transcoranic

What if, when you went to a nonprofit/charity/etc website because you want to donate money to them, you could add ?nomarketing on the end of the link, and it would bring up a barebones version of their donation page that would JUST LET YOU MAKE A SINGLE DONATION.

It would not sign you up to their newsletter.
It would not give them permission to contact you.
It would not ask you to share their link on social media.
It would not ask you how you found them.
It would not show you a thank you letter written in the first person by a composite version of one of their clients.
It would not show you tragic and distressing photographs or descriptions of the horrible things happening to the people you HAVE ALREADY DECIDED TO GIVE MONEY TO HELP.
There would not be any animated banners or carousels.
There would be no popups.
Required fields on the form would only be information they genuinely cannot accept your money without, and they would have checked both the law on what information they actually need and their assumptions about names and titles (e.g. not everyone has a first name, not everyone has a last name, not everyone's name is short, some names have spaces or apostrophes or hyphens, not everyone belongs to one of the four genders Mr, Mrs, Miss, and Dr.)
It would not give you a menu with three choices: make your one-off donation a monthly amount, make your one-off donation a monthly amount but more money, or (deselected and in a duller colour) "keep your one-off donation" before letting you donate.
Or after you donate.
Or both.

I understand they have a job to do, but do they understand how aversive this experience is? It is the biggest thing about charitable giving that I dread, when I have enough to give. "Hi, I'd like to give you some mon-" "CAN YOU GIVE US MORE? CAN YOU GIVE IT EVERY MONTH? KIDS ARE DYING, VASS, ANIMALS ARE DYING, THE PLANET IS DYING, MOREMOREMOREMORE CAN WE TEXT YOU, CAN WE CALL YOU UP AND TELL YOU ABOUT THE DYING KIDS CAN YOU TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO GIVE US MONEY TOO-"

If they made it less stressful, I would not have to psych myself up to do this. And by definition this is how they are treating people who already want to help them.

Books
Still reading Freya Marske's A Restless Truth.
Gave Maxine Beneba Clarke's poetry book How Decent People Behave a go, but so far it hasn't grabbed me. I'll give it another try before I return it to the library.

Food
Made a second attempt at making ice cream met. The first attempt wouldn't freeze properly. I had made the fatal Just A Few Alterations to the recipe.
My hypothesis was that in fact it wasn't my alterations but rather that the custard wasn't chilled enough. I found a product review from someone claiming it needed to be chilled not "in fridge for 4-6 hours" as the manual claims, but in the freezer until "chunks start to form".
I intended to test this hypothesis by making the basic vanilla recipe from the manual the ice cream machine came with, without alterations. But I was out of caster sugar and vanilla and didn't want to wait, so I swapped in brown sugar and cinnamon.
Success: perfectly cromulent ice cream. A little bit too rich, maybe, but definitely acceptable.

Links

• via rydra_wong, US politics phone scripts
• UK heritage crafts at risk of extinction
• Community colleges are facing a wave of bots registering for class to steal financial aid.
• Hannah Montana Linux, a (old and I don't think it's been updated in a very long time, so be careful if you want to actually install it) Hannah Montana themed Linux distribution

Life
I'm still reading my reading page here, but not every day, and I'm very behind and missing a lot. Please ping me if there's something you'd like to call my attention to.

Books
Still reading Freya Marske's A Restless Truth, at the rate of chapter every day or two because I'm just not that excited about it, unfortunately.

Read Andrew Sutherland's Paradise (point of transmission), a book of poems related to seroconverting while living and studying in Singapore and therefore losing his visa and needing to move back to Australia because people living with HIV are not permitted to hold long-term visas there. He was still reckoning with this loss, and with his life with an incurable chronic illness, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. I liked this one a lot.

Read Cameron Reed's novelette, 'The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For'. It is very good to see new work by her. I'm not sure whether this story landed for me or not. The worldbuilding was cool, it's the ending I'm not certain about.

TV/Movies
Watched Pixar's Inside Out (2015). Generally I liked it.

Spoilers:
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Garden
I tried the basil seedling in some potting soil and it started wilting. I suspect not enough water or too much, and I can't tell which. It's still alive, but it's not looking good.