HidingFromTheSpotlight

Saturn. He/Him/They/Them. Late 20s. I don't know what this blog is for anymore. Pro-Queer, especially Pro-Trans. Pro-Choice. Bigots fuck off.

[queercanelady]

how it is apparently

[captain-price-returns]

gentrification is when trash goes in trash cans

[teaboot]

(walking down a street and not stepping in any needles, glass, rotten food, loose bags or bottles of piss) this whole damn place has gone to shit

[goatsorcery]

im so done with seeing articles about kids and screen time that doesnt mention parent behaviors even once. “kids are always on their phones” so are the parents! which the kids look to for how they should behave! ipad babies didn’t chose to only play on their ipads, thats what their parents gave them!

an anecdotal example: when i was a kid, all my parents would do in their minimal free time was watch tv and then they would be surprised when in my sister and i’s minimal free time we would also only watch tv/play video games. they scolded us for not reading books, but they never read books. they scolded us for not going outside but they never went outside.

“kids are always on their damn phones” my mom is in her 60s and opens up candy crush anytime she’s sitting — it isnt just the kids

[rhearoy-hunter]

its called creating an enabling environment. If parents want their children to not be using tablets/phones all the time, then they need to teach the skills and provide the resources needed for their children to engage in something other than technology.

[intelligentchristianlady]

A bus may have only a couple of passengers, especially at the beginning or end of its route. But let's also take fuel efficiency into account.

[foxoftheasterisk]

If there's one person on a bus because that person cannot or doesn't want to drive, the bus is succeeding.

[luckyladylily]

I read a study once on the fuel efficiency of various types of commuter vehicles (car, bus, train) on a per person basis and the number of people needed riding public transit to match the "efficiency" of cars is shockingly low. A bus needs to carry like 3-4 people to be fuel efficient, and trains require 2-3 per train car. Both often carry two dozen or more during peak hours, more than justifying any perceived requirements for efficiency for the train or bus to provide service the entire day.

[brightlotusmoon]

[heatherwitch]

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

Graphic Novel: On Internet Archive.

[unamccormack]

I used to set this one for second year undergraduate creative writing seminars on writing science fiction on a double bill with Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild" and no-one here gets out alive.

[regionalpancake]

!!!! Today is the only chance we’ll ever have to listen to this absolute banger of apocalyptic fiction on the very day the story is set 😲✨

Nemoy’s voice is PERFECT in this!

(A content warning if you do listen - the dog dies, though it’s not super graphic)

[regionalpancake]

I paused the robot vacuum so I could listen to this 1950’s story predicting the robot vacuum.

[parisianqueen-deactivated202004]

During the most poor and homeless period of my life, I had a lot of people get angry with me because I spent $25 on Bath and Body Works candles during a sale. They couldn’t comprehend why the hell I would do that when I had been fighting for months to try and get us on our feet, afford food, and have an apartment to live in.

Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I’d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse - one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.

I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.

When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.

So whenever I hear about someone very poor getting themselves a treat - maybe it’s Starbucks, maybe it’s a home deco item, maybe it’s a video game… I don’t judge them. I get it. I get that you can’t go without anything for that long without it making you go crazy. You need to pull some joy, inspiration, and motivation from somewhere.

[maraeffect]

poor people deserve things they want, too. it is unfair to expect poor people to only buy things they “need”.

[enide-s-dear]

My grandfather used to tell me: if you only have 20 kr left, you buy grocery for 10 kr and flowers for the other 10 kr because you need a reason to live as well.

[elljayvee]

“Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.”

[grrwoof-woof]

"but the text never explicitly stated it!!!" hey, so that's actually what they tried to teach you in those english classes you barely passed 😁

[wizardlybones]

“It’s not that deep!” Yes! It is!

[brain-rot-central]

[sandmandaddy69]

[chellings]

[dambiex]

[walmart-the-official]

Hey, don’t cry. Free online database of Japanese folk lore

[bleu-guacamole]

Might I add, free database of mostly European folklore and myths

[bogleech]

A Book of Creatures by @a-book-of-creatures doesn't update these days but is another thing along these lines, really huge, fully illustrated all by the author and cites all sources

[st-dionysus]

Free database of Native American folklore, sorted by tribe.

[queerwyrd]

Hours upon hours of animated Hungarian fairy tales on Youtube.

[naonic-blog-deactivated20230221]

John Oliver Buys $15M of Medical Debt for $60K and Forgives It All, Because He Could

Once again John Oliver proves that you can do anything with money and lawyers

Oliver then proceeded to detail how with $50 and knowledge of the law he was able to successfully apply online to create a debt buying company named “Central Asset Recovery Professionals,” or as Oliver put it, “CARP” named after “a bottom-feeding fish.”

After setting up a rudimentary website for CARP, the satirical, but still real company was offered a $15 million package of medical debt for $60,000.

Oliver explained that the debt was out of statute, which means it is the kind of debt that a collector can only continue to collect, but not sue the debtor for.

Then, instead of chasing down the 9,000 debtors in the debt package as a normal collection agency would, Oliver decided to stage the largest one-time giveaway in television history and work with the nonprofit RIP Medical Debt to forgive the $15 million with no consequences for the debtors.

[helloquirks]

Okay but now I know what I want to do of I get rich?

[beabaseball]

You dont have to be rich to do a bit of this actually

RIP Medical Debt is a charity (and therefore takes donations). They buy the rights to medical debt and then forgive them. So far they’ve forgiven over 1B in medical debt.

So a little ray of hope for someone out there today.

[shayvaalski]

Donating $10 buys $1,000 of medical debt. This is real, it works, and we’ve done it ourselves. You can too.

[yummy-tummy-time]

As of June 29, 2024, the charity is still active under a new name, Undue Medical Debt

[spiralarray]

Signal Boost!!!

[ffcrazy15]

If you’re Catholic this is a great thing to do for the Jubilee year by the way. Forgive debts and set captives free!

[bringmemyrocks]

Now renamed as Undue Medical Debt:

Undue Medical Debt Homepage

Undue Medical Debt makes it easy for donors to make an impactful difference in the lives of those struggling with medical debt.

[getvalentined]

I got a letter recently letting me know that a $3k medical bill from an emergency room visit in 2018 had been purchased by Undue Medical Debt and destroyed. Gone forever. They were very clear that I didn’t have to do anything, but they would appreciate it if I would talk to people about it to spread the word about what they were doing. Fucking phenomenal.

[leebrontide]

I got $2k erased last year!

[roycohn]

ok girls riddle me this bc i love hearing people's answers to this question. what's a misheard lyric on a song that just made so much inherent sense to you that you accepted it without thinking? ofc the GOAT of this will always be my retail coworker like 15 years ago who was convinced that TLC was saying that a scrub is a guy who thinks he's fly and is also known as a bus stop, because he's always waiting for the bus, he doesn't have a ride of his own... but also i will die on the hill that my mishearing of dua lipa comparing her sound to "martian architecture" (not modern) on future nostalgia is actually a genius lyrical nugget bc like it completely fits the whole retrofuturist disco theme!!! architecture for a planet we've not even colonized yet! so much more evocative than the actual line. anyway that's enough please share yours

[catgirltoes]

What the hell happened to the energy around gender neutral bathrooms. Remember when we were fighting for all bathrooms to be gender neutral. But now we can barely argue that people can use the gendered bathroom of their choice. Maybe there's some single stall bathroom tucked away in a basement somewhere.

[dedicatedlurker]

Maybe I am wrong, but I feel like, around the same time we were also pushing for more changing tables in bathrooms? Like put changing tables in all bathrooms, not just women's bathrooms?

But I feel like where this ended was now there are just *no* changing tables in bathrooms and instead just one "family" restroom that is also supposed to cover disabled people.

I encountered this while traveling at the airport recently. I needed a table in a bathroom to do some wound care, but neither of the gendered restrooms had changing tables.

So instead, I had to join the queue for the single family restroom which included: two families with multiple children under the age of five, two people with mobility devices, an airport employee who I think maybe needed to use the room for an injection as he had a little medical kit with him, and me. It took FOREVER and the whole time my bandage was soaked and itchy and stinky and nasty and I felt so bad for all the other folks in line who probably needed to actually use the bathroom. Oh and there was nothing in the bathroom to wipe down the changing table once I was in there 🙃

So yeah, let's get that energy back: ALL restrooms should be spacious, gender neutral, with changing tables.

Anything less is an exclusionary compromise.

[hyperlexichypatia]

A really insidious part of this is when the only gender neutral restroom is the "family" restroom and "family" restrooms are located only in "children's"/"family" designated spaces, and we've decided that children should only exist in Designated Children's Spaces, and childless adults aren't allowed im Designated Children's Spaces because they're obviously Pedophile Predator Groomer Weirdos.

So the only restroom a nonbinary adult can use is in, e.g., the Children's area of the library, the playground area of the public park, etc... where their presence will be used as evidence of their Danger To Children.

[shadow-manor]

The rest of the thread is here.

tl;dr: Don’t monetize AO3, kids.  You won’t like what happens next.

[ratherembarrassing]

read this thread. this is by far the most concise explanation of a lot of different issues that i’ve seen in fandom spaces in a while. cosigning both the linked thread and the thread about aus/uk/can law that’s linked in-thread.

[billybluboy]

AHDHXHEBSG TWITTER WRITERS DID WHAT NOW???? AND PEOPLE PAID THEM????

[prof-grace-aspen]

If someone has never taken a class that includes copyright law, they may not know this stuff, so I don’t necessarily blame random people for not knowing what copyright is, but like… maybe just maybe it’s something that should be taught????

[antifa-stray]

[mercurywells]

Just another reminder, because this always drives me crazy, but even if monetizing your fic was 100% unambiguously legal and protected, AO3 would still not let you do it because AO3 was founded and is supported by people like me who want a fandom community that is completely divested from making money off of fic.

[naryrising]

Yes, this. Lots of fanworks on AO3 are unambiguously legal. Fics based on Shakespeare plays and fairy tales and Greek mythology and The Great Gatsby and your original character from your D&D game are not violations of copyright, because no copyright applies to those things.

AO3 still doesn’t let you monetize those things on the site, because we don’t want the site to be commercial! Because that’s not what it’s for!

It’s not there for you (generic you) to make money off the efforts of the people who build and maintain the site for free! We aren’t getting paid for the work we do to give you a nice site to use, just like you aren’t getting paid for the work you do to create whatever art you share there. Because fandom is supposed to be a community where we share with each other, and therefore we all benefit.

The deal is, we give you a free, stable, safe platform to host your works. In exchange, you get a site that isn’t covered in ads and tip jars and links to gofundme and “read the next chapter at my patreon”. You get one goddamn place on the internet that isn’t trying to make money off you. And we will defend that space and keep it non-commercial.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

If you want to make money off your fics, you can instead post them somewhere like royal Road. “Oh, but Royal Road’s culture is so much more negative and stressful and lacks the supportive norms of AO3!” Yeah, because people are trying to make money there. Half the userbase is treating it as a storefront and hustling is the natural social consequence of that. AO3’s culture can only exist because it’s not commercial.

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

[ralfmaximus]

The note inside a bullet.

B-17 bomber is riddled with German anti-aircraft fire but miraculously survives. Later they discover the explosive shells were all inert; sabotaged by Nazi slaves working in armament factories.

Inside one empty shell is a written note: it's all we can do for you now.

[gothlovingoth]

The most important part of all this is that these small acts of bravery and noncompliance cannot be known as long as the enemy still stands, and might never be known. Just because it doesn’t seem like anyone is doing anything doesn’t mean it’s true. The best malicious compliance or subtle sabotage is the one that’s never detected, but makes ravages nonetheless.

[weshallbekind]

A critical part of any resistance is

Do not post your crimes

Do not brag. Do not look for brownie points. Do not publicly recruit. Keep your mouth shut.

[chimaerakitten]

“Would you block someone just for disagreeing with you?” Pal, I’ll block someone for agreeing with me in the wrong tone of voice.

[awrkive]

daily reminder:

your "bad" photoshop edits are so much more beautiful than ai-generated graphics. your "bad" writing is wayyyyyyy better than ai-generated paragraphs/stories. fuck gen AI. grow as an artist organically by letting yourself be "bad" at what you do for however long period of time until you learn from them. authenticity matters most especially when it comes to art 💗

[victusinveritas]