This may sound mean, but...

If you send me an ask containing links to Good Omens fan fiction you think I should read, I'll delete it. Do it again and I'll (regretfully) block you. This is a general blanket sort of thing -- I don't want to read it, legally I can't read it, no I won't make it into the next series, and, no matter how pure your motives, it's crossing a line.

I’m reading a lot of baffled responses to this. People, I’m showrunning and co-writing the Good Omens TV series. I can’t legally read unsolicited plot ideas. Think of Netflix. Their terms of service include

8.2. Unsolicited Materials. Netflix does not accept unsolicited materials or ideas for Netflix content and is not responsible for the similarity of any of its content or programming in any media to materials or ideas transmitted to Netflix.

…and you’ll find similar clauses out there for other production entities. They are trying to safeguard themselves. There are people out there who are certain that a hit film or TV series is based on their stolen idea. The easiest way to avoid that is to make sure that their ideas can’t get to you.

It’s nothing to do with not approving of what you do. It’s about not putting me, the producers, the BBC or Prime Video at risk — or about having to throw away plans for the future because someone did that in fanfiction first. I can’t legally read unsolicited scripts or story proposals or manuscripts and sending me a link to your or someone else’s Good Omens fiction counts as those things. If I read your story and then did something close to it you could sue. So I’m not going to read it. There’s no emotional baggage in this. I’m definitely not telling you that what you are doing isn’t valid. (And If I wasn’t showrunning I wouldn’t be so Please Don’t and I Will Delete about it. But I am. So don’t. Thank you!)

Reminder that "By Any Means Necessary," one of the best episodes of Babylon 5, nearly didn't get made because some fan suggested a similar idea (a workers' strike on the space station, dealing with workers' safety and labor issues at a time when Star Trek: TNG was still on the air).

I can't remember how far along the episode was in production — I think a rough draft of the script had been written —but showrunner J. Michael Straczynski had to pull the plug on the episode until they finally tracked down the fan who'd suggested a "workers' strike" story on Usenet and get legal documents signed that the fan wouldn't sue or ask for a cut of the proceeds. AND the documents had to be watertight enough that Warner Bros' legal dept was satisfied all financial/legal risk had been eliminated. In other words, it wasn't up to JMS to make the call.

Sadly, after that, he could no longer participate in the old Babylon 5 Usenet discussion list, where he used to interact directly with fans, answering questions. It was just safer if he stayed away, because that way nobody could accuse him of lifting ideas for the show. We don't want Neil to have to pull back for the same reason.

A lot of creators avoid social media for the same reason. Those that are here @neil-gaiman , @dduane , have a hard and fast rule not to look at unasked solicitations.

And now that Babylon 5 might get a reboot, JMS has issued a similar request:

Reblogging for people who think I'm overreacting or whatever.

please just leave neil the fuck alone.

he's doing us all a favour being on tumblr

he doesn't owe us shit.

as a server I would literally unironically set up a gas leak in this man's house like this is unreasonably enraging me right now we get payed $2.97 an hour in restaurants so bitches can make this comparison oh my god these people need to be killed

when are we gonna start dragging landlords out into the street and beating them to death in public again?

ok what the fuck, elon musk stole the new twitter logo from a kid who can’t do anything about it because *they are a kid.* im so glad i never used twitter, i hope musk burns in hell

This is why I get meal kits. Do I need them? No. Can I easily make them myself? For way cheaper? Yes. WILL I??? No.

Other tips: if you are going to buy things that aren’t pre-taxed, you need to make a habit of always doing the prep AS SOON AS YOU GET HOME. it will NEVER HAPPEN if you don’t.

Get the bulk pack of steaks! But you are never gonna eat them before they go bad. If you freeze them in individual ziplocks as soon as you unpack you probably will?

Get the celery, but you need to cut it ALL UP and store it in the fridge in water or it will rot.

And don’t do all tgese at once, get like, one or two prep things a trip. You aren’t gonna get it started if it’s a huge task.

Don’t pass by these tips because you don’t have ADHD! 

These are valid points for the busy parent, the overstressed college student, and the person working the “wrong” shift. 

Real story - I have thrown away SO MUCH meat and produce in my time. Frozen veggies can even be better than fresh, since they are picked when ripe and frozen rather than picked early and expected to ripen in shipping. My local grocer will sometimes pre-chop less-than-desirable veggies and sell them in the discount cooler - a chopped onion is more useful than a whole one! Meat in bulk packs is WAY cheaper, but you have to make breaking up that huge pack part of putting away the groceries. Also, having a place to put the groceries away helps make the process easier. It’s taken me more than one decade of life to figure these things out. 

It’s not lazy if it is efficient. Professionals call it “time management.” 

are some of the people newer to tumblr aware of the joys of theme customization on desktop? I know some ppl are just on mobile so they can’t really change things but like SO many blogs nowadays have 0 theme customization and just use the default theme and I’m beginning to wonder if they even know about the option. It’s one of the main reasons why I still use tumblr

this post is not to be mean to people for not knowing btw. i just think its good for people to know bc page customization is one of the things that is slowly disappearing from the internet and i suspect that many ppl don’t even realize its something they can do on here bc they’re so used to their only customization options being like a pfp and maybe a header image. The option to do so here is something I desperately want to preserve since its a fantastic middle ground between the bare bones profile customization of twitter and like. coding an entire webpage from scratch.

like for people who don’t know, this is what my blog looks like if you visit it on desktop, outside of the dashboard popups

desktop users who have no theme this is the life you could be living

ppl in the tags asking how to do this, or who did not even know it was an option, here’s a very quick how to:

1. choose a theme. this is the easy part, search “blog themes” or “html themes” in the tumblr search bar, there are MANY blogs out there dedicated to curating lists of free tumblr themes. Find one you like and save the code in a seperate tab. I would probably check to make sure the theme was not created too long ago, as tumblr website changes over the years have broken some older codes/themes. I would also try to find a theme with lots of customization options, as this makes it easier to make your blog totally unique looking, even if you are unfamiliar with html.

2. either go to your blog’s actual page [YOUR-URL.tumblr.com] and click on the little paint palette icon that shows up in the top right corner, OR you go to your blog’s appearance settings, there should be a button that says “edit themes”

3. once you open the blog theme editor, there should be an option to edit html in the top left corner. Select and delete ALL of the present code. Then, paste in the code of your preferred tumblr theme and hit save. You may have to exit and reenter the customization page for the full effects to take place.

4. From this point on, customize to your heart’s content! Just make sure if you are using a theme made by someone else, that you don’t accidentally remove their credits. This can’t really happen unless you are editing the html directly though, so you likely don’t have to worry.

Keep in mind, messing around with tumblr themes still takes time, even if you’re not doing it all from scratch. Think of it like decorating an empty room. It will take time and effort, and it’s not at all necessary, but it’s worth it to make your space feel more like yours.

I always wanted to customize my page but like…any time i see “html” and it has to deal with customizing a page I cry and run away like a scared puppy. So FOR NOW, I’m going to be boring to avoid the utter anguish and despair I’d feel—

i promise you, if you find a theme with customization built in, the only time you will be touching the html is to copypaste it into the theme editor

tumblr has this great function that allows theme creators - the people doing all the html work for you - to put options like colors, changing the size of images and posts on your blog, the text font, etc, into user-friendly buttons and selection screens. Most html themes nowadays have at least a few of these built in! Mine looks like this

you see? no html knowledge required, very simple to use, and still beautiful and unique!

also, if you are still worried, tumblr has the option to revert everything back to the default state, or even restore previous themes. Your blog won’t be bunked up forever if you mess up some html editing if you DO decide to explore. Go ham!

Also some of the most annoying Tumblr behaviors go away once you’re using a custom theme.

For bonus cred, try to keep things accessible, at the very least high-contrast, legible font. Check WCAG standards for good contrast ratios.

white people please just purchase native artwork and jewelry from native people i keep seeing idiot white people be like “waaah i wish i could support native creators but its cultural appropriation” girl why would beaders sell you their earrings then. just dont get a medicine wheel or a thunderbird then like damn it is that easy

http://www.beyondbuckskin.com/p/buy-native.html?m=1

If Native folks are making it to sell to white people with the approval of their tribe, it’s not “appropriation”–its support and appreciation! So yes, buy that native-made dream catcher, but not the mass produced fakes made by white people. Like, you can go to a pow wow and buy native crafts there, too.

here are some places to get native/indigenous goods and merch online if you can’t find something local or if physical access is an obstacle:

https://sweetgrasstradingco.com/ https://nativeharvest.com/ https://byellowtail.com/ https://www.salishstyle.com/ https://trickstercompany.com/ https://hutxh.com/ https://www.thentvs.com/ https://urbannativeera.com/ https://www.oxdxclothing.com/ https://kotahbear.com/ https://www.totemdesignhouse.com/ https://ginewusa.com/ https://eighthgeneration.com/

and the only native-owned comic shop in the world: https://redplanetbooksncomics.com/

This semester in college we’ve been working with a company in an indigenous museum to help their sales

They work with native artists in all of Brazil, so the site is in portuguese

https://galeriamacunaima.com.br/

Buying from indigenous artists is not appropriation!

Quick notes if you moved from reddit to here before you interact with me:

- We have a bot problem on here. That means that blogs that have no pfps (only the default pfp), no reblogs and it's just a completely blank blog will be blocked immediately. This is mostly because bots spread malicious links, often to porn sites or some really messed up stuff. They also sometimes send nsfw asks and messages, sometimes even actual porn. Just reblog a few posts and you should be fine. Lurkers don't really work on here unfortunately, so just at least reblog a few posts here and there so people won't block you on sight.

- Tumblr doesn't work like reddit. Likes are more of a bookmarker than an actual system that will get you to the front page. If you want to support artists, writers or you want boost a post that discusses a topic you love/care about, reblog a post.

- Hashtags are like afternotes. You can use them to boost your post to whatever fandom or aesthetic you're posting for, or just add in your small thoughts to a post. Especially if you reblog. They also help you discover more communities.

- Your follower count isn't shown publicly, so nobody gives a shit about how famous or unknown you are. The chances of your post reaching 1k is 50/50. Ya role the dice and hope something happens.

We need everyone's help right now to protect the rainforest and Indigenous People

The Amazon Rainforest is under a massive threat. I know you've heard this a million times, but this is different. There is a piece of legislation that will decimate the rights of Indigenous people of Brazil, who have been protecting the rainforest. It's unfathomably bad. It has majority support. And they're voting tomorrow. As reported here, the Bill allows "the Brazilian government to find energy resources, set up military bases, develop strategic roads, and implement commercial agriculture on protected Indigenous tribal lands, without any prior discussion with the affected peoples."

The thing you can do—and I know this sounds overly simple—is sign this petition—and tell your friends to do the same: SIGN HERE.

As reported here, the Bill allows "the Brazilian government to find energy resources, set up military bases, develop strategic roads, and implement commercial agriculture on protected Indigenous tribal lands, without any prior discussion with the affected peoples."

Again, this bill has majority support. You may be wondering, why will a petition signed by people who don't live in Brazil make any difference? Because it will give those opposing it political air cover. It will show the world is with them.

But we need a LOT of signatures.

Please do this simple act and spread the word.

happy PRIDE i’m here i’m queer and i believe the land should be given back to the proper indigenous stewards.

Non-Natives reblogging this are great and wonderful

Please remember that "land back" does not mean "indigenous people are mystical elves with innate epigenetic wisdom of land stewardship and they don't belong in big cities," nor does it mean "non-indigenous people can't be farmers." What it DOES mean is that "non-indigenous farmers should be paying the equivalent of property taxes to the native governments their land was stolen from." It means, "there's a great deal of indigenous scholarship on sustainable agricultural practices that farmers should be taking into account, because indigenous agriculture was more advanced than European agriculture at the time Europe invaded the Americas and western agriculture *still* hasn't caught up in terms of figuring out how to produce equivalently high crop yields without compromising the ecosystem." It means, "non-indigenous farmers should be in an intellectual discourse with indigenous agricultural scientists and indigenous peoples that still do traditional farming, figuring how to repair the damage western farming practices have done to the ecosystem."

It also means that indigenous peoples should regain the right to sustain themselves on the land according to the practices they want, and they should have free reign to perform their cultural practices and protect their holy sites, as opposed to the current model where if they try to honor their dead on public lands they get violently removed.

Reminder this applies to Australia too

This is your warning.

Things that will make your computer meaningfully faster:

Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:

Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:

Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:

Things that do not actually make your computer faster:

This post is brought to you by the lady with the 7-year-old laptop that she refuses to leave overnight for us to run scans on or take apart so that we can put RAM in it and who insists on coming by for 30-minute visits hoping we can make her computer faster.

Short-staffing has become a major problem in all sectors. Retail, food service, health care, education, factory production lines, call centers, child care, IT, office support staff, etc. Every corner of our society and economy.

Now we know that even in creative spaces employers are not willing to hire sufficient staff to accomplish necessary tasks, demand workers do more than their fair share of work, for longer hours, without fair compensation or reasonable breaks/time off.

This needs to stop.

I’ve never been so taken out by a response

I got to see mom do this once. It was… terrifying. I was moving into my first apartment, and my buddy had just moved into a place about half a mile away, and he was almost crying with rage because of some of the safety issues the apartment had with the wiring. There were a whole host of other problems, but that one was about safety and it should not have been a thing. Mom gathered us up, and drove to the leasing office. When we got there, she informed him (not asked. She’d walked his apartment, noted everything she disliked (she had much higher standards than he did) and she was PISSED) that he was to keep his mouth shut, make whatever expressions she cued him on, and pretend he understood whenever she and I switched languages and we’d fill him in afterwards. (I have been used as a complainant prop before. I know what my job is when she’s on this warpath; thankfully she does not use her powers for evil.) It took her all of twenty minutes to have a promise in writing from the son of the owner for everything to be fixed by a specific date and also to install a ceiling fan at no cost to my friend. In that meeting, she managed to leverage his church, his family, his reputation, the concept of a gentleman, the biblical concept of how to treat the poor, how people would treat his children, once they were grown, and the concept of a self-made man (which my friend is trying very hard to be), Christian morality, what it means to be a community institution, real estate law, and honestly, I forget what else. She’d never met him before. She does not live in our city -or state, for that matter. We’re not Christian. She did a cold-read of him based on his office, face, clothing, and posture (he didn’t give us his last name -the ‘related to the owner’ was a guess that turned out to be lucky), and hit every point of pride or insecurity she could find. When some things still hadn’t been taken care of a week later, she *called his father* and implied that he’d failed as a man and a parent since his son hadn’t yet honored his word. My friend had the fan that day, and the remaining safety issues were taken care of on top of it. No yelling, no threats, it was just a calm, ‘friendly’ conversation. My friend does not do subtext; he knew the social chess game was going on, but not how it worked.  tl;dr: I’ve seen my mother do this and holy shit this really should be a thing.

my momma is a retired union lawyer. you should see her tear into landlords and rich people. it’s like watching a lion devour a zebra.

Comrade Karen

I see now…“Karen” is a power that can be used for evil or good…

Listen you are all gonna lose your shit once you find out where there’s a company where that is literally their whole business model. They are called “Karens for Hire” and their whole thing is helping out exploited people get justice - essentially complaining to the right people and making themselves heard.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/12/26/karens-for-hire-customer-service-complaints/

Non-Britons! Instead of being distracted by the pomp and fanfare of the coronation, here’s a reminder that:

If your post is a screenshot of text, rather than copying and pasting the text itself such that a screenreader can handle it, I'm not reblogging your post.

I know there are boundary cases where the visual formatting is an important part of the effect (though, y'all, you should still be including a text description at that point).

But some of you are out here screenshotting articles and long Facebook posts, and that's just egregious.

I’m not trying to get into an argument, and you can of course do whatever you want with your own blog, but there are genuinely colliding accessibility concerns in play here. For some people it’s genuinely onerous to type out text descriptions and transcriptions, whether it’s because of chronic pain concerns, mobility issues, fatigue, etc. - and they’re not always the ones who took the screenshots, so copy-and-paste isn’t always an option. And “well, if you can’t type out a transcript/description, you’re not allowed to post” doesn’t seem like a particularly good solution!

Again, do what you want with your own blog. You’re not going to reblog images without descriptions or transcripts - that’s fine, it’s your prerogative. But - I’m not implying you’ve done or are doing this - I’ve seen this go from “I’m not reblogging images without descriptions” to “you’re a bad person if you post an image without a description”, and I’m trying to nip that in the bud.

Competing accommodation needs are a thing. Over on Mastodon, there are periodic rounds of “If you don’t include alt text on an image you’re a bad person!” and “If you don’t CW for <seven thousand different possible things> you don’t care about anyone but yourself, you monster!”, and, y’know.

Remember the whole Spoon Theory thing?

How one of the big defining metaphors that showed up for certain types of disability--especially chronic pain or chronic fatigue, but not just those--is that doing stuff takes up limited resources?

Remembering lists of what to CW takes a mental toll. Adding the extra text is extra time and typing and thought. Hell, reading the CWs on Mastodon and deciding what to open or not can be a mental load on some people.

There is no perfect system that accommodates everyone. That’s just not how it works. Most people do their best. But consider if you look at someone and think “They’re not doing their best, because they’re not doing what I think is most important!”, there’s a pretty good chance they’re balancing different needs and goals than you are.

No perfect people. No perfect systems. That’s the human condition.

Reblogging because people have good and nuanced points.

This is actually why I don't do image descriptions, funnily enough - for me personally and my stupid brain, I loathe them and find them hostile to my ability to read the post (ADHD incompatible, apparently). I've nothing against people adding them to my posts, mind, but on my personal blog, I choose not to use them.

I try to add alt text to make up for it. Though that's become harder as well now that a massive distracting ALT box gets stamped on the lower left

(I have a similar issue with subtitles, too. I cannot focus on the show/film if it's subtitled, I just spend the whole time reading and not watching the rest of the screen. I'll happily do it if I'm watching with someone who needs the subtitles, but it does impair my experience)

Either way, though, you set your own rules for this stuff, and it's entirely fair to choose to only reblog described images on your own blog

Just wanted to share a tip for transcribing images of text. In Chrome on web, you can right-click and do "search image with Google". Then click on "text", "select all text" and "copy text".

It might need some formatting tweaks, but it's 90% accurate, even with handwriting, and is a hell of a lot easier than writing everything out by hand.

Oh my God, this is fantastic.

This still blows my mind

I will happily delete this if I’m derailing or taking away from the original message (initially I put this in the tags, but a friend asked me to reblog as text)

If you don't want to pursue an autism or adhd diagnosis and you have access to a doctor or therapist you can get them to write you a note attesting to a symptom of your neurodivergence (rather than naming the condition itself) and stating the need for accommodation. 

It's something my therapist told me about when we were still working in offices. I have sensory processing issues and on multiple occasions the noise in my office was so bad I broke the skin on my hand clenching my fist. 

This work-around of course won't fix structural ableism and relies on you having access to a doctor/therapist who actually gives a crap, so still might only help a couple of folks. 

Thats a good add on