Interesting...

dès fois, les choses changent

[beardedmrbean]

Bars, Pride and dating apps: How China is closing down its LGBT+ spaces

Apple this week confirmed it has removed two popular LGBT+ dating apps from its app store in China, at the authorities’ request. The decisio

When two dating apps, Blued and Finka, disappeared from the Apple AppStore in China on November 11, a whole world threatened to disappear.

The apps are two of the most popular among China’s LGBT+ community. Blued had been downloaded tens of millions of times, according to the BBC. 

In taking them down, the authorities removed two major LGBT+ spaces, leaving little in their place.

“There are still some local apps available, but they are smaller, and they have limited circulation and popularity,” says Bao Hongwei, specialist in China’s queer culture at the University of Nottingham.

Apple said it removed the apps “based on an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China”.

‘A seismic change’

It is not the first time that the authorities have targeted gay dating apps. In 2022, the American app Grindr was retired in China.

The ban on Grindr could be put down to China’s wider dislike of Western apps, which are often accused of being vehicles for foreign influence. But removing Blued and Finka, which were both developed in China, represents a “seismic change in government attitudes towards homegrown LGBT apps”, says Hongwei.

“The Chinese government used to support the business of Blued,” Hongwei says. “The former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, actually met with the CEO of Blued [in 2012] and it enjoyed a certain legitimacy.”

The disappearance of both Blued and Finka “will affect a lot of LGBT+ people's lives very significantly”, Hongwei adds. “It sends a chilling and very clear message to ordinary LGBT+ people that they can't pursue their own personal interests and desires.”

Erasing gay culture

Evidence of hardening attitudes towards the LGBT+ community in China has been increasing for some time. 

Before targeting Blued and Finka, the Chinese authorities led a campaign against authors of the “Boy's Love”, or Danmei, same-sex romance stories, some of which feature explicit love scenes between men.

Several Danmei writers, most of whom are female, have reported being arrested and questioned by the authorities, and in recent months two major Danmei sites have either shut down, or drastically reduced and toned down their content.

In September, a censored version of American-Australian horror film “Together” was released in China with a gay marriage scene digitally altered to show a heterosexual couple.

And in early 2024, China’s dominant social platform Weibo removed viral images of Chinese dancer and transgender icon Jin Xing waving a rainbow flag. 

Despite being a high-profile and immensely popular celebrity in China for years, venues across the country dropped performances by her dance troupe without explanation in January 2025. 

‘Three No’s’

China decriminalised homosexuality in 1997 and officially recognised that it was not a mental illness in 2001. 

For a long time, China adopted a policy of Three No’s towards homosexuality: no approval, no disapproval and no promotion.

This allowed for a period of “good years in the 2000s where more people were openly gay", says Timothy Hildebrandt, specialist in social politics and sexuality in China at the London School of Economics.

Even so, gay and queer people in China have had to navigate murky legal waters in which their sexuality is legal, but they have no official protections. 

For example, while gay marriage is not recognised, a court in 2016 agreed to hear the case of a man suing local authorities for refusing to register his union with his male partner – a first in China. 

But the judge ultimately dismissed the case. 

Today, “officially, those Three No’s are still in place, but we are seeing evidence that the space for LGBT+ communities is starting to shrink”, says Marc Lanteigne, associate professor of political science at the Arctic University of Norway.

Shanghai Pride shut down in 2020, and one year later the government shut down student LGBT+ accounts for “violating internet regulations”. Grindr disappeared in 2022, and in 2023 the Beijing LGBT Centre closed its doors after 15 years.

In June 2024, the Roxie, Shanghai's last officially lesbian bar, was forced to close “under pressure from the authorities".

“The authorities have been slowly chipping away at those spaces that were open previously,” says Hildebrandt.

With the closure of so many physical spaces, online networks had become “really the only places in which many members of the LGBT+ community could express their sexuality openly” he adds. 

A collateral victim

Why is China’s LGBT+ community being targeted in this way? Rather than being specifically singled out, it is likely that it is a collateral victim of Xi Jinping’s notion of “common prosperity”. 

Historically, common prosperity has meant an effort by the Chinese Communist Party to promote economic and social equality. 

But in contemporary Chinese politics, “the Maoist principles about equality have more to do with uniformity,” says Hildebrandt. “You gain equality by being more like everybody else. You don't gain equality by being diverse.”

In a bid to create greater conformity within the population, “there has been a push in China to reinforce traditional family values and, in some cases, traditional masculine values,” adds Lanteigne.

At the same time, China’s population growth and economy are slowing. “The current population growth couldn't support economic growth,” explains Hongwei, meaning there has been a push to encourage heterosexual couples to have larger families to ensure an abundant future workforce.

In this context of wider policies to promote common prosperity, the LGBT+ community is not the only group facing repression, but it is an easy target. 

Since the Covid pandemic, “the Chinese government has endorsed nationalist discourse and LGBT culture is seen as very politicised siding with Western ideologies”, says Hongwei.

“There's the impression that LGBTQ communities are by default connected to the West and could be seen as destabilising forces,” adds Lanteigne.

Broader political and social forces may be at work, but the result is a real loss of liberty for gay and queer people in China. Hildebrandt says: “There is a real sense that it’s become a more difficult environment to be openly gay."

[spankerella]

@ perfectunion

[worse-than-konstantin-levin]

Massachusetts Uber, Lyft drivers certify first statewide ride-hailing union amid automation fears

Drivers in Massachusetts for ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft have become the first in the nation to certify a union.

May 27th, 2026

[the-eldritch-it-gay]

“but shrouded black figures are scary!” not when ur muslim. its the funniest fucking thing. this is labeled on pinterest under shit like “classic horror” “scary phone wallpaper”

but that LITERALLY just looks like a niqabi or someone in a jilbab. Like Look at this pic of me (from a self photoshoot, now w/o the dramatic lighting and dark background)

or this pic of me

or this pic of me

like its so funny i can’t be scared of shrouded figures it just looks like me.

[the-eldritch-it-gay]

if i saw this i would just be like “Assalam alaikum sister, dope sword you got there”

[ultmateragnarok]

I mean I think a part of the ‘scary background’ bit is the thing where the individual in question is staring directly at the viewer from a foggy pond in a dense forest. And also the literal burning halo

[the-eldritch-it-gay]

sounds like a normal Friday night. if a sister wants to go on a walk in the evening who am i to stop her. if she has a burning halo that’s the will of god.

[justalurkr]

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

under US law, it's illegal for anyone who's not a member of a recognised native tribe to own an eagle feather. the penalty is a $100,000 fine.

14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."

and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.

so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.

on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.

probably a good thing I don't intend to move back there anytime soon. I wonder what the statute of limitations is on bird crimes.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

@freedomisscaryshit I'm fucking dying I think you forgot the word "feathers" in your tags?? or do you just wish you could grab whole ass eagles that land in your yard??

[emotional-support-husband]

As an Indigenous person, it continues to astound me that there are such strict laws (written by White people) in our name, laws against...picking up things just found on the ground. Like, stop pretending this is "for" us. We don't want this.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

so, for clarity, that's not what this is. the law against possessing feathers is an anti-poaching measure, derived from a North American treaty protecting certain migratory bird species from hunting. that treaty has an exemption for indigenous people to allow tribes that use eagle feathers in ceremonial or religious practices to continue doing so.

[chekhovs-raygun]

i used to collect feathers (illegally) as a teenager and the thing is that it's incredibly important for feathers from wild birds to be illegal to possess because it ensures that they never become fashionable to wear. the reason we passed the migratory bird act was because the american and european fashion industry was driving species to extinction in a timespan of years. not just decades. the ecological devastation of exporting birds for hats was absolutely insane and people were watching wetlands and forests and meadows just empty out in realtime. look at the wikipedia article for the plume trade.

the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.

these laws, as harsh and ridiculous as they seem, saved flamingos, spoonbills, egrets, and all kinds of hawks and eagles from extinction. the minute these laws weaken and people can make money off killing them again, they're fucked.

[lizardlicks]

this is one of those "no actually this regulation exists for a reason" laws much like work place safety and building fire codes (that Republicans keep trying to roll back) and is written in blood just like them as well. it's just not human blood this time, and the fact that people actually cared enough about long term future over short term profit to get it put in place is nothing short of astonishing. That it didn't get put in place in time to save several species is heart breaking.

[hapalopus]

And yes, it's still needed today, despite no one wearing hats. People will go to crazy lengths to acquire rare feathers

Dead Exotic Bird Thief | Field Ethos

By Andrew Court In 2009, a college kid named Edwin Rist broke into the British Natural History museum…

[dracula61]

[littleguysdaily]

Bob is performed by the artist Raphaël Gromy

[this-is-trans-joy]

I don’t know if this is an obvious take or a hot take, but I think people need to start re-framing feminism as the fight for body autonomy as opposed to whatever this second wave revival gender essentialist bullshit we have going on right now. Once you reframe it in this way, it’s easier to understand intersectionality and why cis women are not the only people who need feminism. The lack of body autonomy effects cis women, trans people, intersex people, disabled people, poc, homeless people, sex workers, etc. and your feminism needs to include and prioritise all of these groups of people (which will include men btw) because feminism is about autonomy, not about establishing a matriarchy. Body autonomy is the biggest threat to the patriarchy, both with reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and even the right to not be drafted into military services. Once body autonomy is established for everyone, the patriarchy no longer has a leg to stand on.

And body autonomy does include things that you don’t personally like either. I was prompted to write this post after a series of bad takes from progressives, but one of them was re-hashing the Sabrina Carpenter album cover drama with “I don’t think it’s conservative of me to think that the album cover is a bad look when we’ve seen images of women being abused in this way” because I do actually think you’ve failed to understand feminism by projecting your morals onto a woman who was consensually expressing her own autonomy just because she expressed it in a way that you didn’t like or that made you uncomfortable.

Body autonomy also means unhealthy choices. Body autonomy also means regret rates. Body autonomy also means freedom of sexuality. Body autonomy also means mutilation. If you believe body autonomy has limitations and exceptions, then your feminism is most likely surface level.

TERFs are some of the biggest opponents to body autonomy, and if you find yourself thinking “oh people can do whatever they want with their bodies as long as it doesn’t harm them or make others uncomfortable” then you are far more susceptible to TERF propaganda than you think.

[makingqueerhistory]

Botswana officially erases ban on same-sex intimacy

Dick Bayford, Botswana's attorney general, removed anti-gay language that courts struck down years ago. (Photo courtesy of the Sunday Standa

Local LGBTIQ+ organisation LEGABIBO welcomed the government’s move, describing it as “a necessary and long-overdue step toward restoring dignity and aligning our legal framework with constitutional values of equality and human rights.” The group said the change sends “a clear message that LGBTIQ+ persons are not criminals, and that their lives and relationships deserve protection, not punishment.” LEGABIBO noted that the colonial-era provisions had long cast a shadow over the lives of LGBTIQ+ people in the country.

[kropotkindersurprise]

[akajustmerry]

In light of the no.1 trending topic on this site, I'd like to inform youse that Kitty Kendall, one of the survivors who bravely spoke out against Neil Gaiman and accused him of rape in 2025, has said here and here that if you are looking to support her and other survivors, you can make a donation to OurVOICE (the counselling service Kendall herself used) or your local rape crisis centre. If you can't make a donation, you can help to ensure people do not forget what Kendall and other survivors have gone through and continue to go through as they pursue legal action, and that Gaiman has already spent a lot of money in the attempt to sue these women for speaking out.

[exxos-von-steamboldt]

[delicatefury]

I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Thank God someone bothered to check.

[beardedmrbean]

>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

Scientists shocked to find lab gloves may be skewing microplastics data

Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics, U-M study reveals

Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

An Embarrassing Mistake May Have Skewed Microplastics Research All Along

Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though

That should be enough

[animentality]

[martianwitch129]

[theinstagrahame]

This comic is evergreen.

(also apparently the artist has a GoFundMe for legal battles around his comic: )

Donate to Legal fund for Alex Norris "oh no" comics, organized by Alex Norris

I am Alex Norris, creator of the webcomic Webcomic Name. I am here to ask for he… Alex Norris needs your support for Legal fund for Alex Nor

[cyanide-sippy-cup]

For anybody not caught up: Tennessee just passed a new map that pretty much makes it so black neighborhoods have no power in local votes. Two things about this. While protestors were chanting "No Jim Crow", white Tennessee lawmakers were caught laughing on video. On top of this, Representative Justin Pearson and his brother KeShaun Pearson were arrested for trying to give their takes on the matter (which is not only their legal right but literally his job). If you give a shit about black people, help fight this. We can't allow a return to Jim Crow.

[icemankazansky]

Heyyy guess where I live

A local paper had some great photographs, all taken by Nicole Hester:

The day before, Rep. Justin Pearson tries to attend a Senate Committee meeting and is barred access by the Sergeant at Arms.

Lawmakers and protesters link arms as the descend the capitol steps.

Once inside the chamber, Democratic representatives continued to stand together with arms linked.

They continued standing together with arms linked as votes were cast.

Democratic representatives take a group photo protesting the redistricting.

Rep. Justin Jones burns a photo of the Confederate flag with the words, We will not go back.

And stomps the ashes.

KeShaun Pearson being escorted from the building by the Staties.

KeShaun Pearson (left) being taken into custody. Rep. Justin Pearson (right) showing his support of his brother.

Additional information: State lawmakers have been gunning for Pearson and Jones nearly their entire terms. Most notably, in 2023, the House expelled them for participating in a protest at the Capitol. Their districts had to have special elections to have them reinstated.

Pearson is one of the plaintiffs of a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the redistricting.

The city most affected by the redistricting is Memphis, where locals are fighting against xAI's data center, which has been operating with very little oversight and is poisoning the people who live there. Here is a previous post on that with more information and more sources.

[theabigailthorn]

my work campaigning for NHS reform for trans people has gotten me nominated for Amnesty's People's Human Rights Champion

it's a major honour just to be on this list - MICHAEL ROSEN???! HELL YEAH??!

it's public vote, you can vote from anywhere, and ngl winning it would really help with some future projects I've got going on. BUT there are some very deserving names on the list so, I guess vote your conscience?

do vote though, it takes 10 seconds on the link below

People’s Human Rights Champion

The Amnesty Media Awards honours those who use their platform to shine a light on human rights stories. Vote for who you think should win it

[theabigailthorn]

WE WON.

Amnesty named me People’s Human Rights Champion for exposing a scandal in British healthcare. My team and I found abuse, neglect, conversion therapy, and deaths, all ignored by NHS managers.

This was a group effort. Thanks to the crew, fact-checkers, lawyers, journalists, and the team at Nebula who helped bring this scandal to light. And to my friend Jess O'Thompson from the Good Law Project for collecting the award on my behalf!

See the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S5w18sjYLk

Support our work: https://www.patreon.com/c/PhilosophyTube

Hopefully this builds pressure for NHS reform. We need an informed consent system, a public inquiry led by trans people, + the managers who presided over this abuse must be punished.

[aqueerkettleofish]

For those who have missed it, a tourist in Hawaii decided it would be fun to chuck a rock (a BIG rock) at a monk seal. He missed, but he was captured on video, and when told it was illegal to interfere with them, said "I'm rich, I can pay the fine."

Is the best part that he got doxxed? No.

Is the best part that he got tracked down by a local and beaten? No.

Arrested on state at federal charges, looking at up to 5 years and 50K? Nope.

The best part is the local city council's reaction.

And the best part of that is the look on the attorney's face.

[prismatic-bell]

I love that even city council is like "we're not fucking narcs, we have no idea who that guy beating the shit out of him is." Extremely hobbified behavior.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’m kinda surprised that nalbinding isn’t as popular as crochet and knitting tbh because it has an even lower barrier of entry tools wise and unlike crochet and knitting it makes fabric that you can cut.

I guess it’s because it’s slower or something.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Nalbinding aka needle binding is when you use yarn and a big sewing needle to make fabric btw

It also has a lot of different kinds of stitches you can do that make different densities of fabric.

Some people even make rugs.

[thewolfwaitsbelow]

I feel like part of it might be casual people are generally aware of the existence of crochet and knitting, even if they don’t know very much about either, but have never heard of nalbinding

[what-even-is-thiss]

Yeah I hadn’t heard of it until recently and I ordered a big bone needle for myself to try it out and that should be arriving soon.

I was surprised that I’d never heard of it though. It’s older than knitting and crocheting and even though it’s been done all over the world it’s super relevant to Nordic culture and my grandmother and I are both into keeping in touch with our roots a bit so I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it.

It seems like the sort of thing that would be popular even if not as popular as crocheting and knitting, considering the low barrier of entry.

[what-even-is-thiss]

You also don’t need a bunch of different sized needles for nalbinding or whatever. The size of the stitch is controlled either completely freehand or by pulling it against one of your fingers. Most people who have a lot of nalbinding needles seem to either have tried out wood, bone, and metal ones to see which kind they liked or they enjoy carving wood or bone and like making their own needles as an extra hobby.

It’s also a lot easier to freehand and adjust as you go than crochet or knitting and you mostly go by inches instead of rows and number of stitches so a large number of accessories like stitch markers or whatever isn’t really necessary.

Maybe the lack of accessories also makes it unpopular idk. People do like collecting things in their nests.

[the-color-of-sound-is-space]

I've been wanting to do so, I cannot find anyone who can teach me, and any books I can find on it are Ass in the Visual Learning department. Otherwise I'd be making the hell outta some nalbinded fabric

[what-even-is-thiss]

I found this channel by a nice man who makes up close tutorials

Happy Needlebinding

I create videos on YouTube to learn people how to needlebind using two fingers and your thumb. Needlebinding helps people to relax, relieve

[what-even-is-thiss]

I thought this would be kind of a niche post to make but I was quickly reminded that I’m on tumblr, the website full of gay people with one billion hobbies.

[what-even-is-thiss]

So my bone needle actually came this evening (yay!) and I’ve started trying this for real. It clicks in my brain way easier than crochet does. I’ve gotta work up the muscle memory but I think I can do this.

The downside as a beginner is that undoing mistakes is more time consuming than with knitting or crochet. You’ve gotta like sew your mistakes out backwards. Disadvantages of making a really sturdy fabric I guess.

I like the feel of this bone needle though and don’t think I’ll be trying the wooden or metal ones.

Also I think I’m gonna have to get good at doing Russian joining if I decide to get good at nalbinding because I don’t have wool yarn and the ends won’t felt together if it’s not at least 50% wool. A small price to pay for using big bone needle though.

Anyways curse of new fiber craft be upon ye.

[prismatic-bell]

Russian join tutorial I did, if you need it.

[kimmycup]

Like I don't think you guys comprehend what happened in Poland just now but everyone needs to be talking about it.

A random influencer decided he'll listen to an anti cancer song on loop. People liked it enough times he ended up listening for 9 days.

He raised 90 million in these 9 days, and then 160 million more over the last 10 hours, for a total of 250 million.

Hundreds and thousands of people signed up to donate marrow.

Hundreds of celebrities shaved their heads in solidarity.

The Foundation receiving this money had to create a special commission to figure out how to distribute the money.

The national TV stations got highjacked to stream this for hours because it was better news than anything happening in the world.

Because we broke and DOUBLED the world record for this kind of thing.

They raised about as much as the biggest running charity event in Poland did in a whole year with three decades of tradition and a goddamn army of people.

And they did it on a goddamn amateur set up in a shabby room sitting on folding chairs.

[kimmycup]

Little update: people keep donating despite the stream being over. We're at 280 million in the fight against cancer.

Łatwogang refuses to collab with companies that only reached out to him now because of popularity or give interviews. He said any medals people wanna give them should go to the doctors and nurses and the cancer patients.

Someone offered to renovate that shabby little flat for him as a thank you. He refused.

Someone counted up how many people appeared in that room during the whole thing - it was 319 total.

[belladonna-rx]

Love to hear it. Love news articles too.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/polish-nine-day-charity-stream-breaks-records-support-kids-with-cancer-2026-04-27/

Just love this headline phrasing.

Streamer crushes MrBeast charity record with $70 million raised for kids with cancer - Dexerto

Polish streamer Łatwogang’s charity livestream has raised over 203 million złoty for children with cancer, breaking the charity stream recor

[cricketcat9]

Good news from Poland

[luntfontanne]

holy shit