Demi bi unaligned ex-goblin child. Graduated to advanced semi-adult possum/gremlin/hobbit/goblin person. Coffee.Life.Fandoms. Anxiety in the UK. Not a girl.
as requested! this is a super super detailed tutorial for the a-z of gifmaking basics, starting from getting photoshop & downloading hq movies/videos alll the way to tagging & scheduling your gifsets on tumblr for max interaction. if you’ve wanted to get into gifmaking but feel intimidated or you don’t know where to start, this is the tutorial for you!!! making gifs might seem overwhelming at first, but with practice, it’s quite easy to get the basics down. for reference, this post is up to date as of july 2020. please rb if this helps!
rocky's crew dying from radiation exposure, something humans go to great lengths to prevent and are very scared of and grace's crew dying in their "sleep" with nobody watching, something eridians go to great lengths to prevent and are very scared of. cool book that is easy to read through your tears.
if you don’t understand the queer allegories in bbc merlin, all you need to know is that lancelot had genders. all of them, every gender.
and that gwen’s relationship with arthur perfectly illustrates how easily a bisexual woman’s rapport with other queer people is unfairly erased when she accepts a man as a partner.
and that arthur was so repressed due to familial trauma that listening to him speak about love in any capacity was like having your organs blown up from the inside.
and that morgana was an example of the way queer women are expected to play nice and submit to men who oppress them, and how they learn to only cope with their loneliness through self-destruction.
and that gwaine used the guise of happy-go-lucky good fun to hide an essential part of his identity from others and that it was slowly killing him.
and that trying to give merlin gender or sexuality labels will cause you grave mental distress
My favorite part about writing is that first spark of an idea. It can happen at any time, for any reason. The idea for the Opalite music video crash landed into my imagination when I was doing promo for The Life of a Showgirl. I was a guest on one of my favorite shows, The Graham Norton Show. For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s a UK late night show where Graham Norton (the insanely charismatic and lovable host) invites a random group of actors, entertainers, musicians, etc to be on his show and we all sit there and chat like it’s a dinner party. They even serve wine. Anyway. I remember thinking I got ridiculously lucky with the group I was paired with. Cillian Murphy, Domhnall Gleeson, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Lewis Capaldi. All people whose work I’ve admired from afar. When we were all talking during the broadcast, Domhnall made a light hearted joke about wanting to be in one of my music videos. He’s Irish! He was joking! Except that in that moment during the interview, I was instantly struck with an *idea*. And so a week later he received an email script I’d written for the Opalite video, where he was playing the starring role. I had this thought that it would be wild if all of our fellow guests on the Graham Norton show that night, including Graham himself, could be a part of it too. Like a school group project but for adults and it isn’t mandatory. To my delight, everyone from the show made the effort to time travel back to the 90’s with us and help with this video. You might even recognize some friendly faces from The Eras Tour. I got to work with one of my favorite people in the world, Rodrigo Prieto, again! I had more fun than I ever imagined - Made new friends, metaphors, and fashion choices. It was an absolute thrill to create this story and these characters. Shot on film. The Opalite video is out now on Spotify & Apple Music.
As is tradition in tumblr culture the locals unearth the corpse of a long deceased figure and drag it across the streets merrily, laughing at what is preserved of the person’s words. This custom, seen as morbid in other cultures, is instead done gleefully and with an unmatched enthusiasm
I just finished "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and immediately went on tmbr to look for some metas, as one does, but for some reason almost no one mentions my favorite part of Buffy/Spike dynamic. This quote:
I feel like this is the most important part of Spike's character. Everyone knows that he's a loverboy, but damn! Usually loverboys want her to be theirs, but not Spike! He's a knight, a poet.
William is shown as not particularly masculine person. He's sensitive, he has some deep mommy issues, but
Anyway, his wish to be hers, not the over way around, is, I think, the reason Spike is such a fan favorite. Sadly, it's rare to see characters written like this
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Apple has threatened to stop selling iPhones and other devices in the European Union (home to over 500,000,000 affluent consumers) if the bloc doesn't rescind the Digital Markets Act, a democratically accountable anti-monopoly law that bans Apple from blocking third parties from offering services to iPhone owners:
Apple has a staunch ally in this campaign to overturn European laws: Donald Trump has threatened the EU with tariffs unless it halts its attempts to regulate US tech giants like Apple, whose billionaire CEO Tim Cook gave Donald Trump $1m in exhange for a seat on the dais at Trump's inauguration and then traveled to DC again to hand-assemble a gilded participation trophy as a gift to America's fascist would-be dictator:
This is a painfully stupid threat and the EU should call Apple's bluff. The company claims that it is acting in the interest of European owners of Apple products. Apple claims that by blocking Europeans from using their Apple devices with third-party software and hardware, they are protecting their customers' privacy.
This is nonsense. While it's true that Apple protects its customers' privacy from some external threats, Apple also spies on its users, without their consent, in order to gather behavioral data that's used for Apple's ad-targeting system. When this came to light, Apple lied to its customers about it:
Apple has used its exclusive control over which software can operate on its devices to expose every Chinese iOS user to unrestricted government surveillance. Apple removed all working VPNs from its Chinese app store:
Then they removed the ability to anonymously share messages via Airdrop to curb the tool's usage to spread opposition messages during a wave of mass protests in China (they took away this functionality for every Airdrop user in the world):
The idea that Apple is so committed to its users' privacy that it will exit a major market rather than expose users to surveillance risks is an obvious lie – just ask China.
Why would Apple tell this lie? Because it wants to protect its profits – not its customers.
Apple lies when it claims that control over its platforms is primarily about protecting users. The App Store is "teeming with scams":
However, by forcing Apple customers to get apps from Apple's own store, the company can skim a 30% commission on every dollar its customers send to an app maker, a Patreon performer, a news outlet or any other app supplier – a business that's worth $100b/year to Apple. Remember, in the EU, the cost of processing a payment is between 0% and 1%.
Apple claims that it protects its customers from privacy risks by blocking third-party repair depots and by requiring its customers to pay through the nose for official repair. But Apple's own repair technicians have been caught plundering and sharing nude images of its own customers, stolen from phones that were sent to Apple:
(And of course, these are just the instances that we know about).
Apple protects its customers from privacy threats, but not from Apple's own predatory, privacy-invasive, rent-extracting conduct. Apple also gets to unilaterally decide which scams are permitted on its platform and which ones are not, and they alone get to decide when to allow secret, pervasive surveillance of Apple customers.
Apple's threats are lies, but the privacy risks of interop are very real. It's entirely possible to plug something into a secure tool that renders it insecure. It's nice when companies test third party add-ons and warn their customers about defective or risky aftermarket mods, and to the extent that Apple does this, it's doing good work. But Apple has an irreconcilable conflict of interest when it comes to vetoing its customers' decisions about which non-Apple products they use. Apple has some genuinely stonking margins on its payment processing, repair, and other lines of business, and Apple's CEO has openly boasted about using deliberately engineered incompatibilities to drive people to switch to Apple products:
How do we get Apple to protect its customers' privacy without picking their pockets or invading their privacy? By removing the company's veto over who can make software and hardware that works with Apple's competing offerings. The ultimate decision about which products are too dangerous for Europeans to use can't be vested with Apple – instead, it should be vested with expert agencies working for democratically accountable governments. This is the point that Bennett Ciphers and I made at length in our EFF white-paper "Privacy Without Monopoly," which has a whole section explaining how the EU's big, muscular privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), makes this an especially attractive proposition in the EU:
It's also a point that EFF board member and infosec legend Bruce Schneier made in his open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, discussing opening up app stores:
Apple isn't going to exit a market with half a billion affluent consumers. If it does, expect its shareholders to wreak swift and terrible vengeance on the company. You know how people are always complaining that investors are only interested in short-term returns? It's true and here's a place where that cuts in our favor: shareholders aren't going to accept a half-billion-person market exit tomorrow in anticipation of forcing the EU to capitulate next year and thereafter safeguard Apple's continental scale rent-extraction racket. They want returns to their capital tomorrow, not in some hypothetical future in which Tim Cook tears out Henna Virkkunen's still-beating heart with his bare hands and parades it through Strasbourg, brandishing it at legions of trembling, vanquished eurocrats.
But let's say Apple does exit the EU.
Good.
The EU needs to get the hell off US tech infrastructure. Under Trump, Big Tech and the US government have stopped even pretending that American tech companies are independent of the US government. We know (from China) that Apple will happily backdoor its cloud servers to assuage authoritarian governments like Xi Xinping's. You know, Xi Xinping, the guy that Trump says he wants to emulate?
US Big Tech companies keep demonstrating that they are de facto arms of the US and constitute a hostile foreign power operating on European soil. When the International Criminal Court indicted Israeli génocidaires, Trump issued an executive order sanctioning the body. Immediately thereafter, Microsoft deleted the email and cloud accounts of ICC prosecutor Karim Khan – named in the Trump EO – and then Microsoft President Brad Smith perjured himself in his denial:
Microsoft publicly admitted that it can't stop US authorities from conducting secret surveillance of EU citizens' (and EU governments') data, even when that data is stored on server in the EU:
The EU's response is something called "Eurostack" – a top-to-bottom "stack" of technologies from data-centers to operating systems and applications made and maintained by EU entities (for-profits, nonprofits, and public bodies):
Nearly all of the emphasis on Eurostack has been on building the data-centers and creating these applications, but some ways, this is the least important part of the project. Cloning GDocs or Office365 or iWork is the easy part. The hard part is migrating from US-controlled platforms to their Eurostack equivalents. If leaving Office365 means leaving all the documents your company, organization or government agency has ever created, or losing all the sharing and collaboration permissions, or losing all the edit-histories, well, no one is gonna migrate.
Thankfully, this is something technology can easily fix: all you need to do is reverse-engineer the US offering and create a tool that extracts and transforms the data to the new format, and moves a copy of it into the new Eurostack services. This is called "adversarial interoperability" and is eminently do-able, as Apple proved when they broke open Microsoft Office by creating the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote):
The major impediment to this kind of seamless bulk migration tool isn't the technological challenge – it's the law. In 2001, the EU – under pressure from the USA – included an "anticircumvention" rule in the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD). Article 6 of the EUCD mirrors the language of Section 1201 of America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, banning reverse-engineering and adversarial interoperability, even where no copyright infringement takes place. That means that a European company that made an account migration tool to help European companies or government agencies move their own data out of a US Big Tech silo could face liability under Article 6 of the EUCD, with severe criminal and civil penalties. EUCD 6 gives American tech giants more rights to Europeans' copyrighted works than the Europeans who created those works. It's a terrible law, and after a quarter century, it's long past its exipiry date.
Bringing this full circle: Article 6 of the EUCD is also the law that stops European companies from reverse-engineering the iPhone and creating their own app stores, without having to rely on Apple's help, Given that Apple has flagrantly violated laws that order it to open its app store, it's time to unleash Europe's accomplished legion of top technologists on the problem:
Doing that becomes even easier if Apple exits the EU and abandons EU customers, cutting off their supply of security patches and application updates. After all, Europeans own their Apple devices. It's up to them – not Apple – whether they want to trust their fellow Europeans to protect their security and add new functionality of their own property.
The EU doesn't need to be a technology-taker – it can be a technology maker. The Apple/Google duopoly may have sewn up the mobile market with illegal monopoly tactics, but that doesn't mean that the EU will never spawn another Nokia or Ericsson. The shortest, most efficient, most reliable path to reestablishing technological sovereignty for the EU's half-billion residents and 27 member-states is to allow domestic firms to take over the relationship between the Trump-controlled American tech giants and the Europeans who rely on their technology.
If Trump can seize Chinese companies like Tiktok and sell them to his major donors at a 90% discount, then American companies have no right to cry foul when the EU gets rid of the America First Copyright Directive and lets Europeans choose to get their software, updates, and hardware from European companies.
Image:
Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annelid_worm,_Atlantic_forest,_northern_littoral_of_Bahia,_Brazil_%2816107326533%29.jpg
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
The tricky thing about talking about Doctor Who with non-fans is that you can't really say 'I'm pretty casual about it' but nor can you say 'I'm pretty obsessed with it'. You can't say you're casual about it because then they'll vastly underestimate how much Doctor Who media you've consumed, but you also can't call yourself a superfan because superfans exist and you have seen them and you know, god you know, that you are not yet one of them.
