I just finished watching The Harvesting, an Amish-themed horror film, and I have no idea what the hell I just watched. Honestly, I don’t even know what happened. I sat through an hour and a half of this thing, and all I can say is, “What?” Like, seriously—what?
Here’s what I do know: there’s a family that decides to go on vacation in a remote area to spend some “bonding time” together. This house they rent is near an Amish community, which happens to live by a forest. And apparently, this forest is evil, which makes the Amish turn into psycho killers. That’s basically the main thrust of the film.
Now, I have a lot of questions. For one, if the forest is so evil, why don’t the Amish just cut it down? Like, chop the damn thing down and salt the earth to make sure nothing grows back. Problem solved—no more evil Amish.
Second, why do families in these movies always choose to vacation in the most remote, desolate places where there’s zero civilization? Why? It’s like they want to be murdered.
And then there’s the ending. I won’t spoil it in case you want to watch this (though honestly, don’t), but the ending completely undermines everything that happened in the movie. Nothing makes sense. Like, what is this malevolent force that’s causing people to go evil? It’s never explained.
Oh, and why are there drugs just lying around in the house? And why are the kids—literal kids—huffing nitrous oxide tanks? That’s right, this random house in the middle of nowhere has a spare nitrous tank just sitting there. How did it get there? Nobody explains it.
There’s also this B-plot involving a boy who spends time in the forest and then does… something. Whatever he does apparently makes him evil, but it’s never clear what he did or why it matters. Eventually, the A and B plots kind of tie together, but by that point, I was just sitting there going, “Huh?”
I think this movie sees itself as some kind of artsy, high-concept film. And look, I’m pretty perceptive when it comes to figuring out a movie’s themes, symbolism, or subtext. There’s a lot of religious imagery in this film, sure, but it doesn’t go anywhere.
Here’s the thing: I’ve spent time around religious folk, including Mennonites (who are kind of like the Amish but with more technology), and this movie doesn’t even seem to understand the Amish. Apart from the fact that they’re portrayed as not using technology (which isn’t entirely accurate), this film has no clue.
I went in knowing this movie had bad ratings, so I was prepared for it to be crappy. But nothing prepared me for just how weird and nonsensical it was.
BREAKING: All federal employees in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility offices will need to be placed on paid administrative leave "effective immediately," per Newsweek.
The only way to defeat a narcissistic sociopath is to starve them. Protect yourself from their bullshit, of course, but move away from it. Let them have their stage, but refuse to be their audience.
Wee little union sign I painted in 2022, maybe? This week’s question comes to us anonymously: How do we survive being online? Erika and I bought a radio. For...
No widespread power outages at the moment, but in case anyone needs it, setting up a tent INSIDE your house is an effective way to stay warm in cold weather + power outage. Stuff a few pets in there with you and sleeping bags and you'll be happy. #random #SurvivalTips
@ShaulaEvans Big on small spaces. I make playhouses and tool sheds into meditation huts, and have been known to make closets into bedrooms like some folks had in medieval Europe. Currently my bedroom a little small for a bed, using a recliner instead, very snug in the cold.
If you're not already in the habit, do your brain a favor and make something this week. Do something creative; something constructive. In whatever medium holds an interest for you. Even if it's small. In fact, especially if it's small.
Sketch out a couple panels of the comic you've always wanted to make. Write a scene of your novel or play. Crochet one granny square. Make pasta. Bake bread. Put some html files on a webserver.
And while you're at it: drink water, have a shower, take a walk, and get some sleep. Do the things that nourish you. Because, whatever else we are, humans are animals. Your brain and your body are amping each other up and just drenching each other in stress hormones. It's dark and cold, and there are monsters out there, somewhere. Animals don't handle that well. So show your body that it's warm and safe. And that there are still things you can control. You'll feel better. And then you can think clearly. And THEN, you can look ahead.
Listen to an audio version of this long-ass post. On the day of Trump’s second presidential inauguration, Instagram censored search results for the most popular hashtags associated with American Democrats, like “#Democrat”, “#PresidentBiden”, “#VoteBlue”, “#MichelleObama”, “#Kamala”, and dozens more. This ban lasted for 9 total hours and affected users worldwide, regardless of their content settings. During that same time, Instagram was displaying full search results for “#Republican”, “#Trump”, “#VoteRed”, “#PresidentTrump”, and every other popular Republican hashtag I tried. I found about 50 censored political tags related to Democrats, but every Republican tag was still working fine. The removal of these pro-Democrat hashtags started on the evening of January 20th, 2025, coincidentally a few hours after Trump signed the “Restoring Freedom Of Speech” executive act. These censored results lasted for about 9 hours, then went back to normal at around 5 am PST. I want to state again that these words were censored for all Instagram users on the website and app regardless of that user’s content settings or their location. Meta claimed this was a technical “error” affecting hashtags “across the political spectrum,” but this is demonstrably false. I searched through the most popular hashtags used by Democrats and Republicans last night and found that the majority of Democrat terms were being censored, while none of the popular Republican tags were affected. This selective censorship is a scary look into Meta’s updated content moderation practices and its potential alignment with the new administration.
The following hashtags were actively blocked by Instagram on the first day of Trump’s second presidency. While they are now searchable again, I personally confirmed all of these hashtags were inaccessible last night:
Barack
BarackObama
Bernie
BernieSanders
Biden
Constitution
Democrat
Democrats
DNC
Fascism
FuckTrump
Insurrection
Jan6th
JohnOliver
JoeBiden
Kamala
Leftist
Liberal
Liberals
MichelleObama
Obama
OccupyDemocrats
PresidentBiden
PresidentObama
Queer
ReproductiveRights
VoteBlue
And those were just the ones I could find yesterday. I’m sure there are many more. Instagram is still blocking other hashtags like ProChoice, GeorgeConway (a writer critical of Trump), JackSmith (the special counsel against Trump), 14thAmendment, and Drumpf. It’s possible those words were already being censored before Trump’s inauguration, so I didn’t include them on the list above.
During that same 9-hour window, I confirmed the following words were not being censored on IG:
AltRight
DonaldJTrump
DonaldTrump
FuckObama
FuckBiden
FuckKamala
LetsGoBrandon
MelaniaTrump
PresidentTrump
Republican
RNC
Trump
VoteRed
Those words all worked. You couldn’t search for FuckTrump, but you could search for FuckObama or FuckBiden. Trump was searchable, but Biden, Kamala, Bernie, and Obama were not. You could search for MelaniaTrump, but not MichelleObama. PresidentTrump still showed millions of results, while discussions of PresidentBiden were marked as “sensitive content”.
We don’t know what caused Meta to censor these words, but we do know this was not affecting “both sides.”. This was an extremely targeted list of censored words.
As a contrast, I saw several claims on Threads and IG that TikTok was also heavily censoring content. I tested it out for myself and was still fully able to search for words like “Fascist,” “Fascism,” “Democrat,” and “Trump”. I was also able to post pro-Palestinian content like “Free Palestine” without having the post removed. If TikTok is censoring content, they are being more clever about it than Instagram is.
Though we can prove that Instagram was censoring certain hashtags last night, we can’t say why they were doing it. It’s possible this really was a computer error with no human oversight, but I’ve never heard of a computer bug that only affects people based on their political affiliation.
To understand why this happened, take a look at the context surrounding it. Last year, Trump accused Zuckerberg of election interference and threatened to lock Mark up “for life”. After Trump won the election, Zuckerberg started a series of regular visits to Mar-a-Lago for private meetings with the President-Elect. Last week, Zuckerberg announced big changes to Meta’s content moderation team and added Dana White (a Trump loyalist) to Meta’s board. Yesterday, Zuckerberg attended Trump’s inauguration along with Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Shou Zi Chew, and several other of the richest tech oligarchs.
With all of that in mind, I find it unlikely that an Instagram error selectively silencing Trump’s political opponents would coincidentally occur on the first day of his second presidency. Given the state of *gestures broadly at everything around me*, I believe that Meta has many systems in place to quickly silence Trump’s political opponents, and last night we saw one of those systems being used. If Meta really did have an “error” yesterday, it was probably that they activated that system too early. #Biden#Obama#Kamala#Trump#BarackObama#DonaldTrump#MichelleObama#MelanieTrump#Democrat#Republican#leftist#AltRight#Liberal#conservative#OccupyDemocrats#Maga#VoteBlue#GOP#PresidentBiden
Analysis: "Israel’s structural genocide will only end when military, diplomatic support is cut".
"The cessation of fighting does not end the structural genocide that Palestinians have faced since 1948" in one "of the most intense genocidal wars in recent history."
Israel always "causes massive destruction & pays no consequences.... Support for Israel must end."
trumps inauguration is unlikely to usher in an age of human rights…the world needs an uninterrupted and aggressive attempt to criminally prosecute those responsible for this ethnic cleansing (and all ethnic cleansing)
Well, what the world's people need is, sadly, not what western leaders want. That's the reality.
The UN & its courts, etc. have no policing power, so they rely on member states imposing sanctions on criminal states.
But many UN countries are client states of the US & afraid of US retribution. Plus, many have committed crimes themselves & are avoiding prosecution by remaining silent.
Washington’s confected alternative to international law, the so-called “rules-based international order”, is now exposed as nothing more than a hypocritical protection racket in free fall Scott Burchill is Honorary Fellow in International Relations a…
Trump administration directs all federal DEI staff to be put on leave
Trump’s administration is directing that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion staff be put on paid leave, and that agencies develop plans to lay them off, according to a memo from the Office of Personnel Management.
Follow live updates on Donald Trump's first full day back at the White House, as his executive orders are attempting to rescind the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship and firing presidential appointees.
If you’re not blocking SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) attachments in email messages you might want to.
I have observed something I haven’t yet seen. Malicious email messages where the attachment the threat actor wants the target to open is a to SVG file pretending to be an agreement.
The SVG file when loaded makes a HTTP call to load a remote image, it also contains a transparent layer which links to the malicious website.
@misterspinalzo I don't know if they have quite yet hit the point where they will say, "Yes. We are Nazis because Hitler did nothing wrong". But, if nothing stops them for the next decade, history books will reframe Hitler as a misunderstood hero. That is when this will be normal. Right now there are still people who will rightly get upset. So they will have to cover it with, "Oh he was just excited and didn't realize what it looked like*. Or... "That's just a South African football move"...
So like, the world's foremost anti-antisemitism group not condemning a government official even accidentally Nazi saluting, mostly just normalizes Nazi saluting right?
Join organizational leaders and everyday people from across the climate movement TODAY, Tuesday, January 21st at 8pm ET/5pm PT for the What's Next for Climate virtual organizing call and rally.
The Trump regime removed and reassigned several top career officials in the Justice Department’s national security and criminal divisions, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters #AureFreePress #News #press #headline #breaking #breakingnews
I searched for how to disable the AI stuff. It seems that you can't do it officially or permanently though there's a workaround that gets rid of it for now (probably until the next update).
It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s two Copilot products with the same name already.
When I started working at Microsoft I got access to Microsoft Sentinel. No, not the SIEM - we had two products called Microsoft Sentinel, it turned out. I tried getting our one renamed to Grimsby but alas it didn’t work out.
First there was GitHub Copilot, the OG Copilot. And that seemingly was successful at what it did.
And because GitHub is a limited-integrated MSFT property, they of course kept the name and reused it EVERYWHERE where there is a search form. The did change the icon though.
So now you got Azure Copilot, M365 Copilot, Windows Copilot, Bing Copilot and of couse bare Copilot. Neither of which is GitHub Copilot.
The thing I do not understand though is, why there is no Microsoft Flightsimulator Copilot. That would make sense.
On that note, I was installing Office for Windows 3.1 in a VM the other day and was taken by surprise when it asked me if I wanted to install "Microsoft Graph"
Do you have any advice on how to get rid of Microsoft Edge browser version 132.0.2957.115? The Uninstall button from Windows settings does not work although gives Yes/No option "Do you want to allow this app to make changes to your device?"
My job got a 1 year free trial of the Office Copilot. It’s so awful, I don’t think I have used it for months now.
The sales pitch was that you could point it at some spreadsheets and pdfs or whatever and then say, make me a PowerPoint presentation for Q3 blah blah blah. I tried taking an audit report and seeing if it could do that and it couldn’t. Hours wasted trying to coax the thing. Nothing useable. Like the most garbage output ever.
Microsoft have a long, well established track record of poorly branding products and or services that confuse both end users and those trying to implement their stuff. They particularly like doing it midway through my projects! 😉
Word is just Notepad.exe for people who like making text ugly.
PowerPoint is just finger-painting for Executives.
Paying an annual subscription fee so that Microsoft can datamine your documents and scrape them for corporate secrets doesn’t sound like a very good deal, unless you *really* need Excel for something other than a poor-man’s database.
(Editor's note: The Index will no longer be publishing photos or images of Donald Trump. The man needs no further publicity. He takes up enough space in the world as it is.)
#Biden
#Obama
#Kamala
#Trump
#BarackObama
#DonaldTrump
#MichelleObama
#MelanieTrump
#Democrat
#Republican
#leftist
#AltRight
#Liberal
#conservative
#OccupyDemocrats
#Maga
#VoteBlue
#GOP
#PresidentBiden
Friendica software. To learn how to make your own, go look at https://friendi.ca
