A Random Collection

She/Her.  I'm a daughter of a Trekkie. I prefer Old School SW - I do NOT support Reylo. Would rather read than watch TV. I have over 1000 books. I like cats, would love to have a dog. I've been to Iceland, Scotland, England, Turkey and Hungary.    I feel the Bern. I stand with Kshama. I'm quite possibly ace.

[middleearthorcseeksspaceorc]

fuck me sideways I hate ai so much.

Looking for a cute date night outfit on Etsy. Not only am I getting garbage back on my search terms, 22W dress, I spotted one of the STUPIDEST AI backdrops.

Whoms't the fuck is keeping lit candles DIRECTLY UNDER DRIED PLANT MATTER???!!

Wow, what a terrific aesthetic.

Don't worry, I will not purchase from this seller.

[dubiousculturalartifact]

The new Odyssey adaptation has inevitably gotten people talking about a Muppet version of it, and they’re frequently suggesting Kermit as Odysseus, Miss Piggy as Penelope.

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?

It ain’t Kermit

[anyroads]

Miss Piggy tied to the mast while Statler and Waldorf heckle her from the sea

[middleearthorcseeksspaceorc]

I would watch this forever.

[oldshrewsburyian]

I love that so many people on here are (re)discovering the joys of criticism via Emily Wilson's LRB essay; as an academic, I would like to point out one of the joys of its form.

It's structured in the way that many academics are taught to structure our feedback, whether to students or peers. Start with a positive thing ("I appreciate that you did your own work honestly here." "[This] is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours.") Then unleash the necessary critiques. And at the end, after you've pointed out all the ways in which the work betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the assignment and/or the text and/or the scholarly literature, back to the positive thing ("I can tell that you tried to format your citations correctly." "This could be developed into a publishable article." "Nolan... is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.")

[androdragynous]

fuck it I will make this my Disability Pride Month Request: if you are able-bodied, or just unfamiliar, look up the prices of things. Look up what life-sustaining medication costs, look up what good manual¹ and any power wheelchairs cost, look up what corrective surgery and accessible vehicles and home meal delivery services and service dog training and special dietary restriction food costs. and look up how much money is available for people who can't work.

how many months of government support does it take to afford something like a power wheelchair if you're someone who needs one to get out of bed? how much expense is incurred while saving up for that, making sure you still get food, cleaning, other appointments while you're saving up? is it enough to pay rent? is it enough to still have nice meals, streaming subscriptions, a new video game? is it enough to help family or friends cover emergencies? are there resources available to help with dating, girl's nights, family events if you can't do it all yourself? how in demand are those services, how far in advance do they have to be reserved, how much do they cost?

I've had a few posts about disability get relatively well-shared at this point, and there's always an element of surprise in it - like, what do you mean there's subscriptions, what do you mean it's that expensive, isn't there something else? - and while I understand why, it would really mean a lot if people who don't know about this stuff took the initiative to find out just how bad some of this shit is on their own time

¹ and not just the folding ones on Amazon, which are still expensive, but which I can say from experience are also really uncomfortable and not suited for full time use

[antifainternational]

How to Keep Tabs on ICE Agents Who May Be Surveilling Your Neighborhood

Here’s a step-by-step guide.

Get organized and protect your community against ICE raids!

[eversoslightlybitter]

Here is the link to get the organizers' playbook

https://defendandrecruit.org/

ICE Watch Programs Can Protect Immigrants in Your Neighborhood — Here’s What to Know

This op-ed explains how to start an ICE Watch neighborhood program in your community.

By Nikki Marín Baena

January 22, 2025

President Donald Trump’s plans to deport vastly more people living in our communities — whose children attend school alongside the children of US citizens, people who work alongside US citizen employees, who shop in the same stores — might leave us feeling as if there's little the average person can do to keep this from happening.

But many people do not want the immigrants they know to be deported. When Scripps News/Ipsos pollsters asked about the specific potential consequences of mass deportations after the November election, support for deportation plans fell off. Sometimes reliable information is all that’s needed to help immigrants avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and anyone can help reduce the unnecessary panic that arrest announcements can generate.

Many Americans, including me, live in states like North Carolina, where sanctuary cities limit local law enforcement collaboration with immigration agents. Our state legislature in North Carolina recently passed a law requiring sheriffs to cooperate with ICE officers by honoring the agency’s request to hold anyone who ends up in jail for two days to give ICE time to decide whether to detain them. Since taking office on January 20, Trump has signed an executive order encouraging the expansion of a program known as 287(g), which allows local law enforcement to take on some ICE functions, and his Department of Homeland Security has said ICE agents can make make arrests without supervisor approval at “sensitive locations” that were previously off-limits, like schools, churches and public demonstrations. Under these conditions, rumors are likely to spread; some of the families our organization, Siembra NC, works with are already keeping their kids home from school.

In 2017, following a previous set of Trump executive orders, immigrant families in North Carolina were inundated by misinformation and rumors about ICE agents hidden in grocery store parking lots and supposed substations near after-school facilities, leading some people to avoid leaving home. There was no Spanish-language rumor verification hotline here in Greensboro, so our organization — which was just a handful of volunteers at the time — created one, giving more people the ability to talk to a live human and ask whether an undated Facebook post they'd seen shared by someone else was real. We also trained hundreds of volunteers with driver’s licenses to participate in an ICE Watch neighborhood watch program, giving immigrant parents a way to verify the rumors people forwarded them in WhatsApp.

Sometimes the hotline reports we received were not paranoid suspicions. After we began offering trainings in immigrant neighborhood parking lots and circulating Spanish-language videos with tips for how to spot ICE agents, our volunteers came into contact with federal agents. After a volunteer confirmed an officer’s identity, they would alert neighbors to the agent’s presence, and our dispatch team would send a text message to our contacts in the area. ICE agents almost never carry judicial warrants giving them the authority to enter private homes or businesses without permission, so they often wait to make an arrest when the person they’re looking for leaves their home or car. And in every case we worked on, when the agents realized they were being watched, they abandoned their stakeout.

When ICE did make arrests, the majority of people detained whose families we supported were the family’s primary wage earner; the detention created an economic crisis as much as an attack on the family’s psychological and emotional stability. Additionally, there was often little public assistance, beyond food banks, for which the remaining family members qualified. So we started an emergency cash-assistance fund to provide small grants, usually between $300 and $2,000, to help the family stave off eviction and afford the first payment to an immigration attorney. The fund also became a way for local immigrants who were not targeted by ICE to provide support.

Dozens of women stepped up to make and sell tamales and pupusas after church mass or in school parking lots at community fundraisers, and the funds were often sent to someone whose family had experienced detention that same week. Over and over, we heard the phrase “Hoy por ellos, mañana por nosotros,” meaning "Today for them, tomorrow for us.” Local elected officials often pledged contributions as well. But the financial need may be much greater this time. We have listed some tips for anyone who wants to start a hotline, neighborhood watch, or cash-assistance program in our organizing playbook.

When construction foremen, line cooks, and seamstresses were detained, hardship often followed for their employers — many of them in counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. When we visited local businesses after a detention as part of our effort to teach workers and employers how to defend their rights, often they did not know ICE agents had to present a judicial warrant in order to interview one of their employees in any area off-limits to the general public. These informal education programs are relatively simple to begin, starting with a few photocopies of fact sheets and an interest in building relationships with business owners who might be more reliant on immigrant labor.

Sometimes this kind of education turned into advocacy. For example, when a Republican sheriff proposed stationing ICE agents at the Alamance County Detention Center, by entering what’s known as a 287(g) agreement with the federal government. Fifty-nine business owners signed an open letter and testified at a county commission meeting to oppose the proposal; they were worried about the loss of revenue that had accompanied a previous surge in local immigration enforcement. (The Trump administration has since signaled its plans to expand use of those agreements.)

These concerns business owners have highlight a broader truth: Immigration enforcement doesn't happen in isolation. When ICE agents stake out our neighborhoods, it affects everyone — the families living in fear, the businesses struggling to retain workers, the schools wondering why children are missing class, and the communities watching their social fabric fray. The grassroots response we saw in the first Trump administration shows that communities have the power to respond with humanity and practical solutions. As deportations ramp up again, we have a choice: We can watch as our neighbors disappear or we can build on these proven strategies to protect the diverse communities we've built together.

Nikki Marín Baena is co-executive director of Siembra NC, which organizes to help immigrant workers defend their rights in North Carolina.

[crimethinc]

By removing the historical plaques from George Washington's house that acknowledged that Washington held enslaved people there in capitivity, the Trump administration wants to whitewash history.

Here, you can read about how the people that Washington enslaved or indentured sought to escape from captivity, and about the Native Americans who defended themselves against his attacks:

https://crimethinc.com/Washington

[iah-q]

dance that funky twostep, woodland boy

[neepinmoon]

Sôsâsiw Nepihkân | Salmon Flower Badge Reel

Made with Miyuki seed beads, 24kt Gold plated beads, 24kt Gold plated centre, Preciosa bicon crystals, backed with commercial tanned deer hide.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Are allergies and asthma on the rise after Covid-19?

Just as many people are feeling relieved, believing the Covid-19 pandemic is over, medical scientists are becoming increasingly concerned ab

Also preserved in our archive

[formlines]

Killerwhale Pendant 1 1/2" x 3/4"

Shawn Edenshaw

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[bebewrites]

genAI companies are now buying up rare and antique books so they can scan them and use them to train their AI. then they're destroying the books afterward.

AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almos

AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.

they've had to face settlements against stealing from current authors, so they'll just go for the old books now. they're also doing this so they have the only copies of rare books.

they're taking water, power, natural resources for their data centers. they steal. they're book burning, essentially. i'm just so angry, i'm at a loss right now.

[twizzlersandvanillacoke]

From the article:

"One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.

“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” the bookseller told 404. “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books.

From a Google search:

PISBN allows publishers, retailers, and libraries to track and manage books more efficiently. Each ISBN corresponds to one specific edition of a publication, making it essential for smooth global circulation.

[theprismaticsystem]

"But many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.

This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so. And since Anthropic was turning the original physical texts into digital ones — rather than redistributing them as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative,” and therefore protected by fair use."

This is genuinely making me feel insane. I didn't work at a library, taking classes on learning how to fix books (so that they can continue to exist and continue being read and used), spending hours fixing books, carefully maintaining and cleaning books that have been read and used, just for people to tear them apart. And I'm sure as hell these rare book sellers didn't expect the same thing to become of the books they have spent time and effort procuring for their stores, so that collectors can continue to own, read, and use them. I don't spend my free time writing stories - pages upon fucking pages - for my and others' enjoyment, pouring my entire soul upon the fucking pages, just for some ridiculous "AI" company to scan it all into their bullshit machine. Why? Why are they doing this? For profit? For control?

Kiss my ass.

[precociouspuppet]

hi everyone, puppet again. twice terminated today.

as always, it and its partner are homeless and disabled trans women living purely off donations from tumblr as they keep terminating us both every single day, and we still badly need support as we're going to be fully on the streets again in less than a month. please keep reblogging this aid post, and its paypal is here. anything would be greatly appreciated

remember: puppet loves you! please don't forget it.

[yiddishfisting]

great

[yiddishfisting]

this looks helpful at least

[bouncingflowers2]

Hiiiii new side blog yet again 😔

Reblogs appreciated for people to find me 💕

[electricheart]

a little reminder! by annalaura_art

[depsidase]