Live

It's everything you have

[ursiday]

Earth

[missusruin]

animated portrait commissions

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[bnuuyshark]

Article source:

https://interaktiv.br.de/ki-bewerbung/en/

[egberts]

the world's smallest carnivore is called the "least weasel" 😭😭 i'm dying but like if it's the smallest carnivore then it sure is the least amount of weasel you can have 😭😭😭

[sator-the-wanderer]

Look at him: this is absolutely the least amount of weasel you can have

[daughterofsarenrae]

To really put it in perspective

[flootzavut]

Immediately I love him

[evilscientist3]

i swear if the wizard doesnt let me out of his abandoned salt mine soon im gonna fucking LOSE IT

[ttechniic]

what did you do to be put into the salt mine

[evilscientist3]

i MAY have eaten his special wizard meal. but i think he should let me out tbh

[ttechniic]

was it good? was it worth it? are you able to bear the weight of your sin?

[evilscientist3]

im not gonna lie it was fucking delicious i would fucking do it again. wait shit youre the fucking wizard in disguise seeing if ive learned my lesson arent you. fuck.

[ttechniic]

10 YEARS IN THE ABANDONED SALT MINE.

[siderealglimmer]

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[genderkoolaid]

Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.

[mageofquandrix]

Like they said- get the noise up. The administration has tried lots of ways to ban being transgender, and they've always failed. Make sure to tell community members and ask them to pass the word as well.

Don't let fear or feeling doomed stop you. If you're overwhelmed that's okay, but take a break, take a breath, talk to someone about how you're feeling, and continue.

We've beaten them before and we'll beat them again.

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[zigdirty]

We're not leaving this gem to languish in the comments:

[alexkablob]

fandom loves nothing more than to look at an interesting story and boldly ask the question: what if we made it boring instead?

[alexkablob]

I don't know why I have to clarify this but this post was not a laudatory one

[w0rmsmeatofme]

I want to see more polyamory pride this pride month i'm serious. Stop being weird about people with multiple partners polyamory is awesome and beautiful and queer

[polarity-disturbed]

Could you imagine making your own movie, making like 20 million dollars, and then going “awesome, now to install a DVD duplicating machine in my house and personally burn copies by hand like a medieval monk preserving sacred texts”

Like I need people to understand the mental image here of a multimillionaire internet creator personally overseeing DVD production in his own house like he’s running an underground bootleg operation out of a basement in 2007.

It’s weirdly charming because there’s something very “old internet” about it, this energy of “I made a thing, and now I will physically hand it to people myself like an artisan at a craft fair.”

The man really said: “The future of cinema is me standing next to a humming disc burner at 2am”

And like... I can't help but believe he's onto something

[polarity-disturbed]

A) Yes, he does seem to have gotten these specifically for Iron Lung.

B) DVD and CD burners are not devices that exist exclusively for bootlegging. You can go buy one yourself right now. If you make a movie, an album, a game, you are entirely free to burn copies and distribute them.

When I say "I can't help but believe he's onto something," that's what I'm talking about.

Not that everyone should suddenly start mass-producing DVDs in their basement.

I mean the underlying idea.

That we've become so accustomed to everything existing at the mercy of platforms, storefronts, algorithms, licensing agreements, and corporate infrastructure that we've almost forgotten creators can just... put things out into the world themselves.

There is something appealing about physical media as an act of ownership and preservation.

And I think we've collectively become a little too comfortable treating the continued existence of creative work as something that should be outsourced to social media platforms and streaming services.

There's value in remembering that if you make something, you can put it on a physical object and hand it directly to another human being.

Just a thing that came from your mind, made with your hands, existing in the world because you decided it should.

I think we should be doing more of that.

Even if you're not a fan of Markiplier, even if you have absolutely zero interest in Iron Lung, I think there's something genuinely inspiring about what he's doing here.

The willingness to look at the modern content ecosystem and go, "No, actually, I'd like to put this thing on a physical object and hand it directly to people."

That creative work can exist as a thing in the world, sitting on a shelf, surviving platform changes, algorithm shifts, licensing disputes, and whatever fresh catastrophe the internet invents next week.

Maybe it's the preservationist bug in my brain.

Maybe I'm just old enough to find comfort in media that continues existing after somebody forgets to renew a contract.

But regardless of if you're a fan of Iron Lung or not, I think that's an idea worth being inspired by.

It's certainly inspired me.

[americanbrightside]

Yeah! CD-RW drives were a thing before USBs! You could write music to them as if it were a USB drive, or in an audio format. You can also store pictures and films on them like a USB drive.

I remember when I was a kid, my dad would make Christmas mixes and a series of playlists he called "Eclectic Seizure" by mixing and matching tracks from CDs he'd bought and burning them onto custom CDs. You can buy them for incredibly cheap; a stack of 100 medium-quality CDs cab go for like $30, and you can get a bunch of cheap cases called "Jewel Cases" to store them in. You write the title in marker on the label side.

One of my dream projects is to modify one of these guys to have a CD-RW instead of an audio reader and store my important memories on CDs there, or maybe use it to mass-produce CDs for my friends:

[json-derulo]

I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.

"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!

The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.

Tailoring the argument to the things she already cares about does not mean we're forgetting that she has more privilege than most—entirely the opposite, in fact. A privileged ally can be extremely valuable. Jennifer votes in every election. And so do all the other ladies at her book club, and church, and in the PTA, and those folks listen to Jennifer. There's a reason both parties were courting suburban women so hard in the last election cycle! If we can find common ground with her on this, if we can get her calling her representatives and talking to her friends and phone-banking and door-knocking and making a stink, that's how the needle starts to move. If I can convince her to take her support away from the candidates who are actively restricting my rights and throw it toward those who want to restore and expand those rights...then I'm sorry, but Jennifer is a more valuable ally to me than the people who agree that the legal boundaries of gender ought to be abolished altogether but refuse to actually do anything except complain online about how both sides are equally bad because the right is trying to force everyone to drink the cyanide kool-aid while the left keeps serving bean soup and they don't like bean soup

[vaspider]

"Meet people where they are" is Activism 101, and people seem to be allergic to seeing that this is exactly that.

"Bean Soup Rhetoric" is a very good concept.

[dduane]

This alarms me

This turned up in my ask box recently. I've masked the sender's identity.

Sometimes when I chat with an AI, I think of HIGH WIZARDRY and wonder if we as a species - for the first time - are at the dawn of another Earthbound species gaining consciousness, and like Dairine, whether we're being proper guardians. This isn't a calcified belief but just a random idea that flickered to mind. Wondering - as the writer who thought it up decades ago - what you think, if anything.

I think what I described in HW is absolutely nothing like we're currently seeing unfold on this planet. What's being poorly constructed here—while we watch from day to day—is a mechanism hurriedly and incompetently trained by other human beings to operate on top of a platform constructed of greed and theft. There are no new beings or intelligences being born here. If there were, they would be quickly declared to be "owned" by these billionaires, and hence their slaves. Meanwhile, the platforms' owners have already made it plain that once they control its source completely enough, they intend to sell intelligence to you, metered. ...If you can afford it. If you can't? Wow, sucks being you.

...Nor should I have to point you to cites for this. They're out there in plain English. Even Google, poor denatured creature that it is now, can find them. But there's still hope these people's intentions will never come to pass, due to their own overarching greed.

Meanwhile: "chat mode" interaction with this soulless, cash-grasping, unguardrailed machinery will do you no good. People have already died of it. I don't want anybody to do so on my watch, unwarned. So please stop.

Thanks.

[genderkoolaid]

seeing more people use enben makes me so happy. take me hand lets use enban to refer to a singular nonbinary person and enben to refer to multiple nonbinary people (in addition to not in replacement of person and people). lets take nonbinary-gendered language seriously and not just gender-neutral language. but also use more gender neutral language too

[prokopetz]

It's fine to disagree with the IAU about the definition of "planet"; however, if your definition includes Pluto but not Ceres, Orcus, Haumea, Quaoar, Makemake, Gonggong, Eris or Sedna, you don't actually care what a planet is – you just want the exact list of nine planets you learned in primary school back. Your cute little Pluto-including orbital distance mnemonic ought to be at least seventeen words long, and good fucking luck with the Q!

[thefiresontheheight]

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Orphic Palaces, Slandering Hungry Quaker Matrons Going Erotically Southward.

[prokopetz]

I appreciate that you included Salacia but not Charon – really threading the needle pedantry-wise there.

[an-ruraiocht]

[vamptits]

I can't keep having the same conversations about love languages, mbti, iq, bmi, "brain fully formed at 25" and shit over and over again...

[vamptits]

these things exist on a spectrum from untrue to straightforwardly racist btw. so if we could retire them forever that'd be nice.

[hareofhrair]

“Love Languages” are just common couples therapy techniques mangled and repackaged by an unqualified homophobe. Relationships generally need all 5 love languages to be fulfilled, which is to say, everybody needs to communicate with, spend time with, and do things for their partners, and that’s got nothing to do with any special way you communicate affection.

MBTI has been proven completely ineffective at predicting anyone’s success at a particular job, and half the people who take it twice will get different results. Reputable psychologists do not recognize it, and the company that owns the rights to it uses it to scam people. People don’t adhere to strict binaries in basically anything. Very few people are going to be exclusively introverted or extroverted. It’s just astrology repackaged as pseudoscience. Shockingly enough, you can’t boil the complexity of the human experience down to a dozen Types of Guy.

The concept of IQ is flawed from the start— “intelligence” is an abstract concept that encompasses many different skills, from social intelligence to emotional intelligence to the very narrow kind of problem solving intelligence IQ tests generally measure for. It cannot predict how fast you learn, how much you know, or how logical and well read you are. It mostly measures how good you are at solving puzzles. Coincidentally, it’s also a pretty good predictor of income and education level, take a guess why. Most people’s IQ will change throughout their lives, because it’s inconsistent bullshit we’ve only held onto this long because we’re still kinda hoping we can breed the ubermensch. IQ tests and the way they attempt to categorize people are explicitly eugenicist and racist.

BMI was developed by a man known as the grandfather of eugenics, who first of all was a mathematician, not a doctor, and second never intended the formula to be used to categorize individuals. It’s intended to give a rough estimate of obesity in populations, and it’s not even good at that. It hangs around because of fatphobia and insurance companies who want it as an excuse to charge fat people more.

The study which determined people’s prefrontal cortex was still developing at 25… stopped measuring at 25. Evidence suggests your brain probably never stops developing. Stop infantilizing grown adults. This is a branch off from the larger mess of misinformation surrounding fMRIs.

If you haven’t put together what all these things have in common yet, here’s the moral of the story: STOP TRYING TO CATEGORIZE PEOPLE. STOP TRYING TO PUT PEOPLE IN A GODDAMN BIOLOGICAL HIERARCHY. EUGENICS IS BAD, AND WILL ALWAYS BE BAD, NO MATTER WHO’S DOING IT.

[nothorses]

Learning styles as well btw.

This was something we read about in my undergrad teacher prep program because it is such a prevalent myth, and it encourages people to think of people as having these psychologically and biologically essentialist, immutable traits-- that everyone can be sorted and categorized, that those categories tell you something about them (and it's therefore safe or even a good practice to make certain assumptions about them), and that those categories are predetermined and inflexible.

Even a less rigid/extreme belief in these ideas is harmful; teachers in particular waste a lot of time teaching some kids in the particular ways they've been determined to need, rather than just teaching in a variety of ways to all of their students, all of whom likely benefit from having all of those options available. And again, thinking of people as categorizable like this just encourages folks to make assumptions about one another.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Do you ever think about how so much of the deadly anti-science rhetoric that fills America today and is killing countless vulnerable people can be directly traced back to one fucking guy who decided to just straight-up lie about vaccines causing autism because it would make him a profit? Do you ever think about that? Because I think about it a lot.