I feel like I need to summarize something that Neil actually often explained before.

Some people seems to be under the impression that the writing strike is, like, a symbolic protest about the concept of writing in some way rather than a specific conflict over work and compensation for those works.

There are also seem to be some confusion on the concept of “picketing” and “boycotting”. Imagine the writers are factory worker, and the studio are factory owners. The WGA is doing a strike by not working, and they “picket” by standing outside of factories and dissuading people from working. Are you a member of WGA? If you need to ask probably you’re not. Are you writing something that’s supposed to be worked by member of the WGA? If not, that means you’re not a scab, and you’re not “crossing the picket line”. If it’s an actual factory, non-union member generally help the picket by helping the union members dissuading people from entering the factory.

Boycott though, is a different thing. The member of general public can boycott something by abstaining from buying a product or using a service, in an attempt to pressure the service provider. Sometimes the union will call for a boycott if they think if it will help them pressure the producer, sometimes they will not, if they think using the product/service is more helpful for the union. The only one who knows whether boycotting or not boycotting is more useful, is the union.

A few other details:

A boycott of TV/movies/streaming right now hurts the writers and actors. It takes money away from them and plays into the studio lie that nobody wants their work.

BUY BOOKS BUY BOOKS BUY BOOKS. Most authors are barely scraping by; see discussions on bookblr about how long it takes to pay royalties out.

Preorder books when you can. It tells the publishers how many to print.

Buy from indie stores whenever you can. Jeff Bezos doesn’t need any more of your money. Indies will ship to you. Bookshop.org is doing its best to be an Amazon killer, but you can always go straight to a store. My faves include Malaprops in Asheville, Browseabout in Rehoboth, and One More Page in Arlington. I have to say, Malaprops puts particular effort into making sure the books travel safely.)

Looking for novelty without new TV and movies about to stop coming out? Indie bookstores have mystery crate subscriptions!

Nowhere Bookshop has multiple subscriptions: Fantastic Strangelings, Happy Endings, and Nightmares From Nowhere.

The Ripped Bodice has Read, Romance, Repeat boxes.

And as always, support your local library. They need it!

game companies should be fucking EMBARRASSED about being inaccessible. it should be mortifying to ship a game with shit captions or no UI scaling options or no option to disable flashing / strobing effects. games lauding their character customization should be laughingstocks for not including hearing aids or congenital disorders or prosthetic limbs. EA should be publicly fucking humiliated for the sims series being 23 goddamn years old and include cats and dogs and horses and werewolves and zombies and mermaids and star wars and not FUCKING WHEELCHAIRS.

🚨🚨CONGRESS SECRETLY TRYING TO SNEAK IN EARN IT ACT COPYCAT INTO MUST PASS SPENDING BILL (PLEASE READ EXTREMELY IMPORTANT)

July 20, 2023 Congress is right now determining what is included in a must pass spending bill the NDAA. Often congress will sneakily add as amendments their bills that they can't pass in a normal setting.

If you remember, I made a previous post about EARN IT being reintroduced here.

Following it's initial introduction earlier this year was massive opposition from human rights, LGBT, tech, political groups, and grassroots groups. Bc of this, the senators decided to remake the bill but give it a new name, so they can still pass Earn It without actually passing Earn It. Those bills are the Stop CSAM Act (yes really, they actually named it that), and the Cooper-Davis act.

The entire point of these bills is to mass surveil and censor everyone and I don't know why more people or senators speak out against it. There is a direct timeline from when the Attorney General Barr (under Trump) said he wanted to do this to it's initial introduction in 2019, and how the senators explicitly knew they couldn't actually say that so they lied and said it was about "stopping CSAM" or "stopping drugs" for Cooper-Davis Act.

These bills essentially do the following:

We have until the end of the month to stop this, but this can be added literally any moment until then. It's literally code red. If this is added it goes into effect immediately. The BEST way to stop this is to drive calls and emails to the senate. https://www.badinternetbills.com/ connects you directly to your members of congress & gives you a call script.

It is ESSENTIAL to call the Senate leaders who can stop this. Here's a more precise call script you can use: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1huD5Ldd1lPTECYTEb9Gg2ZzrqW6Y9tryHT-MdjOl8kY/edit

All these people expressed concern over Earn It, so we need to press them hard to not allow it's copycats Cooper-Davis or Stop CSAM into the NDAA. This is URGENT and needs all hands on deck. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) (202) 224-6542 Maria Cantwell (D-WA) (202) 224-3441 Jon Ossof (D-GA) (202)-224-3521 Alex Padilla (D-CA) (202) 224-3553 Cory Booker (D-NJ) (202) 224-3224 Mike Lee (R-UT) (202) 224-5444

Please please please spread this message and blow up their phones.

TLDR; The Senate is trying to quietly push the Earn It Act's copycat bills into the must pass NDAA, which will lead to mass censorship and surveillance online by gutting Section 230 which is the entire reason you can even be on tumblr and why the internet exists, killing encryption which put everyone's lives in danger, and appointing far-right people to a supreme court-esque commission that the president has direct control over. They could be added in ANY DAY and we need to push hard to stop it before it gets to that point. CALL YOUR SENATORS **NOW** BY USING https://www.badinternetbills.com/ AND CALL THE SENATE LEADERSHIP AND SPREAD THE WORD!!!!

Anyway if you gotta argue that someone isn't a person because they're cruel/rich/oppressing others, you're actually giving them credentials they never had.

If a human being wants to be a minor god on earth, and acts as if they are, they are stepping out of humanity of their own will. They do not want to be treated as human beings, but as something above human beings.

If we respond by treating them as not human beings, we are saying that their claim to be outside humanity is correct. It doesn't matter if we mean that they are something below human, instead of above it; we are underlining the fact that *they* are not *us*, that they owe us no natural affection or care, that if they *can* behave as minor gods on earth, it is their right to do so until such a time as they can be treated as vermin.

But we drag down the statues of people who set themselves up as gods *because they are not gods*. We feel that standing over others is wrong because we are all human and therefore all worthy of the same care and respect. If anyone can step outside humanity, no matter in which direction, then the foundation of what makes oppression wrong in the first place crumbles.

This only worsens if your argument is 'it's okay to talk/think about them like this, because I'm unable to cause them any harm' -- they think of you as powerless, as someone or something that does not matter and never will, and you are AGREEING WITH THEM.

its legitimately getting to the point where googles become entirely useless

Switch to Firefox and use duckduckgo or ecosia. Google sucks and won't get better.

i was trying to remember what those other search engines were called thank youuuu<3

yw <3

They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.

They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.

So its that easy huh

Of course it is

Actually, this isn’t “easy” and is huge news. You see, Lego is absolutely meticulous about their quality control. Their standards for manufacturing are stupidly high, as are their safety requirements. You know that distinctive “click” when you pop two Lego bricks apart? They engineered that. That sound is so distinctive that it can be used to tell genuine Lego bricks from counterfeits and it’s a sound that would be based on shape and material.

Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)

Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).

What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….

Nobody else has any excuse.

GLORIOUS NERDERY Lego edition

if you’re like. 14 and trans on tumblr rn and getting ur first anon hate from terfs. word of advice. stop responding to that shit. theyre only gonna send more, it’s only gonna make you spiral even if you put on a strong face. report + block messages as soon as they come in, don’t let them sit in your inbox it’s gonna make you feel like shit. turn off anon for a few days, block anyone suspicious in your notes liberally for a little while. repeat as needed. don’t give them the time of day. it sucks, but like. i dont know any trans person on the internet with any following who hasn’t gotten some disgusting messages. just. be safe yknow

so many young teens feel the need to have a snappy comeback, to explain you could never be cishet bc you’re actually t4t!! or whatever but like. just. don’t say any of that. they love that shit, they eat it up. do what u can to bore them into stopping. and sometimes they dont stop, and that sucks too but like. you do not want to get in public arguments with people who can hurt you more than you think they can, its not cowardly to delete discourse posts and shit if you feel like you can’t handle the notifications anymore. like just. you may not be able to completly prevent this stuff but take a few steps if you can, it will at least lower your chances

I used to answer nastygrams, and I can tell you the single most convincing reason I found to stop, and it's not for my feelings or because I can't handle it or whatever.

You know why terfs (and really anyone else) send people nastygrams? Because they don't have enough of a following to say that shit and spread it around by themselves, and they want your following instead. Tumblr is user driven, not algorithmic. The only way their nasty-ass bullshit gets spread is if YOU spread it.

Every time you answer an ask like that or reblog one of their posts... you are ceding your platform to them. You're handing over publicity. You're letting them use you to get at the people who follow you. You're letting them use you to try to hurt others. They're not necessarily even trying to hurt you specifically, they're just trying to be seen, and you publishing their ask means they get seen by all the people who follow you. The absolute best thing you can do is make sure that doesn't happen at all, regardless of what you might say in response.

The first time I ever saw it framed like that, I immediately stopped ever addressing any kind of nastygram. Because that, coupled with the mental image of some asshole wasting their time repeatedly checking my blog to see my response, only to find out that not only did I not answer them, I blocked them and I'm still having a great time, makes it a lot easier to brush aside the whole thing. It wastes less of my time on someone bad. It doesn't expose my followers to hurtful sentiments at all. Everyone gets on with their happy little lives except the horrible little gremlin that didn't get what they wanted out of me.

No one gets to use my platform to hurt others, and they don't get to keep access to me if they can't be nice.

*also as an aside- you can shut off reblogs on an individual post now. That's an option. If you want to make a post about something and some asshole starts discourse or whatever, you can shut off reblogs without deleting the post if you don't want to delete the original post.

I think we should let Ron Perlman burn a house down. You know, as a treat.

Thanks @ingdamnit for bringing this to my attention.

Reblogging a new chain with uncensored captions because disabled people aren't babies

"But I will say one thing before I get off this. The motherfucker who said 'we're going to keep this thing going until people start losing their houses and their apartments.' Listen to me motherfucker. There's a lot of ways to lose your house, some of it is financial, some of it is karma, and some of it is just figuring out who the fuck said that. And we know who said that, and where he fucking lives. There's a lot of ways to lose your house. You wish that on people, you wish that families starve, while your making 27 million dollars a year for creating nothing. Be careful motherfucker. Be really careful. Cause that's the kind of stuff that stirs stuff up."

im having a moment

im turning rbs off of this in 24hrs you have my express permission to repost this image as much as you desire idc.

I love you old trans people I love you old trans people I love you old trans people I love you old trans people I love you ol

Dear mom,

I love @reallyndacarter so much.

babe wake up first usa stripper union jus won !!!!!!

x

[ID: text that says:

Los Angeles – The 15-month effort by dancers employed at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in North Hollywood, Calif. to gain union recognition and become the nation’s only unionized strippers ended today in complete victory. 

"If you have been following our journey, then you know this has been a long, exhausting fight, which is why this victory is so sweet,” said Reagan, one of the Star Garden dancers. “We put everything we have into this campaign, and we were fortunate to have the support and solidarity from the club’s patrons, our allies and friends, the labor movement and our union, Actors’ Equity Association.”

End ID]

She got so mad she wrote song lyrics and edited a video and everything omg

I can’t imagine being a waitress who isn’t thin and having to deal with the constant diet culture bullshit from all of the customers at the restaurant. All of the diet culture foods mentioned in this video, asking for a takeout box for leftovers of a dish that the person didn’t finish solely because they want to “watch their figure” when they’re already eating a kale salad, and then prefacing buying the dessert with “being bad.” I would fucking hate dealing with this every day

shaking six year old me by the shoulders YOU WERE RIGHT. YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT LOVE AND ABOUT FAIRNESS AND ABOUT SHARING IS CARING. YOU WERE RIGHT. THE ADULTS DON’T KNOW ANY MORE ABOUT TRUTH THAN YOU DO. KEEP BELIEVING IN THE FAIRIES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE GARDEN. NOTHING IS “JUST THE WAY IT IS”. I AM SORRY THEY EVER CONVINCED YOU TO FEEL SHAME. YOU ARE REAL AND A PART OF THIS WORLD. YOU WERE RIGHT.

When you call "influencers" what they are, freelance marketers, it makes the phrase "mommy/family influencer" sound just as dark as it is in reality.

They are using their children to sell you things. Some of these people intentionally have children solely in order to use them as marketing devices.

They aren't harmless or wholesome. They are expanding and normalizing new and different forms of familial abuse to a worldwide audience

who else up realizing we weren’t meant to do this alone