She included a very sweet print of that on a card with the two pieces I recently purchased from her.

Wise old horticultural woman I met: “If you find a rabbit’s foot and tickle the leaves of your tomato plant with it your tomatoes will grow faster.” Me: “Interesting. I might try that.” Next-door’s rabbit, the following day: “Stop that, and put me the fuck down. I did not consent to this.”

Call me a luddite but I kind of prefer the old version of the Devil who used to put a murrain on crops and command his demon dogs to terrorise church congregations to the new one who insists on having an app for everything and gets rich by designing clever ways of capitalising on people's fatigue.

Exciting update: I went here again the other day and found that it has resident donkeys. Even better: THE DONKEYS LIVE IN THE SAME FIELD WITH PYGMY GOATS.

Badgers run like old neglected footstools who have suddenly discovered their own sentience.

An old door in an old wall which is so arrogantly great, it’s almost disgusting.

Technocapitalists’ great trick is to make people who hate all this bullshit feel like they’re suffering from the same fogeys-not-coping-with-a-changing-world syndrome every generation succumbs to, rather than, say, just rejecting a rampant evil that seeks to rob us of our individuality and soul.

To celebrate March, here's a meadow hare linoprint by my mum, Jo, from my book Ring The Hill (which is a medieval term for hare). More about my mum’s work here: www.tom-cox.com/the-magic-ro...

This bit right here, the complacency! The frogs all sitting in hot water, looking at their phones, asking for more stuff, for drinks, more shoes, for IKEA crap, for AI cat videos (why??? The real ones are great!), and as the water starts to boil, they lay back yowling and blame the Green party 😓

Remember when Apple Maps was first released and everyone absolutely roasted it because it sometimes gave you a bad route? We are now supposed to base our entire economy on an even less reliable technology 😡

We recently moved into a new build house. I noticed there was no doorbell, and asked if they were going to fit one. The woman wrinkled her face and said “no, most people want a smart one”. Now if people want to make themselves known, they just bang on the door, which works fine.

I am glad to be bucking this trend by moving to a stupid home later this month. Some say we will find it difficult to survive without a pointless giant wall clock, an app-operated robot washing machine or a greige colour scheme, but I suspect we will be ok.

Paywall is off this one until 5pm today...

My lil old vacuum robots just pull slightly off the charger and give up. Truly a match for my vibe.

Technocapitalists’ great trick is to make people who hate all this bullshit feel like they’re suffering from the same fogeys-not-coping-with-a-changing-world syndrome every generation succumbs to, rather than, say, just rejecting a rampant evil that seeks to rob us of our individuality and soul.

WHY DO ALL THESE HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES WANT TO BE CONNECTED TO THE BLOODY INTERNET? Our landlady installed light switches that don't work properly unless you use them in conjunction with an app. I don't want a fucking app for light switches. I just want to switch a light on and off, using a switch.

The thing I don’t get is why doors still have handles, surely by now we should be opening them from an app which you have to load every time you want to walk from one room to another

Me too. Every morning, I check the news, fearing what now! And every fucking morning, the news says: "You're not going to believe this, but this shit happened whilst you were sleeping." Somebody once said: "If you put a clown in a palace, you don't get a King, you get a circus." They were right!

Every time I see something like this I ask "What problem is this solving?" And then (if there is a problem) "Is there a simpler and more efficient solution to the problem?" with the corollary that a solution should not involve data privacy & the inefficiency of faffing about with passwords etc.

Somerset buttercups, with Wales just over the water in the background (early June, 2019).

Yeah, I know there's two "and"s in the opening post in this thread but I was feeling flustered.

Technocapitalists’ great trick is to make people who hate all this bullshit feel like they’re suffering from the same fogeys-not-coping-with-a-changing-world syndrome every generation succumbs to, rather than, say, just rejecting a rampant evil that seeks to rob us of our individuality & and soul.

Paywall is off this one until 5pm today...

Our washing machine has a setting so you can connect it to the wifi and then turn it on via the internet from anywhere with your phone. You still have to put the clothes and the washing stuff in there but, instead of pressing go you could do that later from a train station or something. Why???

AND having a very natural wish to reject overcomplication on top of overcomplication being added to daily existence and not being so braindead that you don’t see right through that overcomplication’s posturing as a sleek helpful simplification and that the only motive truly underlying it is greed.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves. There is ZERO reason why a machine that SHOULD BE COMPLETELY MECHANICAL needs to be connected to the Internet.

Yey! Thank you @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social!! I wasn’t expecting them to be signed! Richard is chuffed.

100%

They very much need us to buy in to the notion that it's all inevitable, so that they can bring about their techno-feudalistic dystopia.

Appealing to ageism is backfiring because weirdly, the more I fight back, the younger I feel.

I will literally pay extra at this point to not have to use an app.

To elaborate: These "smart feature" add an extra point of failure and obsolescense to everything. What will you do in 5, or 10 years when the manufacturer no longer supports the App? Rip out your lights and buy New. In case of washing machines, the vibrations regularly break the computer Chips.

My fridge is online and works with Google/Alexa/hassio etc. What can it do? It can tell me the temperature inside the fridge, and let me change it remotely. Which is great for all those times when your fridge is at 3°c, and you're traveling interstate and need it to be 4°c, right fucking now.

I am glad to be bucking this trend by moving to a stupid home later this month. Some say we will find it difficult to survive without a pointless giant wall clock, an app-operated robot washing machine or a greige colour scheme, but I suspect we will be ok.

Tom Cox's mum sould be, in my honest opinion, declared a national treasure!

For now I am afraid it is so. Parody shall become possible at a later date. When the jesters finally get off the throne.

I can't think of a bigger “Oh, mum” moment I've had than the time I wrote about Taylor Swift's Folklore album on my website and my mum read it then told me, “I bet that young singer will be ever so pleased with all the extra sales she got because of what you wrote about her."

As Louisa May Alcott once wisely said: “If you’re going to join your local village book group, bring a knife.”

I just want to live in a world that's still not gone quite insane enough to render parodies of real events utterly impossible. Is that really too much to ask?

People need to realise the Internet doesn't know everything. I am thinking, just to pluck one example out of the air, of when Edith Wharton & I were in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris in 1918 & Edith said to me, "Mo Monet, mo problems." Just cos it's not on her Wikipedia doesn't mean it never happened.

I'm making this short story, which I wrote last year, free to read for the next 24 hours (but only telling people on Bluesky about it): www.tom-cox.com/brad-francis...

Technocapitalists’ great trick is to make people who hate all this bullshit feel like they’re suffering from the same fogeys-not-coping-with-a-changing-world syndrome every generation succumbs to, rather than, say, just rejecting a rampant evil that seeks to rob us of our individuality & and soul.

BBC Radio every 5 minutes: or why not ask your smartspeaker? Because I don't have one! I either have a tab open to you on my computer while I work which is surely modern enough or I'm listening on my car's janky FM radio that can only get about 6 stations on a good day!

I personally won’t be satisfied until I’m able to place online wagers from the dehumidifier in my basement.

We all need a ref dwarf “talkie toaster” in our lives…. Don’t we?

What is a garden pond if not a high-specification home for frogs?

WHY DO ALL THESE HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES WANT TO BE CONNECTED TO THE BLOODY INTERNET? Our landlady installed light switches that don't work properly unless you use them in conjunction with an app. I don't want a fucking app for light switches. I just want to switch a light on and off, using a switch.

But does your toaster have a menu you have struggle with to find "slightly carbonise slice of bread 12,7mm thick?" My washing machine wants to be connected to the ther internet to browse machine porn! >_<!

Not what the story in the link is about but why does this frog in my mum and dad's garden pond look so much like a smug billionaire frog casually showing off his pad in an expensive magazine devoted to high-specification homes for frogs? www.tom-cox.com/the-box-of-f...

😍