Category Archives: Uncategorized

lady-griffin:

onthedriftinthetardis:

If you vote in North Carolina, you’re going to see this on your ballot. Looks pretty straightforward, right?

But it’s a trap placed by the GOP. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Voting “For” this referendum will remove the phrase “and every person who has been naturalized” from this section on voter eligibility in the NC constitution. This could place the future voting rights of about 400,000 naturalized US citizens in the state in jeopardy.

Just a reminder – it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote! There’s no evidence that this happens in significant numbers anywhere in the country, and North Carolina has restrictions in place against it happening at all, like the voter ID law that’s now in effect.

(The voter ID law disproportionately affects POC, as well as transgender voters, both of whom are more likely to vote Democratic as well as lack the needed ID, but that’s another post.)

Voting “Against” on this measure will leave the state constitution unchanged.

Here’s the whole bill (PDF): https://dashboard.ncleg.gov/api/Services/BillSummary/2023/H1074-SMBK-89(sl)-v-2

Ballotpedia was extremely useful to me in looking up propositions; as it gave a lot of information on the propositions, most significantly who was opposed and pro each one as well as their reasoning.

I don’t know if this will be useful for your state, but in my personal experience of voting by mail in Arizona, it was a great tool.

I simply search for Arizona Proposition # in Ballotpedia’s search bar and then clicked on the proposition.

santapau:

mayflower-gal:

katy-l-wood:

xkcd-for-that:

eaglefairy:

fallentechnate:

macleod:

daalseth:

surroundedbybooks:

womaninterrupted:

Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history

Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of this, but of course.

This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.

Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.

So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.

That is not good.

In pseudo and acadamic circles this has routinely been called the ‘digital dark age’, I even wrote on the subject a few years ago but can’t find that article right now. [There is even a Wikipedia article on the concept] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age#:~:text=The%20digital%20dark%20age%20is,technologies%20evolve%20and%20data%20decay).

It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.

This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.

@xkcd-for-that

Digital Resource Lifespan

This is exactly what I’ve been saying. It’s a loss of history. And, given how important it has been for activists of all sorts, it will be a loss for the future as well.

Star Trek yet again being accurate about future history (Picard saying “little is known about this era (the early 21st century) because much of the digital records are gone.”)

I think this article from The Guardian must have been one of the first, prominent ones to mention Digital Dark Age? It’s from 2011, and it’s entitled

Report warns of ‘digital Dark Age’ if digitisation is left to private sector.

Ten years later? You have this piece on The Atlantic:
The Internet is rotting. From 2021.

The heading goes: «Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.»

(I’m so relieved none of these links are down, because that’d be some ironic bs)

And since you know I have to be annoying about this, here’s the comic I made about preservation, called Memory Weaver.

victusinveritas:

flightyquinn:

victusinveritas:

In case you need it for your D&D games or siege actions— here’s what the ballistic trajectory of a flaming pumpkin fired out of a trebuchet looks like.

Actually, this is very helpful for visualizing a ballistic arc.

Right? I’ve already sent it to my math teaching friends. One occasionally brings in a tiny trebuchet for his class and this might encourage him to up his game.

wilwheaton:

“The calculus is straightforward. If Harris wins the election, it doesn’t matter. Democratic administrations don’t play that way. Donald Trump’s do. We don’t have to predict how a future Trump administration will act. We have plenty of evidence from the last one. Just ask AT&T and CNN. At a minimum, having Trump win after endorsing Harris invites a very unfriendly regulatory environment — and probably a lot worse than that. This is a bad sign well in advance of whatever happens on November 5th. And it’s an important reminder that without actually doing anything, he threatens, he sends a message, and the message is received. I will say again, we can’t know for a certainty why the Post is choosing not to endorse anyone this year. But, seriously, what other possible explanation could there be? They’re afraid of antagonizing the Trump supporters in their reader base? Does that count for the LA Times too? Seriously, it doesn’t pass the laugh test. We know what’s going on here.”

—

On the Newspaper Non-Endorsements