GrapheneOS has a duress password: a different PIN you can type in at any unlock prompt that tells your phone to wipe your SIM and contents

I feel this one in my bones

Hahaha guy used to tip with concert tickets! They were such a hot commodity

I was born on Long Island in the '70s and have a congenital predisposition to fucking LOVE Billy Joel. Also, it’s illegal to be from Long Island and not like Billy Joel. I love Billy Joel.

Turns out, I also love memes calling him out for how much harmonica there is in fucking Piano Man

I don’t have any suggestions, I’m sorry. It’s something you hear about from other people who have lived here longer and just kind of observe happening to you and around you through daily life, the news, and Wikipedia rabbit holes. My favorite depiction of the Machine is in the show South Side. I have no idea how true to life it is, but they capture the spirit of Chicago politics really well.

Lol back in 2019-2020, I volunteered with Marie Newman’s campaign. She was a progressive Democrat running for the House of Representatives, Illinois District 3, as a challenger to the incumbent Dan Lipinski (also a Democrat, but a socially conservative blue dog Dem, so he voted against things like abortion and health care). Here’s the thing about Dan Lipinski: he basically inherited the position from his father and kept it for seven terms. How does that work? Rep. Bill Lipinski ran for re-election in the Dem primary, won it, and then retired. He talked the IL Democratic Party into replacing him with his son on the election ballot. Here in northern Illinois (I don’t know how far the political machine reaches out from Chicago), the dem races are the only races because nobody up here votes republican. (Sidenote: Chuy Garcia, a progressive Representative from IL-4, got reprimanded last month for doing something similar: on the day of the deadline to register for the ballot, he waited until there were only a few hours left and announced his retirement. His chief of staff stepped forward as the only Dem eligible to register because she had already collected all the signatures she needed.)

With that background in mind, let’s get back to my anecdote! I was volunteering for this upstart campaign and I come into the office to all this chatter one day. It was a week or so until the primary, and even busier than expected, so I asked another volunteer what was up. They were trying to catch up on stuff they’d had planned for the previous day, when they’d been unable to work because someone from Lipinski’s campaign physically cut power to the office. If I remember correctly, the power cut was only to the section of the building where Newman’s campaign office and a couple others were, the kind of disruption that took some research to pull off. A breaker getting flipped could’ve been fixed in minutes, maybe an hour if it took that long for someone to go and check it. The power line was cut and getting a line worker to do the repair took them the whole day. Despite the Democratic machine’s best efforts, Newman won the seat. She held it right up until 2023, when they gerrymandered it out from under her.

You do not defy the Machine.

It’s Illinois, so there are a lot of politics in play that aren’t usually an issue in most of the US. If someone in charge of my post office snubbed the wrong person at a work event, it wouldn’t be surprising if the snub-ee did things like moving money around to stop an order of new mail trucks from being deployed to our routes. (That’s not a democrat or republican thing, it’s an Illinois political machine thing.)

However, bigger political issues come into play, too. When DeJoy first took over, people in parts of my House district weren’t getting mail at all. He was removing mail sorting machines from post offices, for cryin’ out loud. Apartment buildings had package dumps that the residents had to comb through to hopefully find their stuff, if it hadn’t been stolen. Letters and packages were getting delayed or lost and being reported as delivered. (I’ve had at least one package get reported as delivered that showed up in my mailbox a week later, but a two-day delay between report and delivery is much more common.) People getting government checks and medication in the mail were left waiting for things that might or might not show up, no indicators of where they were, and nobody to ask for a status update. Just “item delivered at mailbox/front door” and nothing.

Ten years ago, it was $0.49 to mail a first class letter that would be delivered, pretty reliably, in about three days. Now that services have been “brought more into line with existing services” like FedEx and UPS, it’s $0.78 and shows up whenever.

Right now, first class mail to homes in the Chicago area is taking two WEEKS to arrive due to holiday increases. I don’t think it’d be this bad at tax or voting deadlines, but it’s good to know what kind of variability you can expect, especially with all of the changes made to the US postal service since 2017.

Not off the shelf smartwatches; wrist-worn tracking devices issued by ICE.

“The device was not an ordinary smart watch made by Apple or Samsung, but a special type that US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) had mandated the woman wear at all times, allowing the agency to track her. The device was beeping when she entered the hospital, indicating she needed to charge it, and she worried that if the battery died, ICE agents would think she was trying to disappear, the hospital workers recalled. She told them that, just days earlier, she had been put on a deportation flight to Mexico, but the pilot refused to let her fly because she was so close to giving birth.”

What a fucking dystopia. The only thing that gives me hope for America’s future is knowing that this is part of our established pattern: we’ll never do a right thing without trying all the wrong things first, and we’ll only get there kicking and screaming the whole way. This is part of that wrong-things-first approach, and we’ve got a good deal of kicking and screaming already… I really hope we get to the right-things-last part soon.

Not speaking for OP, but aside from catching up with the world in terms of news and culture, social support is a big deal. Being kicked loose means needing a ride to get to … somewhere to go. Hopefully that’s lined up already. Adjusting to non-institutionlized living takes time and practice. Suddenly not being forced onto someone else’s schedule is a big change and can easily lead someone down into a state of depression. It also means having the opportunity to process the time they spent living in prison. It might not be an easy thing to talk about, and there’s always the risk of well-intentioned (or just uncomfortable and not doing a great job of handling it) friends or family being like, “But you’re out now! Why do you still want to talk about it? It’s over, and you need to move on!” but someone just getting out has just spent however long constantly on guard for any little sign of trouble. That’s pretty rough on a person.

There are probably a million other things I’m missing from here, but leaving is a massive transition that can be hard to make for a lot of people for a lot of good reasons. Check out the work of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in California! Unsupported re-entry is something they’ve been addressing for more than a decade.

And I bet that feels bad.

But you already don’t have somewhere you like

If you get banned for being under 18, you’ll end up starting from where you are right now. Trying other services, including +18 ones, can give you an idea of what features and things are important to you in a host. Not trying them only leaves you in the same spot without any benefit.

It can be hard to feel guilty about doing something you “aren’t supposed to,” but the feeling is not the same as actually doing something wrong. The feeling is there to help you slow down and think more deeply about the next steps you ought to take.

If I’m coming across as pushy, I apologize. I’m just excited about more people becoming privacy advocates (especially people who have grown up with invasive tech) and maybe a little mad about an age gate keeping you from doing something important to you.

I think I understand your hesitation better now. It feels like you’re calling attention to the fact that your stuff is by someone under 18, is that right? I get why that can feel like an unwise thing to do, but really, it’s super unlikely that anything bad will happen. I think the worst they could do is terminate your account for violating the terms of service, causing you to lose anything you posted. (Keep a backup of anything worth saving and you’re pretty well protected against that.) And it would take someone reporting your account to even get to that point in the first place. All’s I know is that if I were in your shoes, I’d just go ahead and make the account on the instance I wanted. Nobody’s checking IDs at the door, and people of every age and skill level post their anime-inspired art.

Is there something keeping you from making an account on a +18 instance? Not saying this to be obnoxious, it’s just been a while since an age gate has been a hurdle

Fucking mirrors… how do they work?! --Hegseth Clown Posse

Ooh, I’m a big fan!

I would be shocked if it turned out my dog didn’t have the canine equivalent of sensory processing disorder. She shows the same variations of discomfort, annoyance, and irritability I do when she encounters sensations she hates, even though we hate different things.

So let me get this straight: no dogs, no cats, no companion animals of any kind, no rock stars, and no comedians. Who the fuck wants to get raptured? Place sounds like a nightmare.

Anybody know if it’s intended to stay like this or allow a reef to settle/grow there?

Yeah, that’s what I’m sayin. We were their classmates. We the ones who made it hard by attacking and verbally abusing them and contributing to a culture where the word “queer” was a slur, not just a descriptor with 0 inherent right/wrongness to it. Then, what, graduation rolls around and a magic switch gets flipped and suddenly we’re not a bunch of dry-roasted shit on toast people? It was so fucking disrespectful, stupid, and just plain wasteful of the time we could’ve spent together with them feeling confident in living their regular lives. We missed out on some of the best parts of the people we called our friends because we didn’t build them a safe environment. There weren’t that many parents teaching their kids that people are just people regardless of what their bodies look like, who they’re attracted to, or how well their insides match their outsides. This is, objectively, some pretty basic, don’t-be-a-garbage-species shit. We’ve been learning and re-learning this lesson for generations in America between waves of immigration from different parts of the world, the personhood and rights of Black Americans, and the recognition/rights of sexual and gender minorities and it just feels like maybe we should dispense with the bullshit already. Learn the lesson one last time and move the fuck on. Don’t we have better things to do?