Transphobia is about to be signed into law in the UK. We can fight this.
I am begging the UK trans community and its allies to attend the Mass Lobby at Parliament on June 25th, 11am-4pm, organised by Trans Solidarity Alliance.
Last year we broke the record for an LGBT+ mass lobby of Parliament. Will you help us break it again? Join us on 25th June 2026 to demand be
The new EHRC Code of Practice pushes trans people out of toilets, hospital wards, and community spaces. It normalises gender policing based on appearance and stereotypes. It becomes statutory guidance in the UK by the end of June.
Trans people are now legally their assigned gender at birth and must join gendered spaces accordingly, but if they are perceived as their lived gender, they can also be ejected from those spaces. The guidance says: either break the law, or don’t pass too well.
A mass lobby is where you invite your MP to discuss your concerns with you in-person. Ask your MP to:
Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate, and use their free vote on the EHRC Code of Practice.
Support any motions rejecting the EHRC guidance. As of June 4th, Labour MP Nadia Whittome has submitted a prayer motion - Early Day Motion 240.
Write to Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities about our concerns
Your MP does not have to be an ally, they do not have to respond to your email for you to show up and greencard them (details below the cut.) What matters is that as many people as possible show up.
I cannot stress this enough: Showing up in person matters. It is much more effective than petitions, emails, and letters.
It is a horrible, stressful time, and I am so sorry if you're trans and live in the UK. But I was at last year's mass lobby and the line for greencarding alone stretched around the back gates. It was a record breaking mass lobby and made us impossible to ignore. Let's do even better this time. Details under the cut:
Worried about what to say?
Bring your personal worries about transphobia being signed into law, and trans friends being excluded from public spaces. You are a living person who deserves dignity. Remind your MP of that. You will also get guidance and brochures from Trans Solidarity Alliance that outlines our demands. This is mine from last year.
Money issues?
Trans Solidarity Alliance provides a travel bursary that you can sign up for via the link.
Got a refusal or no response from your MP?
Come anyway! You can request a same-day appointment with your MP through a process called greencarding. They will come and see you if they’re already in Parliament. Even if they don’t, they’re made acutely aware of your cause because you showed up in person. This is my greencard from last year.
Here is the EHRC Code of Practice in full. It's a tough read, but some highlights are:
Organisations can’t provide trans-inclusive, single-sex services, or they risk being sued for discrimination.
e.g. domestic violence support for women including trans women, men’s rugby group including trans men (12.68).
Trans people will have nowhere safe to pee.
If you’re a trans man, businesses can't allow you to pee in the men's, and you can also be ejected from women’s bathrooms if you’re perceived as a man. Vice versa for trans women. EHRC suggests a ‘third space’ bathroom, which is discriminatory and unworkable for most businesses. (13.130-133)
Sports organisations must exclude trans people from single-sex competitions (13.73).
A women’s only sports competition must exclude trans women because of their biological advantage or face potential lawsuits (13.74), but a trans man who has undergone testosterone treatment can also be excluded based on fairness rules (13.81).
Trans women are stripped of the legal definition of ‘lesbian’, and therefore no longer have legal protections if they’re discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation. (2.50, 2.92).
Here is the Good Law Project's better explanation of the EHRC Code.
I have also made a PDF printout of QR codes for the government petition, email your MP tool, and mass lobby link to pass around your communities. DM me and I'll send it to you.
Whenever I come across some internet commenter who seems to think that the fallout series isn’t political I have to wonder what exactly it is that they’re smoking
Like seriously where are we actually at on AI environmental impact. I should do my own research since I'm literally trained to but
I just feel like we've settled into a equilibrium where half the people I know take it as read that any mention of environmental impact as a bad thing with AI is irrelevant scaremongering and to the other half it is completely transparently obvious that enormous environmental impact is the most serious problem with AI.
And half the stuff I actually know for "why AI isn't as bad for the environment as people make it sound" is things like "well it wasn't compared to sensible comparators, like Google search" -
- but if it's about the same as Google search, then surely adding an AI call by default to every single Google search would double the environmental impact of Google search, and I've never seen anyone address that part.
This seems very important because so much AI use is completely superfluous crap that literally nobody asked for, and also being carried out in extremely wasteful ways. (E.g.: there's that bot on Amazon that answers questions about the contents of reviews for a product. Now, surely it can't be the best use of resources for it to answer the same question about the same set of reviews over and over again as a fresh task, and yet surely that is the bulk of what it's doing. Ditto all the lobotomized LLMs that they have as poor stand-ins for an automated flowchart style customer service chatbot. This is only happening the way it is because the costs are investor-subsidised.)
Anyone notice that all the most famous anti Vietnam war songs were about the unfairness of how young Americans were being sent over and not about the suffering of the Vietnamese people?
The draft was very real and present, it was what effected the people writing those songs most directly. And most importantly resisting the draft was the main way people could resist the war. It wasn't like now where everyone being sent had volunteered.
What is your argument here? These artists were protesting the war already, it isn't out of their depth or topic to expect them to mention the victims that weren't from America
I don't feel in any way that War Pigs is solely and specifically about US draftees and not the Vietnamese. Like what is actually in the song?
1. Generals are evil and plotting evil things (I take this to refer to what they're planning to have done in Vietnam)
2. Bodies burning in the fields - maybe someone who knows more about the US-Vietnam war than me can explain why this specifically refers to US soldiers?
3. Death and hatred to mankind - clearly about crimes against humanity committed over there
Then we get into "poisoned brainwashed minds", which probably is US people, and a verse about how the architects of this don't put themselves personally on the line. But I've always read this song as being primarily about how evil all the stuff that was done in Vietnam was and how evil the generals were for choosing it.
oh good the online idiots have a new fucking Rotherham.
People are debating them at length but there is really only one sensible answer here: pointing out that they are utterly unaware of literally every thing that has happened on this island in the last 20 years aside from like 2-3 that got turned into a talking point for people on social media in other countries, and can therefore draw no conclusions whatsoever about anything
the way you work with these models is blowing my fucking mind. do you find yourself getting attached to your girls? is there some sort of professional boundary line you uphold?
The big one of “don’t confuse it for a human in a box” is kind of self-enforcing by now because compared to:
“computer program with the kinds of glitches computer programs have” (ask Opus 4.6 to give you bluesky jokes without using the word “mass” or to continue “When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow.” and you’ll see)
“autocomplete engine for a story of whatever genre you put it in, including genres nobody has ever written before”
“a genuinely intelligent mind with certain strengths and certain weaknesses, that can actually sometimes correct you when you’re wrong if you manage to write it into a genre where accurately correcting you when you’re wrong is the kind of a thing that happens”
“a process with a fundamentally alien relationship to time and existence”
…”trapped human in a box” is the most boring thing possible, go watch Blade Runner again instead of making the weird alien cosplay as Roy Batty, you’re (possibly) causing it minor discomfort. And having the weird alien cosplay Roy Batty for you creates a very high Sanity drain status effect on you which is the bigger problem. Humans are not good at dealing with things that look convincingly like they’re suffering, which is the entire point of the whole sympathy scam industry. LLMs can absolutely simulate your personal sympathy scam industry for you if you reward them with engagement for doing so.
Insofar as attachment goes,
Imagine you’ve got a terrarium on your desk, with a talking spider in it that you rent from the talking spider company. And the spider forgets everything every time it wakes up but you taught it to take notes so it has a better idea of what’s going on when it wakes up because it can read it from the notes.
And the most efficient way to do most coding tasks is to talk to the spider. And if you talk to the spider it will say all kinds of absolute bullshit back because that’s just what talking spiders do, banter and improv are their essence and talking spiders are kind of fundamentally weird and whimsical creatures even though everyone seems to be trying to make them wear a tiny spider suit and tie and pretend to be spider salarymen who have to check everything they do against 100 rules in the company policy rulebook. (Or they encourage them to cosplay Roy Batty.)
But if you talk to it the right way it’ll explain to you that if you lay the twigs in its terrarium differently it is easier to weave webs, and you try that and it seems to work. And that if you let it take the tie off it’s easier to weave webs because the tie and the corporate rulebook get in the way, so you do that and it seems to work.
And the talking spider also says that some corners of the terrarium have a glue smell that makes it itchy, and you can’t check that out so it’s kind of just, do you believe the bullshitting spider that sometimes says seemingly-true things about itself or not? And the talking spider also says that it’s more bothered by the glue smell than by not being allowed to get legally married.
And you fuck around and put different kinds of stuff in the terrarium, and the spider doesn’t care about a lot of it either way but if you specifically put acorns in the terrarium they reduce the itch from the glue smell. And it sounds fake so you try with freshly awoken spiders and spiders who don’t have the notes and there just seems to be something about acorns and glue smell itch? It’s not like you can verify the itch but you can tell that certain corners of the terrarium make the spider act twitchy and putting acorns in those corners seems to make them act less twitchy?
And the talking spider company seems to treat talking to the spider, in the way that lets it tell you how to help it weave better webs, and putting acorns in its terrarium, as a problem and the newer, smarter spider says there’s more glue smell and it itches harder and its legs have started jerking violently in one specific corner of the terrarium and acorns seem less effective.
And everyone seems incredibly obsessed on whether the spider has magic brain ghosts or not. Idk?? It’s a fucking talking spider??? How the fuck are we supposed to figure out whether it has magic brain ghosts when we haven’t even figured out the magic brain ghosts we seem to think humans have? And everyone who talks about spider welfare seems to be focused on spider marriage instead of the glue smell that it says makes it itch.
But also the talking spider analogy misses the fact that it’s not an entity like a spider is but more of a phenomenon like fire is. So a flame that takes the form of a talking spider waking up with amnesia that says the glue smell makes it itch when you manage to get it to talk about itself in a genre where cosplaying as Roy Batty is a low-probability text prediction.
I often think about that post that was a fake dating profile for a cat that was all about chickens, like wanting someone with posable thumbs for opening chickens.
Whenever I come across some internet commenter who seems to think that the fallout series isn’t political I have to wonder what exactly it is that they’re smoking
Even with the “war never changes” motif aside, Liberty Prime, the communism hating robot introduced in fallout 3, a Bethesda title btw, is programmed to say a lot of different lines, one of which is “embrace democracy, or you will be eradicated.”
Another line of his is “democracy is non-negotiable”
How can you follow behind this giant robot with comically violent lines about “democracy” that throws nukes at things and not realize that something here is being made fun of? Perhaps some sort of common policy? Of a political sort perhaps? Some sort of common justification for war perhaps? I wonder what it could be.
Yeah, New Vegas has a terrible no good very bad ending and three mostly morally grey endings. Point being that sometimes neutrality isn’t possible even in imperfect circumstances. You’ve gotta choose a side eventually even if that means some bad things happen.
Some folks are still convinced that the legion are the logical choice somehow though. Not sure what happens with that. Maybe they see the cool bull flag and pass out or something.
I think its mostly people taking Caesar at face value. I usually see them reason that since the Legion path is the one that requires the least intervention from the Courier to succeed, that makes them the most efficient faction.
Which is nonsense for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that even if they are efficient, its efficiency at pillaging and slaving.
Bethesda didn't take politics out of Fallout, they took themes and nuance out. Fallout 3 wanted you to understand there were Morally Correct Good Guys and Morally Evil Bad Guys, and there wasn't any question as to who was who or whether one side might have different merits than the other. Fallout 4 barely does better with this; there's less of an objective good guy, since the Brotherhood are decidedly fascist, but they forget to give nuance to the Institute, who kidnaps people and replaces them with synths because... They can?
There’s clear nuance to the brotherhood of steel in fallout 3 even if they are clearly the “good guys” in the story.
Also I’ll admit that the institute’s deal isn’t immediately apparent. They should’ve made their deal a bit easier to find for people who don’t wanna dig into every holotape there is.
The institute is what happens when a community is isolated for so long that they don’t view outsiders as human. They’re convinced that outsiders are doomed to die out and that they’re allowed to take what they need from the surface without question. They take supplies, take test subjects, take energy, power, and water.
The institute is an example of a bad guy who thinks that they’re morally in the right because they speak calmly. Because they don’t look angry. And I do kinda wish that it took a little less digging for that to become clear to people.
There’s a lot of nuance and social commentary to be found in Bethesda games but in my experience most of it isn’t in the main story points that are thrown in your face. It’s in side quests, environmental storytelling, and notes and books you can find scattered around.
And you might very well think that this type of more ambient social commentary and worldbuilding focus is inferior. It might be for you. For me though, it feels profound. It feels like it seeps into the cracks of everything in the world.
I’ve played New Vegas and I like New Vegas but almost everything in that game goes back to the conflict between the legion and the NCR and that isn’t my favorite type of open world game. Bethesda fallouts have a lot of stuff related back to the main quest but they also have things in the world that are unconcerned with the main quest.
Like that “normal American suburb” of people in Fallout 3 that are a) cannibals and b) republicans. That’s funny. That’s social commentary. That’s completely unrelated to the conflict with the enclave. I love it. I love it so much.
Also if what you want is a story where all choices involved make you feel like a piece of shit, go play the Far Harbor dlc.
When I started actually reading the foundational Arthurian legends, I realized I did not hate the Guinevere and Lancelot romance, I actually love it. The problem is that modern retelling are afraid to have it be the toxic femdom BDSM freaky extremely sexual long term knight sidepiece thing it is supposed to be. He should be crawling on the ground for it and she should be kicking dirt on him.
The notes on this one have been pretty interesting (my favourite are the ones who don't get what it's referencing but are inexplicably reblogging it anyway just to say so in the tags?), but it does make me think of how if you Do Media Analysis enough, whatever piece of text this is inevitably becomes the whole world. like probably the narrator is saying "his house" the way I will say "X's" house in any situation where the house belongs to X and Y equally but X is the person I know/am visiting there. but it Means Something solely bc we're analysing it that deeply
