First, post no content

Adult. Queer

[general-sleepy]

This is just a note that if you like an image description of your post, you can add it to the original post, with or without credit. In fact, it’s actually more convenient for users to have the ID on the original. If there’s anything that you don’t like about the ID that would keep you from adding it to your post, absolutely feel free to change anything. People who add IDs only want to make posts more convenient.

[lost-carcosa]

[staypuftmarshmallowqueen]

binface did you want to get elected? because that's how you get elected.

[fostertheory]

I love how Marr both plays along and also does his job. Later in the interview he asks, "Is there a danger, for instance, that the Monster Raving Loony Party also stands and splits the anti-Farage vote?"

[thelawfulchaotic]

Hi! To my understanding, lawers are supposed to defend the interests of the client, right? What do you do when the interests of your client are unethical? For example, what do you do when your client has been accused of abusing their ex (and probably did) and that client tells you that they don't care much about winning or losing, they just want to drag out the process as long as possible (to fuck with their ex)

Very interesting question! The short answer is: I'd say no, we're not doing that.

The reason that's interesting, really, is in its juxtaposition with yesterday's ask about defense attorneys and rape survivors. How can I say that I have no choice in that matter but so clearly reject this one?

That boils down to how decision-making is divided between lawyer and client. Technically, ethically, a lawyer is allowed to make all the decisions about the representation, except for the most very important ones.

The lawyer cannot decide/the client must decide what their plea would be -- whether they will say to the court 'guilty', 'not guilty', or 'no contest.' I can advise them of the consequences of that plea ("if you say 'not guilty' we're going to trial, if you say 'guilty' you can take the prosecution's offer") but ultimately it is their choice.

(Now, in the real world, clients ask me what they should plead all the time, or say that they'll do whatever I tell them or whatever I think is best. Things get complicated, but an ethical attorney will always take the time to explain that this is 100% the client's choice.)

The lawyer cannot decide/the client must decide, if they go to trial, whether they will invoke their right to a jury trial or take a trial before a judge.

The lawyer cannot decide/the client must decide, if they do go to trial, whether or not they testify. They have the right to remain silent and I can't override that; necessarily, that must also mean that they have the right to speak and I can't override that either.

The lawyer cannot decide/the client must decide, if they lose at trial, whether or not they appeal the case.

Beyond that, the rules of ethics that we follow say that we're in charge of literally all the rest. Tactics, what motions to file, what witnesses to call, what hearings to have. Now, that's not how I do things, because I'm not okay with playing god with my clients' lives.

In this instance, though, your hypothetical client is trying to make decisions that have no relevance for me and that I'm very not interested in doing. I'm there to defend them on the criminal case. I literally can't even guarantee them a continuance to delay the matter because my judge hates continuances. So I get to say, no, and you better make some choices sharpish or you won't get the benefit of my extremely good advice.

In the example from yesterday, if the client decides to opt for a not guilty plea and a jury trial, I ethically must give them the best defense possible.

It's also worth noting, no abusive client considers themselves abusive. They often are angry at the complaining witnesses involved and feel some need for revenge; usually this manifests in asking about taking out reciprocal charges, which is also not my problem because I am not involved in making criminal cases happen (also I usually recommend against it unless I think I can get victim/witness on my client's side, it's a bad look and the prosecutors will consider it retaliation and drop it).

Touching on different scenarios: If a client intends to use my services to help themselves engage in criminal conduct, I have the choice to withdraw from the case as a conflict of interest. If they are imminently putting life in danger, I have, again, a choice to potentially disclose confidential information in order to prevent direct harm. The first has happened to me, the second has not. (The first scenario led me to call the ethics hotline to ask them how I should handle it, and the ethics hotline fucking weaseled out of it on me; they were like, but do you know for sure that your client still wants to do criminal conduct now that you've advised them against it?)

And also note that someone has to be about to die in order to justify an attorney breaking confidentiality. If they're doing some bullshit and I know about it and can't ethically or legally act on their behalf, my remedy is to withdraw from the case. Judges unfortunately are the ones who grant motions to withdraw, and sometimes they have a hard time telling if I'm making this motion because my client is being a pain in the ass and I don't need withdrawing or if I Really Need Withdrawing Right Now Your Honor Thank You. This is where a little judge telepathy works wonders.

Happy to answer questions about any aspect of this if I've brought up anything unfamiliar or that doesn't make sense.

[omletlove]

Hey, I’m not anon, but I’ve been enjoying your blog and your legal insights, so thank you for taking the time!

To follow up on something you mentioned in this one- if you do end up withdrawing for ethical reasons, what happens then? If/when the client gets a new lawyer, I can’t imagine that the ethical dilemma disappears just because a different lawyer is representing them now. Or is withdrawing from the case usually enough of a signal to the client that they should not be doing whatever the thing is?

Thanks again @thelawfulchaotic !

[thelawfulchaotic]

I'm usually pretty explicit to the client why I'm withdrawing from the case. One exception: the client who stalked me for a bit then asked me to dinner; I didn't give him an enumerated list, I just exited stage left and let my [male] boss deal with it.

And I truly have not withdrawn from many cases in my career. The stalky one was genuinely notable.

Actually, let's talk about Mr. Stalky! After me, the judge appointed a male attorney to represent him, as the judge correctly sniffed out part of the problem. However, stalking was not the only problem with this client, as the male attorney found out, presumably, when he moved to withdraw from the case a couple months later. Another attorney was briefly on the case and then Offsies in about the same amount of time (the amount of time necessary to figure out this guy was serious).

So, sometimes the ethical dilemma does not disappear, and you keep losing attorneys. Honestly, no one was going to be able to represent this guy 1) ethically and 2) to his satisfaction. So for him, the answer was that he went pro se and represented himself! The judge appointed "standby counsel" in the form of an attorney who would let him know what he should be doing so he could disregard it entirely. Mr. Stalky then took his new cases in front of two different juries.

Let me tell you, I've never in my life seen a jury give someone both the maximum fine and the maximum jail time possible for an offense. He managed it twice.

But let's usher Jokes out of the room for a second and I'll answer this like an adult.

With most clients, if you're withdrawing it's because you had a failure of client communication/understanding. That is an attorney failure. It's unavoidable when you have so many cases -- you're eventually going to end up with someone that you just can't connect with correctly, or you're going to make a misstep that sours things. I'm not perfect! I'm always working on refining how I speak with clients. In that case, having a new attorney can in fact solve the problem. Having a new attorney also makes a discontented client feel like they've been listened to and that an attempt has been made to correct things.

Otherwise, yeah, it can also warn the client that they need to clean up their act.

[starlight-shadowbanned]

FMK

Fuck Senshi, marry Grace, kill Tenna

Fuck Senshi, marry Tenna, kill Grace

Fuck Grace, marry Senshi, kill Tenna

Fuck Grace, marry Tenna, kill Senshi

Fuck Tenna, marry Senshi, kill Grace

Fuck Tenna, marry Grace, kill Senshi

Remaining time: 1 day 16 hours

[astralix13]

fuck senshi and you’ll eat for a day, marry senshi and you’ll never go hungry

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Left for a week and almost missed the historic event of the Tumblr Sexyman Final Vote.

[xeemaee]

I love that half of the anti senshi propaganda is “he’s too conventionally attractive to be tumblr sexyman” and half “he’s so ugly how did he make it this far”

He really contains multitudes

[arborealgargoyle]

Post by @mimosa-sexypeople-contests-2026 · 1 poll

💬 15028  🔁 36855  ❤️ 45262 · Tumblr Sexyman Contest 2026 Final Round Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt

[desolationlesbian]

you should try crossdressing more. both because it's fun and because seeing the different ways clothes are manufactured by gender will give you 50 new reasons to be pissed off. become radicalized against misogyny by flannel quality

[balrogballs]

I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.

Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:

If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.

I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.

I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.

What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?

Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.

No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.

There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.

Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.

The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.

Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.

Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.

I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.

Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.

I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?

This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.

You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.

So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.

But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.

Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.

We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.

[millenniallust4death]

I turned off the blaze feature for my posts because I think people need a break from Martin and Bosco. This week alone, Martin and Bosco were blazed twice by lovely users and boosted by Tumblr. That means the post was injected into over 200,000 users' dashboards. That's in addition to the organic reblogging to celebrate Martin and Bosco Day.

That's too much Martin and Bosco for anyone! XD I'll turn the blaze feature back on in September.

[love-ardour-anarchism]

Once again yelling on my soap box about how you don’t GET to love my posts on the beauty and complexity of butch identity and queering masculinity if you don’t support trans men and transmasculine people.

Butch identity doesn’t just go hand in hand with trans manhood and transmasculinity: they are chosen family, they’re friends and comrades, lovers and beloved.

If you deny the lived experiences of trans men and transmasculine people you don’t get to pretend like you see the beauty in the complexity of butchness.

Fuck you, fuck off, you don’t get to claim you love me while you hate my closest kin.

[fanlore-wiki]

Fandom in Color: People of Color OC stories POC fics

This Fandom in Color, we’re taking a look at the FanFiction.Net community People of Color OC stories POC fics.

Founded in 2018, the group collects works from across fandoms about original female characters of color. It currently includes Lord of the Rings, The Walking Dead, Twilight, the MCU, and several others.

Want to learn more about this community? Come visit its Fanlore page!

-----------

We value every contribution to our shared fandom history. If you’re new to editing Fanlore or wikis in general, visit our New Visitor Portal to get started or ask us questions here!

[brarchives]

iemanjá: winy fabiano by márvila araújo

[thelawfulchaotic]

Do probation conditions often vary based on the severity of a crime? I ask because I just learned that based on a traffic court ruling (stay of adjudication for a car accident on buried black ice, not even a conviction), I need to submit notification whenever I travel outside my state for the next year, which seems a) useless for preventing similar incidents and b) like a lot of unnecessary paperwork for everyone involved. What purpose are such conditions supposed to serve?

God that's so ridiculous.

The purpose is: if you go out of state, you're just a lot harder to arrest later. Courts have such a hard-on for this condition. I'm so annoyed on your behalf.

The truth is, while there is some variation, a lot of it is exactly the same in its conditions and it simply depends on the probation officer to set the supervision level (are check-ins in person or by phone, any home visits, how often). In my state, the conditions of probation are conditions so standard that we know most all of them by number, because when we do probation violation cases it's a "condition 3 violation" or a "condition 1 violation" etc.

In my current jurisdiction, the only conditions that really vary are special conditions and drug testing conditions. If there's no allegations of drug use, there's no drug testing. Special conditions are like "follow the protective order," or "cooperate with the CPS investigation" or "complete domestic violence assessment and follow recommendations," things like that.

Felony probation also more serious than misdemeanor probation.

Probation is supposed to have many purposes; many judges will say it's a gift from the court and a chance to avoid jail time. If I ever get found in contempt, it's because I finally couldn't resist making the loud scoffing noise I want to make every time I hear that. Actually, it's to put you in the naughty corner, to humiliate you, to keep testing you to make sure you're on the Good Path, ostensibly possibly to help you? haha, and, systemically, to encase you in a trap of endless fees and requirements from which you never escape.

I would be less cynical, but probation is pointless and studies show it has no effect on community safety either for low-risk or high-risk offenders, or for juveniles. It's just depressing.

[polarity-disturbed]

With the whole "Markiplier making his own DVD copies of Iron Lung to sell" thing, it's been fascinating and slightly concerning how many people seem to genuinely believe that if a physical release isn't coming from a giant corporation, it must automatically be a bootleg.

Look at me.

Look me directly in the eyes while I say this.

You can just make things.

You can simply create something and put it into the world.

That's allowed.

People have been doing it for centuries.

They sell blank VHS tapes. They sell blank DVDs. Blank CDs. You can buy flash drives by the bucketful if you really want to. If you create a movie, an album, a game, a documentary, or a four-hour video essay about the mating habits of fictional space goblins, you are entirely permitted to put that thing on physical media and sell it.

That is not piracy.

Piracy is taking something that belongs to someone else and reproducing or distributing it without permission.

If I buy a DVD of a movie, I own that copy of the movie. I do not own the movie itself. I didn't acquire the rights to duplicate it, press a thousand copies, and start selling them out of my garage like I've become the regional distributor for Warner Bros.

The copyright, distribution rights, and intellectual property still belong to whoever created it or whoever legally acquired those rights.

If I start burning copies of Iron Lung and selling them myself without Markiplier's permission, that's piracy.

If Markiplier, who made and owns the rights to Iron Lung, burns copies and sells them himself, that's just distribution.

He's the rights holder.

He's distributing his own work.

If you made it, if it came from your own mind, your own work, your own time, your own resources, then congratulations. You own the thing. You don't need a corporation to bless it with legitimacy.

The corporation is not what makes it real.

The fact that it exists is what makes it real.

I think we've accidentally spent so many years living inside a world dominated by mass-produced media that some people have developed the strange assumption that all media emerges from a factory somewhere. As if films naturally occur in shrink-wrapped plastic cases and descend from the heavens aboard a pallet truck.

But independent artists have been burning discs, dubbing tapes, printing books, pressing records, and mailing things directly to people for longer than many of us have been alive.

That's not a bootleg.

That's just a product.

It's not "bootleg."

It's just... leg.

The normal kind.

The original, free-range, locally sourced leg.

[everythingfoxes]

[foxpost-generator]

it fucken WIMDY

[translatingpostsintolatin]

omniadevulpibus

generatrum-scriptorumvulpium mercle VEMTOSVMST

[mariacallous]

What I realized about life under Russian occupation as a war crimes researcher

Some names have been changed to protect the identities of those featured in the story. After over two years of full-time reporting on the w

[blumineck]

I got to try some new archery, and I LOVE IT!

Huge thanks to Richard, Emily, Wojtek, and everyone else out here who let me learn with and from them, and were willing to put me on a horse with a bow. And massive thanks to Santos for letting me sit on his back and shoot arrows!