heyy jeff!!! i just wanted to say that ever since marvel rivals released i’ve been in love with uu, youre just so cute, i really just want to hug you and give you love, u have no idea how happy and honestly kinda emotional u make me from how lovely you are, pls never change most adorable shark in the whole worlddd!!!!!
THIS IS A CALL TO ACTION. Censorship affects all of us, and if Project 2025 gets its way, the entire trans publishing industry is at a significant risk of criminalization. In this article, I lay out the problem and the stakes, and suggest a broad action plan with dozens of potential response ✊
What I cover:
- Citations from P25
- Historical overview of American obscenity law as pertains to trans people
- Assessment of trans censorship in Nazi Germany
- Three core philosophies for resisting fascist censorship
- An action plan broken down by interest group (readers, authors, etc.)
I took absolutely no pleasure writing this article, but I have a lot of research around obscenity law and historical precedents for this that I know nobody else has access to, and getting the information out there is crucial right now 😔
The core thesis of this article - one that echoes much of the other advice that I’ve seen floating around leftist spheres over the past week - is that our best defense against this type of censorship is mass grassroots action. If every person who reads this picked five books they want to preserve and five people they want to share this with, it would have a much broader impact than if a singular group of readers attempts to document and archive the entire corpus.
A centralized preservation effort can do immense work, of course, but it won’t be accessible to the trans people who need to read trans books and see trans joy to survive whatever comes next.
The more copies there are the more likely it will survive. Anyone who has extra space on their hard drive should consider picking a few things and storing copies
Mohammad Ayesh wants to finish his campaign as soon as possible, so that he may return to North Gaza and rebuild his life. Please continue to support him, boost and donate! Gaza will be rebuilt by her own people but they need to rebuild their lives now.
I made a gif not long ago (see below). Many of you expressed that it was “deeply uncomfortable” and “upsetting”. I hope this new one will calm your feelings.
I made a gif not long ago (see below). Many of you expressed that it was “deeply uncomfortable” and “upsetting”. I hope this new one will calm your feelings.
if you moralize to people in the global south about piracy youre going to hell btw. no atonement no take backsies. guaranteed hell forever permanently.
omg there’s a newborn in the notes
Look for all my fellow ass backwards Americans and the European as well, let me tell you a story.
A few years ago me and a Brazilian friend (they/them) had a joke that I owed them a sandwich because they burned one while in a VC with me.
A year later I sent $20 USD to them for the bit, about what I paid for my lunch at Subway at the time (before tips).
They texted me worried about how much money I sent them and if I was sure. Because with the exchange rate at the time, that was almost 100 BRL. I had assumed 1 BRL simply bought less (in local goods), turns out the pricing is, well its close enough that it is about 100 in spending power equivalent.
It is my understanding (though I could CERTAINLY be wrong) that Brazil is one of the nations in the Global South that is doing better relatively, and also that the exchange rate has worsened for BRL since.
However, many game devs simply set the price in USD and then forces everyone to pay that price. You know how some books have a slightly higher price listed in CAD if its printed on? Imagine if instead of like, 20 USD 22 CAD that book cost 100-120 CAD. That would be absurd right?
If you can’t see the problem with condemning piracy in the Global South after that explanation, then I suppose you’re deserving of whatever shit lands in your lap next.
Also, just for the record, we get you a lot more stuff than you realize. A lot of whistleblowers/ leaks/media archiving is done in the global South/spreads from there. It’s a genuine underground and public industry that a lot of us grew up learning to do and it matters. Because yea, the system is designed to make media completely impossible to afford
So… I got a notification from the State Department at like 8 PM Pacific that my passport was approved, and I was quietly thankful and stunned bc my legal gender in Oregon is listed as X, or undeclared, and that’s what’s on my passport. I’m pretty sure someone(s) worked late to get the X passports done today.
I was already really grateful to whoever in the Seattle Passport Office worked late to get these things processed on the last Friday before That Man gets back into office… and then I got a notification that my passport shipped at fucking midnight Pacific and whoever got that shit out the door so it couldn’t be picked up on Monday and like, denied and shredded?
One of the best stories I ever read as a child was a fantasy novel by some local dude selling books out of a suitcase on the sidewalk downtown, and I don’t remember what it was called or who the author was, and it’s so obscure that no matter how many elements I remember, I’ve never been able to find it through web searches. I only vaguely remember the story - it was a love story, something about a tower on an island and two characters on a quest to discover their forgotten past. They fall in love and at the end the only way to stay together is to allow themselves to forget again, and you realize that they’re right where they started, in the exact same tower, and they’re doomed to go on this same quest over and over again, never completed, but that also means they’ll fall in love over and over again forever. And I remember how that ending blew up my little child brain into a million pieces.
I don’t know what happened to the book, and I’ll probably never read it again, but if you’re somewhere out there and you were once selling fantasy novels from a suitcase on the sidewalk in the suburbs of Chicago, and if you ever felt like your writing never meant anything or went anywhere except a hundred copies you had printed yourself and sold for almost nothing, please know that your story buried itself in my young brain and has probably shaped my worldview in ways even I don’t understand.
There are a lot of sweet, well-meaning folks in the notes advising me on how to search for this book, and I want you to know that I will never find this book. And that’s okay.
This author self-published, which at that time meant he paid out of his own pocket to print 100 copies and sold some but not all them for cash on the sidewalk in one small town. E-books weren’t a thing. There is no digital record to find. Even if I remembered any of the names or details, it wouldn’t be searchable. No librarian has it in a catalogue.
The vast majority of books written before the modern day are lost media. Countless artists poured their hearts into stories that were read by few and lasted only as long as the paper they were printed on. Most of the art ever made has been destroyed or thrown away. Most of the music ever written will never be heard again. The expectation of permanence in art is very new, and even now, there are millions of works of art that will never be recorded or posted or shared. Millions more that will never even be completed.
Creation, with few exceptions, is a mandala. A vulnerable song performed for dear friends by a campfire, but the singer soon forgets how it went. A poem shared in a coffee house that rattles the audiences’ bones but will never be heard again. A sketch of a lover on hotel stationary that the maid will throw away tomorrow. Our current reality exists by the influence of art that no one remembers.
i feel like a lot of the time fatphobia tends to manifest as a similar phenomenon to the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” thing especially among older people. sooo many people who have gained weight with age see themselves as temporarily embarrassed thin people. like 60+ y/o people who have not been thin since their 30s but they still keep going on diets. it sucks to see cause it reads like such a clear expression of self-hatred to me, like they’re punishing themselves for their bodies developing in ways that they probably in reality had very little control over. fatphobia is such brain poison dude
Please tell me that y'all won’t go back to tiktok once Trump gets whatever nefarious concessions he wants from the company and “saves” it. Like, you all NEED to stay gone. Stay on Xiaohongshu or move to other platforms or create a new one or whatever, but don’t go back to whatever Trump-appeasement monstrosity TikTok is about to become. Don’t do it.
If you’ve been seeing a resurgence of Homestuck fanart in the last few months and you’re wondering what the hell happened, the answer is simply that it’s been a solid decade since the comic’s active popularity was at its peak, and the author has finally shut the fuck up about it for long enough for it to be re-framed as an object of nostalgia.
Now: if you’ve had a turn on this particular merry-go-round before, and you’ve seen first hand what happens when an active fandom makes a successful transition into a nostalgia-based fandom, you’ll know that this is the part where Shit Gets Weird.
Gets weird?
Different kind of weird.
The transition from media-driven fandom to nostalgia-driven fandom is typically marked by a period of turmoil regarding what the “correct” way to engage with that nostalgia is.
Which old arguments will be considered gauche to drag up again after all this time, and which will continue to simmer?
Which authorial mis-steps is it cool to criticise, and which ought to be excused as a product of their time?
Which portions of the source material will be subject to an unspoken agreement that We Don’t Talk About That?
In other words, folks are going to be getting weird about what kind of weird the weird should be.
its so fucked up how difficult it is to move to another country you shouldn’t need a reason or anything you should be able to show up at the border and be like “the vibes were off back home” and they should let you in
[Video Description: An NBC News segment showing a split screen with Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde on the top and President Trump and Vice President Vance sitting in an audience watching her. Subtitles appear for what the Reverend is saying, and the subtitles read “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in democratic, republican, and independent families. Some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat picking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants, and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their our lands, to find compassion and welcome here. Our god teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger for we were all once strangers in this land. May god grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love, and walk humbly with each other and our god. For the good of all people, good of all people in this nation and the world, amen.]
[Image Description of tags: #videos #religion mention # rachael maddow said something interesting about this last night #she was talking about how the way you contain trump #is that you shame and embarrass his supporters in the government #and turn them against him slowly #and what this reverend did is a part of that #make them embarrassed for supporting him #make them embarrassed that they support a guy who invokes this kind of sermon from a religious leader #never let them know peace about it]
“One doesn’t need to make things unnecessarily complicated at the outset. He who raises his right arm at a slant forcefully and repeatedly while standing on a political stage at a political speech in front of a partially extreme right public is performing the Hitler salute. There is no need for ‘allegedly’ or 'similar’ or 'debated’. The gesture speak for itself, it is documented on video. Whoever then wants to reinterpret it, whoever doesn’t want to see (i.e., refuses to recognize) the Hitler salute, does so on their own behalf.”
(sorry I am really bad at translating but this is roughly what it says, for my non-German speaking mutuals)
Oh honey, no. Fortunately, you are. Because the world needs more people who aren’t afraid to be their most authentic selves. Being a man is yours, and I will celebrate it with you.
Whatever Homestuck’s flaws, you’ve got to admit that taking the archetypal scheming idiot whose wildly inadvisable plans keep working out for them due to plot-armour levels of impossible luck and going “and also, the ability to do that is literally their super power, so you’re not allowed to call it a plot hole” was a masterstroke of pissing people off.
The fact that this could refer to any number of the following characters really sells it:
Vriska, the obvious one, who’s power is literally to steal people’s luck.
Gamzee, because of weird plot bullshit.
Caliborn/Lord English, who jury-rigged causality itself to cause this.
Not apocalyptic levels of OhFuck unless you’ve sat through a Cat5, but shit’s been like this for a long time now. We just put up with it for far too fucking long:
Me: I need to go home. There’s a hurricane coming and my basement apartment is on the coast, so I’m worried about my cats. (To myself: And maybe needing to evacuate.)
Boss: Is your house and your cats more important than this job?
Me: YES.
Boss: …oh. Okay. Uh…see you tomorrow…
Different boss, several years later, a conversation that happened multiple times:
Me: Hey, it’s starting to really snow outside, I live on a steep hill, and I only have 2-wheel drive. If I don’t leave now, I can’t get home.
Boss: Is getting home more important than getting your job done tonight?
Me: Considering I value my life more than I value this paperwork being digitized? YES.
Boss: ….
Me: Bye. See you tomorrow.
Boss: Uh, yeah, okay.
Different atttempt:
Boss: Why don’t you just get a hotel after work?
Me: Do I get a raise so I can afford it?
Boss: No.
Me: Bye. See you tomorrow.
Boss: Is getting home
more important than getting
your job done tonight?
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Haikubot aside we should normalize saying those things to bosses absolutely. It’s only going to get worse.
What’s crazy is how the bosses are so conditioned to guilt trip and then when they don’t get the response they expect, they don’t even follow through on the demand, like “oh, uh, I guess that’s okay then.” They’ve been trained, but when you break the training, it turns out they’re kind of real people.
the thing about disability is it really does sometimes boil down to “wow i wish i could do that” and then you can’t. and it sucks.
accomodations are important but i think they miss the point of this post. sometimes you can’t do it. at all. someone needs to do it for you or it will never happen.
ALT
ALT
