Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es
Joined Aug 2018
I've started to reframe my living strategy around: how can I make myself as useless to capital as possible while still working within that system towards our collective well-being? (Where I think of "capital" as systems that exploit available resources for someone's benefit, even when doing so is a net negative to society.)
Friends, if you boost requests for financial aid, consider including a note so that I know you know them. It helps.
You know, I didn't really get the term "deadname" until last night when I thought "yeah, whoever that was really did die".
I think what obscured it for me was that "transition" was only a part of the process. There have been so many changes over such a long time that I didn't notice.
Esme Povirk
boosted
re: autism; half-joking response?
@quinn it's important to understand that "neurotypical" people have different needs and require being treated with great patience so that they don't become distressed. by and large, "neurotypicals" have an underdeveloped sense of equity and fairness, as well as difficulty navigating social situations in which they don't intuitively understand their place in some imagined hierarchy, and thus struggle to reconcile their belief that they are "normal" with the experiences and expectations of others
Esme Povirk
boosted
Every time conditions worsen, someone starts pushing the idea of a general strike. Shut it all down! Starve the system! And yeah, it sounds powerful—but here’s what they don’t tell you:
It’s a honeypot.
And no shade with this subpost, but:
If you're suggesting one? It tells me how theoretical and abstract your current relationship to our times is: your post probably isn't going to start a general strike - even though a prosecutor would have no trouble arguing that.
You see...
Under U.S. law, organizing a general strike—especially across industries—is straight-up illegal. The Taft-Hartley Act (1947) makes it a felony to advocate for a mass strike across sectors. Courts ruled long ago that calls for general strikes count as criminal conspiracy—which is why labor leaders, radicals, and workers have been crushed every time they tried to organize one.
Think about that: The state doesn’t just want you working, it wants you to believe striking is an option—so they can catch you the second you push too far. They let the words circulate, they let people dream about it, but they’ve ensured that the mechanisms for a general strike are dead on arrival.
So what do we do?
Instead of fighting on their terms, we need to cultivate the material conditions of a general strike without setting ourselves up for repression. The goal isn’t a moment of resistance; it’s a slow, grinding attrition against capital’s demands.
This is something workers and business owners in China have long understood. Within an economy that monitors, tracks, and punishes direct defiance, workers and small business owners have built an entire ecosystem of passive, small-scale disruption:
躺平 (Tangping) – “Lying flat”: Refusing to overwork, avoiding excessive consumption, cutting down on participation in capitalist growth.
摸鱼 (Moyu) – “Touching fish”: Finding ways to slack off at work, do personal tasks on company time, and subtly resist productivity expectations.
Small business "slowdowns": Deliberately taking longer to fulfill orders, delaying processes, and subtly reducing efficiency to limit corporate extraction.
All of these are done within the boundaries of legality, while still achieving the material slowdown that a strike would bring.
Instead of calling for a general strike and waiting for someone to deliver it, start cultivating these practices. The goal isn’t just to “not work”—it’s to starve capital without painting a target on your back. If millions engage in passive disruption, undercut overconsumption, and prioritize resource-sharing over waged survival, we create the material slowdown that capital dreads.
They’ve made a general strike impossible. So we don’t give them one. We give them something worse: an economy that bleeds out, quietly, without a single illegal call to action.
AI rant
Guys, the new magic language generating machine is producing a grammatical, well-formed, but factually incorrect English response to an arbitrary question I asked it, also in English. And it's a question my complex biological brain that evolved for language processing could have correctly answered after a mere 4 years of training. I have no idea how the machine works, nor does anyone really, but I expected perfect accuracy and am shocked that it does not work better.
Resolves to never make an official build outside of a CI process again
Esme Povirk
boosted
@mcc Whenever I am coaching new engineers who are trying to figure out what to do now that they built something and it doesn't work, I tell them this;
"Verify that everything you think is true, actually *is* true. For anything that isn't or is unexpected, find out *why*."
At the end of that exercise they will nearly always know what the problem is.
What I lack in sleep quality I make up in sleep quantity.
stream announcement
Streaming random pattern mode in HyperRogue. https://twitch.tv/madewokherd
Nice! I use plex for my music. I like making playlists of categories.
After a year of working on this, I have made a new release branch and new release of Mono.
Didn't put it in the commit message but did put it in the release notes today. https://gitlab.winehq.org/mono/mono/-/releases/mono-6.14.0
Esme Povirk
boosted
something I wish I had learned much earlier in life is that if you are weird, trying to be buttoned-down and normal in spaces that aren't for being weird in might feel safe, but being fully weird signals to other people that you are safe for them to be weird around, which is more important
Magic is real. You just have to look for it. I mean this completely literally.
Esme Povirk
boosted
Instead of, “I can’t unmask because no one will accept me,” what if it’s, “I must unmask because people already aren’t accepting this masked me?”
What if it’s, “I need to find out who will accept the real me.”
#AutisticMasking #ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #Neurodiversity #AuDHD #unmasking
I did a write-up of how I do my taxes. Maybe that's interesting to someone, I dunno. https://madewokherd.nfshost.com/bookmarks/adulting/taxes.html
Finally starting that "bookmarks" site I talked about a while back. Decided to just edit HTML straight up, rather than come up with some system to build the site for me.
My thinking is that whenever I go to look something up, I'll leave the tab open until I've added it to this system.
Already finding that providing context for these links is encouragement to write in more detail.
Esme Povirk
boosted
Hello friends! I am excited to (re)share the #mentalhealth project I started two years ago: https://littlebetterzine.com
Little Better Zines are free guides to evidence based coping skills – now expanded and redesigned with new info and improved accessibility.
These are techniques I often share with therapy patients, but I know not everyone has access to therapy. I hope you find these zines helpful, and I’d be grateful if you repost/share the link with anyone who might need them!
Joined Aug 2018
