The KIDS Act, ostensibly aimed at protecting children, will raise the risk for journalists, dissidents, and whistleblowers.
"Democrats and Republicans in Congress have struck a deal on a bill they say will help keep children and teens safe online. The KIDS Act could pass on the House floor as soon as next week; if enacted, it would fundamentally change the way everyone — not just kids — accesses the internet.
At stake is your ability to use many social media platforms without revealing your identity.
That’s because the KIDS Act at least strongly incentivizes — and, for some services, outright requires — age verification. Many platforms will turn to age verification to avoid potential liability under the law. Companies like X, video-sharing services like Vimeo, and others with a history of users’ populating social feeds with edgy content may be required to verify users’ ages because they host a certain amount of content deemed “sexual material harmful to minors,” a term that the KIDS Act defines broadly.
That’s a big problem for people who need to be able to use the internet anonymously, since, as Taylor Lorenz has previously written about in The Intercept, “there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are.”
Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources. [...]
Mandating age verification effectively hands Big Tech and the government a skeleton key to the identities of every whistleblower, dissident, and investigative reporter who uses online platforms, not to mention everyone else, including children. This kind of surveillance on steroids that surrenders our right to speak, report, and read the news anonymously won’t make anyone safer."
i must say, i am a huge fan of when a book is in the middle of a very exciting plot containing many interesting problems when out of nowhere for a few pages it's like, "hey by the way, real quick, here's a detailed explanation of the city's water filtration system! i'm telling you this for a reason and you should worry about it. anyway! haha okay back to the plot" and you just get to be Scared for a while
i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.
The idea of Mario and Peach having any kind of relationship beyond the occasional kiss on the nose and "mama mia" is like viscerally incomprehensible to me
Not like in a prude way I just can't conceive of Mario experiencing... urges. He's a character outside the scope of that. I'm not saying he's asexual either cause positioning him on the allo/ace spectrum implies that it's a dimension of his character that at least exists, that he has at some point noticed it. I think he just jumps.
#op interrogate yourself about why you think this right fucking now
So unlike Mario, who continues to be essentially a void with no internality, I actually act with thoughts and intent and already did do that when writing this post.
Mario is a mascot of one of the most sanitized corporate brands in existence. He differs from real, full-fledged ace people in that his sexlessness is not queer, not transgressive in any sense of the word, just a void left by his position as a player character. He has no queer identity because he has no identity beyond the fact that it's-a-him, Mario.
Similarly, I don’t know if Peach could comprehend the concept of sex. There is no light beyond that blank stare. She doesn’t not understand anything besides baking and being a princess
Peach lives a life that is almost entirely defined by her position as an object of other people's desire, wherein she is robbed of autonomy by Bowser and expected to reward Mario with signs of affection. I think if anyone in Mario has complex thoughts about sexuality to work through with a therapist, it's Peach.
"NW" Zadie Smith, "the Hands of Friendship" in Yerevan (@metamorphesque). "Jane Eyre" Charlotte Brontë (@flowerytale), Franz Kafka’s Diaries (@hungryfictions), "Summer night by the beach" Edvard Munch, "A Magic Mountain" Czeslaw Milosz (tr by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee), "Answer July" Emily Dickinson, "Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed" Vincent van Gogh, The Diaries of Franz Kafka (@shisasan)
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