The Germans really cooked making "Hobbyless behaviour" an insult. It is both devastating, applicable to a wide range of people and behaviours, and doesn't resort to swearing.
Man ranting on the internet about the Superbowl halftime show or complaining that something is "woke"? Hobbyless Behaviour. Girls mocking another girl for not looking right? Hobbyless Behaviour. Mindless vandalism? Hobbyless Behaviour.
It is more powerful than "get a life" or the English "You're Sad" because it gets to the central point of the matter, and that is wonderful. Danke, Deutsch.
Copyright governs who has the "right" to produce and distribute "copies" of books/music/movies/creative works. This is where fair use doctrine applies, because most creative works are referential by nature.
Weird Al is allowed to parody everything because he's operating under copyright law, not trademark law.
Trademark governs who can "trade" under what "mark" i.e. the brand identity of a company. Companies don't own their trademarked word forever, but they maintain the exclusive right to sell things under that brand in their specific market sector. Patagonia doesn't own the name of a geographical region, they just own the right to be the only company using that name to sell clothing and outdoor gear.
A drag queen name can be a parody of a clothing and outdoor gear company.
A company's trademarked logo can be used in parody creative works, with more leeway if it's not for commercial purposes. Trademark parody is allowed! Patagonia has been aware of and allowed Pattie Gonia's trademark parody for years.
Trademarks are specific to market sector. Actress Chase Infiniti could start a makeup line named after herself and her trademark would not infringe on the Infiniti car brand because they are different markets and there is no risk of confusion. Pattie Gonia could probably trademark her name to sell frozen veggie burgers and Patagonia would not care.
Drag queen Jan Sport did a collab with JanSport bags. What Jan Sport almost certainly did not do is independently apply to register "Jan Sport" as a trademark in order to sell bags on her own, because that would infringe on JanSport's own trademark in the bag market sector.
What Pattie Gonia is not allowed to do -- the thing that Pattie Gonia actually did do and is being sued for -- is apply to register "Pattie Gonia" as a trademark to sell clothing, because apparently Pattie is in talks with North Face and HydroFlask to sell "Pattie Gonia"-branded gear. These companies probably won't finalize anything unless Pattie shows that she actually owns the trademark. Unfortunately, "Patagonia" is already a registered trademark in the clothing market sector, and these two names are too similar to exist in the same sector (see: "likelihood of confusion" legal standard).
Your drag queen name can parody a clothing company. You can parody the trademarked logo of a clothing company. But you cannot use the same name to then go on to also become a clothing company.
In order to maintain their own trademark, Patagonia must sue for trademark infringement. If they don't sue, and Pattie Gonia gets her own trademark, Pattie could sue Patagonia for infringement on her trademark. You can see why Patagonia won't be dropping this suit no matter how much you harass them.
Yes, Pattie's legal fees to fight this will cost more than the $1 she's being sued for. Pattie could also not fight this, withdraw her trademark application, not spend any money, and carry on being an environmental activist drag queen named Pattie Gonia. She would probably be better off making nice with Patagonia in the hopes of a Jan Sport-esque deal where Pattie designs an exclusive fabric and Patagonia maintains the trademark, but apparently Pattie's legal team has been sassing off to Patagonia in their communications for years, has applied for a trademark they should 100% know they'll never get, and has now decided to play the victim on social media just in time for Pride month, so I don't know how likely that is. I guess we'll see!
This is mostly correct, but I’d like to offer a small correction. The product deal with Hydroflask and North Face apparently occurred in 2022, and HydroFlask got Patagonia involved to make sure everything was in the clear. It seems like Patagonia was very agreeable about everything at the time, and only asked that Pattie Gonia and her partners avoid using the Patagonia logo and font or similar images, and to avoid putting the words “Pattie Gonia” on any products. This is the email exchange from 2022, from the recent Patagonia trademark complaint, including Pattie Gonia apparently agreeing to the limitations.
The new conflict is from Pattie Gonia using the Patagonia imagery and the Pattie Gonia name on her own merchandise. This is the email Patagonia sent, with the images they feel conflict with the 2022 agreement.
Pattie responded to that by disagreeing that she had broken any agreement, and also obliquely threatening to expose Patagonia for making tactical gear for the US military?
It’s possible that Patagonia understood the terms from 2022 to be a good-faith ongoing agreement about keeping the brands separate, and Pattie interpreted it as an agreement limited to the now-ended North Face and Hydroflask collaboration. It’s also possible that Pattie Gonia didn’t believe she was actually agreeing to anything at all, since her responses were very neutral, though positive in tone, up until 2025. The email chain does, however, show what I think is a very clear effort on Patagonia’s part to protect their trademark while also showing support and goodwill towards Pattie in her use of the Pattie Gonia stage persona.
This is a good thread really diving into the details of how copyright/trademark law works, I have no objections to the meat of it. I just wanted to note something at the very top:
Weird Al is allowed to parody everything because he's operating under copyright law, not trademark law.
Weird Al is allowed to parody everything because virtually every single one of his parodies is officially licensed from the rights holders. He asks permission, and shares revenue with the original artists. You hear a lot of people when you look into this - including the man himself! - saying "He doesn't have to do that! He just wants to cover his bases and maintain relationships." And....ehhhh... I mean maybe. Probably, even! But the world of copyright is vast and confusing.
For example, musicians own the copyright to both the lyrics and the music of their songs, and those can operate separately. Weird Al changes the lyrics of his parodies; but he very intentionally does not change the music. It is kind of the point, right? But if your parody recreates 99% of the music of the original, is that "transformative"? Could that not "substitute in the market" for the original work? Maybe American Pie's lyrics are a wash, and we are all only tuning in for the guitar riffs, so The Saga Begins does it for us just as well? Hey, how does retelling Star Wars comment on American Pie? That doesn't seem like a parody to me; that seems like satire, which operates under a less permissive legal regime...
To be clear, I think Weird Al is transformative and the use of the original music is key to "the joke". And I think Fisher v. Dees (1986) established precedent that would cover him. But copyright law - like most law - doesn't exist in the ether; it only exists in the breach. There is no universal standard for what qualifies as transformative. It is evaluated case by case, judge by judge, market by market. Weird Al asks for permission because he never wants to find out what those cases might say. It is very much not worth it to learn the answer.
I lived and worked in a lighthouse at a previous job. There was a thick line painted in a circle around the shack where the fog signal was kept. The line represented how close you could get to the fog signal without experiencing physical harm in the form of eardrums shattering or worse.
Even in the house it was LOUD. Probably the loudest thing I have ever experienced but at a normal, predictable interval. You would begin to time your sentences with little pauses with the rest of the lighthouse crew so you would talk like this while making your………..HORN…………. tea and then carry on talking because you knew when it would go off. It rattled the walls and the dishes in our cabinet.
At least one girl had died there. They kept photos of her everywhere “in honor of her sacrifice” because she had decided to take the winter watch alone and died in a storm where bounders the size of mini vans had been lifted out of the ocean and left scattered across the island, to say nothing of the ice chunks. People weren’t allowed to be alone on the watch after that.
One day a dead moose washed up on shore and it took my entire crew all day but we managed to rig up a line to hang it up to dry because we thought having a moose skeleton in the house would really spice the living room up a bit. It did. Weird shit happens when six of you are left alone, like ALONE ALONE, no cell reception, no wifi, just a radio to contact the real world and not a lot of reason to do that. People don’t go on lighthouse jobs if they want to stay connected, I’ve found.
That said Id do it all again, I really do treasure those days
@elumish I almost reblogged your post about trans SFF novel lists being heavily YA, horror, and anthologies to add some recs that aren't, but didn't want to derail your completely fair complaint.
Still, if it helps you or anyone else, here are some trans SFF novels outside of YA and horror.
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman
Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall (arguably cosmic horror)
The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings
The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott (note: MC is not trans but a major character is)
The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang
Expanding to novellas I can also add
Unexploded Remnants by Elaine Gallagher
Volatile Memory by Seth Hadden
The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo
The Tensorate Series by Neon Yang
The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia
Again, not an "oh these exist so it's not an issue" response, just good books for anyone who's looking for them.
I actually got Notes from a Regicide as an ebook from my library a while ago but didn't end up reading it so this is a good reminder to put it on hold again, because it looked really interesting.
A few that I would add to this are:
Novels/series:
The Ancient's Bargain series by V.T. Hoang
Tales of the High Court series by Megan Derr (specifically books 3 and 4)
The Hades Calculus by Maria Ying (science fantasy horror)
Novellas and shorter:
How Not to Marry a Prince by Megan Derr
Dirt-Stained Hands, Thorn-Pierced Skin by Tabitha O'Connell
The Devotion of Delflenor by R. Cooper
Of the Wild by E. Wambheim
Hyacinth by Elle Porter (horror-adjacent mythological retelling)
Anyone else think the reason ds9 deeply resonates with Queer people is because, at its Heart, its about a third space created but a group of patriotic people fundamentally alienated from their own people. Like obviously garak and quark but consider how were told in the first episode that Kira has been sent there to get her "out of the way" of the civilian government, how the things shes needed to do to both survive and secure their freedom seem deeply uncomfortable to all the civilian leaders. Dax considering both Joran and her eagerness towards reassociation make her basically a non entity on Trill. Bashir takes a while but the augment reveal puts him firmly in this Category. Obriens difficulty with his ptsd and moving passed personal préjudices puts him at odds with a lot of federation ideals. Siskos deep trauma around the loss of his wife and inability to move pass this, makes him very inconvenient to a federation desperate to pass itself off as a Utopia. He then becomes more and more unacceptable as he leans further into his role as in emissary, with the federation seemingly very uncomfortable with this religious expression. Jesus, Worf begins his tenure by getting himself exiled from klingon space.
Like idk, I dont think its all that shocking a Bunch of Queer people most liked the show about having a complicated relationship with your culture and never being allowed to go home.
I frequently reference the dynamic between Benjamin Sisko, Julian Bashir, and Jadzia Dax, and I think that Jadzia’s characterization as established through her interactions with those two characters embodies what I find most engaging about her; it’s also through considering her arc in relation to theirs that I can identify what I find most lopsided about her writing.
I wrote a piece earlier this year about how Ben and Julian are both strongly invested in their identity as Starfleet officers, and how that clashes with other facets of their identities (in Ben’s case, being the Emissary; in Julian’s, being a doctor). Jadzia is the only other commissioned Starfleet officer introduced at the beginning of the show, and the only non-human Starfleet officer in the main cast until Worf’s arrival; her identity as a joined Trill is also central to her character and her motivations in many of the early episodes centered on her. While Ben and Julian both experience ruptures in their institutional loyalty to Starfleet over the course of the show, it is Jadzia’s institutional loyalty to the Symbiosis Commission, and the culture surrounding joining more broadly, that is tested.
In “Equilibrium,” she discovers that the Symbiosis Commission has been lying to the public about the number of Trills who are capable of being joined, and that this cover-up has caused a chain of events that has led to Jadzia’s life being in danger; furthermore, the doctors at the Symbiosis Commission are willing to let her die to keep this secret. Jadzia’s reaction to this is not shown onscreen. It is possible to reconcile her seemingly calm acceptance of this revelation with her response to other wrongs perpetrated against her (for example, her forgiveness of Curzon in “Facets”). But the degree to which this affects her relationship to the rituals and institutional apparatus surrounding joining is never explicitly made the subject of an ongoing arc.
However, one can draw a through line from this episode to “Rejoined,” which sees Jadzia willing to reject the values she holds dear for the sake of love and personal loyalty. Although the script stresses that Jadzia forms a new and apparently deeper connection with Lenara Kahn than that of their previous married hosts, her intentions towards Lenara are also strongly guided by her inherited guilt over the reckless actions and resulting early death of Torias Dax. Because a relationship between them would result in their exile and the secession of the line of their symbionts, this clashes with Jadzia’s belief in the necessity of preserving the life of the symbiont and continuing the line of hosts - a belief that, as she emphasizes to Ben, is still deeply felt for her, but that she feels compelled to put aside. The ways in which individuals are shaped and constrained by the norms of their cultures and institutional loyalties is a recurring theme on the show, and this episode features the most thorough exploration of it through Jadzia.
What feels underexplored in Jadzia’s writing is her relationship to Starfleet, and by extension, Trill as a political entity. Most of the other major characters have ties to nation states that are important to the show’s overall plot - the Federation, Bajor, Cardassia, the Dominion, the Klingon Empire, and even Ferenginar. Trill’s status vis à vis the Federation, and Alpha Quadrant politics in general, is unclear, which leads to an entire dimension of missed opportunities for Jadzia. Trill culture is also only explored through the symbiont conceit, and the glimpse of institutional corruption that we see is very confined and narratively small scale, with no broader implications for the ongoing storylines. Furthermore, while we get some indication of Jadzia’s motivations for joining Starfleet - being academically motivated so as to be a more appealing candidate for joining, and later valuing the career in part as a pretext for avoiding her home planet and its bad memories - it is difficult to situate her regarding that decision, as the question of whether or not she’s a Federation citizen, and the nature of Trill’s relationship to the Federation, do somewhat colour the implications of that choice.
Jadzia never sees Starfleet as central to her identity in the way Ben and Julian do. And while her career in Starfleet is usually presented as a complement to being joined, as they are both markers of prestige and success, these competing responsibilities do clash on occasion. This is most directly represented in “Blood Oath,” in which Jadzia goes AWOL and risks her career in order to fulfill an oath Curzon made - another instance of her prioritizing personal loyalty over institutional responsibilities. However, the little information we get about her feelings about Starfleet also suggests that she buys wholeheartedly into the idealization of military service and sacrifice; in “The Ship,” when Ben agonizes over the loss of five officers on a mission, they have this exchange:
SISKO: …Did you know that Jake and Muniz have the same birthday? That I performed the ceremony at Hoya's wedding? And Rooney, he could play the trumpet. I heard him at Quark's once and he had the people dancing in the aisles.
DAX: I remember. And you know something else I remember about him? How proud he was to wear his uniform. And how proud he was to serve under you. The same as Hoya, T'Lor, Bertram and Muniz. They chose a life in Starfleet. They knew the risks and they died fighting for something that they believed in.
Jadzia’s unquestioned “dolce et decorum est” sentiment here, in tandem with the possible fault lines in her ideological loyalties, would have been well served by complicating and disrupting Jadzia’s perception of Starfleet as heroic, in the same way that perception is disrupted for Ben and Julian. This could have been accomplished in a variety of different ways - possibly through her relationship with one of them (such as the Section 31 arc involving Julian, or having her accompany Ben and Odo to Earth in the “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost” two-parter), possibly through Trill politics, possibly through her friendship with Kira and Federation-Bajoran relations, etc. That would have made her character feel more balanced, for me. And those are the angles through which I’m most interested in examining and reading about her.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
Historically, many major figures from queer history were criminalized for expressing their identities, and court records are in fact how we know about many queer people from history.
This fact should inform queer peoples relationships to polices and prisons. We should know better then most that being criminalized is not based on morality, and we should use that knowledge to work in solidarity with communities experiencing the same or similar criminalization.
why are there so many posts about asexuals being immune to sirens. people. sirens don’t lure you in with sex (necessarily). they sing about whatever it is that you want most. they could sing about mothman or cinnamon toast crunch and guess what then your asexual pirate is fucking dead
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“but shrouded black figures are scary!” not when ur muslim. its the funniest fucking thing. this is labeled on pinterest under shit like “classic horror” “scary phone wallpaper”
but that LITERALLY just looks like a niqabi or someone in a jilbab. Like Look at this pic of me (from a self photoshoot, now w/o the dramatic lighting and dark background)
or this pic of me
or this pic of me
like its so funny i can’t be scared of shrouded figures it just looks like me.
I mean I think a part of the ‘scary background’ bit is the thing where the individual in question is staring directly at the viewer from a foggy pond in a dense forest. And also the literal burning halo
sounds like a normal Friday night. if a sister wants to go on a walk in the evening who am i to stop her. if she has a burning halo that’s the will of god.
Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real: Nature.com
I'm a bit frightened for the time when someone less ethical than the person that did this decides to repeat the experiment but leave out the part where they come in later and announce that it was fake and people wind up diagnosed with the fake condition and all kinds of wacky hi jinks ensues.
A rule change pushed by White House officials would slash benefits or end support for as many as 400,000 Supplemental Security Income recipi
The Trump administration wants to make a rule change that would decrease or end benefits for SSI recipients who live with their family. As many as 400,000 disabled people may have their benefits cut if this rule change occurs.
It's worth noting as always that as things currently stand, the MAXIMUM benefit a person can receive from SSI is $994 a month.
If two people on SSI are married, the MAXIMUM they can receive is $1,491 a month, total, for both of them. (Meaning marriage to another SSI recipient reduces your maximum income possible to $745 a person each month.)
Could you live on that?
Could you live on that without living with family?
I am very gently but firmly grasping the faces of authors who genderbend Stiles but refer to her by a very random female first name, because y'all REALLY need to hear this:
'Stiles' is short for 'Stilinski'.
'Stiles' is not his first name.
'Stiles' is not a gendered, male name.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO CHANGE STILES' NAME.
And also, alternatively: You are ALLOWED to write about your female OC! It is OKAY to write about Stacy or Stella or Michelle Stilinski, not as Female Stiles, but as his OC sister!! Because at the point of changing the character's gender, name, personality and often times even background, the "Female Stiles" tag is a very flimsy paper mask behind which your OC is hiding. It's okay to write about your OCs.
"So, what would fandom etiquette for journalists actually look like?
At the very least, it means asking permission before embedding fan art or linking directly to fan fiction in coverage. It means thinking twice before asking actors or artists to react to ships or explicit fan creations. It means considering whether a fan reasonably expected their work to stay within the community it was made for. Most importantly, it means treating fandom spaces like real places inhabited by real people, many of whom seek out these spaces precisely because they offer a sense of belonging they may not find elsewhere.
Fandom does not need to remain in the margins to deserve respect. But if journalists are going to cover this subject, and we should, we have to be willing to approach these spaces with the same care, ethics, and nuance we would bring to any other community. Because behind every fic or piece of fan art is someone saying, 'This mattered to me.' Did it matter to you too?"
Crystal Bell - "The Pitt" fans aren't happy with journalists. We need real etiquette when reporting on fandom" Teen Vogue, April 9, 2026
