminalising all porn:
> Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.
... now has one concrete bill by Mike Lee advanced to review stage:
https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/08/12/senator-mike-lee-obscenity-bill-committee/

2025-08-07 09:12:46 GMT

anyone recommends a lawyer in Poland who 1) is friendly to antifascists and queer/transgender causes, and 2) takes appointments online in English? boosts welcome :boostsPorFavor:

2025-08-07 06:21:08 GMT

living in the age of the the slippery slope fallacy fallacy

2025-07-26 22:16:34 GMT

porn games kicked out of itch, non-porn queer games brought down together as collateral, karada house deleted from instagram… the capitalist puritanism keeps accelerating as christofascism comes out of the closet… being overtly sexual and kinky was always a political act and is now more than ever, the fascists don't really want to eliminate sexualness or sex work, they want it hidden, marginalised, easily abusable outside of public life… it is by horny on main that we build safety and justice. horny on main is an insurrectionary act.

2025-07-17 06:53:39 GMT

the current Brazil news is that Trump is pressuring to punish us for the existence of Pix, Brazil's public universal free instant pay system. It is unfair because it deprives Visa, Mastercard, Venmo, WhatsApp Pay etc. of their precious mafia cuts, apparently

2025-07-16 06:56:36 GMT

morning~
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/861/593/274/058/749/original/8530e5b6c4c278e1.jpg
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/861/601/601/166/189/original/e11b9d6237b3e6e3.jpg

2025-07-10 22:05:15 GMT

what a loud cricket!! :blobcataww: I don't think they're even in my balcony, it sounds like they're on the ground several floors below?? but still so high. can't begin to express what a relief it is to have some insect noise at night for a change in this cemetery of a country
video for the sound 🔊
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/831/198/989/523/482/original/72a799203b529a19.mp4

2025-07-02 20:27:08 GMT

you were touching grass. I was digging deep into the moist earth and delicately penetrating it with my fingers as one would a lover, feeling my way through the crumbling soil aggregates to fish for the roots of linarias and horsemints and using my tactile sense to sense and protect plant roots and insect larvae and slimy invertebrates from the harsh shovel before I moved away dirt
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/785/513/064/120/788/original/692f3a3779b0ac27.jpg

2025-07-01 22:51:55 GMT

oh dang what a nice shelf to be discarded, solid wood and everything... :thinknyan:
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/780/422/817/030/924/original/9ff6645d6bcc19db.jpg

2025-07-01 14:29:44 GMT

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the AI is already woke anyway, quoting someone in another forum:
> I had applied to a job and it screened me verbally with an AI bot. I find it strange talking to an AI bot that gives no indication of whether it is following what I am saying like a real human does with “uh huh” or what not. It asked me if I ever did Docker and I answered I transitioned a system to Docker. But I had done an awkward pause after the word transition so the AI bot congratulated me on my gender transition and it was on to the next question

2025-07-01 14:26:18 GMT

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> Cruz withdrew the compromise amendment and blamed a number of people and entities he said “hated the moratorium,” including China, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a teachers union leader and “transgender groups and radical left-wing groups who want to use blue state regulations to mandate woke AI.”
in real life the notorious thing is that even Republican lawmakers massively opposed the "AI"-friendly law. but anyway thank you transgenders, radical left-wings, China, and unnamed teacher's union person 👍

2025-07-01 14:24:53 GMT

> A proposal to deter states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade was soundly defeated in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, thwarting attempts to insert the measure into President Donald Trump’s big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts.
> The Senate voted 99-1 to strike the AI provision from the legislation after weeks of criticism from both Republican and Democratic governors and state officials.
hopefully another sign that the bubble is about to pop.
while a concerted effort by techies managed to shove "AI" to depths that blockchain, NFT and Metaverse could only dream of, they did manage in the process to make the word "AI' synonymous with crappy, sketchy, exploitative, amoral, cheap. I'm here rooting for the Softbank money and other measures of investor patience to dry soon and lead to a big crash that hopefully takes half the tech industry with it

2025-06-12 10:26:03 GMT

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ich habe auch nur einen Balkon, aber mit Edelweiß :blobcat_thumbsup: Antifa-Symbolblume
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/669/903/685/123/841/original/3c4aac53bb112311.jpg
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/669/905/812/237/412/original/61bfe8d515db35bc.jpg

2025-06-12 10:16:57 GMT

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ja mein Lavendel blüht auch, und Vergissmeinnicht und Edelweiß :blobcatlove: dein Garten klingt wunderschön! schön Tag noch 🙋‍♀️

2025-06-12 10:05:56 GMT

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aah ich verstehe jetzt die Frage. nein, die sind weiße Glockenblumen! (Campanula spp., wahrscheinlich C. carpatica oder C. portenschlagiana). und die Bienen lieben sie :blobcataww: Hier, gerade jetzt
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/669/818/227/012/696/original/18afbb7db9c32634.jpg
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/669/818/689/378/317/original/4cebd37263a882ee.jpg

2025-06-12 09:52:35 GMT

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Phlox und Gypsophila sind nicht heimisch. die Insekten mögen am liebsten die Blumen, mit denen sie geevolvet haben

2025-06-12 09:36:17 GMT

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:blobcatmeltlove:
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/669/711/328/103/040/original/e9917894bc578488.jpg

2025-06-12 08:49:15 GMT

born under two Venus signs, pombagira-fronted, I'm generally torn by an abundance of love. I love life, I love being alive, and I struggle with how short the days are to express how much I love everything. I love people and plants and animals and fungi and I have a microscope here on my desk so I can look at bacteria and protozoa and nematodes and tell them I love them too.
I fly from passion to passion like a pretty little fucking butterfly, my interests this quarter include: my garden, advanced bondage, a decades-old and recently rekindled passion for the Japanese language, like twelve to twenty lovers, hookups and flirts, antifascistische Aktion, weightlifting, hand sewing, embroidery, every single one of my plants from the tiniest duckweed to the mighty blue fern, kickboxing, my kids, my kid's friends, poetry, lesbian fantasy fiction, playing two types of Japanese flute, and candy.
so for example right now I am watering my ~200 plants outside and I keep thinking, hmm this is such a prime spot that still has space, I have some wildflower seeds that can be planted just fine still in June, calendulas would be nice, also cornflower and delphinium… I meant to just water my plants, nothing else, but I'm inevitably like, :thonking: this morning-glory is always dry no matter how often I water, let's add a layer of homemade compost and another of bark mulch and… speaking of which I have all the materials to make some new soil, everyone would grow so much if I repotted the small ones… I wonder if I could hit the hardware shop between one date and the other and fix my garden hose situation, etc. and then I look at my white campanulæ who decided to bless me and my bees with a second bloom despite me not even deadheading them and I'm like, they love me too :pinkgirl_hearts:
and I'm that with everything/everyone. I start listening to honkyoku music while I garden and I'm like, that technique is so cool I wanna practice my shakuhachi more, I want to be able to play that I was progressing so well… or if I'm listening to an audiobook instead I'm like, omg let's buy the paper version of this entire series, I want to close read this story, maybe we could do a tattoo—then I'm doing a bit of exercise and thinking how cool would it be if I got to fight on a ring at least once, maybe I could already put a Probierzeit on queue at the good gym?, let's enlist kid #2 to spar more often…
unlike most people I know the apocalypse doesn't phase me either. like when I hear news of local nazis plotting to attack people in the near future I just feel like, maybe I finally get to punch one of those fuckers again it's been too long…
no, what phases me is the finitude of time, the unbridgeable gap between potential and actual, the feeling that I was stolen a third of my life and the uncertainty of how to make the most out of what I have left. what phases me is the drudgery and humiliation of dealing with bureaucracy and paperwork and crushing institutions of domestication, the resentment I feel over having to waste precious time I could be using to put a beautiful girl on a harness, instead going to the post to send some registered letter in two copies. the decision paralysis of "what do I do next" leads me straight into the arms of social media and reinforcement algorithms, our era's Lotus Island.
I want to keep more awareness of computers as a time stealer, of like, here's all the cool stuff I wanted to do if I wasn't trapped in the Youtube scroll trying to make it pop a video that latches onto my fickle attention… it's a basic point of the #bujo to keep track of things you have to do, which are probably things you don't *want* to do but have to. I will start doing the opposite, too; have a list of cool ideas, projects, entertainment, fun; of things and people I want to do; this list will always be bigger than what you actually do—that's just a function of a working imagination—but I want to have the tradeoff spelled out for me, the same way that zero-base envelope budgeting makes you aware of what you're giving up when you impulse buy something…

2025-06-11 20:49:28 GMT

Palantir is suspected of astroturfing reddit to frame the LA protests in a bad light
https://redlib.freedit.eu/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1l8hno6/palantir_may_be_engaging_in_a_coordinated/
what kind of clever investigation gave them away? well someone seised some old subreddit, became moderator and started spamming obvious propaganda. someone with username *checks notes* Palantir_admin . another moderator in that subreddit, also mass spamming propaganda, is a moderator on *checks notes again* r/palantir . so people have a *suspicion* that *maybe* Palantir could be involved

2025-06-11 18:53:55 GMT

oh hey I missed this T-shirt
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/666/240/660/593/761/original/9577e9d40fa5516b.jpg

2025-06-09 15:32:27 GMT

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found a link after all, which was enough to find it in the web archive. I'll leave the old images here without explanation or image description, gotta go date lesbians. I have a number of improvements in mind for this script, and I guess I'll now have to rename it to something else; but I don't promise anything, dunno if I'll be in the mood for it.
tagging so I find it later: #linguistics #conlang #conscript #neography
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/654/121/863/484/624/original/1fac8e6c663f87c8.jpg
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/654/126/310/564/399/original/acf589d784fade65.jpeg

2025-06-09 15:21:07 GMT

was trying to find the constructed script I did once (Vinescript, a featural abjad imitating plant shapes) and it made me feel a bit better about deleting data cos dang once I delete stuff from my social media it doesn't show again for real, huh. I have it on my mastodon archives somewhere but I can't access them on the go.
someone else made a "vinescript" conscript (the idea of a plant doodle writing system isn't remotely only mine) but that's not even the reason, once you add more keywords or my usernames you draw a blank.

2025-06-04 13:57:46 GMT

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ok so the thread above, about my dystopic experiences selling out for Google, clearly wants to be a coherent essay. I have therefore rendered it in blog form
https://wordsmith.social/elilla/deep-in-mordor-where-the-shadows-lie-dystopian-stories-of-my-time-as-a-googler
it’s still a wall of text—if anything even a bit longer—but it should be clearer, more fluid, better organised, easier to read. (also: now including extra Bertold Brecht).
bit reluctant to talk about tech in public but here we go, if you want to show it to someone this is the preferred form.
*edit*: now featuring illustrations!

2025-06-04 09:33:50 GMT

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one day, shortly before I was fired, the 2008 crisis had hit full force, the Phoenix office that managed us closed, and while cost-cutting Google fired 70% of the Latinoamerican precariat, in one fell swoop. then, during one of my last TGIFs, I accidentally listened to two high-level managers talk about it, two male gringos in expensive business-casual, and they commented on how the company was still doing perfectly fine without all that weight.
and that's not what stuck with me, the arguments, no. I understood the incentives to do layoffs, and the human need to rationalise them. what stuck with me was their happy smiling faces. their *laugh*.
yes they laughed about it. out loud.
I had a full understanding of what it meant for Third World people to be fired under the crisis, what it was about to be like for the Argentinians, for our families, but *so did they*, they were down here, they knew the reality. they talked to us every day, they were eating the food that the contractors prepared. and here were these people, in tailored clothes that cost more than a cafeteria lady's monthly wage, partying without even bothering to pretend to be sad. not caring enough about us to even bullshit. any sympathies I might have had over the simplistic logic of free-market liberalism evaporated under that laugh.
as a kid I used to despise the devilish villains of cartoons like Captain Planet, who destroyed the world with manic laughs for nothing but the thrill of power, polluting for the sake of polluting. I thought that was unrealistic. I cherished nuanced villains like Lady Eboshi from Mononoke-hime, the leader of Irontown who was destroying the ancient forest, but with the goal of liberating women from violent patriarchy and poverty; Irontown was a refuge of outcasts, and Lady Eboshi would give her own life for her girls. complexity! humanity!
it was at Google that I learned that no, capitalists are actually literally the same as in Captain Planet. we are not blessed enough to live in Ghibli reality, capital owners built us a USA cartoon reality. what is crypto mining if not a Captain Planet villain scheme—to kill and raze and destroy for nothing but imaginary tokens proving that you did it? what is GenAI if not stealing power and water and even art itself to feed into a grinder, producing no benefit but hoarding more money away from the poors—when you already have more money than a human being could possibly ever spend? what is this addiction to "number go up" if not Sly Sludge going "Aloha suckers! I'll miss this profit paradise but I have a souvenir to remember it by", picking a briefcase of cash while the island explodes?
this drove me to want to understand capitalism, and I would eventually find in Malatesta the answer as to why capital owners cannot help but be cruel, revel in cruelty, performatively broadcast cruelty. why the cruelty is indeed almost an aside, a corollary to what it means to *do* capitalism: every action you take has consequences not just for the world but for your psyche; you cannot make people work for you and hoard all the profits while they are stuck with fixed salaries, without in the process developing strong feelings on why you're entitled to do that and they deserve it actually.
but before I got into political theory, it was Google who *showed* me what capitalism is, firsthand up close. I wouldn't say that was worth working there, but I benefited from the lived experience; from that part of it, and nothing else.

2025-06-04 09:15:49 GMT

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I was always abstractly an anarchist, but in many ways passing by Google was my political awakening.
you might have noticed, Dear Reader, that I have made somewhat contradictory claims: 1) that we Engineers were pampered, and 2) that we Engineers were underpaid, pressured to do overtime at rates low even for the Brazilian market. such was the carrot and the stick. we all were told that if we performed just a bit better we would get shares, get relocated to the magical Global North where salaries were high and societies had human rights. meanwhile we trudged on.
but we trudged on with style. the offices were all gaudy in Google colours with vinyl flooring, full of fridges with free snacks; the break room had the latest Playstation with brand-new high-tech Rock Band controllers; when you joined in you got a small bonus to buy toys for your desk (most Engineers got legos, I got a pink Kirby plushie I would dress up). this was unheard of; companies at the time were all Microsoft, all performative professionalism, Google was fun! Google gave you Perks, gods, so so many Perks. the Lumon motivation baubles from "Severance" gave me instant Google flashbacks. we were periodically treated to dinner with the managers at the most expensive churrascarias. master let us eat right there with him, inside the big house.
I will be honest and say that most of my fellow programmers ate that shit up, we had all been gold-star kids and here was the hottest company in the world constantly massaging our egos, telling us we were better than everyone for being geniuses. I would have loved to feel the same, I *tried* to feel the same, but I came from poverty and I could not stop noticing the precariat: temps, part-timers, and contractors, an entire layer of the company who did the brunt of work without being Googlers.
it's the little things that bugged me, how people would eat the free snacks or a bowl of cereal and just leave trash and dirty dishes everywhere for the cleaning ladies (contractors) to deal with. we Brazilians have a social vocabulary for that, I knew what this was: they were maids. servants. my mom, my grandma, my cousins. my then-wife visited the "campus" a few times and it creeped the Fuck out of her, the distinction between people and non-people.
we had an office party every Friday evening. every single Friday. it was called TGIF, "thanks God it's Friday", and involved fancy finger food, drinks, and more of those dystopic heads on monitors talking to us of all the great things Google was doing to revolutionise the world. because of the TGIFs, we all stopped working early on Fridays.
except, of course, the cleaning ladies who dealt with the afterparty. I couldn't help but think that they probably would never say, "graças a Deus é sexta-feira". most of them would probably never step inside a Fogo de Chão restaurant in their lives.
we had those expensive, high-tech water purifiers, several on each floor. one day there was a discussion on the topic of cost savings, and I suggested the traditional Brazilian solution—the well-known ceramic filters; they're consistently rated among the safest, take no electricity, make the water cool under the heat with no electricity, cost little and last a long time before you need to replace the charcoal element. the idea was dismissed out of hand.
the fancy water purifiers weren't owned by Google; they were leased, at a high cost. somehow it bothered me a lot that each of those unnecessary, excessively technological water purifiers got more money per month than any temp, part-timer, or contractor.

2025-06-04 08:40:40 GMT

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I wasn't out as trans yet, but I was already proud to be queer. showed up with neon orange hair, the works. this made of me a Gaygler™, and Google Belo Horizonte was always happy to have me on team photos to add some colour and progressiveness to it.
now even though Google is fundamentally a spyware advertising company (some 80% of revenue is advertising; the rate was even higher back then), we Engineers were kept carefully away from that fact, as much as meat eaters are kept away from videos of the meat industry: don't think about it, just enjoy your steak. If you think about it it will stop being enjoyable, so we just churned along. the ads and business teams were on different floors and we never talked to them.
one day one of the AdSense people asked me for a little meeting. they sat right by my desk, all sleek and confident, and said that they heard I was a Gaygler™ and were wondering if I could help with one of their clients. "can you tell me some words that the Brazilian gay community uses? like slang, popular media you like, names of parties, that kind of thing?"
caught off-guard and unsure how to react, I struggled to think of gay-coded speech, and I was expertly mined for pajubá words to be fed into the machine. whole interaction took maybe ten minutes. AdSense goon left, never to be seen again, leaving me feeling violated in ways I couldn't articulate.
that was how Google supported its queer employees.
---
after I got marked as a troublemaker and put into the inevitable performance review, one of the items raised against me was that my company profile page was 'too personal'. the extent of personal information in my profile was this sentence: "I am a nerd, a bisexual polyamorist, and a parent."

2025-06-04 08:33:20 GMT

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a small anecdote.
when you joined Google, you were quickly overwhelmed by massive amounts of corporate jargon—a hundred opaque project names, TLAs for everything etc. to help settling in, the Intranet had an online glossary.
now in the spirit of "20% time", we were encouraged to tinker with pet projects (or so they told me). and we used to hang out in IRC chatrooms back then. so I made a little IRC bot that would fetch from the glossary. very basic stuff, if someone said "wtf is Chrome" in the channel, the bot would dump the summary page, "Project Chrome is an internal project to develop a Google web browser, based on KHTML…"
I then got scolded for it, because I was leaking private information into a space that could be accessed by "temps, part-timers, and contractors"—Google's sprawling precariat (put a pin on that, more on that later). we Googlers were pampered with prestige, but "temps, part-timers and contractors"—no fun name for them, they were always called "temps, part-timers, and contractors"—were second-class in the Google Republic, and had to be put in their place in a myriad ways. one of the ways is that they should not have access to company inside info like what is Project Chrome, or what some acronym means.
I pointed out that all that my bot did was to fetch info from the glossary page, and that anyone with access to the IRC channels already had access to the glossary page.
Dear Reader, this is how I became responsible for provoking Google into fencing off the glossary against temps, part-timers, and contractors.

2025-06-04 08:24:04 GMT

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around the time when I posted that fatidical internal Blogger post titled "Is the 20% time a lie?", not aware of what I was getting myself into. there was a post, soon afterwards, by some distant engineer I didn't know, a core programmer from the secret Project Android. out of the three big ones I had to stay quiet about, Project Android and Project Chrome got finished and successful, only to become world-wrecking monstrosities that we low-level grunts would never have dreamed them to be. the third one, about a broadcast technology for the Internet—Youtube with HD quality if you tuned in at showtime—never went forward.
but this insider, they were venting about how disappointed they got about the directions Project Android was taking. they were losing their motivation, this is not what they thought the "Linux phone" would be about, not what they had signed up for. the post was silent about tech details or what exactly was so disappointing, but with the benefit of hindsight it's easy to imagine.
anyway a few days later the person posts something like "haha disregard that, I wrote a post here when I was having personal mental health issues and it's all my fault, of course there's a few bumps but Project Android is actually amazing!! y'all are going to love this, it's going to change everything!! we're organising the world's information and will improve so many lives", etc. etc.
like, conspicuously back-to-back, the two posts.
this time, I was observant.

2025-06-04 08:15:15 GMT

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yesterday I was talking about my brief stint at Google back in 2008 and how dystopic that was—basically a real-life version of the Alpha Complex from the dark comedy RPG "Paranoia", where being unhappy or being born a mutant or having a task that's impossible to fulfil are considered to be a criticism of the dictatorial Computer, and criticising the computer is a crime of treason. ("Happiness is mandatory. Are you happy, citizen?")
and I was talking of how Google was my first taste of the surveillance society that's the new normal now. see, all of us at Google Brazil dreamed of the job as a way of getting a ticket to the Global North—it didn't help that Google severely underpaid Latinoamerican employees, even for local standards (with the assurance that if you "excel" you'll be given "shares" eventually and partake of some crumbs of capitalism; even get a visa to the First World).
now I was always a weeb and back then I was already like, intermediate to advanced in Japanese. so of course my dream was to move to Japan. but when I talked to it with my boss about it—a disembodied face from Phoenix I would talk to on a giant monitor; this too felt very new, high-tech, and dystopic back then—he dismissed it out of hand, saying my Japanese wasn't fluent and that would make me a poor fit.
I talked to my colleagues about it and someone said wtf no, most international engineers brought to Shibuya cannot even say konnichiwa, if anything your level of Japanese and cultural experience in the diaspora makes you the ideal candidate. we had a Brazilian friend in Google Sweden and my mates said I should talk to her about contacting Shibuya directly regarding relocation.
readers from before notice that this was already *after* the "backstabbing" episode, when I became persona non grata to my boss because I voiced my concerns over recruiter promises not being real. I wrote that in the internal Blogspot system, and afterwards I got a number of emails from employees thanking me for talking about it, and praising me my bravery.
now my actions back then will feel very natural for people who only ever met me post-transition, as this badass nazi-punching anarchist with no filter, but you have to understand: back then I was a shy little nerd terrified of everything. I wasn't brave, I was incredibly, magnificently naïve. I was the only person in the world who believed the corporate kool-aid of Google, that it was some sort of new, dynamic academia where we didn't work in offices we worked in "campi", we were there to improve the world, at least I thought I was (interviewer: "what attracts you to Google?" me: "I agree with the Ten Principles of the company" interviewer: "the what now?" me: "the Ten Principles? Google's Principles? in the 'about us' page?" interviewer: "uuh, sure..."). It did not even *occur* to me that it was all a scam, that everyone else knew it was all a scam and the point was to get rich. in retrospect I should have read the undertones in early Paul Graham essays; I was a literary girl I'm good at undertones; but I read what I wanted to be true.
anyway so I got my scolding and marked myself as a troublemaker. and I was about to directly contradict my boss and look for a way into Japan behind his back. my colleagues *strongly* advised me to *never* mention any of this by email, and also not call from my desk. international calls were very expensive those days so I ended up calling Sweden from a phone in a little locker, between brooms and bottles of disinfectant, in the dark, after everyone was gone.
my friend from Sweden told me she had contacts in Tōkyō and she was sure they would want to relocate me there. a couple weeks after that, I was fired. (mid-economic crisis, in the 3rd world, with one 2-year-old kid and another about to be born.)
and it was *so* weird and surreal to be in that little locker room, afraid of every whisper, aware that every communication was being spied on. and when I tell this story to my now adult children, I struggle to convey how weird it was. I realise they never *experienced* existing with technology without it being the default that it's hostile to you and it's spying on you all the time. for them this has been the case *all of their lives*.
today, the concept of "spyware" has been obsoleted because every software is spyware. Google's "improving the world through search" was revealed to be about searching Gaza families to bomb, children and all; and "making money in the free market to invest in social progress" was actually about bankrolling literal fascism. today, for us Latinx to even briefly step in the USA, if we don't have an always-on handheld device with spyware "social media", that means we're probably a criminal. and my kids will never know a world that's not like this, but for me I saw this world being forged right there, deep in Mordor where the shadows lie.

2025-06-03 21:03:58 GMT

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I saw an example of this up close back when I briefly worked at Google, in 2008. (not a good year to start a new career, as it turned out). back then they made a big deal out of something called "20% time"—the idea that regular engineers hade 1/5 of their time for themselves, to do anything they wanted. famously Gmail came out of someone exploring their interests during this time.
I don't think much of anything else came out of it. I found out I was always overworked on drudgery; my job was basically fixing bugs on the Ruby on Rails internal user accounting system that someone else had developed. when I complained that this was a far cry of the academia-like exciting research environment I had been promised and asked to be assigned to a more challenging project, I was told: "no". moreover the deadlines and expectations were of the type that if I worked (unpaid) overtime (at an underpaid job for the market) every day, I still was at risk of a performance review. making use of "20% time" felt like a pipe dream.
like most people I blamed myself for my laziness, until I saw "Googlegeist" statistics that some 95% of employees never used their "20% time", being trapped under the same pressures as I was.
I started a discussion about the promise of "20% free time" being what was known in ancient Samarkand as "a lie". the result of this was my boss having a fit over me having "backstabbed" him. see, me complaining about the promises of recruiters being unrealistic marked me as an Unhappy Googler, which means my manager had Unhappiness in his team. and Google's image was of being the best place to work where everybody was happy all the time. Unhappiness isn't allowed.
I said, "didn't you say we operate under 'radical transparency'?" (I was young and believed this kind of thing. yes I was a sitting duck.) boss said, and I quote, "radical transparency doesn't mean you get to say negative things."
I was fired not long after, allegedly because of the crisis, when they laid off 70% of the Latinoamerican precariat.

2025-06-02 07:45:01 GMT

a lot of even liberal Germans are weirdly defensive about their dysfunctional, openly classist, evil and 100% indefensible education system :thonking: when you point out that no other country in the world has anything like locking children for life into white or blue collar career paths at ages fucking 10-12 (!!!) and that, therefore, the whole thing with "if you don't improve your grades you'll be kicked down to Realschule" is not just cruel and evil but entirely unnecessary, because, again, nobody else does this 19-century-Prussia-ass class segregation so why do you think only you need it?? nobody else in the world burdens their kids with a lifelong curse like the Abitur why do you think only you need to have such a thing as an Abitur??—it doesn't matter how much evidence you show, it's like hitting a brick wall. They go "yes but it's not meant that way..." "I have an aunt who went to Realschule and she's proud..." "the problem is the lack of money, the teachers are overwhelmed" bitch the teachers are overwhelmed everywhere no, the problem isn't lack of funding the problem is your system is formally sanctioned eugenics.
> Gymnasium children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Hauptschülerin, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Realschule kids. Realschüler*innen are stupid. They all wear green. Oh no, I don't want to play with Realschule students. And Sonderschüler*innen are still worse.
the only difference with Huxley is that you think it's progressive because you abolished uniforms. at least in Brave New World they gave kids drugs to ease the pain, children in a literal dystopia were considerably happier than in the German school system

2025-05-30 11:54:21 GMT

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ok I'm fucking with euch'all, there's more things I like in Germany for sure.
- antifa music
- antifa fashion
- occasionally even the antifa movement, when you find one that's down to actually doing things (that are not demos)
- sorry I was trying to be positive
- just lots of bitterness accumulated over the years, you know?
- DGS. unambiguously love DGS
- Feierabend ist Feierabend
- "what are your symptoms? you think you possibly have a little bit of a mild headache but you're unsure? ok I'll write you off work for a week"
- queer sex parties in Berlin specifically
- Wanderjahre tradition
- Naturgarten being a widespread thing
- healthy respect for herbal medicine
- that they use animals like Schneki, Biene or Mausi as terms of endearment
- the -i and -li diminutives while we're at it (but not -chen :p )
- easy for women to not do makeup or heels if they don't want to
- not being beaten up on the streets for looking queer (well, not as much as were I come from, at least)
- KiKa teletext
- immigrants

2025-05-30 11:48:09 GMT

things I like in Germany
- bottoms
- masochists
- girls
- abundant vegan food
-
- :thounking:
- :thaenkin:

2025-05-28 16:31:27 GMT

according to the Washington Post Elon Musk is really sad that everyone keeps being mean to him. He is particularly shocked that people were burning Teslas. "Why would you do that? That's really uncool."
I bet you could really feed into his anxieties even more if you kept burning even more Teslas. the great thing about Teslas is that once they're on fire they're basically impossible to put out

2025-05-23 10:15:53 GMT

was talking with a queer person I don't know but who I met during a poetry performance, who is into music theory and made some cool points that I wanted to learn more about, so I hunted their contact afterwards to ask for references. then they sent a link to a youtuber and said, "he talks about it in a more informative and entertaining way than I ever could", to which I said "you're underselling how entertainingly you infodump about music theory, I don't even know anything about music theory and I was definitely Entertained". then this person was like, highly emotional about this and told me in a shaky voice that I really made their day with the compliment etc.
I also feel insecure often about my tendency to overwhelm people with a barrage of words, to talk loudly etc. so I understand how they must have been felt, so I'm writing this as a reminder to compliment your neurodiv friends when their weird stuff is genuinely positive for you, as they probably carry lifelong trauma of all the times they've been told it's wrong and unacceptable to be like that

2025-05-13 08:36:40 GMT

*Unable to decrypt message*

2025-05-11 15:23:01 GMT

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somos duas :blobcatuwu: eu pra toda gringa que pego "tenta falar pão" gringa: pawn eu: :pinkgirl_ayy:
*não funciona em polonesas

2025-05-11 14:46:05 GMT

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Árabe siciliano com superstrato romance escrito em alfabeto latino!!!!onze!

2025-05-11 14:39:04 GMT

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eu morro de vontade de ir pra Malta especificamente por causa da língua :blobcatboo:

2025-05-04 22:48:17 GMT

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if you're trans you probably understand looking at your body and feeling like that's not you. that, but for voice

2025-05-04 22:00:21 GMT

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like like take that last voice right at the end, I quite like that one. abstractly. one of my headmates would do well with that voice. I could practice until I can do that one effortlessly and then go through life and not be misgendered and stuff.
but then I look at me and I'm, well, this. does that feel like the voice of this woman? look what this world made me become. but I can't imagine what would be my voice, either.
(eye contact)
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/451/802/588/741/173/original/3e544bcd104e0da5.jpg

2025-05-04 21:50:17 GMT

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probably doesn't make sense for anybody or anyone particularly care about other people's voices but for us it's a bit of a trip
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/451/748/328/510/212/original/c5fe62af7a1ef80c.mp3

2025-05-04 21:36:01 GMT

ever cycle through all voice parameters you can and you are like succeeding at what you're trying to do but no voice feels like, yours, in ways that include but are not limited to gender
https://transmom.love/system/media_attachments/files/114/451/707/870/645/949/original/e7d76aac837aae33.mp3