terfs be like i’m joining the fight against restrictive gender roles on the side of the restrictive gender roles

we did it patrick we saved the city

Hey, in the midst of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike, I’d like to encourage everyone to join a Union. They’re genuinely so, so important when it comes to fighting for your rights as a worker. Look into specialized unions for your industry or join a larger organization like The Industrial Workers of the World (which grants membership to ANY worker in ANY industry regardless of current employment status). Learn your rights. Unionize. Fight back.

reminder that teachers are forbidden from joining or starting a union in several states 🥰 🥰 🥰 🥰 🥰 🥰 it's because those states have made collective bargaining (ie the reason why having a union is important) illegal.

My first question to someone who’s like, “You should give up writing and learn to code!” would be to ask, “Is that how you entertained yourself during the pandemic? With long videos of people coding? Or did you read books and watch TV and movies like the rest of us?”

Universal Basic Income as explained by Monsters, Inc.

TL;DW:

In Monsters, Inc., the entire economy of the monster world is based on the evil act of terrifying human children for their screams. It isn’t until the events of the film that Sully and Mike discover by accident that children’s laughter is 10x as powerful as screams at producing power.

Our economy, though not powered by literal screams, is also powered by fear, the fear of death, starvation, and homelessness.

If instead, we shifted our economy to be powered by passion and joy in what we do, instead of the fear of the negative consequences of what happens if we don’t, we’ll be a lot better off not just morally, but economically.

Passionate people doing something because it’s what they love work a lot better and produce better results than those who are forced to work to live.

The way to achieve that joy-based economy is by providing everyone with their basic needs, through a universal basic income.

I can’t believe how much this makes sense

Every day we are able to inact a UBI but aren’t is a day we are doing the economy wrong.

It’s a day where we allow suffering and fear to continue.

It’s a day we as a society didn’t spend to the fullest and a day we aren’t getting back.

Universal Basic Income as explained by Monsters, Inc.

TL;DW:

In Monsters, Inc., the entire economy of the monster world is based on the evil act of terrifying human children for their screams. It isn’t until the events of the film that Sully and Mike discover by accident that children’s laughter is 10x as powerful as screams at producing power.

Our economy, though not powered by literal screams, is also powered by fear, the fear of death, starvation, and homelessness.

If instead, we shifted our economy to be powered by passion and joy in what we do, instead of the fear of the negative consequences of what happens if we don’t, we’ll be a lot better off not just morally, but economically.

Passionate people doing something because it’s what they love work a lot better and produce better results than those who are forced to work to live.

The way to achieve that joy-based economy is by providing everyone with their basic needs, through a universal basic income.

I can’t believe how much this makes sense

Every day we are able to inact a UBI but aren’t is a day we are doing the economy wrong.

It’s a day where we allow suffering and fear to continue.

It’s a day we as a society didn’t spend to the fullest and a day we aren’t getting back.

Federal troops were called against 13,000 miners.Three battles that led to the biggest armed insurrection since the Civil War. 

 Ask yourself why you were never taught this in school. 

Although there were planes used against the miners in the Battle of Blair Mountain, it is not true that this was the first time planes were used to drop bombs on American soil against Americans. 

The Battle of Blair Mountain took place in August and September of 1921. Just a few months prior to that, on May 31 and June 1, planes were also used to help destroy the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous black neighborhood nicknamed The Black Wall Street. At least 39 people died during the event, which is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Hundreds were wounded, and 6,000 black people lost their homes. 

Both of these events were hugely important moments in American history. 

Ask yourself why neither was taught to you in school. Also ask your local school board. 

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.

Thank you for this addition!

And, following up on the previous post …

“This makes me uncomfortable” is NOT a valid reason for censorship

These fucking book editors should remove themselves from the profession ASAP 😡

The only reason a book should be removed, the ONLY reason, is “we are keeping it in the restricted section for research because its only intended function is to cause harm.”

And to be clear, when I say this, I’m talking about shit like To Train Up A Child and The Protocols of Zion. One is a text responsible for the deaths of multiple children because it’s an abuse how-to, and the other is entirely fabricated “protocols” from a group that never actually existed but is claimed to represent all Jews, and it’s basically one long antisemitic screed.

And even these should be available. Just. Not where they’re gonna be used to start a white supremacist cult.

A lot of folks are responding to the whole Reddit situation by calling for the return of decentralised forums, and I think it's important to remember that, contrary to certain popular narratives, the reason early 2000s forum culture has fallen by the wayside is not because people are Just Lazy. Certainly, ease of use is part of it, but a much larger part of it is how vulnerable self-hosted forums are.

Basically, the problem is that even the largest and most carefully managed self-hosted forums can be rendered unusable more or less indefinitely by a single sufficiently determined hostile actor. This can take the form of both attacks on the forum's social infrastructure (i.e., via sock-puppet accounts, botting, organised "raids", etc.) and attacks on its technical infrastructure (i.e., via hacking, DDoS, etc.). In either case, a self-hosted forum has no real defence, and the majority of decentralised forum communities survive only by virtue of their relative obscurity; once a self-hosted forum manages to attract the attention of That One Guy who's willing to devote his life to shitting the place up over some microscopic slight, it's effectively game over.

Right now, there are essentially only two mitigation strategies:

To be clear, these are not intractable problems; other solutions may well exist. However, any proposed plan for bringing decentralised public forums back needs to address them. If you're going in operating under the assumption that forums have become marginalised simply because corporations are evil and people are lazy, you're setting yourself up to learn the hard way why self-hosted forums no longer seem to be capable of growing beyond a certain point.

Okay so! You need to download something!

Be it a movie, a game, a software, a book. Where do you even start? You know people catch viruses or fines pirating, so how to do it, and do it safely? This is going to be a bit verbose, so coloured text has the most important info. THIS WILL BE LONG but you can just skim it! (P.S. there are some goodies for artists in the end so do take a peek there if you do art and would like courses or procreate brushes) By the end of this you should be able to download or stream almost anything.

(Disclaimer: I'm not super knowledgeable on the technical side of things, just a moderately seasoned pirate. Will explain stuff to the best of my abilities, but there will be wild semplifications. If there's any issue, or precisations you'd like to make, or just need a hand with something, feel free to reach out to me directly on here!)

Putting a cut here so I don't spam your dashes <3 - now, here we go:

She had a pixie haircut.

No, that was literally the reason why he went after her.

The World Of Becca Blake

Art by Dan Schkade

alright I found the video.

hey white people listen to this video.

Video Transcript:

First person: Black people are treated like a sexuality. And I do not-

Video cuts to second person: See, I actually like this video. And I think I got a explanation for you.

The reason that blackness almost acts as a sexuality is because antiblackness is something that is so innate in the minds of nonblack people when growing up, that them preferring not to date someone who is black is almost as normal as them preferring not to date someone who isn’t their preferred sex.

Did y’all follow that? Like, let me give you an example. Like, a straight white male saying that they don’t date black girls is just as normal in society as a straight white male saying that they don’t date boys. And straight white women saying that they don’t date black boys was almost as normal as them saying they don’t date women. And granted, that example might not be as prevalent as the last one, but still.

And I know in both of those examples, they were white, but it applies with nonblack POC too. And to add a little bit of intersectionality, let’s be honest, it probably applies to some black men, too. And that’s a shame, that we would treat our own women similarly to that of a sex we don’t prefer.

Oh, I just thought of something! Antiblackness is something that is so innate in the minds of nonblack people that they would almost have to come out! Come out! And say that they like black people. It’s like homophobia was so innate that you would have to come out and say you’re homosexual.

That’s the one. I’m not even gonna lie, that’s the one. End Video Transcript.

Worth noting that interracial marriage became legal in 1967. 1967. That’s about 52 years ago.

Oh this.

EVERY single one of my relationships, once we get to meeting the parents? I have to ask them three questions:

Do they know you're gay/bi/pan/whatever?

Do they know I'm transgender?

Do they know I'm black?

Sometimes I've gotten "I don't see how that could be an issue" for the last one and I tell him I don't care, warn them in advance that I am black. You know most of them have reported back to me "they were really surprised, I don't understand, it's more surprising to them that I'm dating someone black than someone gay and transgender?"

I've been through this song and dance with friends already, friends who neglected to mention to their parents that I'm black prior to me coming over and whose parents had less than fantastic reactions to seeing their kid playing with a little black kid in their yard. I'm not doing a surprise round with a partner I'm trying to determine if I want to spend the rest of my life as part of that family. My sister still has not met her white husband's family because she insisted on the same prior warning before walking into that house, and a good thing too because his parents basically disowned him for even considering marrying a black girl. They've been married more than a decade! They have children together! They're straight! And he had to 'come out' to his parents and get kicked out of his family for his attraction to a black woman.

It is one of the major reasons I stopped actively pursuing relationships with people who are white.

Interracial marriage was legalized when my parents were teenagers. My parents grew up not knowing they would enter an interracial marriage, not thinking it would be possible. It remains a major factor in why my parents hesitated for YEARS to get married, thinking the ruling would be overturned and they would have to end their marriage and not wanting to do that to their future children. Or that they would have to constantly uproot their kids and move around the country to stay safe. I remember growing up repeatedly having to explain how I could be black even though my mom is white [passing], because everyone jumped to 'adoption' and not 'her husband is fucking black'

I'm just going to put this here again so you understand I'm not just ranting alone by myself

Florida's Anti Gender Affirming Care law has been partially struck down

This is a good first step. However it’s only partial. It may not be enough to help every trans person in Florida. It might even turn out to only help the specific plaintiffs in this particular case. So, others might need to build a case against the law. Keep up the fight!

TV Executives: “if the strike goes on, you won’t get new episodes of your favorite shows! You won’t get new movies you were looking forward to! Isn’t that terrible, what the writers are doing to you?”

Me: Bitch, that might have been an effective threat in 2007, but we have since survived a Covid shutdown and discovered ways to amuse ourselves while we waited, we can outwait this shit, too. I got a pile of shows saved I haven’t even watched yet, and a Mt. TBR waiting for me.

Compensate (and respect) your writers for their work, assholes.

And the thot plickens….

HOLY FUCK

SAG-AFTRA = Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists

More info:

- The actors walk off at the end of June if the studios don’t sit down with the writers

- Rumor is directors will follow. This will grind everything to a halt.

- Nobody is asking for a boycott. Neil Gaiman has pointed out that making Good Omens S2 a huge hit actually puts more pressure on Amazon to negotiate with the writers

- This implies it’s okay to catch up on old streaming content without breaking the line too

- This is a screenwriter strike; books will keep coming out.

- Movies already made will keep coming out for months. Again, actors have not called for a boycott; you aren’t breaking the line if you go see a movie.

- I don’t know where this puts podcasts but none of them have studio funding or platforms so they’ll probably keep going.

- Substack/Tumblr book club are all public domain works and will keep going. In addition to Dracula Daily there’s Whale Weekly, Dickens Daily, My Dear Wormwood (The Screwtape Letters), Letters from Watson (Sherlock Holmes) and more.

- Your local library always needs love. With the Libby app you don’t even need to physically go there.

I wanna emphasize "nobody is asking for a boycott." A thing that's happened a lot in the last decade or so is that workers will pursue a particular action, and as it starts to go around online, the internet game of telephone expands and expands the actions called for and who's expected to take part in those actions.

The problem with this is that what makes organized action effective is that it's decisive, specific, and clearly bounded. That's because it has to be extremely legible to the targeted institutions that the losses taking place directly correspond to the demands of the workers. When workers are striking, and some people are boycotting, and starting and stopping on different days, that's not expanding the impact of the strike. It's making the contours of the effects of the strike blurry, and therefore debatable. At the negotiating table, the bosses will interpret that blurriness as favorably for themselves as possible. This functionally diminishes the power of the strike.

The "organized" part of organized action is essential. 21st century corporations are designed to absorb the impacts of disorganized action against them. This is why "voting with your dollar" doesn't work: the market is not a democracy. In order for conscious consumer behavior to matter, it has to be sudden and dramatic.

When you hear about strikes, check whether they're calling for a boycott. If they are not, don't boycott, and don't tell people to boycott. It's actively harmful to muddle the messaging like that.

The reason to not boycott: Because the media companies might claim "oh, there's less demand than we thought for these things, so of course we can't agree to pay you more."

Keep going to movies. Keep watching shows. Keep your streaming subscription. Keep proving that you want the content that they're refusing to pay for.

It's possible that, at some point, the writers or actors will ask for a boycott. But mostly: this is a game of endurance, backed by numbers. Trust the unions to know which numbers will best help their cause, and follow their lead.

One thing I’ve learned about writing is ”give everything a face”. It’s no good to write passively that the nobility fled the city or that the toxic marshes were poisoning the animals beyond any ability to function. Make a protagonist see how a desperate woman in torn silks climbs onto a carriage and speeds off, or a two-headed deer wanders right into the camp and into the fire. Don’t just have an ambiguous flock of all-controlling oligarchy, name one or two representatives of it, and illustrate just how vile and greedy they are as people.

it’s bad to have characters who serve no purpose in the story, but giving something a face is a perfectly valid purpose.

This is the real heart of “show don’t tell”

My film teacher always says “write visually” and people are so confused what he means. I take it as “don’t explain the events/theme/emotion, write something that exemplifies the events/theme/emotion” ex) I am angry vs I throw the beautiful pot my grandmother made for me on the ground, and it works for me!

Happy Pride everybody! Don't fall for the yearly "divide and conquer" tricks from the right