Things.

Beans | He/Him | This is an opinions sideblog

[willowbilly]

So they officially renamed vaginal atrophy to genitourinary symptoms of menopause (GSM), even though menopause is not the only cause of vaginal atrophy; see possible symptoms of testosterone HRT. Trans exclusive language fucking everywhere. Thanks, medical sexism.

[cutecipher]

it really is annoying as hell how someone will talk about how poor people can't avoid ethically dubious products because of how being poor works and then someone with a two story house in the suburbs will take that to mean they can order harry potter books through a drone delivery from amazon and if you criticize that you're a bigot

[rimeheart]

[queeranarchism]

No ethical consumption under capitalism also means: "the production mechanism of capitalism are deliberately obscured and so complex that it's nearly impossible to accurately measure the environmental and humanitarian impact of everyday items and it's okay if you can't do the research to find out. Even if you're financially very comfortable, you don't have to spend 5 hours researching which tomatoes are the most ethical before you take a trip to the grocery store. Spending your whole life trying to accurately measure the ethical impact of every purchase is a time sink that will not bring about a systemically better world."

not "obviously shitty choices don't exist".

[proship-shuujuu]

harassment is not an appropriate reaction.

anon hate is not an appropriate reaction.

doxxing is not an appropriate reaction.

death-threats are not an appropriate reaction.

suicide-baiting is not an appropriate reaction.

encouraging self-harm is not an appropriate reaction.

harming someone, either with words, baits, or trying to cause them physical harm, is not an appropriate reaction.

what is an appropriate reaction to things or people you do not like on the internet is a handy little feature that comes free with almost every social media platform, but is hardly ever used; the block button. use it.

[helenvaughans]

from what i've observed, i do think there is some pressure for women in not explicitly feminist leftist circles to affect a kind of "cool girl" posture for the benefit of the men in the movement

[helenvaughans]

same as it ever was!!!

[heylittletomboy]

They Hacked Women

[brightereyes]

[caspercryptid]

I would actually go as far as to say that MOST abuse is unintentional. I think most people will go through their lives without ever experiencing intentional abuse. People are abusive because they're selfish, because they're stressed, because they care more about what society thinks they should do than the impacts of their actions on their children and partners, because they think what they're doing is correct, because they've made it make sense in their own heads, because they think they can fix their victims, they think they can fix their relationships, they think they can stop you from leaving, they think they can make you a better partner to them, they think that means you need to do what they want. We've sort of constructed mental illness in a way that doing this shit to other people counts as a form of mental illness because it is anti social behavior in the literal sense— it is behavior that causes social harm.

I don't say any of this to excuse it. I think everyone needs to be more aware of this because if you think abuse has to be intentional you will never realize you are capable of abusive behavior. You will never realize you are being shitty to the people you love, because YOU know what you mean, YOU know you don't mean any harm. But you're doing harm. You need to pay attention to the impact you have on other people, and you need to do it all the time, Especially when you feel least capable of doing so. Sorry! You live in a society. Get your head out of your ass.

[theauspolchronicles]

Pauline Hanson is against paid parental leave, but knows people want it so is lying about her voting record to make her seem more compassionate and normal.

She doesn't even show up to vote the vast majority of the time. She's not a reliable person.

[ganondorf]

i think this captures the defining pathology of the collective social media psyche right now. we are in the thrall of people who are wantonly cruel but who also demand to be coddled at all times in every way

[tedcruzisthezodiackiller]

[captain-price-returns]

oh no they’re going to start calling democrats the same thing they’ve been calling democrats for 20 years now

[rosalarian]

I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.

[firesidetextiles]

I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim.

It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business.

This post hits SO hard.

[zeroafterdark]

I had 20k+ followers when tumblr shut my account down along with other nsfw ones in 2018 during its panic to appease Apple.

This post is so incredibly accurate and hits hard like you won’t believe.

Anyway I’m mostly just active on twitter and patreon now [LINK]

[gailynovelry]

I think it might be useful if we viewed representation as an imperfect community effort rather than a big, heavy weight that every writer, artist, animator, etc needs to bear by themselves.

[totally-a-wizard]

Also I've always viewed it as a "Yes, and" endeavor. For example I don't mind queer villains in fiction but I do have a problem when that is the only queer representation in a certain context.

[soulcandy]

You're only allowed to kill your gays if there's more than one and you don't kill all of them.

[gailynovelry]

Okay. So. I say this as kindly as possible.

This post is not about making iron-clad Rules for Good Rep.

This post is about actually paying attention to your community, and the communities of the people you are portraying in your writing, and putting a little thought into finding the underrepresented and portraying it. It’s also about taking a breath and absolving yourself of the need to do it perfectly as a marginalized person. There is no perfect way to do it, because no group is a monolith.

I’m just a little weary of having to manage moral scrupulosity in myself and my community.

If I followed this rule to the letter, as a queer author who loves tragedy, I would not be allowed to write a single-character work of tragedy and make it queer. You know? Can we be messy? Can we let each other be messy?

And the post is also not limited to queerness.

If one does not like how the usual stories go — if one feels unseen — then the solution is more stories, rather than clamouring to take away other people’s pens.

You are allowed to tell your stories.

[elierlick]

The Department of Education worked with the far-right Family Research Council to officially designate March 12th as Detrans Awareness Day last year. But what actually leads people to detransition? It's not regret, but social stigma, incited by the very figures who claim to protect detransitioners. I want to hear their stories describing how the current moral panic influenced their decisions.

[queeranarchism]

This is from the 2015 US Transgender Study

The 2022 US Trans Survey had similar numbers:

Too hard to be trans in my community 41%

Pressure from a parent 37%

Pressure from other family members 24%

Too much harassment or discrimination for being trans 33%

Gender transition was not right for me 4%

Another good source on this is the 2021 study Factors Leading to “Detransition” Among Transgender and Gender Diverse People in the United States: A Mixed-Methods Analysis,

Pressure from a parent 35.6%

It was just too hard for me 33.6%

Pressure from community or societal stigma 32.5%

I had trouble getting a job 26.9%

Pressure from other family members 25.9%

Pressure from spouse or partner 20.2%

Pressure from friends or roommates 14.2%

Pressure from my employer 17.5%

Pressure from a mental health professional 5.7%

Pressure from religion 5.4%

Fluctuations in identity or desire to transition 10.5%

Psychological reasons 3.9%

Financial reasons 3.5%

Medical reasons 3.3%

Uncertainty or doubt around gender 2.4%

And many studies from other countries show similar data.

[transhuman-priestess]

All these industries with shortages of workers and they can’t figure out why.

Im proposing the hypothesis that the reason we don’t have enough doctors/pilots/bus drivers/etc is that maybe, just maybe, having your entire industry function as a lifelong hazing ritual isn’t the best recruiting strategy.

[transhuman-priestess]

Doctors are subject to 8 years of post-secondary education and are forced to work 48 hour shifts.

Pilots and other transportation workers have absurd hours of service requirements that start your rest period as “the moment you shut the vehicle down” and can be as short as 9 hours in some cases.

Railroad workers have to be available on-call 6 days a week and be ready within two hours notice. They don’t get sick time.

Retail workers have to keep a veneer of politeness against any and all abuse or they can be fired.

Truck drivers get paid by mileage and rarely see pay for shipper or receiver delays.

Work should not be designed to make you a miserable burnout and yet here we are.

[isozyme]

as we enter another period of horrific online censorship, remember this:

you must protect the anime titty for the anime titty's sake as well as for the sake of queer people and sexual education (etc). it is good and beautiful for there to be cheesy games to masturbate to. nobody is growing hair on their palms and going blind.

kill visa and mastercard with your bare hands

[ashintheairlikesnow]

They start with the anime titty, but they never stop there. Censorship is a ship that tosses a few overboard but never tells you the plan is to drown everyone on it.

[redwingedwhump]

Censorship is a ship that tosses a few overboard but never tells you the plan is to drown everyone on it.

[isozyme]

hi op here and i know you all agree with me! we are not fighting, but i want to stay on the topic of my post:

even if online censorship was only going to ban stereotypical titty porn that is made for heterosexual men to jerk off to and leave all the other things alone, that would still be bad.

[skodasforge]

We live in the stupidest broligarchy imaginable what do you mean ChatGPT told Elon Musk’s cronies that preserving museums is DEI because “diverse audiences” might see the exhibits?

[digsdigsdigs]

Kill Chain

On the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children

precise writing about "AI" as a bureaucratic problem as well as some military history of precision bombing

[digsdigsdigs]

i usually try to share articles with a pull quote because i know a lot more people will read it than will click through. but Baker writes in a densely argued way with a bunch of references to other writers and all my pull quotes were like a thousand words long. let's try something else since it's getting more reblogs than expected. my brief summary:

large language model ai like Claude and chat-gpt has been taking up all the attention around discussions of AI technology, but there are other kinds of AI too, that can't be understood by the discussion of LLMs.

Maven is an example of a technology that uses AI that is not large language model AI. it's a tool made by Palantir for the US military to conduct operations more "efficiently." He cites that the volume of strike coordination decisions that took two thousand people during the war in Iraq in 2003 can now be done with 20 people using Maven.

Maven is the tool being used right now to bomb Iran.

Baker goes into some detail about the history of how making bombing decisions more quickly became a priority of the US military, and criticizes how prioritizing speed means de-prioritizing anything that might slow those decisions down, like checking information for accuracy, or checking whether it was a good idea to bomb at all.

Baker explains how the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school was enabled by this type of "efficiency." He criticizes the media for discussing this as a case of "AI error," as if it were similar to an incorrect chat answer from Claude, and letting the people responsible for these decisions go unchallenged.

[artistformerlyknownasbutttrumpet]

i keep seeing ppl being like "just get an id, what's the big deal?" about the potential voter registration restrictions, and let me tell you a story i am actively dealing with

i work with unhoused people fleeing domestic violence, and i have a client rn whose driver's license expired in 2024, and she needs a new id to apply for apartments. ok, cool. problem is, she lost all her documents due to the domestic violence

so we call the dmv. dmv needs a birth certificate. like i said, she lost her birth certificate. she needs a new one. her birth certificate is from out of state

we look up how to get a new birth certificate. the birth certificate needs an id to order it. cool cool cool

ok then what about secondary options? well, she needs two secondary sources of identification to order a replacement birth certificate, and she only has one, because for everything else she needs an id. fishing license? need an id. fucking park pass? id. she could have her 18+ child use their birth certificate to vouch for her, except her abuser won't let her talk to her children, so that's a no go

ultimately we land on social security card. this is where we're at in the process rn. ofc she doesn't have her ss card, so we need to order that. social security also requires an id to request a new card, but they'll take a health insurance card with a picture attached (god fucking bless them). she has medicaid but doesn't have a physical copy of the card, so we have to figure out how to get that. then once we do that we have to upload it to the social security website, and if that doesn't work, we have to, god forbid, call the social security office (takes literal hours) and then make an appointment. she doesn't have transportation or cell service, so we would have to figure out a way to coordinate me getting her to the appointment in order to present the document

then we wait 10+ days for the replacement, that has to be mailed to me bc she is unhoused and doesn't have an address

then we need to submit her request for a new birth certificate, which we have to figure out how to pay for, bc it is not free. they're at least a month behind on requests, btw, so we are probably looking at may at the earliest for that to arrive

then we need to take the birth certificate to the dmv

dmv also requires two pieces of mail not from a po box. she doesn't have an address, she is unhoused. she can use the homeless shelter in town, but we will need to mail her stuff there and have her receive it first, and also then the homeless shelter address will now be on her new id, which landlords will recognize and may discriminate against her for

during all of this she is sleeping in a garage. it was negative one degrees this morning. also, forgot to mention, she is terminally ill. some days i legitimately don't know if she lived through the night. every day is a toss up

the absolute soonest she will have an id is probably late may. forget voter registration--most rentals won't let her apply without it. she won't be offered section 8 housing without it. she can't apply for ssdi without it. she is blocked at literally every corner without it, and the absolute soonest she can get it is late may. the dmv literally has her old card on file, and she knows the number by heart, but it doesn't matter. it doesn't count if it's expired, as if she's somehow become someone new

and that's all with the help of someone whose job it is to do this shit. imagine if she didn't have a caseworker. she has a ten year old donated iphone that only works on wifi, she can't even do her own research bc she doesn't have internet half the time. how the hell is she supposed to get anything done on her own?

so yeah, fuck you if you think requiring an id isn't voter discrimination. "just get an id" is privileged af thinking and it infuriates me every time i hear it. lawmakers know exactly what they're doing with that restriction, and it's absolute bullshit