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Hope yall are doing well

@bluebutch

meg|22|they/she|lesbian
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ever since my gf and i moved in together a couple years ago i've been semi-regularly executing something i call a "prank night." this is something you want to do frequently enough that it's not a special occasion, but spontaneously enough to make it a prank. the set-up for a prank night is simple

  1. listen to your partner and take note of a couple things she's putting off doing, as well as a couple things she's been wanting
  2. wait for a day when your partner is out of the house for work or errands
  3. tell them that you'll be playing videogames/hanging out with the guys/doing very little all day. this way her guard will be down

now you can execute the four core aspects of the prank night

  1. act of service. complete a chore or task that you know she's been dreading. doing the dishes/cleaning the living room/making an appointment/doing the groceries, etc.
  2. lil gift. flowers, chocolate, anything that you know she wants but hasn't felt justified in getting for herself
  3. sustenance. a charcuterie board, a homecooked meal, her favorite snack, or a fancy cocktail can all work
  4. fourth, final, most important, when she gets home you sit her down and eat her out like she's your last meal on death row

The Look On The Girlfriend's Face Will Be Awesome!

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

  • Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
  • The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
  • The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
  • The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
  • Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
  • The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
  • Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
  • He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Edit to add further developments:

  • Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
  • Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
  • The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
  • The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
  • The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.
  • TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
  • This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".
  • This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")
  • X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
  • Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
  • The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
  • One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
  • Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.

actually im just gonna make my own post about it: please read more webcomics. please try them. every time people make posts about “aw man i wish SOMEone would WRITE about FLAVOR OF QUEER THING/TRAUMA OR ABUSE BUT IN SPECIFIC WAYS I CAN RELATE TO/WHATEVER” and then it gets reblogged into a giant thread of people agreeing with it and demanding Content i die because whatever it is is definitely being painstakingly created by an indie author who would really like for people to consume it and every time i point this out people suddenly can’t read lmao

it is out there it is free it is being made from firsthand experiences by people who care very very deeply who would be DELIGHTED to hear that it’s resonating with anybody at all, please throw some of that enthusiasm and support at people who will actually appreciate it

if you’re an indie comic person and any of this applies to you i encourage you to reblog this with a link to your comic and a short synopsis so people can browse the notes and find shit they’re looking for. or make your own post on your own blog if you don’t want to fool with other people i don’t care this is a sign from the universe that you should be louder about what you’re working on because people can’t fucking find it apparently.

i’ll go first i make kidd commander and it’s about an ensemble cast of queers on their way to kill god, they live on an airship and they’re all too pissed off to die. it’s free to read and it’s in the middle of its third arc right now. it lives here http://kiddcommander.com/

go go go

on second thought gonna add if you’re a READER and you’ve had Feelings about a webcomic feel free to recommend it here too

In addition to Kidd Commander, I enjoy:

Dumbing of Age - semi-autobiographical webcomic by an ex-Christian fundamentalist; explores a wide bevy of social justice issues in more nuanced ways than I often see, especially in regards to abuse

Monster Pulse - A group of kids (some of them explicitly queer) have their body parts turn into monsters; great analyses of trauma and transhumanism

Leftover Soup - slice-of-life story about the most philosophically inclined 20somethings in the world, seriously they spiral off into fascinating discussions all the time, this is basically Having Difficult Conversations: The Webcomic; the opening is terrible but stick with it

Forward - I’m just gonna link to the author’s artist’s statement and you can decide for yourself if it’s for you

i follow a lot of podcasts, i can put together a curated list.

http://ohumanstar.com/ is incredible, it’s about trans robots (in minneapolis! not a huge plot point, but it’s where i’m from). it finished recently, so you can have a completed reading experience.

https://www.baldwinpage.com/spacetrawler/2010/01/01/spacetrawler-4/ spacetrawler started as the story of six humans kidnapped by an incompetent alien to help free the eebs, an enslaved alien race. it’s very good, sometimes it hits very hard. the first and second series are complete, the third series is updating currently.

http://www.rice-boy.com/see/ rice boy is a “brightly colored and surreal fantasy adventure story”. bittersweet chosen one stuff. also by the same author is the order of tales (completed) and vattu (on going, i think it’s near completion)

https://www.egscomics.com/ very queer cast of magical teens. starts out very rough, but that was 19 years ago. lots of gender transformation magic and magical hijinks, with a helping of tragic backstories and nerd stuff.

https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1 about a couple of weird magic british school children at a weird british boarding school. there are a couple chapters in particular that hit hard. also, it’s just very well drawn and written and it always updates MWF, which is more than most webcomics can say.

http://diggercomic.com/ digger is just a good comic, i should reread it again, it’s been awhile. it’s about a “take-no-nonsense” wombat who finds herself dealing with a talking buddha statue, a tribe of the best anthropomorphic hyenas you’ll see, and a dead god.

boy have i got good news for YOU

the good news is that on this list (to my limited knowledge) both my comic and gunnerkrigg court feature wlw protagonists!

the other good news is there are TONS of us working outside the aggregate sites, please please don’t assume those companies are indicative of everything going on in webcomics as a genre. my thoughts on that could fill a whole other post but i wanted to bring it up here at least.

I also just remembered there’s the website https://archivebinge.com , which is FANTASTIC if you’re looking for something specific. It’s limited by the fact that the creator needs to post the comic themself, but it’s got a great tagging system for both genres and content warnings:

and lets you know when new posts go up even on independent sites! Extremely useful for finding and reading a bunch of comics without taking agency from the creators.

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i read a shitton of webcomics but here are my recs specifically for ones that aren’t on networks like hiveworks so they need more love (on mobile so sorry if formatting gets weird)

Softies i can’t summarize better than page one sorry. there’s a bit about a stubbed toe that will hit you like a freight train to the feels.

Job Satisfaction is slice of life about queers and demons and queer demons.

Radio Silence is a coming of age story about a British band on tour.

Ingress Adventuring Company is about Professor Toivo Kissa. He is an elf and he goes on adventures instead of doing his job, which is professoring.

Skin Deep is about a girl who goes to college and finds out she’s a sphinx (i feel like everyone reads skin deep but also not enough people read skin deep).

Sfeer Theory has a magical university for a very complicated magic system, if you’re into Lore.

Outliers takes place in a superhero world but these boys are just trying to be happily married in peace.

Some LGBT webcomics just off the top of my head

Muted - fantasy comic about a gay, poly witch in New Orleans.

Paranatural - All ages fantasy comic about middle schoolers who fight ghosts.

2 Slices - Classic, trope-y romance comic with a queer spin

Alice and the nighmare - Fantasy/sci-fi retelling of Alice in Wonderland.

Sleepless Domain - Magical Girl genre deconstruction. In a mysterious fantasy/sci-fi world where teenage girls sometimes have superpowers, how are those girls treated and valued? Content warning: This comic is usually pretty cute but has some serious violence early on.

Chaos Life - autobiographical slice-of-life comics about an agender illistrator and their gay, disabled wife.

Boy In Pink Earmuffs - All ages comic about two best friends who solve mysteries together and are also crushing on eachother.

Magical Boy - Fantasy comic about a trans boy who finds out he’s descended from a long line of magical girls and is destined to save the world. (tapas exclusive)

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what’s up if you’re in the notes looking for recs you can’t see most of them because tumblr hides anything with a link in it, view this reblog to see a big ol’ list of webcomic links

tiger tiger is so gorgeous and funny! a girl steals her twin brother’s identity and jaunts off with his ship to study sea sponges. really amazing.

skinhorse it’s been a long time since i caught up but i’ve admired garrity since i was reading narbonic in middle school. skinhorse is about a government department full of weirdos that tries to regulate nonhuman intelligences and it’s also just very funny and cute.

kill six billion demons is extremely dense, extremely gorgeous. a woman wakes up in hell with a magic thingy in her forehead and it only gets weirder from there.

Do you want ass kicking nuns? Do you want badass witches? Do you want every single person in the webcomic you’re reading to be queer?

Then you want to read Sister Claire by @yamino!

I don’t even remember when/where I picked up this webcomic but it’s been going for YEARS now, and I have loved every single thing the artist has ever done.

Aside from the main webcomic (updated twice weekly I think?), there are the missing moments, short stories about the world and characters that fill in a TON of lore and are well worth a read.

Yamino has also done some zines about elastigirl and stratogale that have changed the canon of the incredibles for me, not to mention the awesome sailor moon polycule content on patreon.

My runner up suggestion is Questionable Content by Jeph. It’s a little slow to get started and there’s a LOT to catch up on, but it’s updated every weekday and it just gets queerer and queerer as time goes on. Also quirky robots (seriously Melon is my absolute fave).

I got real petty over on the Facebook page and IT WAS GLORIOUS.

This is me, going to check out Legendary Books now…

Publisher: We think that the way the fantasy genre treats women is problematic so we’re going to try and do better

A Fool: If you don’t like it why don’t you make your own!

Publisher: That

That is literally what we just said we are doing

GUESS WHO’S BACK, BIGOTED FUCKWADS?

BOY it feels good to be back in this particular saddle!

AHAHAHAHAHA we have a winner for today!

*Snort*

if anybody like me a) lol’d and b) wanted to get my hands on that book series, here’s the link

This is magically what I’m looking for right now.

Hi Legendary Books, I’ll take one of everything.

I literally don’t have the space for any more physical books, but I’ve downloaded every Underrealm book on Kindle. I read The Alchemist’s Touch specifically because of this post and I seriously can’t recommend the Underrealm books enough. they are absolutely fantastic.

I don’t really read anymore, not like i used to. And of i get a masters this year like i am planning to then that isn’t going to change. But hell yes I’m going to go and buy these books because THIS is exactly the kind of thing that i want to support!

YISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

One day I will have a job and a bank account and I will have money from the job in the bank account and I will use some of the money to purchase these books

Hey did you

did you know

did you know we have a podcast now and you can literally listen to the books for free.

(You probably didn’t. That’s okay because it’s very new).

It’s slower than buying and reading them, but it’s great if you have no book budget but you do have some listening time!

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You could also beg your local library to get them.  Just saying.

Asking your library to stock a book for you to read is one of the most helpful things you can possibly do for an author.

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In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”

If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.

This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:

If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I'm not hearing about that, so... Tree law!

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The Studios: *speak*

Botanists and other Tree Experts:

Update and confirmation of Imminent Tree Law:

He mentions later in the thread that not only do they not trim the trees annually, they’re trimmed at best once every 18 years. Supposed to be every five, and only in dormancy, which even my layman’s ass knows about tree trimming.

And yes, Universal can probably eat the fine. But it’s gonna be a whopper even if the trees survive (which is as mentioned kinda unlikely), California is a triple damage state for tree law, and it may increase dramatically if there were nesting birds in the trees.

All this to be a Captain Planet filler villain to some writers. And yes, it’s currently just the writers officially picketing there; SAG-AFTRA recommended against it for petty bullshit like this and the suddenly necessary sidewalk construction.

I asked my dad— a retired arborist—about TREE LAW and he just kinda blinked and said (i paraphrase because Dad Tangents, amirite?):

"Worst and best case I ever saw was a guy who was caught in the act of cutting down a C&C tree by two Department of Urban Forestry supervisors while they were randomly driving around on a Saturday. Not only did he have to deal with the cops showing up and months of paperwork and bureaucracy, but he also had to pay the fines AND cover the cost of the tree removal + stumping + buying a new tree + planting the new tree + wages for the regular crew plus the extra workers they needed to get the jobs done. That tree ended up costing him upwards of $35K, and that was over 20 years ago."

So yeah, respect Tree Law or pay out the bootyhole.

someone actually made an exact replica of Caitlyn’s rifle. and yes.. it folds.

@.volpinprops: Finished! Caitlyn's rifle from Arcane, made for @sew_angry

Bonus:

People really think they’re ready for a relationship even marriage but how good are you at apologizing? How attentive are you at others needs? How sacrificial can you be even when you can’t and how vulnerable will you be even when you’re angry? How much does pride mean to you? Are you okay with knowing your person can be sick for the rest of their lives, become broke, can gain weight or lose their most attractive qualities? Do you know how to be faithful? How good are you with leaving your needs and wants at the door sometimes and putting someone else first? Will you learn new things, can you be open minded? How quick are you to walk away when things become crazy? How grateful are you when things don’t go as planned? Do you care about being the better lover or the bigger person? What would you do if someone better came along? Can someone entice you easily? Do you know how to defend? Are you a selfish person? Do you consider yourself to be loyal? How are you with protecting someone else? How do you feel about true commitment? How do you treat people who can’t do nothing for you at the moment? Are you okay knowing that butterflies don’t last forever but love does? How do you handle stress? Can you cope or are you easily defeated? Can you unlearn unhealthy patterns and habits or you are who you are? How do you react when your truth is really not truth? Can you handle being wrong? Are you okay with being honest and are you also an honest person? Is lying a way of escape for you? Do you believe in white lies? Do you consider yourself too good? How are you with patience? Does social media influence you? Will you be okay knowing things aren’t always as it looks? How are you with problem solving? When was the last time you gave credit when it was due? Do you know who you are and what you need? Are you observant? What does Love mean for you? What if your interpretation of love is wrong? Will you fix it?

This is why fat shaming can have tragic consequences.

If this sort of weight-based medical bias happens to any of y'all, politely tell the doctor (during your visit) that you want them to write in your file that they are refusing ordering tests for you because of your current weight. This usually causes them to order the test anyways because they do NOT want a malpractice suit. Remember: You want to make a paper trail to hold them accountable.