I'm probably gonna get yelled at for saying this but sometimes something isn't a real problem in fandom, you just learned a Japanese word describing a general fandom practice and got scared and decided it meant "The Bad Ones" of that practice
Whenever you see someone being like "we don't mind when women enjoy or even create m/m content, we just hate fujoshis" you are being racist. If you mean "I hate the way some female fans treat gay men like fetish objects" then say that, and we can have a conversation based on that, but "fujoshi" is, I cannot stress this enough, just a word for any woman who likes M/M content, for better or worse. It may have started out as a reclaimed insult (by the way, the insult was based on "liking gay shit makes you perverted and sinful," not "please respect the humanity of gay men") but it does not make a distinction between The Good Ones and The Bad Ones. You just decided to No True Scotsman it and that the English word for that should describe The Good Ones and the Japanese word for it should describe The Bad Ones
Same goes for the people I saw just the other day whose discord server explicitly disallowed "Yaoi" but said that M/M content was allowed. What they meant was "M/M content is allowed as long as it isn't pornographic and fetishistic." What they actually said was "M/M content is allowed, but M/M content is strictly forbidden," and expected you to understand that the Japan-Adjacent term has porn/fetish connotations while the English-language term for THE SAME THING refers to the "normal, non-perverted" version.
It'd be like if you used the word "cartoons" to refer to all Family-Friendly animation, regardless of style or country of origin, whether it's Japanese or American or French or whatever, and used the term "anime" to refer to all animated pornography regardless of style or country of origin. There's plenty of animated pornography that isn't Japanese! There's plenty of anime that's not pornographic! But this is the sort of thing you do when you say shit like "obviously women can read stories about gay men, but NO FUJOSHIS"
OP is correct and smart for saying this. this is related to/a subset of how people are about non-fandom foreign words, too, like how people say "Christians worship God (good), Muslims worship Allah (bad and scary)" when gues swh. gu. guess what. gues s w hat Allah mea. guess what the word "Allah" means--!!
For 10,000,000 years, I've had a scan of my sig on my computer. When I get sent a form for a signature, I open it in the GIMP, open the signature JPG, paste the latter into the former, set the layer to "multiply" and align it.
This morning, I pasted that same JPG as a *brush*. Now I just select that brush and click once on the signature line!
This is incredibly obvious, but it never occurred to me, and maybe it's useful for you, too.
I think the battle is long since lost on what the “-coded” suffix means, but I (old movie guy specifically invested in queer coding) seem to be unable to let go of how annoying I find the fuzzy popular use of the term. This is probably a flaw in my character.
Coding is intentional, it’s a way of communicating indirectly with the audience through a shared language of signs. That’s why it’s called coding, because it’s communicating in code. It isn’t when a thing reminds you of another thing.
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
Data brokers are a cancer. There's a direct line from the unrestricted collection, retention and processing of our data to a host of evils, from deepfake porn to phishing scams; from racial discrimination in hiring to ICE roundups of migrants; from targeted election interference to identity theft:
Why do data brokers exist? Because we let them. Congress hasn't passed a new federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when they made it illegal for video stores to disclose your VHS rentals. All other acts of consumer surveillance are legal. Data brokers spy on us for the same reason your dog licks its balls: because they can, and we don't stop them:
Getting rid of data brokers wouldn't solve all our problems, but it sure would go a long way to solving many of them. Rather than legally requiring platforms to spy on kids (to exclude them from being targeted by platforms' algorithms), we could prohibit platforms from spying on anyone, including kids, meaning kids couldn't be identified (much less targeted) by algorithms or ads:
Data brokers produce mountains of raw material used for every form of scam and torture. It's data brokers who power the gig economy's "algorithmic wage discrimination" system, where nurses and other workers are offered less pay based on how much credit card debt they're carrying:
So the feds (both Congress and the executive branch) have surrendered, and that leaves states alone on the battlefield fighting the privacy wars alone. State legislatures have taken some big steps, but – crucially – they've stopped short of banning data brokers from operating within their borders. Having taken a ban on data brokers off the table, states are left with complex, often unworkable "compromises" that go nowhere.
This is where DROP comes in. DROP stands for "Delete Request and Opt-out Platform," and it's a new phase of California's privacy regime that kicks off next month. Under DROP, you fill in some paperwork and then the state requires every data brokerage operating in California to delete your data, as well as any inferences they've made about you based on that data:
Implementing DROP is nowhere near as good as banning data brokers. The idea that data brokers should be able to collect, retain and process your data unless you tell them not to implies that everyone starts off wanting to be spied on, and therefore data brokers should assume that unless they hear otherwise, we're delighted to be the subject of commercial surveillance. This is an incredibly stupid supposition, contradicted by all available evidence. For example, when Apple offered iPhone owners a one-click option to block Facebook from spying on them, 96% of iPhone owners clicked the button:
Indeed, given this fact, one wonders why Apple bothers with the "don't spy on me" button at all. Why not have a "do spy on me" button that is unchecked by default, and leave users to dig through their settings to find the option to opt in to being surveilled? Of course, then it would make the fact that Apple spies on its customers and uses the data to target ads (with no way to opt out) a little awkward:
In the absence of a ban on surveillance without explicit, opt-in consent, we are left with the bizarre fiction that most of us want to be spied on, a fiction that pervades the DROP process, making the entire procedure nearly impossible to complete.
To start the DROP process, you must first create a Login.gov ID. This is an incredibly invasive process that involves photographing multiple pieces of ID and taking several selfies using special apps and webpages that hijack your device's camera and processor in a bid to prevent bad actors from spoofing the process. There's a plausible reason for this rigmarole: Login.gov is the authentication system for multiple federal, state and local IT systems in the US, so a fake or stolen Login.gov ID could be used to access your IRS, Social Security, and other very sensitive accounts.
The corollary of this is the promise of Login.gov: once you create your ID (a lengthy, multi-stage process) you won't have to jump through lots of painful bureaucratic hoops to access a wide variety of government services.
DROP didn't get the memo.
After you log in to DROP via Login.gov, you are sent a text message – to the phone number in your Login.gov profile – with a link to access a "secure" website that takes over your camera to let you take a "secure" photo of the front and back of your California driver's license or your US passport. What if you don't have either of those? I guess that means you want to be spied on by data brokers.
Note that these are the same credentials you have to supply to get the Login.gov ID that you've just used to get to this step in the process. In other words, in order to get to the stage where they ask you to photograph your driver's license, you have to have already photographed and validated your driver's license.
Once you complete this (pointless, redundant) step, you're directed back to your computer, where the process continues. Here, you must fill in all kinds of biographical detail, as well as specialized pieces of information, including your car's VIN. This is a piece of information that most people don't have – but which the California DMV does have and could auto-feed into the system, given that you've repeatedly affirmatively identified yourself to the service.
You also have to provide your mobile advertising identifier, a long, unique number that you may or may not be able to extract from your phone, depending on the model and the OS version. If you can't get it that way, you can install an app like AAID, which comes with a long list of – you guessed it – permissions to extract, store and process your private information.
Here's the thing: the whole point of a mobile ad identifier is that apps can access it (this is how they identify and track you). That step, where the system made you switch to your phone and use your camera to photograph your driver's license? That step could have automatically pulled this data off your device. That's the whole fucking point of this exercise: that web-pages and apps can request your mobile ad identifier.
Instead, DROP wants users to dig through their phone's deepest settings and/or install an app to retrieve a 32-digit number, which they then must key into a webform on their computer or in a different app on their phone.
Once you've done this, you must fill in another page of biographical information, including information that you've already provided to Login.gov and information you've already filled in on previous screens.
On this screen, you must also verify your phone number by sending yourself a text and then pasting in a unique number the system sends to you. But remember how this whole thing started? The first step is that you authenticate with Login.gov, which sends a text to your phone so you can take a (redundant) picture of your driver's license. There is no way you could get this far in the process unless you controlled the phone number you've just "verified" with the system.
Next, you must verify your email address, by receiving an email with a unique code in it and keying or pasting that into the webform, too. Again, remember how this process started: with you logging in with Login.gov, using your email address, which the system has already treated as verified since the very start of this (very) long and (very) complicated process.
This whole thing is terrible, and it is predicated on the absurd premise that Californians have to be defended from the threat of strangers who pretend to be them in order to sneakily opt them out of surveillance. DROP requires stronger authentication than any other US government system I've ever interacted with. I file my tax returns with fewer authentication steps. I renew my car's DMV registration with fewer authentication steps. I became a US citizen with fewer authentication steps.
This is either a system with no coherent threat model, or (far more probably), its threat model is that people will use it. This is California's answer to "a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'":
It's especially instructive to compare this process to the steps you have to take in order to "opt in" to having a data broker open a file on you and stuff it full of your sensitive, personal information, which is then sold to all comers:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
It's also instructive to compare this process to the steps a data broker has to take to spy on you and sell your data:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
Though there are many obvious ways this could be made better, I want to stress here that you shouldn't have to do this at all. It's entirely backwards. The process for not being spied on should look like this:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
If anyone is going to be forced to jump through hoops to participate in the mass collection and catastrophic mishandling of private data, it should be the data brokers, not the people they spy on.
This kind of malicious compliance is the inevitable outcome of a process that starts by taking the obvious best measure off the table. The answer to the problem of data brokers is banning data brokers, not creating a demented hairball of form-filling that maintains the fiction that data broker surveillance is consensual.
In its own way, this process reminds me of the whole "carbon credit" fiasco. The answer to too many carbon emissions is to democratically decide to ban certain kinds of carbon emissions. But that would require states to do things, rather than simply "nudging" a process that is guided by "the market." So we end up with these junk "credits" that companies manufacture by promising not to log forests, many of which are already wildlife preserves and/or subsequently burn down:
The best critique of this whole thing came in 2021 from the Climate Ad Project, who produced a short video in which people were allowed to kill one another provided they purchased "murder offsets":
In a state of nature, murder exists. We, as a society, have decided this is bad. Rather than creating "incentives" not to murder, we just banned murder. Admittedly, we still get some murders, but when these happen, we don't treat it as "a mispricing of the anti-murder incentive" – we treat it as a crime.
The commercial surveillance industry may not be a criminal enterprise (yet), but it is the source of a torrent of crime, a flood of crime, a tsunami of crime. Every piece of your information that a data broker possesses exposes you to the risk of being victimized by a criminal. For this reason, I strongly believe that you should go through the tedious, performatively difficult DROP process:
https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/
But let's not pretend that this is good – or even adequate. There is no demand for being spied on. There is no basis for taking such enormous care in making sure people aren't maliciously removed from surveillance databases. If these databases exist at all (they should not), then we should make spies go through all this paperwork, to prove that you do want to be spied on, and unless they manage it, then spying on us should be treated as the crime it is.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
like say what you will but basically what's happend to ianthe is she's spent her entire life playing second to her sister while working twice as hard than she ought in order to compensate for corona's lack of power. while receiving no recognition for her feats of necromatic power. she finally becomes lyctor and is immediately upstaged by cythrea then harrow. gets her ass beat by the former and spends the next book playing second to the latter who's literally gods special favourite pseudo-daughter now. despite the fact shes's more defective than ianthe. oh and then. ianthe chooses god. chooses to be his last loyal saint but oops! his real daughter shows up. so. ianthe still isn't the most interesting or important person in the room. one of the two things she wants the most. plus her shitty coworker is throwing a temper tantrum in her skull this whole time cause she ate him. i'm just saying she's having a shit immortal life so far
Researchers focused on whether kids that are spanked are more likely to share or, conversely, more likely to have anxiety, years down the li
2021:
Spanking found to impact children's brain response, leading to lasting consequences.
2018:
The American Academy of Pediatrics says new evidence and research not only show that spanking affects a child’s brain development and increa
2016:
Kids who are spanked tend to act out more and have more problems later on.
2012:
A study reviewed more than two decades of research on the effects of spanking and found nothing positive to report, only that physical punis
2010:
A multiyear study shows spanking kids makes them more aggressive later on
I haven’t pissed people off lately by reminding them that ALL types of physical punishment of kids has been proven beyond ANY reasonable doubt to have only negative long term outcomes.
So let me scream it from the hilltops:
Stop hitting kids. End of sentence.
If you think, “but I was hit and I turned out just fine” let me pre-reply: NO YOU DID NOT. You think hitting a child is ok, how the fuck does that qualify as “fine”?????? From one abuse survivor to another: please start healing yourself.
The World Health Organization report I highly recommend because there are so many conclusions that are shocking and yet completely obvious.
For example, being exposed to corporal punishment as a kid makes it more likely for a person to commit domestic violence against a partner. In places where corporal punishment is normal, people are more likely to think that rape and intimate partner violence are normal. Kids who are spanked are more likely to be violent with and to bully other kids.
Spanking is literally teaching a kid that violence is okay and normal and it affects the whole society.
It also talks about how corporal punishment affects the brain in its development. It changes the structure of the brain and slows the development of mental abilities. Kids who get spanked have much stronger hormonal responses to stress.
The master's thesis I edited in 2009 was a pilot study about corporal punishment and eating disorders, and turned up a correlation.
(For those currently saying "correlation doesn't equal causation," you're correct! The point of this study was to determine if there were higher rates of disordered eating in adults who'd experienced corporal punishment as kids. If the answer was no, then there's probably no statistical relationship. If the answer was yes--as it was--the research would then move on to "so is there causation here, or are there other factors?")
I don't bring this up because of the study itself. It was a small pilot study, I haven't seen any follow-up research, and the original isn't available online.
No, I bring this up because the author cited many other studies on the adverse effects of spanking to demonstrate why she thought the study was necessary in the first place.
THOSE STUDIES WENT BACK TO 1939.
ONE OF THEM WAS AN AGGREGATE METADATA STUDY.
If you're not familiar, that basically means its authors were studying studies. They took every single study on spanking they could find within a 70-year span and studied them all to see what patterns emerged. What they found was horrifying:
Every single study in that period, from the most rigorous right on down to "you can tell the authors wanted a spanking-is-good result," showed negative results from spanking. These were as diverse as increased risk of sexual abuse to depression to increased risk of substance abuse to poorer educational outcomes to greater likelihood of committing violent crimes as adults.
But that's not the horrifying part. If you're wondering how that could possibly not be the horrifying part, well...
NOT ONE STUDY SHOWED A POSITIVE TRADEOFF FOR THESE RISKS. NOT. ONE.
There was no "sports can cause injuries but can also improve self-esteem, personal fitness, and teach important disciplinary skills." There wasn't even a "homework has marginal benefits at most."
THERE WAS NOTHING. Multiple studies noted that while corporal punishment could produce the immediate appearance of improved behavior, what was actually happening is the kids were getting better at lying and hiding their undesirable behavior, and they were actually more likely to enter the juvenile detention system. The results were so overwhelmingly negative that even the biased studies deliberately designed to produce "it's good actually" results could not deliver those results.
In other words: in thousands of studies across ALMOST A CENTURY, we have never found a good reason to use corporal punishment. We haven't even found a mediocre one.
tony's chocolonely mildly pisses me off every time i eat it. like yeah i get it ur doing a whole symbolism thing about unfairness and whatever, but its actually SO DIFFICULT to eat fucking. gerrymandered chocolate. your symbolism is ruining my chocolate experience.
like. ur already more expensive. i understand this. i am willing to pay more money to have slave-free delicious chocolate. why must you punish me further by making it a goddamn puzzle to break a piece off.
Tony's Chocolonely does not ensure a living wage for cocoa workers in West Africa (see 2020 report by Voice Network).
Food Empowerment Project maintains an updated list of chocolate brands they recommend based on the following standards:
transparency about the country of origin for cocoa
if sourced from Western Africa, the workers must own the companies/be in charge of the profits from their labor (this standard is because child labor and slavery have been widely documented for decades in this area)
if sourced from Brazil, the workers must own the company and/or be in charge of the profits from their labor, or the company must be going above and beyond to support the workers and their families (this standard is because "child labor and slavery only recently have been documented in cocoa in Brazil" and they are "giving Brazilian companies that are trying to address the issue by supporting the workers and their families the benefit of the doubt.")
this isn't perfect, obviously, but it is much more grounded in the rights of workers than the various certifications (e.g. Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, etc.) you'll see on product packaging
I think it should be noted that the Food Empowerment Project specifically only lists companies making "at least one vegan chocolate product" and that they only ask about the companies' vegan chocolates specifically. Their list is not an exhaustive resource for every type of chocolate.
[Source: "Understanding Our Chocolate List" from their website]
Before I found that link I was curious as to why I didn't see any Norwegian manufacturers on their list(which makes sense now, as their chocolates are almost exclusively milk chocolate) and looked up where our companies source their chocolate from and found Nidar gets theirs from the Rainforest Alliance and Freia from Cocoa Life, both of which have been under scrutiny for not preventing child labour and not paying farmers a living wage among other things. So it appears Norwegian chocolate is out of the ethical picture.
I stated this in the comments of the post already, but it’d probably be better to add it as a reblog, so it’s more visible and doesn’t need to be restated by anyone else in the future.
So, Tony’s allied with Barry Callebut to get its cocoa. Barry Callebut is one of the biggest chocolate companies in the world, and it is unethical, obviously. This led to Tony’s revealing in February 2022 that 1701 child laborers were in their supply chain. Barry Callebut had over 21K at the time. Both of those numbers have risen, and Tony’s has outright admitted they don’t give a fuck about child labor laws when asked about it, content to let children to continue farming their cocoa instead of actually doing the activism they claim to do. (business-humanrights.org, feb 6 2022)
About a week ago, Tony’s joined Barry, Nestle and Ferrero in pushing against the reinstatement of important EUDR deforestation legislations. Under that regulation that they pushed against, they would’ve had to be more transparent about their supply chains for their more key ingredients - So Tony’s is lobbying against the exact thing they claim to stand for. (confectioneryproduction.com, mar 18, 2026)
Won’t restate @closet-keys’s addition, of course. That’d just be redundant and maybe annoying since, yknow, it’s already been said.
If you wanna find a better chocolate brand it’s really damn easy. There’s lists on slavefreechocolate.org of both the ethical and unethical companies. Both lists can be found here:
Below is a list of chocolate companies that only use ethically grown cocoa. Find out how you can tell if the chocolate you are ea
And it doesn’t have the vegan product restriction the other list has, which solves @aloofraven’s issue.
Also, please do not listen to how people talk about cover letters on this site. Cover letters are important, and in many industries you can be damn sure they'll be read. And no, they're not 'fanfic about working in your office', or just re-stating the resume contents in a fancier guise. If you treat them like that, then of course they're not doing much for you. That makes you sound like a syncophantic windbag, and it's not doing anything else to help.
I was trained in the dark arts of the cover letter by my mother, who is a hiring manager. And her training has paid off: I've been consistently told my cover letters are excellent. Let me pass on the wisdom.
The job of a cover letter is to give a prospective employer strictly more information than is on the resume. This is where you take the resume contents and put them into context. You look at the job requirements (you are looking at the job requirements before applying, right?) and look at your resume and ask the question (in your head) "why would a person think this candidate would be good for this job?" and your cover letter is the answer to that question. If you don't answer that question, the hiring manager is going to have to do it themselves, and you have way more information to work with than they do.
This is especially important if you're moving from one industry to another, because then the relevant connections aren't obvious. It's also very important if you're overqualified, because then you can use the letter to say "I know it looks like this job would be too entry-level for me, but I'm interested to pursue it for reasons x, y, and z". You can also use this space to explain away something that might otherwise be disqualifying, like job-hopping or a long break in employment. The tone to strike here is always matter-of-fact and constrained to topic - don't go into detail about health stuff or personal tragedy, just tell them what they need to hear: that this period of your resume was affected by [bad thing] but that it's now in the past and you're looking forward to the next chapter. Remember, one of the things they're trying to learn is whether you'd be content in this role, or whether you'd be miserable and leave after 2 months, which would force them to do all the work of hiring again. You're trying to establish that you will fit right in and not cause problems. Knowing what drew you to this job in particular (and don't just say 'money', that's true for everyone) helps with that.
And the other mistake? Everyone writes cover letters that are too long. One page is fine. Two is the absolute maximum, and that's if you have a lot of specific things to say. It's a waste of your time and theirs to pad it out with fluff. Of my two most recent successful cover letters (i.e. jobs for which I was interviewed) one was 390 words and the other was 550. That's the length of this post. How long did it take me to write this post? About 15 minutes to write, 5 to proof and edit. That's how long you should be spending on a cover letter, maximum.
one thing mash really did nail is the complete chaos of the male living space. i walked into my friend’s college apartment once and two of his roommates were completely hammered and trying to figure out how long it would take them to brew their own beer while the third one was working on his golf swing in the middle of the living room while smoking a cigar. tell me that’s not an opening shot of the swamp
Came across this art installation, Liza Lou's Kitchen, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. It's a kitchen made of tiny glass beads, that artist Liza Lou did, taking 5 yrs. to complete, from 1991 - 1996.
it’s sooo funny when rude customers encounter employees who can deny them service for the first time.
i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.
so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”
And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”
I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”
And he was so astonished he didn’t even argue he just turned around and left 💀🙏🏻 it was like he suddenly became self aware
One summer I was running ferry rides across a lake so people could see the waterfalls without walking 6 miles when a guy snapped my bra strap as he was boarding the boat. So i immediately threw him off, he started yelling for my manager, my boss cheerfully informed him that, yeah, she’s the captain of the boat and she can kick off anyone she wants. He goes to storm off, looks expectantly at his girlfriend, and she just goes, “Well, I’M not walking six miles, Michael! I’ll meet you back at the car!” and sits right back down!!!!
The expression on his face when he was told that he couldn’t get on the boat, then immediately told that his girlfriend was ditching him? PRICELESS. he just blinked at her and then stormed off like a child. I gave her a free hat and was like maybe rethink this relationship…….
i once had this fucker come up to order a beer. while i pour it he shows me the wanky fucking chemical structure tattoo on his arm and he’s like “hey. you know what this is” i was like “nah sorry” (never cared abt chemistry in school, plus having to look at a some rando’s pretentious tattoo gives me the douche chills). he decides to respond with “heh. you must not read many books”
i immediately stop pouring his beer. i reply: “heh. you must not want this beer.” thirsty boy immediately starts groveling like a worm “please please no i do want the beer im sorry im sorry” believe me when i say it was one of the most pathetic things ive ever witnessed
I genuinely believe that part of why it has become so normalized to be openly callous and evil in politics is that customer service culture has trained affluent people that they can treat everyone they consider beneath them however they want and still be treated kindly.
Basically what I'm getting from the present "giving 100% at work" Tumblr discourse is that a lot of people have fairly narrow notions of what blue-collar versus white-collar jobs actually entail. There are in fact manual labour jobs where a significant chunk of your average work day consists of Fucking Around, and conversely, there are desk jobs where you crunch eighty-hour weeks for years on end until you suddenly drop dead from heart failure at age 32. It's absolutely true that you're more likely to end up in a No Fucking Around Allowed situation in a blue-collar occupation, but you can't tell whether or not someone is in that position based purely on whether or not they work in an office. Shit, call centre workers are white collar on paper, and the kind of fuckery a lot of call centre workers are subjected to involves genuine human rights violations.
One time I came home from uni very upset and my younger siblings asked what's wrong. I said that mutated flies in our lab escaped because someone broke their jar. I didn't even realise how scary it sounded to them until I saw their faces lmao. I was upset because we were short on said flies (they don't reproduce very well) and my siblings thought that some crazy radioactive fly monsters escaped and we are all fucked now. Love being a mad scientist in their eyes lowkey
Stop Hitting Yourself @heelgripper - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
