some people are so used to mostly consuming media where the women and people of color are static set dressing in stories about white men that they can’t wrap their heads around the concept that female characters and characters of color can have arcs of their own. they’ll see a character who’s not a white man display a personality flaw that is clearly being set up to be overcome and they see it not as the setup of what promises to be an enticing character journey, but as an essential defining trait of their being, and proceed to demonize such characters for it. white men get to be dynamic and complex, women and people of color get essentialism and a pressure for likeability over good storytelling.
i’ll never not hold disdain for the idea of “content starvation” and the more i see people parade it around the more i hate it
i think v*ltron putting out eight seasons in two years really kickstarted this in online fan spaces specifically, but nowadays so many shows and games release things at an absolutely absurd rate. pokemon has been notoriously controversial for its crunch time and poor quality of games as a result, bingewatching culture has killed a lot of tv shows because executives have an expectation for instant success and will kill shows if they don’t meet it. and it’s frusterating to continue to see fans treat this like the norm when it comes to their favorite shows or games too. i don’t want to see things put out under absurd crunches. i don’t want to be surrounded by people who’ll cry “i’m so content starved!” and then dismiss the actual content they’re being offered in the same breath. i don’t want to see creators have to feel like they’ve got to keep up with the incessant demands of fans in order to continue making the thing they’re making. hiatuses are normal and there’s always plenty of other stuff to get into while you wait.
like literally the fact that this has 9 notes (and most other posts abt asian american rep i’ve seen, rbed, or written have similar amounts), is proving my point. every time i reblog or post anything about racism agains asians, i can literally see everyone scrolling past it. not even given a performative like. are y’all consciously ignoring it or are you truly just that desensitized to racism against asians?
May I add:
Dont fetishize asians.
Dont make coronavirus jokes about asians. (Yes, it’s still happening, and it’s still a problem.)
Dont like?? Stereotype asians? Not every asian you’re going to meet is good at math or lives on a diet of rice, that’s just rude as hell and wrong
Exactly. Speak up for everyone.
Keep the same energy for racism against all asians as we do with other races. That includes more than just east asians. Asia is more than China, Japan and Korea.
And I see y'all, you’re really selective about the shit y'all reblog from me. This should have more than one reblog.
There has been a sharp increase of AAPI hate crimes ever since the pandemic (especially in the Bay Area if you live in the United States). If you’re going to be an advocate for Asians, please don’t forget to include Southeast Asians, South Asians, Western Asians, Central Asians, and our Pacific Islander cousins in your activism. As well as mixed Asians, too, especially if they’re not white passing
god fell out of heaven yesterday and we all started making fun of him bc the corpse is only like 5'3’’
i have been thinking about this, because i am 5'2 and was raised catholic. in churches, the body of christ lingers ever in the air, on the back of our tongues, in every sconce and shadow. close your eyes. can you draw the shape of white jesus - bent and always muscled, rangy but masculine. i know the slant of his body from every tortured angle. his serene and pleading face - underfoot and rising above. white jesus is always either a baby or he is a 33 year old man, and the halo is goldleaf. jesus on the crucifix is almost always depicted sagging, a little hollow between his back and the wood of the cross.
god fell out of heaven yesterday, and fox news wasn’t pleased about it, because god was 5'3". in our picture books, god takes up the whole sky. god can lift a mountain. god removed my brother’s rib. my father is a deacon and showed me a diagram of the piece that adam used to form eve, and now “all women” have extra ribs. i was 7 and wanted to talk about if faeries are real or if trees can hear or if magic works, which was not favored. good catholic girls do not look like white jesus. they do not look like white old father-god. they might look like mary (virgin, always an adult, always demure). my brother is 6'0", so the lack of a rib did not stunt his growth. maybe i am smaller because the weight of eve’s sin is pulling me down.
they didn’t want to do an autopsy on god, which was ironic, because, like, didn’t we say god made us in his image? and if god has (according to transubstantiation) been inside my body, can’t we, like, get inside of god’s body? that feels fair. i was mad particularly because when i tell people i am nonbinary, they talk about cutting open my grave and peeling back my gender so all the pulp of it shows. when i am dead, they tell me, they will uncover my “real” gender like a butterfly and pin her to the board. but god was 5'3".
the problem was that god was 5'3". first of all god was measured in imperial units which was kind of fucked up. the corpse landed inside of a townhouse in baltimore, which was bad for the insurance adjuster. that was not how the rapture was supposed to take place. also, the rapture is not covered under insurance, before you ask. the corpse of god was left overnight due to a confusingly-worded twitter update. i got in my car and drove south for over 9 hours, listening to the radio and my audiobook. i’m re-listening to graceling, but will always take good fantasy book recommendations. the radio said god’s body made a strange hum - the announcer said like. well. it sounds like the living room fan from my childhood.
fox news had to say it wasn’t god, because god is a man, and men stand up to pee. they had on male experts who talked about how yes, of course, god might have fallen from heaven, and yes his halo has singed through the first layer of the earth’s crust - but this is probably not god. maybe one of the angels. micheal? rapheal? god cannot be 5'3", god lifts the rich from perdition and allows them passage into the fine life above us. god’s body would be brave and tough and rugged like a lumberjack on a papertowel roll. god’s body couldn’t be like this - whalefall. nobody knew what to do with the body, so he was just lying there, alone in his crater.
i have a lot of reasons to hate god. i am not here to defend any part of the faith nor of god. unfortunately god was 5'3", and i am 5'2". and i guess some of us maybe felt the same way because i wasn’t the only one getting out of the car. we all gathered around the crime scene tape and just stood there and looked at the body of god, who is a small man. god wasn’t rotting correctly - his skin was flaking off like feathers overlapping. did i tell you? my girlfriend and i both saw the same god in our dreams, long before we met. we both described the experience as many hands.
all of us who were there bent down and picked up god from the rubble, which was blasphemy. we put him down in a clover patch. a bee rested on his cheek. what do you say at a funeral for god? he didn’t look like jesus. people got mad then, because it wasn’t funny anymore. they didn’t want us to put god on the tombstone, and that made me laugh, and i suggested INRI. unfortunately i was raised super catholic, so that was only funny to like 3 people and of course the honeybee.
i think god would have liked swingsets and public transportation (when it works). i think he would have liked bodegas and good grilled cheese sandwiches. i think he would have lost his mind about dumplings. think of the humor behind getting god stilts or showing god mariokart. it is warm in baltimore so the ground is thawed. we talked about putting god under the ground and under many rocks, which is ironic because like - back in the cave you go. but it felt wrong to close him off from open air. god should sleep with his chest towards heaven, right?
god ruined my childhood and bored a splint through my eye and now i can never see this world without flinching. when i brought him in the clover i still laid him down with a care that almost felt parental. he was so small, is the thing. it was important to be gentle.
I’ve slowly been chipping away at drawing scenes from that imaginary Muppet retelling of the Princess Bride, figured it was about time to share what I’ve drawn on Tumblr!
you sign up for the job because you want to save lives, and sometimes you get a chance to just be really, really, clear about “yes it is my job to save lives, there is an obstacle, and i am paid to use an axe to solve this problem”
you sign up for the job because you want to save lives, and sometimes you get a chance to just be really, really, clear about “yes it is my job to save lives, there is an obstacle, and i am paid to use an axe to solve this problem”
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im working on a thought here but i think a crucial component of supporting and advocating for liberal and progressive ideas is you have to trust people to muddle through mistakes. i see a lot of people that clearly want *safety* for marginalized people but their proposals amount to putting everyone in a padded room with their hands on a well lit table forever. we have to sanitize media, we have to protect people. we can’t hurt anyone, we can’t risk anyone– but we can constantly constantly surveil each other and make new rules against ever doing the wrong things. you know, the bad things, the dirty things, the things that hurt you and make you sick and ruin everything for everyone forever. it’s our moral duty, isn’t it? to make the world cleaner and brighter and safer?
i think, probably, it would help a lot of us to take a deep breath and consider that you have to make mistakes in life. and so does everyone else. you learn things and you fuck up and you pull through. and you can warn people, if you think they’re going to make a mistake, but i don’t think you have a right to stop them from doing whatever damn fool thing they’re up to.
i think that’s what’s really bothering me about current progressive discourse, and a lot of the proposed policies. a lot of kids are really scared right now that any single mistake is fatal, and while they’re not totally wrong– the economy sucks, there’s still a plague going on, and america is a carceral panopticon–it’s still not their *right* let alone their moral obligation to build a system where no one has the freedom to fuck up.
i don’t know what the solution is here. a world with more resources would be great. a world with less deadly risk, too. but i’d settle for a world where we recognized and applauded everyone’s human right to do weird stupid bullshit and learn better–or not–on their own time.
”IRL”? this is real life. you’re just talking to me from computer. i’m on the same planet as you. perhaps one day i will pull you from a burning building
OK but I do genuinely believe we need to push for something like this before it’s too late - and not just in digital spaces. We should have the right to peace and quiet from advertising. There should be more limits on how much and where we get advertising because otherwise it’ll just become a creep of more and more until every fucking public space is lit with several billboards blasting us with ads, and the walls between spaces lined with ads, and our commutes filled with ads, and local parks sponsored by corporations to offset the cost of local councils, and so on and on and on and on. No. I need quiet. I need spaces where ads cannot touch me.
“don’t post links to pirate sites” as a security through obscurity strategy seems… weak. if a pirate site is so obscure that almost nobody can find it, it’s also essentially pointless.
but yes, if a pirate site is common knowledge, the feds will be working on destroying it. so the idea is i assume to achieve an intermediate level of obscurity, where you have to have a certain amount of talent for asking the right people or searching the right things to find it. but… whatever capacity for research you are asking people to have on that front, the feds are equally capable of it, and they have a whole lot more time on their hands for tracking down pirate sites! security through obscurity is a losing game for piracy. the perfect sweet spot where people can find your pirate resource but the feds cannot is something of a mirage.
if not that, than what?
the current piracy system involves a few different tiers of accessibility, and various components that are more or less decentralised.
torrents are the most resilient tech because to stamp out a torrent (with DHT enabled) you have to suppress every seed. so, you have big public torrent trackers like TPB; these are well known and rely on hopping domains and redundancy for security. the ratio of seeds to leeches tends to be low, but the number of users is large enough that there will be at least a few seeds out there for most stuff. torrent clients have gotten a lot better at seeding strategies that take into account your seed ratio and what’s currently available in the swarm, so if you just leave everything on seed and open your torrent client fairly often (use a VPN though lol), you don’t really need to think about it.
then you have private trackers; these operate on an invite basis. the problem with this is that when the pool of users is so small, the odds of a given seed being online are also small. to prevent torrents dying, they gamify it: you get points for seeding and if you don’t have enough points you can’t download anything until you seed more. to help people get back in the game there will be ‘freeleech’ events. being active on a private tracker takes a bit of work.
and of course you have to get in in the first place, which tends to require a proven track record of seeding on other private trackers, and some kind of interview with the operators. getting involved in private trackers is a much bigger ask, you have to figure out where to get your foot in the door, and work your way up to the more insular trackers. it’s like a mini subculture. it’s valuable, but not scalable.
at the top level of inaccessibility is the warez scene. this is a whole subject that i’m not even gonna get into, go read wikipedia. historically this is where the files actually come from, before getting distributed on public trackers, usenet etc. but good luck getting in there lmao, they are understandably quite paranoid.
of course, for stuff to get on pirate sites you need somebody to go the effort of ripping and encoding it. this is where a major point of failure exists. when RarBG went down recently, the biggest loss was not the existing archive of torrent links, which can be backed up - it was that they were very active at converting scene releases into torrents with a decent balance of file size and quality, which then filter out into the various public trackers. that is much harder to replace! but what killed RarBG wasn’t even suppression by authorities - according to their statement, it was a bunch of the admins getting covid or dying or fighting in the Russia-Ukraine war, which made the whole operation impossible to continue. so despite the thousands of people who download RarBG torrents, this single point of failure was overstressed and broke.
as far as the ethics of spreading links to pirate sites go… if it’s something like a mega drive, yeah, the chances of a takedown are pretty high if it gets noticed! no question. but those things are by nature short-lived; if you want to use that for archival you’re building on sand. there’s also databases like emuparadise, but there was no saving that through obscurity, it just took Nintendo a minute to bring the case.
in this kind of centralised case, the clock is ticking from day 1. what we want is to maximise the number of people who are able to save copies while it’s up, and then some of those people can put it up again somewhere else and keep the authorities playing whack-a-mole. (for a small collection of files, a sensible measure would be to make a torrent and a mega drive side by side, so that people can download the mega drive and then add the torrent to their client to seed if it gets nuked.)
as for torrent sites, the thing is that torrents rely for effectiveness on a swarm that is either very large or very responsible about seeding. if it’s a public tracker, it has to be well known or it’s pointless. instead of security through obscurity, the form of security for these sites is try to make the resource itself hard to take down - operating the tracker/archive in countries that don’t have copyright treaties, maintaining mirrors, and of course distributing as many seeds as possible so the torrent can stay alive even if the site goes down.
the major problem with a dead torrent site is discoverability. if it’s harder to find the torrent, fewer people will download it, the existing seeds will gradually go offline, and of course you can’t download a torrent that you don’t know exists. and while you could imagine a system of broadcasting metadata about a torrent (title, encoding etc.) in a DHT-like way but that would be so vulnerable to fakes and spam. maybe some kind of cryptographically signed 'this torrent is good’ declaration is possible? I know certain torrent clients tout discovery features, but honestly I don’t know how well they work. I’m sure there are projects that are way ahead of the game than me on this question.
but yeah anyway trying to browbeat people into not sharing links to pirate media is 1. futile, by the time you see it the cat is out of the bag 2. not a sustainable strategy for security. if you wanna lecture people, 'use a VPN and seed your torrents’ is evergreen ;p
Oh nooo I hadn’t noticed that my cat’s automatic feeder was getting low on food so as usual she dashed off when she heard the machine start but I couldn’t hear the usual sound of her food falling into the bowl so I went to look and my poor cat was just. Sitting there. Staring at her empty food bowl. Then for a second she glanced up at me then right back to her bowl with the biggest, saddest, most bewildered eyes you could ever imagine on such a small creature. I filled her bowl and the machine right away ofc but I still feel a little guilty 😭
no babe!!! we’re not gonna die!!!! we’re gonna push for change and reach net zero!!! probably not by 2050 but we will get there!!! dont let the defeatist attitude take over babe!!! we’re still very much alive and we have time!!! every 0.1 of a degree we dont warm by is a success!! dont give up now!!!! keep fighting!!! there is hope!!!!!!!!!!!
Child abuse is a big problem, so it’s important that we don’t let children communicate with adults except their parents and other official authority figures. Everyone knows the best way to prevent child abuse is to keep children isolated and ensure all their communications are controlled.
people are saying do it scared, but you also gotta do it alone. you’ll miss out on so much you want to do if you wait til someone will do it with you. do it scared and do it alone.
me (scared & alone) out in the wider world trying to broaden my horizons:
wait holy shit dude you think being horny is a biological thing? oh my god that’s been disproven for years [pulls out my phone to read wikipedia to you] “sexual arousal (also known as sexual excitement) describes the psychokinetic response to leylines intersecting over areas of the brain dedicated to conceptualizing fear”
Genuinely wish there was some way i could thank chickens and cows for what they provide to humans. between eggs and milk they singlehandedly do more for our society than any CEO and i will never be able to thank them properly for it
thank you for eggs. thank you for the dozens of ways they can be eaten or used in cooking. thank you for milks, and the dozens of ways it can be changed and still be edible.
I thanked them for you with treats. (Sorry Hyrule looks like she went through a lawn mower, she’s molting.)
One fallacy, I think, of anti piracy arguments is that a lot of them seem to assume that if I’m unable to pirate something I’m going to pay for it instead rather than going “oh! that’s a terrible shame” and then quickly forgetting about it
As a former librarian, the whole “don’t pirate books, you are taking money authors need to feed their starving children, just borrow from the library instead :) ” makes me angry.
Because e-book prices for libraries are insanely high. Like I’ve heard the jokey meme about how “if libraries were proposed today, they would be condemned as some socialist infringing on intellectual property rights.”
Well, the rights for libraries to lend out paper books were negotiated almost a century ago in most western countries, while the rights for libraries to lend out e-books and digital audiobooks were negotiated during the present neoliberal era where corporations are very powerful. And It fucking shows.
The prices for libraries to buy e-books are insane, and that’s not even counting the circulation fees. And the books are frequently restricted by licensing to a certain small number of loans per book, after which the e-book is destroyed and the library has to buy a new one to the exorbitant prices the publishers give.
Like the advice about how piracy is some great evil cutting into author’s profits and how you should just borrow from libraries instead is so infuriating in that context. Like listen to actual librarians talk about e-book pricing for libraries. It’s a major drain on library funds, and in the era of neoliberalism and austerity those budgets are strained as it is. And libraries inability in the face of these costs to provide digital content is used as justification for further cuts.
This is fucking corporate robbery of library funding, of tax payers money to further their own private profits. Any moralistic bullshit about the evils of book piracy should be put in that context. If the ordinary person is stealing the publishers precious book sales profits, those publishers are already robbing that person’s tax dollars.
It’s a fucking hypocrisy to justify the present system of copyright and intellectual property with “well, if you are poor it’s still wrong to pirate because you can get books for free legally from libraries”. Because book publishers are already using their strong intellectual property rights to bleed libraries dry of funds, killing them in the process like the fucking vampires they are.
ALT
