Mesmerized by The Lorax. For now. It won’t last long.
Things that make a teacher upset
So, I have to sit with kids who aren’t taking the “pass this or don’t pass 3rd grade” reading test. This won’t be a diatribe on standardized testing - this time.
One of the boys came in just a few minutes ago, tardy to school. He admitted to me that he’d had no dinner last night, and he was too late for breakfast at school today (we feed everyone breakfast and lunch for free). I went and asked the lunch ladies if there was a cereal bar, or something, we could give the boy. There were some breakfast bags left, so the poor boy got something to eat. He hugged me for getting him a crappy school breakfast: a cereal bar and milk and some sort of fruit. Then the boy SNARFED that crappy breakfast. Sometimes, I hate the world.
ROBERT DOWNEY JR. wins the award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role at the 2024 Oscars
(via spartanguard)
Walrus versus fairy
Phryne was curled around a warm cup of tea, surveying the people gathered at her kitchen table with satisfaction and affection when Cec and Bert burst in.
“Alright,” snapped Bert, “We’ve been at loggerheads about this since sparrow’s fart, so we’re bringing it to you lot for review.”
Jack and Mac had both been buried in the morning paper. Mac cocked an eyebrow at the cabbies over the top of her page, and Jack sighed and let his paper fall onto the table. “Wonderful,” he muttered.
Dot didn’t even look up from her embroidery.
“I’m intrigued,” Phryne told them, placing her tea carefully on the table. “Please, go on.”
“Well, you gotta imagine that it’s a nice weekend morning like this, right?” Cec said earnestly, Bert folded his arms and scowled behind him. “And you go over to open it. What would you be more surprised to see, a -”
“A fairy,” Bert cut in, “or a fucking walrus.”
Phryne and Mac shared a perplexed glance, before Phryne shrugged and declared her answer. “The walrus, I suppose.”
Mac nodded. “Walrus.”
“It’s the Walrus for me, too,” Dot said.
Jack had been reaching for his own tea, but he froze with his hand outstretched towards the cup. “What?” he said weakly, glancing around at all of them.
“See,” said Bert to Cec with a smirk, “you’re full of shit.”
Cec groaned. “How?” he demanded. “How can a walrus be more surprising than a fairy?”
Phryne tilted her head to the side, considering this. “Well,” she said, “how on earth would a walrus get here?”
“How would a fairy get here,” Jack asked slowly, letting his outstretched hand drop loosely onto the table, “when there’s no such thing as fairies?”
Mac shrugged. “But if fairies were real, I would almost expect them to show up at Wardlow first.”
Jack made a pained sound. “But they’re not real.”
😂🤣😂🤣😂😄😂
(via galadriel1010)
A really extra way to announce you got a haircut
Or a very inspiring way for a popular Black British actress many people look up to to reveal she cut off all her damaged, processed, hair (the part many of us fear the most) and decided to start her natural hair journey, at the age of 40 (yes y'all she’s 42. I don’t see it either).
But then again if you don’t get that, the post wasn’t for you anyway, so that’s fair. That’s fair.
Also, as I mentioned this post is two years old but things are going very well 😍
I know a lot of people don’t get it whenever they see posts about Black hair. It’s just wild to me when I remember there are people who’ve never had any significant thoughts or cultural concerns about their hair.
My hair doesn’t grow in the back of my head. I keep it shaved because it doesn’t grow, not to be on trend like some tend to think. My hair/scalp was damaged when I was 13 because an aunt put a strong perm in my head. For years I had sores on my scalp from chemical burns.
It’s a big deal. We’re in a beautiful era of Black women in all walks of life embracing their natural hair and it should be celebrated and encouraged.
(via gingerchangeling)
I think one of the consequences of getting older is finding out that your parents were kind of right when they complained about technology? At least you can see they weren’t entirely wrong.
I’ve been hearing from friends that it’s getting harder to find quality refrigerators that don’t connect to the internet. Why exactly does my refrigerator need wifi? Or even a computer, at that? Older fridges can last decades because they have so few failure points. They have one job and they do it well.
I tend not to use my smart TV very often because the damn thing glitches and it’s laggy and too much of a hassle unless I am really committed to watching a movie in my living room. And the worse thing is…can you even buy a non-smart TV these days that isn’t secondhand? Are they even making ordinary…yanno…televisions that don’t need software updates and internet connections, anymore?
Someone in the comments of this post asked how bluetooth earbuds are forced and everyone pointed out that a lot of phones (especially iphones) simply do not have the ports to plug in wired headphones anymore. You must get the apple wireless headphones - and I think that’s the crux of the problem. I am glad I have an android phone because I can use the old wired earbuds I’ve had for over 12 years. If I wanted to, I could buy wireless earbuds and use them instead, because my model of phone gives me that option.
And that’s the kicker: the problem is that as things are “advancing,” more and more, options are being taken away. It has nothing to do with consumer demand - obviously there are a lot of people that are not happy with these developments. But as we’re seeing, the products being made don’t reflect customer preference or choice. It’s always about is best for the companies making and selling those products.
Every day we’re hearing about new apps and tech startups and really…does anyone really want this shit? Is the nth attempt to make crypto work, the billions spent on the Metaverse, doorbell cameras; is a fridge with an IP address really allow it to do its job better? Is that actually going to improve the lives of anyone who aren’t the developers of that product? Just the other day I was reading about a tech startup that wants to be able to beam ads into your car’s GPS screen. Video ads! On a screen! To tell drivers what’s nearby when they can just…continue to look out the window because they’re supposed to be driving a goddamn car.
The problem of a world run by tech companies is that the tech isn’t being made to accommodate us, we are being forced to accommodate the tech.
I’ve said it before I’ll say it again.
Nostalgia tech is a thing that would make money if they would just fucking do it. That’s why they still make records and record players.
BUT. Now it’s a luxury and luxury items sell. As LUXURYS.
Because it’s now about money. It never was. It’s about control.
Y’all understand? It was always about control.
So I had a new boiler fitted the other day. The old one had done its job for a long time but finally gave up.
It wasn’t until the damn thing was all installed and ready to go that I was told that I would need to download an app on my phone and register my details and prescise location in order to set my heating.
I would no longer have a thermostat in my house. I would only be able to control it from my smart phone.
I am 36 years old and I went mad - not at the poor boiler engineer of course, but I refused to do what he was asking. I asked for an alternative. He initially said there wasn’t one. I told him to check with the company. He phoned the company and eventually someone spoke to me about it. Explaining that this was the standard for all new boilers. I told them it was ridiculous. What if I was an elderly person living alone who didn’t own a smart phone? What if I lost my phone? What if the wifi failed? What if there was an electrical fault?
It took over half an hour of exasperated bargaining before someone agreed to swap out the smart app connected parts of the boiler with a “standard issue thermostat”. At first they were gonna charge me an extra £100 to swap it out, but I argued my case there as well.
After a lot of back and forth and effort that totally drained my energy, eventually I got a standard thermostat fitted. No smart phone app or registration needed. No extra charge. Just a lot of extra effort that someone a bit less stubborn and determined to avoid this technological attack on basic living would have easily backed down on.
We are already living in a world run by tech companies, where every. single. thing. in our lives is slowly being transformed into another system where they can track our every move, steal our personal information, and make life that little bit more complicated.
The fact that even white goods like refridgerators and washing machines are starting to require app connections is worrying. It’s not a good thing, and its not being done for convenience. It’s being done for data tracking, location tracking, and finding new ways to inflict ads on us.
Sorry if this rant derailed the post a bit, but the memory is still fresh and so apparently is my anger! But at least this is an example where being persistent and stubborn does heed results against them!
Hired someone to swap out my mom’s programmable thermostat for an old-fashioned analog one. (She has memory loss. The new one confused her.)
The tech arrived with a “simpler” programmable one. That’s not what I asked for, I say.
“I get it. Even these are too complicated for some people. What we really recommend is a smart thermostat that her kids can control with an app. It gets too cold in her house, she calls you. I don’t even think they make those old round ones any more.”
Haha, I have an ace in the hole: I whip out an analog thermostat, which I bought at a hardware store because I knew this was going to happen. He rolls his eyes, but he does install it.
He didn’t even work for the people who would benefit from the data! He was a handyman! But he was persuaded that smart tech was smart, and in the end all I could do was persuade him to humor us.
The problem here is most programmable tech is either proprietary junk that needs a custom app, proprietary junk that needs a proprietary home automation hub, or proprietary junk that needs to talk to a server in the cloud.
It would be kind of cool if I could, say, hook up all my home appliances to a separate LAN via ethernet, and then I could query my home server to see what is running and how much electricity it used. It would be cool if I could turn my appliances on and off like a shelly relay. It would be cool if devices had an RS-232 port so an Arduino could talk to it. It would be cool if I didn’t need a proprietary app to talk to my smart devices, if I could just pair my machine via Bluetooth and use generic tools provided by my OS.
That’s not even how some printers work any more. HP printers need an app and a server. It’s completely uncool that my washing machine has WLAN.
There could be so much cool home automation and monitoring, and it’s all thwarted by Bosch devices that don’t speak IKEA, Chinese smart watches that don’t speak Apple, Phillips light bulbs that don’t speak LG.
But by and large, what’s the point? What’s the point of turning devices on and off remotely, my stand mixer, my coffee maker, my washing machine? What’s the point if I’m not there to drink the coffee? What good does it do me if my stand mixer is smart? What good does it do me to have a cloud-enabled scanner if I need to physically insert the pages I want to scan anyway? Why would I want to have a smart TV if I can’t even hook it up to a VCR and record a live stream in crappy 4:3 SD.
Honestly, what good does a smart TV do me versus a set-top box?
Maybe in the far future, a home robot looking like R2D2 will be able to communicate with my rice cooker.
But it’s far more likely that, far in the future, you will need one app to talk to R2D2 and one app for the Rice cooker, and IKEA will tell you that their smart hub for light bulbs can talk to C3PO, but you need a different protocol droid to talk to their new and improved speaker system. That protocol droid can’t talk to the rice cooker, but it can talk to R2D2, as long as you use the right app.
Agreed. I don’t want everything to be connected by WiFi. Definitely don’t want a smart refrigerator.
Not everything has to be wireless.
(via owl-librarian)