To everyone in the notes rightfully dunking on anon, please remember that not everyone experiences empathy and that a lack of empathy says nothing about a person's character. Anon is operating under the belief that lack of empathy means a person is bad, but please remember that that is not reality. Please be mindful of low-empathy people when you think about what language you want to use in reaction to this post.

I’ve noticed online anti-theists language is always explicitly ableist and saneist.

Calling someone delusional for being religious is not an own because experiencing delusions is not a moral failing.

Calling someone psychotic is not an own because psychosis is simply an altered state not a moral failing.

Saying someone lacks empathy is not an own because having an empathy disorder hypo or hyper empathy is not a moral issue.

Religion has little bearing on neurotype outside of specific symptoms such as scrupulosity OCD (which can be completely secular ) or delusions that use religiosity as a schema.

Psychotic people are not evil or illogical we are human people of every race and ethnicity.

Please stop moralising mental illness. Schizo-spec people can be of any religious or ethnic background and we are. much more likely to be the victims of state violence than the perpetrators.

To everyone in the notes rightfully dunking on anon, please remember that not everyone experiences empathy and that a lack of empathy says nothing about a person's character. Anon is operating under the belief that lack of empathy means a person is bad, but please remember that that is not reality. Please be mindful of low-empathy people when you think about what language you want to use in reaction to this post.

Rules: Make a 24-hour poll with the names of your WIPS, let it run, then write one sentence for every vote the winner received

I was reading something about Whitestown, Indiana and my eyes nearly popped out of my head thinking it was one of THOSE comically racist towns. Nice to know, at least the name, wasn’t that.

Racisttown, named after the abolitionist Stopbeing Racist,

That's nothing. Check THIS shit out

WHAT THE HELL

George Washington Hitler and his son Dr. Gay Hitler,

i need white ppl to shut the fuck up forever actually.

it really does have it all.

1. the assumption that the people who are trying to talk about anti transmasculinity are just trying to gain “male privilege” (hmmmm wonder where y’all heard that) because we feel we’ve been “wrongfully deprived of” it is just????? so fucking cruel and intentionally disingenuous. and also makes it clear you haven’t actually read anything any of us have written. it’s clear you disliked us for saying something that challenges your worldview, and your reaction was to decide that we must have malicious or selfish intent, instead of thinking “you know what? maybe this is something i don’t know enough about to fully understand what they’re talking about, i’m going to talk with them to see if we can find common ground.” i have a post in my drafts talking about gender essentialism and the ways we project selfishness onto the actions and politics of men based solely on gender, and i think this is a good example.

2. erasing racial and ethnic minorities from this conversation, not just by the usual means but by outright using racism to do it. “those non whites know better than to talk back to white women” do u hear urselves???????????????????????? also are we finally acknowledging that the vast majority of the people trying to derail conversations and demonize people trying to talk abt transmasculinity are white?

3. using “truther” language derived from antisemitic conspiracy theories to create an “us vs them” instead of trying to form an actual dialogue. because if you’ll notice, a lot of the people posting things like this aren’t trying to talk to any of us. they’re screenshotting our posts to crop out the context (while leaving in the username of course) then pass around and mock and warn people not to talk about anti transmasculinity. the only reason i’m not replying directly to this post is bc the op already blocked me over a year ago for trying to have an open dialogue with them. these ppl are not interested in anything but shutting down discussions that upend their gender essentialist and binarist worldview.

why would women, cis or otherwise, be inherently better at understanding the stigma of being a "wrong woman" "wanting" to be a "wrong man".

Do they hear themselves do they think all trans men pass effortlessly irl or online and just

wha t

also like most of the time transandrophobia posts only include the url of the person called out if they are doing this time and time again. I know I take especial effort to avoid targeting people who make like one low note post every six months or so. There's misunderstanding frustration and then there's like. active idiots that need to be put in the internet time out zone.

yeah like. a lot of us have lived as women for years or even decades, so the assumption that we just don’t understand what it’s like to experience misogyny or be spoken over, simply because we identify as men or not women, is so fucking bonkers to me. the gender essentialism brainrot is so real.

some dipshit uploaded my book to an AI site, so suffice to say, I will fucking kill them

emailed my agent cuz our contract states she has to protect me from shit like this, so we'll see what she says

but I will still kill these ppl

LMFAO THE SITE IS BEING TAKEN DOWN

hey so, just so there's no ambiguity about what just happened-- this was about Prosecraft, a website that would help you compare your writing to your favorite author by analyzing the "vividness" of the words used, passive voice vs active voice and the number of adverbs used in a given section.

unfortunately, the service is dogshit for various reasons but that's not the issue here.

the issue is that the website had trained an AI on 25,000 books, one of which included mine. and i definitely did not give anyone permission to use my work to train an AI. it's literally stated in my contract.

and if i didn't give permission--i can imagine quite a number of authors didn't give permission either. (oops, i don't have to imagine--because hundreds of authors came forward and said they didn't give permission either!)

so i emailed my agent about this. my agent directed me to my publisher which has a legal department that looks into piracy on this scale. all of those authors did the same, emailing their legal team, getting The Authors Guild involved.

EVERY AUTHOR pretty much roasting this guy named Benji Smith on Twitter for claiming to "support authors" yet clearly using pirated work to train an AI.

of course, he decided to take the website down. authors are now talking about getting AI protection clauses in their contracts going forward. i already have one with my agent, but I imagine I will have to get it instated into every publishing contract moving forward.

source: it happened to me lol (but if you don't believe me, here's a link)

I think we should have a turn of phrase for "I'm not in the right, but I AM annoyed with this situation, so I just need to go bitch to a friend about this before I suck it up and go do the right thing" because more and more I'm finding this is a critical element of functional adulthood.

The people don’t need a bank holiday they need to be able to pay their bills.

Honestly this is why so many people disengage from politics.

Starmer CALLS OUT Sunak over bank holiday if ball kicked many times into goal.

Fuck off.

Scottish Labour turns it’s back on the LGBT community.

The face of a fucking coward.

let’s hear it for tinnitus

Someone in an autism facebook group I'm in just asked "How am I supposed to earn enough to make a living without burning out?"

Someone replied: "You're not. Even neurotypicals can't right now in the system designed for them. We're the canaries in the coalmine. When we start failing, they know something is wrong."

People keep saying, "Oh, everyone thinks they're neurodivergent now!" or they'll say it's the foods or chemicals or whatever other nonsense they've fallen for, but to me the answer is so obvious?

We've gotten to a point that more and more people are being left behind by the system, making it so that neurodivergent parents who could get by fine *enough* in decades/centuries past are bringing children into a world that cannot and will not attempt to accommodate them. There's nothing in the water and people aren't faking, it's just that this is no longer sustainable or livable and of course people with disabilities will be hit first and hit the hardest. There aren't more people with it, it's just harder to go through life without being aware that you're not functioning the way your peers seem to be able to.

The Swedish warship Vasa. It sank in 1628 less than a mile into its maiden voyage and was recovered from the sea floor after 333 years almost completely intact. Now housed at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, is the world's best preserved 17th century ship

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Kinda funny that the best example of its kind is the one that sucked as bad as it possibly could.

Oh, it was *ridiculously* bad. That initial post says “from the sea floor,” but that implies it made it out to sea.

So Gustavus Adolphus is king when Sweden is fighting wars all over the place. They need more ships, so he commissions four of them, two big and two small. The Vasa was supposed to be one of the smaller ones. Emphasis on “supposed to be.” Because Gustavus Adolphus keeps ordering changes. Like, add twelve more feet to the keel! Pile on the carvings! Add another gun deck for the hell of it! It got even worse when Sweden lost ten ships in a huge storm, so now they needed the Vasa *yesterday*. But Gustavus Adolphus is STILL demanding changes. So the shipwright scales up the measurements to try and make things work. Which might have worked, except the ship was being worked on by Swedes, Finns, Danes, Sami people. Communication is hard enough, but also it turns out that there are two different types of rulers being used by the workers. One is in Swedish feet and one is in Amsterdam feet. Amsterdam feet were only eleven inches long. (There’s a joke there I’m too tired to make.)

Anyway, because of that, the port side is heavier.

Okay, so you have to imagine the Vasa, with its hastily-scaled-up measurements, its *seven hundred* decorative carvings, its sixty-fucking-four bronze cannons. It’s a goddamn mess, AND its center of gravity is way off. Except that’s not something you could measure with instruments at the time. What you’d do is, you’d put it in the water, then have a bunch of guys run back and forth from port to starboard a bunch of times to test if it’ll tip over.

The guys who did this test could only do it three times before the Vasa was like, “I think I’m gonna hurl,” and almost tipped over right then and there.

Everybody there is like, “… uh-oh.” The admiral conducting the test just sighs and goes, “If only the king were here,” because Gustavus Adolphus wasn’t, and maybe if he had been he would have seen they fucked up and decided to pull the plug. Oh, and those bronze cannons? They weighed down the ship so much that the lowest row of gun portals was almost at the waterline.

But. Sweden needed the Vasa. It needed it to go to war. At that time, it was the most expensive thing Sweden ever spent money on.

SO. It’s August 10th, 1628. It’s the port in Stockholm. There’s music, there’s festivities, everybody’s showed up to see the Vasa off. A few ships tug the Vasa out to the current, let her loose, she drops four of her sails, and off she goes.

For about thirteen hundred meters.

Then, a light breeze blows. When I say light, I mean light. But that was all it took. The Vasa flops to port, water flows into the gun portals, and down it goes, still in the fucking harbor with its masts sticking out of the water.

So when that original post says “recovered from the sea floor,” it means brought up from the *actual harbor*. Like, within sight of the docks.

Oh, oh! But cool story about all this. Remember those sixty-four bronze cannons? Yeah, Sweden kind of needed those back, so about three decades later in 1658, the Swedes go down and retrieve almost all of them with a diving bell. Which is kind of badass.

I was trying to research the claim that TNR (trap-neuter-return) as a management tactic for stray and feral cats is ineffective, and I found this article very informative, I encourage reading it (if you're not too triggered by reading about awful things happening to cats.)

My main takeaway is that the health and welfare of feral cats is awful. The link reviews various studies on the health of feral cats and basically they're full of worms (an average of 53 tapeworms in one study!) and other parasites and carrying and spreading Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (the cat version of HIV, the virus which causes AIDS), Feline Leukemia Virus, Feline Parvovirus, cat flu, and rabies.

(Ectoparasites aren't covered in the same depth, but I can confirm from casual observation that ticks and fleas do enjoy cats as a food source.)

The article also discusses how common it is for cats to ingest poisons such as Roundup and to eat plastic and other inedible matter when feeding on trash. Multiple studies of feral cat colonies are cited that have found even regularly fed cats eat garbage and ingest great amounts of plastic, aluminum foil and other non-food material.

Death from trauma due to being run over or shot is also very common (the cat from the Croatian study that was brought into the vet with a homemade arrow stuck in its body is going to stay with me).

So if the cats are in horrible health and there's constant efforts to sterilize them, why doesn't their population decrease?

What the paper seems to show, is that feral cat colonies are often maintained by a constant influx of new cats. I have anecdotal evidence to corroborate this. Near where I live there is a place with a large feral colony, popularly called the "cat farm," where people dump unwanted cats. One of the problems I read about (not sure if it was this article or another one) was that areas where a cat colony is established become hotspots for people dumping cats.

(This happens, unfortunately, because other options straight-up don't exist. My family cared for a feral colony for about ten years. Our low-cost TNR program had a nine-month waitlist, no shelters anywhere in the area accepted cats, and spaying one fertile female at the vet's cost $200+. It's legitimately an awful situation to be in, and to this day, my mom's stress dreams always involve kittens popping up all over the place.)

As much as people talk about cats being "independent" animals that don't "need" humans, feral cat colonies really don't seem to establish and maintain themselves without constant human influence. In the studies, feral cat colonies are all in urban areas. In the USA we have actually feral populations of "wild" horses and pigs and some other animals, but we don't have "wild" cats. (Look at iNaturalist and observations of domestic cats are almost entirely confined to cities and towns.)

(Don't look at iNaturalist unless you want to see a bajillion dead cats.)

The linked article discusses how common it is for people to feed and sort-of look after colonies of feral cats (talking about Australia, not USA as my experience references, but similar situation). It can't really be known if some "feral" cats are considered to be "someone's cat" or not. With all the people that have "outdoor" cats, which can be counted as part of "feral" populations, I think calling cats "feral" obscures the problem a little bit: it's not so much a subset of cats that have escaped domestication, as a broad spectrum of cats that are neglected to varying extents.

So you have fully unsocialized cats, and you have friendly strays, and you have "outdoor" cats that may be fed or claimed by various people, but they're all invasive species and they're all reproducing and fighting with each other and they're all getting poisoned, shot, run over, infested with parasites, infected with diseases, and killed by predators. And it's really awful.

Of course I care about the impacts on wildlife, but holy shit, I also care about the cats.

This is a huge part of why I, 1) keep all my cats indoors, and 2) advocate for humane breakup of cat colonies, by adopting out socially able and relatively healthy cats (with curable or at least treatable problems) and humane culling of the others. TNR, from what I've seen in my own communities, just leaves more cats to die terribly.

It's horribly upsetting on a personal level to know that that means thousands of cats will be euthanized; it's more upsetting to know that those same cats will die in horrendous, awful ways if we don't, along with a great many others.

yup nothing convinced me that cats should be indoors like having outdoor cats as a kid.

People get upset at the idea of killing an animal, and yeah, I get it, but it's so upsetting because you can see/imagine a cat being captured and euthanized.

(or shot—honestly shooting is probably the best option because capture and euthanasia is going to be really scary to the cat and involve non-zero amount of suffering, whereas a bullet through the brain literally obliterates whatever could feel a thing called "pain" or "fear" before it can even exist. It just FEELS more violent and that's why we're squeamish about it, but we can get over it for the sake of the animals, I think.)

Whereas you might not have seen or imagined the much slower and nastier ends that will come to most cats you capture and release in a TNR program

So much of it comes down to misinformation about cats. No, cats are not "less domesticated" than other pets, they've literally evolved their range of vocalizations to be able to talk to us. How cool is that?! They have a communication system specifically for talking to another species. (wildcats sound different than house cats to humans, we've tested it, and cats only meow to each other when it's a mama cat talking to her kittens—which in my observation is a different vocalization than the meows they use to talk to people.)

spam emails are horrifying on an entirely different level once you actually begin to grapple with the material reality of ‘cyberspace’. how many servers were involved in dumping this message into my trash folder, where are they located, how much water goes into cooling them every day? where did the metals come from to build these facilities, who maintains them, how much labour and suffering and exploitation is required to bombard me with 50 messages a day i don’t even look at for products i will never buy? not just useless or a nuisance, but actively harming the earth & its people, and for what. zero social value, zero human communication, just capital trying to metastasise