[biophonies]

been thinking a lot lately on what it takes to really sustain a movement. I think USAians expect protests, boycotts, and letters to be met with instant results, and when this doesn't happen, there's helplessness, burnout, and the movement is quietly dropped...

as we approach the year of the dragon, the hydra comes to mind.

over 30,000 innocent Palestinians are now gone, on our tax dollars, with no end in sight. now more people than ever realize that our representatives do not represent us, or care to. we are financing our own destruction, and we are running out of time.

so what does it really take to build a new world? who do we need? drawing on those who did it best (the global south truly has all the answers), these were my conclusions, but please tell me if you have any notes.

all I know is that our feelings of helplessness are by design. we cannot do it alone. it will not happen overnight. when one head tires, there must be two others to take it's place. happy early new year. we all have a role to play. which one are you?

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[capitulism]

The largest mass shooting in American history was a hate crime against gay people. Don’t ever forget that.

[exmellivorinae]

June 12, 2016. Putting a date on this for when it gets reblogged months from now by people who think the post is about something from 30, 40 years ago.

[butch-reidentified]

I am a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting, having grown up in Orlando and just turned 20 a month prior. If you didn’t know, there were several families who refused to claim the bodies of their relatives due to their sexuality. One family even had their relative’s name removed from the memorial. Murdered by the same hate with which their families reject them in both life and death.

Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:

We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.

The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.

At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:

ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.

Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.

This year was the sixth anniversary. The first couple years I received dozens of messages checking in on me on 6/12. Year 5 got enough news coverage for people to think to reach out to me. This year it was my therapist, the woman I kissed in that photo, and a couple of other gun violence survivor friends. People are forgetting already.

[butch-reidentified]

With the 7 year anniversary <2 weeks away, I figured I’d reblog this

[stuckinapril]

I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.

[axolotlofficial]

Child soldiers exist, war is not an adult topic.

Children die, death/murder is not an adult topic.

The Troubled Teen Industry exists, child trafficking is not an adult topic.

Children get raped, sexual assault is not an adult topic.

Children have alcoholic parents, addiction is not an adult topic.

Children get beat to the point of hospitalization at school, that level of violence is not an adult topic.

That when these things get into "kid friendly" media at all, they tend to be heavily censored is about protecting adult control over kids, not about protecting children.

[elbiotipo]

More than "here in the Southern Hemisphere we have inverted seasons :)" thing, which is TECHNICALLY true, I would go a step further and encourage to think about that "much of the world does not exactly has a spring-summer-fall-winter season sequence as they show in cartoons"

[paperdragonsong]

I will scream about this to anyone who listens forever. AUSTRALIA DOES NOT HAVE "ENGLISH SEASONS BUT BACKWARDS" and the insistence that it does creates a massive layer of alienation from the natural world.

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

Most Indigenous nations around Australia had six or more seasons, revolving around wet and dry times as much as hot and cold, and marked by the appearances of certain native animals and flowers. Schools need to start teaching the real seasons, and explaining that climate cycles are too complex to generalise globally, or else we will keep raising generations who view the natural world as hostile and unpredictable and climate predictions as generally irrelevent and frequently wrong - and I'm sure I don't need to spell out why that's a problem in the era of climate crisis.

[tiredtransgal]

i want to add that 40% of the world's population lives in the tropics, and the 4 season model just doesn't make much sense for a lot of places in there. usually it's just the wet season/monsoon season and the dry season. it's often hot year round.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

in general the way humans define seasons is largely subjective and varies across cultures. the one you were taught is not at all universal!

[deaddogbrain]

imo the way you feel about groups it's fully socially acceptable to hate (like children or polyamorous people, among others) is the canary in the coal mine for underlying bigoted beliefs. if you're only supportive of marginalized groups when it's cool to do so, probably you don't actually care about marginalized groups, you care about other people thinking you care

[deaddogbrain]

there are 1 trillion people in the notes of this post saying "yeah! i mean i hate kids but they should have rights!" you hate kids? you mean you hate all members of an oppressed group solely for their membership in this group? right. why do you hate them? because they can't take care of themselves and need help? because they don't understand social norms and can be "annoying" and disrespect boundaries as a result? because they can be messy? because they don't understand things in the same way as you do? that's awesome. how do you feel about disabled people btw

[xanaxfarts]

[eebie]

I just ate one

[eebie]

You can lie when you name things

[ducksintherain]

They used to be good !! They used to be not so red, but delicious. Except they started getting sold in supermarket, and people only picked the most red ones, so farmers selected their varieties to be more and more red, not concentrating on the taste... And now the variety is regulated, you can't legally select (breed varieties to get a better version) it and still call it the same name, so we're stuck with that.

[the-supernatural-atheist]

if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills

[this-is-trans-joy]

You can’t call yourself a leftist if you hate children tbh, like you can choose not to have them or be around them, but outright hating the most marginalised group of people in the world who have absolutely no power or control over the most basic parts of their lives and bodies is a dangerous mentality to have and you need to grow the fuck up and get out of your edgy phase and start treating everyone around you like human beings, even the ones that piss you off.

[this-is-trans-joy]

Like the older I get, the more empathy I have for children. Imagine living on this planet for less than a decade and having to figure out every single thing from scratch, only for the people around you to treat you like a living doll and constantly invalidate your feelings because you haven’t learned how to express them beyond screaming at the top of your lungs, like you’d be having meltdowns in the grocery store as well. The least you can do is offer them some grace, everything is so fucking confusing and scary and overwhelming and they’re not able to communicate that properly and no one around them is explaining shit, and they are constantly at the mercy of whether or not the terrifyingly giant adults around them CHOOSE to be kind like genuinely put yourself in the situation of a child and tell me you wouldn’t also be freaking the fuck out.

The way society treats children is borderline inhumane, and you have the audacity to call them hellspawn crotch-goblins for screaming a little bit too loud or daring to be in the same vicinity as you.

[this-is-trans-joy]

I do also believe that hating children is a sign of underlying ableism, because most of the justifications of hating children comes down to “they’re annoying” or “they don’t know how to act” or “they’re gross” and if you are unable to treat people who lack social skills, who make loud or repetitive noises, who are incontinent etc. with basic respect and dignity, then what’s the difference between hating children and hating disabled adults that share the traits you find so irritating?

[creatingblackcharacters]

Y'all wanna know a trick? A trick as to how you can better understand the mentality of someone who is antiblack (particularly white, but tbh it works on anyone who really buys into antiblackness), if not make them do an Ace Attorney Blow Up? 👀

[creatingblackcharacters]

(Tl:Dr- have a spine and hold the line 👍🏾)

I was being facetious with the trick part lol but you know the joke "I might be racist, but you're mean and that's worse?" It's the root of that. We discussed it back when we read White Fragility. You can see it in Trump, Elon Musk, and your average Tumblr racist:

They really, REALLY want to be liked. Not just liked, no that's not the right word, but validated.

Think about it this way. Racism is the status quo; the default, right? Part of maintaining that default is through normalization, and that includes the solidarity necessary to reinforce that (DiAngelo called it white solidarity).

So, if being covertly racist is the status quo, then that means you will be socially rewarded for being so. When you get rewarded, people are nice, friendly, relatable, they keke and haha right alongside you. But when you confront someone's racism, you're not socially rewarding them anymore- the spigot of validation has been paused! Instead of taking it as a valid critique, you are seen as socially punishing a person. You're being MEAN, because the validation I got from everyone else's also-racism was NICE!

That's why when you confront racism, you HAVE to stand firm on it. You cannot feed into the desire for the validation of their behavior. That's what makes a lot of people snap. The blowup is meant to stop you, to force you back into compliance! The only one being punished really is you for bringing it up.

And hell, if not socially validating a bigot is punishment... 😐 Why would that be... A bad thing? We're not hitting you with rocks, we're just saying we don't fuck with you and your behavior. (But that's also a part of really all of the books we've read in #cbc book club so far; that antiracism is seen as violence.)

Personally, I wanna live in the world where it's normal to boo racists, not coddle them. But that starts with being willing to push back against the normal we're in.

[sztupy]

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previou

[ayeforscotland]

Let’s fucking go

[made-in-manetheren]

This is HUGE.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

TL;DR Google reeeeeally stepped in it this time.

[draconym]

It's nuts how common it is to not allow children to be angry, even (especially) in households where adults are angry all the time. As a child I knew my own anger was unacceptable--not just expressing it outwardly but feeling it at all. So now as an adult my immediate reaction to my own anger is often to feel guilt instead of like. Noticing when someone is being rude or unfair or my boundaries are being violated or whatever. fucked up.

[jackawful]

to this day "who is allowed to be angry" has been an incredible benchmark for teasing out who, in abusive situations with mutual accusations and DARVO happening, is being abusive and who is being abused. one of my favorite resources about this, the Creative Interventions Toolkit, phrases the question "who sets the weather?" in the relationship and I think about it so so often when I think about my own childhood. I was parentified in a way that set me up for future abusive relationships, because I had to soothe my parents' anger while not being allowed to feel angry myself. I am extremely grateful to everyone outside myself - friends, therapists, partners - who's gotten angry on my behalf about how I'm treated or let me know something I'd been excusing or blaming myself for was actually Not Okay. I guess the good news here is that it's possible to learn how to access anger again in a healthy way, it just takes support, like doing physical therapy for a muscle that didn't develop quite right.

[draconym]

I relate so strongly to this.

This is not to say that feeling anger is abusive; it's human to feel anger. But if you've ever felt like your anger was "unjustified" or were afraid to express it outwardly because you expected it to be dismissed ... ask yourself how you would react if the roles were reversed. I find that a lot of folks who were The Grown Up in a relationship with their parents hold themselves to much different standards than they hold other people.

I've seen plenty of situations that involve two or more people hurting each other and not admitting any fault because they want to protect their own egos. But. Notice when you think you're not entitled to be upset about something. When someone tells you you shouldn't be upset. There's a difference between taking your anger out on other people and just. Being allowed to feel angry.

[tredlocity]

[tredlocity]

(Dex is owned by @blankvhs)

[masterqifrey]

TONGARI BOUSHI NO ATELIER (2026) episode 05 ✴ the dragon's labyrinth created by shirahama kamome

[theartofmadeline]

happy pride to the gay people in my computer <3