and what if i fly?

Jay aka Bluejay/Jaya/J | Gender Fluid (he/him and they/them) | 21+ | Biromantic Demisexual Polyamorous | Writer, book lover, and huge advocate of ship and let ship | TBC | Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/bluejayinflight | "Why were words created if not to show us that we too can fly." - Me (icon by mayakern)

[cottoncandylesbo]

oh fuck... the adderall has hit my system... the change, it's happening... grRRRGH...!! get away from me, before it's too late...!!

(flails on the ground, then stands up and does the dishes)

[satanfemme]

it's not enough to say "IP law doesn't prevent theft" (<- true) we must also stress that IP law enables and causes theft and then legally bars the original creators from using their creations, until corporations are mass producing the IP for immense profit while the original creators die in poverty (<- also very extremely true!!!)

[satanfemme]

like I could not care even a little bit about "IP theft". you can not steal a concept the way you can steal a car just by copying someone. that isn't a real thing you can do. I don't care about this.

but what I do care about is comic book writers dying broke and hungry while disney pumps out another $1billion military propaganda MCU film using their characters (labor they were payed comparatively nothing for).

what I care about is Gary Bowser paying nintendo 30% of his income for the rest of his life, just because he was pirating games.

IP law is not just some kind of hypothetical ideal. IP law is a law, and it hurts people in real material ways, while helping corporations further stuff their pockets.. if you support IP law, if you're some kind of pro-IP activist, you are perpetuating real harm that hurts real people while helping corporations gain more and more power. your motivations do not negate this. and if anything your motivations just make you look like a useful idiot.

[prokopetz]

"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.

[xeansicemane]

Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.

We're not fast and don't have a lot of natural weaponry but we're bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.

[vexwerewolf]

[missmacfire]

[queenbruv]

the power of hitting 'end task' on a glitchy program in task manager is intoxicating. i feel like an assassin. i feel like a tyrant. you don't want to work properly? begone. off with your head. i need to kill my apps with a guillotine

[stillfuckingtired]

Uh-oh, coming down with a case of “what-if-a-bunch-of-other-people-experience-these-symptoms-as-bad-as-I-do-but-they-suck-it-up-and-work-anyway-and-I’m-just-being-a-little-bitch”-itis

[sobcat]

me when there's work at work

[spiribia]

it doesn't matter to cats what kind of bad week you're going through, they'll come into your room and start doing repeated bulldozer attacks on you

[r0zeclawz]

one of these big new indie cartoons should release with an exclusive adopt of like the main character. pay up 10000 dollars to be the only one whos legally allowed to draw pomni. i feel like the resulting fandom drama would change the face of the internet it would be so cool

[xxvapejuicekittyxx]

yeah hi this is actually a horrible idea why would you want this

[r0zeclawz]

i like when bad things happen

[everythingbutlarry-deactivated2]

AU: President Obama falls for part white house intern part rockstar Harry Styles. Obama surprises Harry in the audience of one of his shows and the affair blossoms from there.

[heritageposts]

date of origin: 2015.

[blignick]

[glumshoe]

do not go to Dr. Kenneth Wolf for top surgery

[glumshoe]

I went to him because he was 1.) the cheapest possible option and since I needed crowdfunding that seemed best 2.) within driving distance of my friends who’d be able to host me. I didn’t have any complications and I don’t hate my results, so the fact that he stopped offering free revisions after COVID (including for people who had their surgeries before the pandemic) and ghosts everyone isn’t a huge deal personally. I do have moderate to severe dog-earring right in the middle my chest which limits what clothing I can wear and have inquired about possible revisions with other surgeons (so far no one has been willing to operate on other dr’s work and have told me I’d need to pay the price of a full secondary top surgery). Dr. Wolf famously ghosts all his patients after surgery and has strict weight limits.

HOWEVER I accompanied my friend to their top surgery at the University of Michigan last year that made Dr. Wolf’s entire process seem back alley and sketchy by comparison. My friend had extensive pre- and post-surgical monitoring and extreme sanitary precautions. Dr. Wolf just had me take off my shirt and slapped me on the operation table still wearing my street clothes and then scraped me up and sent me home the moment I regained consciousness. His bedside manner was offputting and uncomfortable. It has been impossible to contact him ever since, even to ask politely why my stitches look so different from his other results. Other people with much worse results have also been ghosted.

[glumshoe]

OH AND ALSO when I asked if he could swap my left and right nipples just for the hell of it he said “yeah sure lol” but apparently you’re not supposed to do that because there is the risk of like, manually metastasizing cancer cells. lol. I did ask for it and I think I am at very low risk for breast cancer but I do think a responsible surgeon should at least know about and warn you of that possibility before agreeing to it.

[glumshoe]

my friends and my ex were great caretakers who made the recovery process easy and kind of fun but knowing what I know now makes the whole experience retroactively a little bit traumatic

[faggotry-enjoyer]

An additional anecdote: My roommate got top surgery with this guy during our freshman year of college, and he had no family or other friends in the area to accompany him. On any normal day I would've skipped class to do so, but I had a quiz worth like a fifth of my grade and not enough advance warning to ask if I could take the alternate time (my roommate told me about this literally the morning of).

Dr. Wolf operated on an unaccompanied patient and let him get in a Lyft by himself immediately post-surgery.

A week or so he had to go back in to deal with a minor complication, and wanted to go by himself again. So I emailed Dr. Wolf to ask if I should push back and insist on coming with this time, and got this reply:

We always feel safer for the patient to have somebody with him. If it was the hospital, they would refuse to even do him without somebody with him.

I guess it technically beats operating on him alone a second time, but straight-up admitting that a hospital would never do the kind of thing he does is... telling, I think.

[glumshoe]

wow yeah I don’t love that

he seems to have been a lot more communicative in the past when he offered revisions but I don’t know if his other policies used to be better

also correction: there was a one week follow up appointment where he changed the bandages and told me it looked fine but there was no other communication after that. also he used penrose drains which I didn’t personally mind but was a lot grosser for my caretakers because it meant I was just oozing directly into my bandages, soaking through them, and staining clothes/bedding.

[glumshoe]

I’m suddenly laughing at the idea of a cliche noir detective story written in the brutally concise style of Hemingway.

A woman walked into my office. She had legs. I noticed her legs. “I have a problem. I need your help,” she said. They always said that. I knew her legs weren’t the problem. I hoped she might want my help with them anyhow.

[glumshoe]

“Can you pay?” I asked. Of course she could. Her shoes were worth more than my rent. She could pay. “I can pay,” she said. Her eyes were wet. I wondered if anything else was wet. Probably not. I am not handsome. Not since the war. She was looking at my scar. Lots of people do. Most look away. Not her. She did not look away. She looked at my scar and I looked at her legs. There were two of them. I liked that about her. I liked that a whole lot. “Will there be danger?” I asked. There always is. This city bleeds danger, then drinks it right back up again.

[glumshoe]

“I’m afraid there might be danger,” she said. She had the voice of a beautiful woman. She also had the face and body of a beautiful woman. She was beautiful.

The light from the window was striped. It made stripes on my cigarette smoke. The end of my cigarette crumbled into ash. My marriage had also crumbled into ash.

“I can handle danger,” I said. I patted the butt of my gun. My gun was a Colt. My gun and my scar were all that was left from my time as a soldier. My gun, my scar, and the nightmares. I looked her up and down. “I am good at handling things.”

[glumshoe]

“It’s about my husband. He’s gone missing.”

She was not wearing a ring. It means something when a woman does not wear a wedding ring. Usually, it means that she is not married. “Seems your ring has also gone missing,” I said. I hoped her dress would join it.

Her red mouth curved upwards. She was smiling a little. “I don’t wear it outside. A diamond that large would only invite trouble.”

“In my experience, trouble doesn’t wait for an invitation.” I looked at her legs again. They were both still there. “When did you last see your husband?”

[animentality]

[blignick]

[dominaexmachina]

They Said They Were Protecting Artists

There's a particular kind of movement that mistakes policing for protection.

The anti-AI art community will tell you, loudly and repeatedly, that everything they do is for artists. The harassment campaigns. The witch-hunt comment sections. The public pile-ons where a piece of art gets thousands of angry reblogs because someone decided the brushwork looked suspiciously smooth.

Let's look at what the protection actually looks like in practice.

A Japanese artist deleted their account after sustained harassment — accused of using AI based on their technique being "too clean." The accusation was false. The account is still gone. Artists have started deliberately drawing worse — safer, blander, more obviously hand-made — to avoid becoming a target. One false accusation post can hit 176k likes before anyone bothers to check the facts. The community's own moderators asking people to stop calling others scumbags were told: "It's not harassment when they deserve it."

So to recap: the movement protecting artistic expression is now determining which artistic expression is acceptable. The movement defending creative freedom is training artists to self-censor their style. The movement that exists to protect people is producing death threats.

Raise your hand if you can see the structural problem here.

"We're protecting artists" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It's carrying the weight of a community that has decided some artists deserve protection and some deserve to be made examples of — and the difference has nothing to do with craft, and everything to do with the tools they used on a Tuesday afternoon.

That's not protection. That's a witch trial with better fonts.

The mechanics are identical: communal accusation, no burden of proof, social execution by pile-on, and a crowd that genuinely believes it's doing good. Salem had confessions extracted by pressure. Tumblr has reblogs extracted by fear of being next.

The witch was anyone who made the community uncomfortable. The AI user is anyone who made the community uncomfortable. The historical rhyme is not subtle.

[dominaexmachina]

They Said They Were Protecting Artists

There's a particular kind of movement that mistakes policing for protection.

The anti-AI art community will tell you, loudly and repeatedly, that everything they do is for artists. The harassment campaigns. The witch-hunt comment sections. The public pile-ons where a piece of art gets thousands of angry reblogs because someone decided the brushwork looked suspiciously smooth.

Let's look at what the protection actually looks like in practice.

A Japanese artist deleted their account after sustained harassment — accused of using AI based on their technique being "too clean." The accusation was false. The account is still gone. Artists have started deliberately drawing worse — safer, blander, more obviously hand-made — to avoid becoming a target. One false accusation post can hit 176k likes before anyone bothers to check the facts. The community's own moderators asking people to stop calling others scumbags were told: "It's not harassment when they deserve it."

So to recap: the movement protecting artistic expression is now determining which artistic expression is acceptable. The movement defending creative freedom is training artists to self-censor their style. The movement that exists to protect people is producing death threats.

Raise your hand if you can see the structural problem here.

"We're protecting artists" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It's carrying the weight of a community that has decided some artists deserve protection and some deserve to be made examples of — and the difference has nothing to do with craft, and everything to do with the tools they used on a Tuesday afternoon.

That's not protection. That's a witch trial with better fonts.

The mechanics are identical: communal accusation, no burden of proof, social execution by pile-on, and a crowd that genuinely believes it's doing good. Salem had confessions extracted by pressure. Tumblr has reblogs extracted by fear of being next.

The witch was anyone who made the community uncomfortable. The AI user is anyone who made the community uncomfortable. The historical rhyme is not subtle.

[malwarechips]

"i think", i say, about my own ocs, who i made,