Daily Happiness
Jul. 28th, 2025 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
2. I got my hair cut this morning. That always feels nice.
3. Look at that cutey chin!

"If your customers are too happy, you're leaving money on the table": it's the rallying cry of the enshittifier, and it's also what a friend of mine was told by a respected professor in a top-tier MBA program.
Enshittification is the theory that if platforms can shift value away from workers, suppliers, users and/or customers without facing consequences, we should expect that they will. A company is a colony organism made up of many differing organelles, some of whom have firm moral centers and good values, but those factions can't win an argument about enshittifying the company's offerings merely by gesturing towards their ethical reservations. To win that argument, the good guys have to be able to appeal to a villain's highest priority: their own self-interest. It's one thing to say, "I'll feel gross if we wreck our product this way," but it's another altogether to say, "We'll go broke – because of fines, or employee defections, or competitor poaching, or interoperable blocking tech – if we do it your way":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
Someone in the org is always ready to believe that the customers (or workers, or suppliers) are too happy, and that this represents money left on the table. Customer service can be scaled back, wages cut, free features turned into upsells. Some of capitalism's most imaginative inventors are enshittifiers, dreaming up new ways to sell you to yourself.
The great tragedy of all this is that the more useful and important a service becomes to you, the more the service's proprietors can extract from you. They don't care if you hate them, so long as you love the data, the friends, the productivity, the utility you get from the service more.
Writing in Ethics and Information Technology, Louisiana State's Michael J Ardoline and Muhlenberg College's Edward Lenzo write about another one of enshittification's systematic torments: "The cognitive and moral harms of platform decay":
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-025-09846-1
The authors observe that our technologies quickly turn into cognitive prostheses: as soon as we can externalize some function of our thinking into a technology, we do.
I used to walk around with a hundred phone numbers in my head, now I remember two, maybe three on a good day. Which is fine! Sure, remembering those phone numbers wasn't cognitively useless. I cultivated all kinds of clever mnemonics based on the spatial relationships of the phone buttons, their alphabetical equivalents, the tones they made, and the arithmetic relationships between sequential digits, all of which constituted a kind of cognitive workout. But after the Great Telephone Number Forgettering, I retasked all that cognitive capacity to memorizing and thinking about stuff that's much less arbitrary and far more consequential than phone numbers.
Whenever we adopt a cognitive prosthesis, there's always someone who overweights the value of the old system of unassisted thinking, while ignoring the cool things we can do with the free capacity we get from replacing our fallible and scarce meat-thinkers with something reproducible and external. No one is immune to this: Socrates thought that reading would make us all stupid because we'd lose the discipline of memorizing all works of literature (ironically, we only know that Socrates thought this because Plato wrote it down):
https://wondermark.com/socrates-vs-writing/
Versions of this continue to play out. When I was a kid, there was a moral panic that pocket calculators would make us all innumerate (an argument advanced by people who know so little about mathematics that they think it's the same thing as arithmetic). Now I keep hearing about millennials who can't read an analog clock, a skill that has as much objective utility as knowing how to interpret a slide-rule or convert from Francs to Lire to Deutschemarks. Not actually useless, but entirely bound to a specific time and place and a mere historical curiosity at some later date.
So I love cognitive prostheses. As a perennially disoriented man with innately poor spatial reasoning and consequently no ability to parse a map, I fucking love living in the age of turn-by-turn GPS directions.
If you wanna know how I write 2-3 books per year, blame the cognitive prosthesis of blogging, which forces me to apply rigor to the notes I take, and rewards me with a searchable database of everything I've ever found important, while stimulating a constant mnemonic rejuggling of all those thoughts that crystallizes into an endless stream of novel synthetic insights and road-tested ways to express them:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/
My blogging is self-hosted, and for good reason. An asset that important to my personal and professional life is too precious to entrust to any kind of third party service, especially in light of the collapse of discipline that prevents firms from enshittifying. Remember, the enshittifier's motto is "If your customer is too happy, you're leaving money on the table." My digital, networked online notebook makes me very happy indeed, which means that if it were under the control of an enshittotropic colony organism like Google or Apple or Microsoft or Meta, it would only be a matter of time until some dominant faction decided to see how much they could extract from me by holding it to ransom or making it worse.
It's not practical for everyone to self-host everything. I'm blessed with a lot of technical knowledge and the incredible talents and generosity of a brilliant sysadmin, the wonderful Ken Snider, who makes it all go for me. I've known Ken for 20+ years and the man is no enshittifier. But most of us don't have a Ken in our lives, and even fewer of us are Ken, and so perforce, most of us end up externalizing large parts of our brains to networked services run by companies that would enshittify you without a second thought.
Trusting these companies with so much of your life can be catastrophic, because they are manifestly too big to care, which is why you can't get a customer service rep to save your life (and why they're turning over their vestigial customer service functions to chatbots, AKA "the Idgaf Gambit").
Take the case of "Mike," a software developer whose infant son developed a UTI during the covid lockdowns. On advice from his pediatrician, Mike took a picture of his son's infected penis with his Android phone and sent it to the doctor using a secure telemedicine app, forgetting that his Android device would also automatically sync all his photos to Google's cloud. Google automatically scans all these photos, and it flagged this one as child sexual abuse material (AKA "child pornography"), which resulted in the termination of all of Mike's Google services.
In an instant, Mike lost every family photo he'd taken since his son's birth, every saved email, all of his business and tax records in his Google Drive, his phone number (he was a Google Fi subscriber), his authenticator app, and his email address itself. Google handed his search history and many other sensitive records they held on him to the San Francisco Police Department, who concluded that everything was fine. But the cops couldn't tell Mike any of this because he had no phone and no email, and, lacking these, could not recover any of his online accounts. Eventually, an SFPD detective had to ring Mike's doorbell to tell him he was cleared of any wrongdoing. Despite this, Mike never got his accounts or data back:
https://locusmag.com/2024/07/cory-doctorow-unpersoned/
This is an accidental lobotimization of your outboard brain – it's what happens when a company that's too big to care drops one of its procedures on your head and crushes it like a grape. But there is an important sense in which these companies do care: they care whether you hate them more than you value the data and connections and utility they control. They care about this because if you're too happy, they're leaving money on the table.
That's where Ardoline and Lenzo's work comes in. They both document the ways in which we turn these online services into cognitive prostheses, and then investigate how the enshittification of these services ends up making us stupider, by taking away the stuff that helps us think. They're drawing a line between platform decay and cognitive decay.
The authors look at examples like the enshittification of Google Search, a product that Google has deliberately and irretrievably enshittified:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
The web is a giant cognitive prosthesis, and early web tools put a lot of emphasis on things like bookmark management and local caching, so that the knowledge and cognition you externalized to the web were under your control. But Google Search was so goddamned magic – before they cynically destroyed it – that a lot of us switched from "not remembering things because you have a bookmark that takes you to a website that remembers it for you" to "not remembering things and not remembering where to find them, and just typing queries into Google." The collapse of Google into a giant pile of shit is like giving every web user a traumatic brain injury.
It's a good paper, but I think the situation is actually more dire than the paper makes it out to be, thanks to the AI bubble –
Wait! I'm not actually going to talk about what AI can do (which is a combination of a small set of boring useful things, a bunch of novelties, and a long list of things that AI can't do but is being used to do anyway). I'm talking about the financial fraud that AI serves.
Tech companies must be perceived as growing, because when a company is growing, it is valued far more highly than a company is once it has "matured." This is called the "price to earnings ratio" – the number of dollars investors are willing to pay for the company compared to the number of dollars a company is bringing in. So long as a company is growing, the PE ratio is very high, and this helps the company to actually grow. That's because the shares in growing companies are highly liquid, and can be traded for equity in other companies and/or the labor of key employees, meaning that growth companies can almost always outbid their mature counterparts when it comes to expanding through acquisition and hiring. That means that while a company is growing, its PE ratio can help it keep growing.
But here's the corollary: when a growth company stops growing, its shares are suddenly and violently revalued as though they were shares in a mature company, which tanks the personal net worth of the company's top managers and key employees (whose portfolios are stuffed with their employer's now-plummeting stock). Worse: in order to retain those employees and hire more (or to acquire key companies), the no-longer-growing company has to pay with cash, which is much harder to get than its own shares. Even worse: they have to bid against growing companies.
A growth company is like an airplane that has two modes: climbing and nose-diving, and while it's easy to go from climbing to crashing, it's much harder to go the other way. Ironically, the moment at which a company's growth is most likely to stall is right after its greatest triumph: after a company conquers its market, it has nowhere else to go. Google's got a 90% Search market-share – how can it possibly grow Search?
It can't (just like Meta can't really grow social, and Microsoft can't grow office suites, etc), so it has to convince Wall Street that it has a shot at conquering some other market that the street perceives as unimaginably vast and thus capable of keeping the growth engine going. Tech has pulled a lot of sweaty tricks to create this impression, inflating bubbles like "pivot to video" and "metaverse" and "cryptocurrency," and now it's AI.
The problem is that AI just isn't very popular. People go out of their way to avoid AI products:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040
For an AI-driven growth story to work, tech companies have to produce a stream of charts depicting lines that go up and to the right, reflecting some carefully chosen set of metrics demonstrating AI's increasing popularity. One way to produce these increasing trend-lines on demand is to replace all the most commonly used parts of a service that you love and rely on with buttons that summon an AI. This is the "fatfinger AI economy," a set of trendlines produced by bombarding people who graze their screens with a stray fingertip with a bunch of AI bullshit, so you can claim that your users are "engaging" with AI:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem
It's a form of "twiddling" – changing how a service works on a per-user, per-interaction basis in order to shift value from the user to the company:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Twiddling represents the big cognitive hazard from enshittification during the AI bubble: the parts of your UI that matter most to you are the parts that you use as vital cognitive prostheses. A product team whose KPI is "get users to tap on an AI button" is going to use the fine-grained data they have on your technological activities to preferentially target these UI elements that you rely on with AI boobytraps. You are too happy, so they are leaving money on the table, and they're coming for it.
This is a form of "attention rent": the companies are taxing your muscle-memory, forcing you to produce deceptive usage statistics at the price of either diverting your cognition from completing a task to hunt around for the button that banishes the AI and lets you get back to what you were doing; or to simply abandon that cognitive prosthesis:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers
It's true "engagement-hacking": not performing acts of dopamine manipulation; but rather, spying on your habitual usage of a digital tool in order to swap buttons around in order to get you to make a number go up. It's exploiting the fact that you engage with something useful and good to make it less useful and worse, because if you're too happy, some enshittifier is leaving money on the table.
(Image: Stephen Drake, CC BY 2.0; modified)
The South Park thing https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/07/the-south-park-thing/
A billion people would be plenty to sustain civilisation https://crookedtimber.org/2025/07/27/a-billion-people-would-be-plenty-to-sustain-civilisation/
VHS tape with a built-in digital mp4 video player https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYrY3nFrsho
BVH 522232323434 https://chrisbathgate.blogspot.com/2025/07/bvh-522232323434.html
#20yrsago Canada bans copying CDs to iPods https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2005/07/crias-higher-risk-strategy/
#20yrsago No taking pix of San Fran building from the sidewalk? https://thomashawk.com/2005/07/one-bush.html
#20yrsago Microsoft “Genuine Advantage” cracked in 24h: window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’ https://web.archive.org/web/20050810083151/http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24961
#20yrsago Costikyan’s jeremiad against the video game industry https://web.archive.org/web/20050730021700/http://www.costik.com/weblog/2005_07_01_blogchive.html#112254986073206098
#20yrsago Economics of used books https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/technology/reading-between-the-lines-of-used-book-sales.html
#20yrsago My Adbusters sf story https://craphound.com/stories/2000/08/06/the-rebranding-of-billy-bailey/
#20yrsago Richard Branson claims to own all uses of “virgin” https://web.archive.org/web/20051030080223/http://www.chillingeffects.org/weather.cgi?WeatherID=507
#20yrsago Security researcher quits job and blows whistle on Cisco’s fatal flaws https://web.archive.org/web/20060426162432/http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11259
#20yrsago File-sharers buy more music than non-swappers http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4718249.stm
#15yrsago Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain: alternate history in which John Brown wins at Harper’s Ferry https://memex.craphound.com/2010/07/27/bissons-fire-on-the-mountain-alternate-history-in-which-john-brown-wins-at-harpers-ferry/
#15yrsago Inception‘s musical secret https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVkQ0C4qDvM
#15yrsago Shark Knife will terrify your enemies with macho impracticality https://web.archive.org/web/20100724002534/https://www.sadanduseless.com/image.php?n=293
#10yrsago Satanic Temple required protesters to pledge their souls to Satan as condition of entry https://web.archive.org/web/20150728003106/http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/07/26/to-weed-out-protesters-at-last-nights-event-the-satanic-temple-had-attendees-transfer-their-souls-to-satan/
#5yrsago Quick, inaccurate, cheap covid tests https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#pick-one
#5yrsago Swarov.se https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#goatse
#5yrsago Police "unions" are not unions https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#selective-solidarity
#5yrsago Snowden's Little Brother intro https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#snowden
#5yrsago Audible Exclusives https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#acx
#5yrsago Mexican copyright crushes free speechhttps://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#mexico-copyright
#5yrsago Afterland https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#XY
#5yrsago NYPD disciplinary records https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/#nypd-who
#5yrsago Replace the police https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/#defund-the-police
#5yrsago My HOPE 2020 talk https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/#digital-human-rights
#5yrsago Constitution Illustrated https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/#r-sikoryak
DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25
Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469
Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress)
https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409
If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Editor’s Note:
Last night’s attacks were brutal. Undoubtedly people left the scenes of strikes with terrible injuries that need reconstructive surgery of one kind or another.
Our mission is not just to tell you about the strikes, but the legacy of physical scars and the people who bear them.
Do you support our human-first news approach? Upgrade your subscription!
Sensitive content: the story contains photos of injuries
“I’m 300, I’m 300,” Yana shouted to her comrades, using the code for battlefield injuries.
The shock from the attack erased any memories of how she was evacuated from the position. Yet, the scars on her body are a constant reminder of that moment.
“My hands and face are burned, everything is covered in shrapnel... My face was like a sieve,” Yana recalled.
Like Yana, thousands of Ukrainians have suffered from physical injuries caused by explosive drones, mines, and missiles since Russia’s full-scale invasion started.
They count themselves lucky to be able to share their stories, but the horror of their attacks continues to haunt them every time they look at themselves in the mirror.
Just last night, Russia launched another massive attack, sending more than 300 drones toward civilian cities across Ukraine. In Kyiv alone, eight people were injured, including a child. As Ukraine waits for all 17 Patriot systems that NATO partners will buy from the U.S., cosmetology in Ukraine is no longer just an aesthetic choice; it is becoming a necessity for many recovering from injuries.
As of March 2024, more than 2,000 military personnel have required surgery and facial reconstruction procedures. To this end, several rehabilitation centers have opened in Ukraine that provide aesthetic treatment for the wounded for free.
Plastic surgery has the reputation of being for the very rich or very vain. But in these wartime cases, doctors show a deeply empathetic and altruistic side of the field. Instead of waiting for the government to respond to every wartime challenge, people are stepping up to to help the most vulnerable.
When Russian forces entered Yana’s native Kherson region in early 2022, she promised to take revenge against the enemy for illegally occupying her home city.
Yana joined the army in 2022, only a week after she got out of occupation, and went by the call sign ‘Multyk’, which means cartoon in Ukrainian.
She moved around a lot as she searched for her place in the military: at first, she worked as a military journalist, and she was then retrained as a combat medic.
Despite working constantly on the front lines, she managed to avoid the most serious injuries, receiving only concussions.
In the military, they joke that those wounds are not real injuries, Yana said.
She chose to leave her role as a combat medic when the weight of watching her colleagues die became too much to bear. So she shifted to a drone operator in one of the hottest fronts of the Donetsk region.
That’s when she got injured: ironically while on a break from a combat mission. A Russian drone exploded right above Yana, when she went outside for a couple of minutes. Luckily, the drone got stuck in the tree branches – otherwise her injuries could have been much worse.
“I had been at my post for a long time, and I guess fatigue played a cruel joke on me. I thought it was our [Ukrainian] drone taking off, but it was actually an [Russian] drone flying towards our antennas. I heard that it was flying towards me," Yana recalled the moment when she was wounded.
Despite the severe injury, Yana decided to return to her job as a drone operator a year after the attack, immediately after she felt ready to fight on.
Four days after the attack, Yana had a call with her commander: “Sir, give me some time, I'll be back,” she told him.
Between 10,000 and nearly 47,000 Ukrainian soldiers have suffered craniofacial injuries, which involve the face, neck, jaw, and skull. In addition to that, between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians have had amputations as of 2023; about half of these cases have left scars on people’s stumps, which can cause pain and discomfort when using a prosthesis.
It took seven months and about ten operations to restore Yana’s body to the state that would allow her to return to military service. She had endured two ruptured eardrums, shrapnel wounds all over her body, and shrapnel in her eyes.
The restoration process started by removing the remaining shrapnel from Yana’s body. The process consisted of multiple operations and dozens of stitches. She also had to go through numerous operations on her ears to restore her eardrums. She now uses hearing aids.
Currently, Yana is awaiting one more operation on her right ear. She also frequently undergoes laser resurfacing procedures for her face and hands, which are still marred by the discoloration caused by the dirt trapped beneath the skin.
“Honestly, sometimes it was really overwhelming,” she said. “I cried because I understood that my arms would never be the same... But I tried to listen to the doctors and my comrades who supported me.”
Yana’s rehabilitation and treatments are free of charge. At the start of the full-scale invasion, doctors working in the fields of plastic surgery, dermatology, and aesthetic medicine decided to volunteer their services to treat military personnel and civilians wounded in the war.
One of the volunteer projects available in Ukraine is ‘Neopalymi’. Its co-founder, Oleksandr Turkevych, contacted Yana himself after the photo of her injury got really popular on the Internet and offered to treat her at his clinic. His project offers cosmetology and dermatology procedures in clinics across Ukraine to help people wounded during the war.
“At some point, the question arose that our knowledge and skills would obviously be useful in helping people with scars and burns,” said Oleksandr Turkevych, dermatologist and founder of ‘Neopalymi’ project, founded in the first half of 2022.
During the first months of the invasion, it was too early to launch the project, as scars and burns can only be treated once they have completely healed, which can take between four and six months. During these months, however, Oleksandr worked on assembling a team and preparing to receive the patients.
The restoration procedure mainly combines laser and injection treatment. Each patient’s situation is different and may require an additional step.
‘Neopalymi’ currently has 32 partner clinics across 16 regions in Ukraine and Poland, which are assisting wounded civilians and military personnel. A couple of hundred people are undergoing treatment under this project, Oleksandr said.
Patients in need of assistance fill out an online form, and they are then invited to schedule their initial checkup. There are far fewer requests from civilians than from the military, Oleksandr added. The program also includes psychological supervision for the patients.
Injuries are categorized into two types, Oleksandr said: traumatic, resulting from shrapnel and penetrating wounds, and thermal, caused by high temperatures/fire.
About 73 percent of the cases in the project are a result of an explosion, which can cause shrapnel injuries, concussions, and even the amputation of a limb. In addition, over 95 percent of soldiers held in Russian captivity were subjected to torture, often resulting in physical disfigurement and gangrene that led to amputations.
One of the most recent examples is the case of former Ukrainian POW Andrii Pereverziev, who told his story in an interview to United24 and is also a patient of Oleksandr Turkevych. He was returned from captivity as part of a series of large-scale prisoner exchanges between Ukraine and Russia, which was agreed upon at the first round of talks in Istanbul in May.
The picture of his body after his release went viral across social media platforms.
Russian forces captured Andrii after he was wounded amid a grenade explosion, and he underwent surgery during captivity. When he came out of surgery, he noticed that the Russian surgeon had burned ‘Glory to Russia’ and the letter ‘Z’ — a symbol of the Russian war — on his stomach.
“He is currently undergoing treatment, which consists of various stages, and of course, there is still a long way to go,” Oleksandr told The Counteroffensive. “We have only just begun, but he is already noticing improvements.”
Andrii is receiving injections of polynucleotide, which helps reduce scarring and improve the condition of the affected area. After the first part of the treatment concludes, more aggressive interventions will be employed, including lasers.
The laser is used to heal thermal and post-surgical scars. It is also used to reduce pigmentation, scar thickness, pain, and itching. Additionally, it helps improve texture, flexibility, color, and range of motion in joints.
Yana is aware that she still has a long way to go in her recovery.
“Basically, I have accepted myself with my scars and my hands, which are still black [the dirt got under Yana’s skin together with sharpnel],” Yana said.
In addition to the existing injury, Yana suffered additional injuries after returning to duty a year after her first incident. She suffered a concussion when she and her crew were fleeing artillery fire.
"I am no longer the Yana I was before my injury. And I am not the Yana I was in 2022, when I was full of enthusiasm. That is, you get tired faster, but you hold on purely because of your character, because I am in the senior group of the FPV [drone] crew, and I cannot let them down," Yana said.
Russia has been leaving its mark on every Ukrainian for over three years: dark circles under the eyes after air strikes, gray hair from constant stress, wrinkles from relentless tension.
But scars such as a shrapnel fragment under the skin, or a burn that prevents you from clenching your fist, are worse.
They remind you of your traumatic experience every day.
By: Artem Moskalenko
Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.
UKRAINE IMPORTED AZERBAIJANI GAS FOR THE FIRST TIME: The move was a test delivery of gas via the Trans-Balkan corridor. This route allows gas to be transported from the South Caucasus and through the Balkans to Central and Eastern Europe, bypassing Russia. This was announced by Serhii Koretsky, chairman of the board of Naftogaz, the largest state-owned energy company in Ukraine.
Ukraine needs to import gas because Russia attacked the country's gas infrastructure. Ukraine is currently at a historic low in gas reserves and needs at least another 5 billion cubic meters of gas to ensure a stable energy supply for the country during next winter.
At the same time, this makes it possible to transport Azerbaijani gas through Ukraine to Europe after Ukraine stopped the transit of Russian gas on January 1, 2025. This is an alternative source of gas that will help replace Russian energy resources and free Europe from its dependence on Russian energy.
RUSSIAN AIRLINE CANCELED 40+ FLIGHTS DUE TO HACK: the hacker groups Silent Crow and Cyberpartisans BY claimed responsibility for the incident affecting Aeroflot.
The hackers claim that during the operation, which lasted about a year, they gained access to a massive amount of flight history data, personnel control systems, and recordings of internal company telephone conversations.
They managed to destroy thousands of the airline's servers, “compromise all critical corporate systems,” and gain control over the personal computers of the company's management.
According to them, the damage is “strategic” and recovery could cost tens of millions of dollars. Aeroflot has not commented on these statements.
LITHUANIA STRENGTHENS AIRSPACE PROTECTION AFTER INCIDENT WITH RUSSIAN DRONE: On the morning of July 28, an unidentified drone flew into Lithuanian airspace from Belarus. It was spotted over the country's capital, Vilnius.
After that, several NATO reconnaissance aircraft from Britain, Latvia, and Poland were sent to monitor the country's airspace. Later, another aircraft from Moldova was sent to patrol around the Kaliningrad region.
According to the commander-in-chief of the Lithuanian army, Lithuania has a plan to deploy additional air defense assets closer to the border.
This is Rusoriz the kitten. Tanya and her friend found the kitten in a trash can and decided to take it home and find it a new owner. They named the kitten Rusoriz, which in Ukrainian means ‘to cut Russians’ and is a name of the ongoing fundraising campaign for FPV kamikaze drones for the Ukrainian army.
Unfortunately, Tanya couldn't keep the kitten because she is allergic to cats. But the grandmother of Tanya's other friend agreed to take it, and now Rusoriz lives in a private home.
Stay safe out there.
Best,
Nastia
Once More With Feeling by Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton.
A non-fiction account of their attempt to make a porn film after they stumbled into a job reviewing porn movies in their youths and decided they could definitely do it better. I DNF'd I'm afraid - I'm just hopeless at reading physical texts these days. My eyesight is worse at night which is usually when I read, and I can't read them in bed. I was enjoying this amusing tale, and if it was an audiobook I'd have mainlined it for sure. Unfortunately, as an older text, it's not even an ebook. Recommended if you still read physical books.