Abigail K 🌼 @ak@queer.garden

Previously, I was accepting all follow requests that weren't obvious spam

I am now being slightly more selective because the amount of negative interactions here is on the up - if we haven't interacted, and I can't see your posts, and/or your profile shares nothing about you (e.g. if it's just a list of computer code you use or something) then I probably won't accept

I'm not ready to feel exposed to people who want to take and not give

Bold hypothesis: call centres only still exist because without them we'd have higher unemployment, and we haven't as a society got around the idea that the massive advances in technology over the past 30 years mean that we don't need, for instance, rooms full of people answering telephones for routine queries about insurance or electricity bills, and that we could instead fund those people to live creative, interesting lives

Why are call centres even still a thing, like who even uses the telephone any more

"Yes, hello insurance company, I'd like to renew my car insurance" said no one since 2003

This is the strangest spam I've ever had, I can only assume I've been put on someone's employee mailing list by mistake

Anyway, well done Hamza for turning your stats round whatever that means

My computer has started making a weird squeaky noise every morning

At first I thought it just had the same attitude to mornings as I do, but on closer inspection it's the two SSDs both doing what appears to be a full SMART self-test every single day, it takes nearly an hour and sounds like a dying mouse although doesn't seem to impact performance

They never used to do this, are they dying? It's not implausible as they both have >1.5 years of power on time

"What do you want to be when you grow up, Abi?"

"I want to be one of those people who texts the local radio station every morning just to say I'm listening from somewhere much nicer nowadays, and that I think the mystery golden year is 1993"

I know I'll lose a shitload of followers for taking a pot shot at the God of Mastodon, the Great Gargron

But I don't appreciate being talked down to by dickheads

Bloody nerds

Real shame that the only alternative to Mastodon, which appears to be sponsored by a load of dodgy essay writing services, casinos and wank sites, is Pleroma which is basically like putting a massive flashing sign on your forehead saying "I'm a total nobface"

At least the Redcar Beacon has a caff at the bottom and a radio station using the little rooms inside

Hot on the heels of that Marble Arch Mound thing from last week I have now learned about The Vessel in the middle of New York

https://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com/discover/vessel

It seems to be a whole *thing* - buildings in city centres with no function other than people can climb them and take photos for Instagram

They're like the Redcar Beacon (https://co-curate.ncl.ac.uk/redcar-beacon/) only about a thousand times more expensive - can we not think of anything better to fill our urban spaces

Every day I'm shuf-fflin (off this mortal coil)

Remembering the guy in my town who used to drive a battered hearse as his daily driver car, and would beans it around town at top speed blasting Party Rock Anthem

I have so many thoughts on cities and place and nowhere to post them (or write them because university is out)

The latest thing is fucking nerds buying and selling "digital artworks" - some sort of crypto scam, but the money they pay to own a virtual encrypted 💩 emoji or whatever is more than I've ever earned in my entire career to date

I read the Financial Times because I get a subscription through the uni and because it's the only British paper that isn't literally run by TERFs

The amount of money flying around for everything nowadays is insane - millions of pounds on utter shite, so why do we never see any of it, we're intelligent folk scraping around for money for food while some random computer coder in San Francisco is deciding between a Tesla and a Porsche

It can't carry on - we have to stop this

Someone had a go at me yesterday

"Abi," she said, "you're a snob, you think you're too good for this place"

And I said, yes - guilty as charged, I do think I'm too good for this place

But the thing is, I think you are as well, I think we all are

How come the benefits of the exciting global knowledge economy never make it to us? Why is it other people living it up in London, California, Tokyo doing creative work while we toil in the warehouses and call centres just because of where we live?

I am no radical lefty but something is wrong with the world, we've got a majority of the population feeling like they have no inherent worth

Something that troubles me is just how deeply unhappy most people I know are

Why are we living in a world where it's normal for people to be so fed up of everything all the time? It's really frightening that we've normalised this

The region where I live is particularly depressing - last night I was woken up at midnight by someone outside on a mobile phone call desperately shouting that they only had £16 in the bank

How did we get here?

One of the more insidious things capitalism does to our psyche is plant the idea that there are too many people in the world

Too many candidates for every job; too many men for every woman; too many applicants for every house

It is designed to make you feel like you have to compete with everyone around you for everything, which makes it okay for people to treat you like dirt because hey, there are 100 people who would kill to be in your position right now

It's subtle and damaging

At some threshold of "vs", it stops being a music track and becomes a fight