It's almost Midnight

[lightasthesun]

EU NEWS: IDENTITY AUTHENTICATION NECESSARY TO ACCESS AND POST ON ALL SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITES

(Read from left to right.)

Wtf is happening.

PLEASE REBLOG.

[foone]

Important rules for the "age verification" era of the internet that we're living in:

1. Do not do age verification.

2. If you have to do age verification, cheat. Do not under any circumstances give them your real ID.

[very-gay-alkyrion]

Free Tool Says it Can Bypass Discord's Age Verification Check With a 3D Model

The tool presents users with a 3D model they can then manipulate to, the creator says, bypass Discord's age verification system.

Oh no I dropped my link, what a horrible thing! Sure hope this doesn't get reblogged until it reaches users from the UK and Brazil!

And remember to not make a second account just to test out what works best when verifying your identity

[asksanguinius40k]

A reminder that we still dont support Age Verification bullshit.

[flower-crowns-and-combat-boots]

Paywall removed here

[leresq]

WE LOVE YOU PEDRO

[milfuetoast]

This is actually such a huge thing for an actor to do. Like we know he is wonderful and correct about this and not afraid to say so but when was the last time an actor this famous called for a boycott of a series this popular on a network THIS BIG.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[threadbare-stories-if]

I feel so called out

[artistformerlyknownasbutttrumpet]

i keep seeing ppl being like "just get an id, what's the big deal?" about the potential voter registration restrictions, and let me tell you a story i am actively dealing with

i work with unhoused people fleeing domestic violence, and i have a client rn whose driver's license expired in 2024, and she needs a new id to apply for apartments. ok, cool. problem is, she lost all her documents due to the domestic violence

so we call the dmv. dmv needs a birth certificate. like i said, she lost her birth certificate. she needs a new one. her birth certificate is from out of state

we look up how to get a new birth certificate. the birth certificate needs an id to order it. cool cool cool

ok then what about secondary options? well, she needs two secondary sources of identification to order a replacement birth certificate, and she only has one, because for everything else she needs an id. fishing license? need an id. fucking park pass? id. she could have her 18+ child use their birth certificate to vouch for her, except her abuser won't let her talk to her children, so that's a no go

ultimately we land on social security card. this is where we're at in the process rn. ofc she doesn't have her ss card, so we need to order that. social security also requires an id to request a new card, but they'll take a health insurance card with a picture attached (god fucking bless them). she has medicaid but doesn't have a physical copy of the card, so we have to figure out how to get that. then once we do that we have to upload it to the social security website, and if that doesn't work, we have to, god forbid, call the social security office (takes literal hours) and then make an appointment. she doesn't have transportation or cell service, so we would have to figure out a way to coordinate me getting her to the appointment in order to present the document

then we wait 10+ days for the replacement, that has to be mailed to me bc she is unhoused and doesn't have an address

then we need to submit her request for a new birth certificate, which we have to figure out how to pay for, bc it is not free. they're at least a month behind on requests, btw, so we are probably looking at may at the earliest for that to arrive

then we need to take the birth certificate to the dmv

dmv also requires two pieces of mail not from a po box. she doesn't have an address, she is unhoused. she can use the homeless shelter in town, but we will need to mail her stuff there and have her receive it first, and also then the homeless shelter address will now be on her new id, which landlords will recognize and may discriminate against her for

during all of this she is sleeping in a garage. it was negative one degrees this morning. also, forgot to mention, she is terminally ill. some days i legitimately don't know if she lived through the night. every day is a toss up

the absolute soonest she will have an id is probably late may. forget voter registration--most rentals won't let her apply without it. she won't be offered section 8 housing without it. she can't apply for ssdi without it. she is blocked at literally every corner without it, and the absolute soonest she can get it is late may. the dmv literally has her old card on file, and she knows the number by heart, but it doesn't matter. it doesn't count if it's expired, as if she's somehow become someone new

and that's all with the help of someone whose job it is to do this shit. imagine if she didn't have a caseworker. she has a ten year old donated iphone that only works on wifi, she can't even do her own research bc she doesn't have internet half the time. how the hell is she supposed to get anything done on her own?

so yeah, fuck you if you think requiring an id isn't voter discrimination. "just get an id" is privileged af thinking and it infuriates me every time i hear it. lawmakers know exactly what they're doing with that restriction, and it's absolute bullshit

[battlecrazed-axe-mage]

So we're all gonna let the new Harry Potter show die on the vine, right? No hatewatching. No thinkpieces. No videos about how bad it is. Deprive it of oxygen and let it wither away unremarked-upon and unprofitable; make HBO lose their entire investment and prove to the corporate entertainment sphere that the entire IP is poison. And spend that time doing something that brings you joy instead.

[lesbianjaxsondart]

if you put the new harry potter show on my dash in any way it's gonna be an automatic unfollow from me, guys. like. it's 2026. come the fuck on

[stovetop00-deactivated20230907]

We’re winning.

[lilnasxvevo]

I found his bio on societyofpresidentialdescendants.org and it was so delightful I had to copy paste the whole thing:

“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.

“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.

“Ulysses is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant. His late mother, Julia, was the President’s last living great-grandchild; youngest daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III, and granddaughter of the president’s eldest son, Frederick. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City. He is also on the board of the U.S. Grant Presidential Library and Museum at Mississippi State University.”

[wakingfromthewater]

And frankly, the novels sound like they slap:

Desmond was nominated for a Lambda Award.

[doctorscienceknowsfandom]

“With his husband of 45 years.” You kids don’t know ... they got together before AIDS, at the peak of the Gay Glam Life. They stayed together as their generation died around them, and made through it to the point where they could marry and have a legal family. He looks like a chipper preppie who never had a serious thought or care in the world, but it took *incredible* determination, commitment, and also luck to get here.

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

having now read the first of this man's vampire books, you can absolutely tell that he cares a lot about historical furniture because oh my god he really wanted to tell us about all the historical furniture in this vampire's house. material culture as foreplay. seduction via theses about chairs

[lightsaber16]

How I sleep knowing that my Codywan fanfiction may be shit but at least I didn't write it with ChatGPT :

[i-got-the-feels]

Is this a new AI trend or am I just extra lucky to get a comment like this on AO3

[sharingfandoms]

what the actual fuck

[the-lady-mel-king]

Hello???

[theballadofthesunandthestars]

It's AI! It's all over Reddit, but basically if they mention you being alone for Christmas, it's definitely AI. There have been HUNDREDS of comments that are just some variation of this over and over again; if you're ever wondering whether a fic comment is AI or not, check it out on Reddit, most of the posts are referencing these kinds of comments. It's fucked up, but the main theory is that recently, AO3 denied a bunch of tech bros the ability to train their AI systems on fanfic, so this is their revenge. They want you to stop writing. It's pathetic, just delete and block <3 I promise your fic is lovely!

[theballadofthesunandthestars]

Here's some proof of my above claims!

Similar Comment #1

Similar Comment #2

Similar Comment #3

Similar Comment #4

And that's FAR from all of them unfortunately. But your writing is good; it's a fucking AI hatebot who wants people off of the platform. Stay strong!! I'm so sorry that happened to you

[i-got-the-feels]

Oh thank god

I hate to think that ao3 had such vile people (sure there are some rude or entitled comments) but NOT this

Thank you so so much for this clarification

[forest-of-stories]

Some of the language in those comments definitely would have sent me into a self-hate spiral in the past so it might help others to know that that the messages aren’t real.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

every day I learn bot comments on ao3 are stooping lower and lower

anyway if you get a comment like this, chances are that they are bot and their goal is to do whatever it takes to get you to delete your work, most certainly (from what I’ve heard) it’s because they want to “safely” steal your work, use it to train their ai without you being able to rightfully claim ownership of your work since “there’s no proof that the work was stolen/was posted elsewhere first by you” because the original source has already been deleted.

THEY ARE ALL BOTS. at first it was “ao3 is deleting fics and your entire account will be affected unless you delete the fics yourself” then it was “this work contains contents that are illegal and they have already reported you and your fic to the police” (yes, that’s how desperate these bots are), and now it’s this.

report their comments to ao3 for spam—in this case, specifically, I think you may be able to report them for harassment too—and don’t pay attention to them, most importantly don’t delete your works, don’t feel discouraged by their comments. remember that they are bots and they mass comment something like this on people’s works at random to get people to delete their works. (or even if they’re not bot, they are still pathetic bullies who don’t deserve your time or attention.)

MORE ABOUT BOTS AND SCAMS PLAGUING AO3’S COMMENTS SECTION HERE

[clytemnestraaa]

i'm going to say something insane. i think the overall pronounced fandom cultural slide away from complex plotty violent work and towards kidfic and coffee shops AUs and cozy domestic romcoms is a symptom of fascism.

[darkskyatnight]

I heavily disagree with this and think this is some kneejerk reactionary bullshit, but you know, go ahead and keep disparaging ‘normies’ like people are doing in the notes. That’ll really endear you to fluff fic writers.

Fuck you.

[lioness--hart]

I say this with genuine, and I do actually mean genuine, respect, but the point of the original post wasn’t to put an equals sign between fluff/cozy fic/coffeeship AUs and fascism. The point of the post was to draw attention to the very real push toward a "cultural hegemony" that happens every time fascist ideology takes hold of a culture. The rest under a cut for length.

In this case, it is white Euro-American Christofascism that demonizes and criminalizes any sexuality that is not reproductively-driven sex between cisgender heterosexual men and women. It is Christofascism that calls any sex not cishet sex for the singular purpose of procreation (or any physical or psychological deviance) degeneracy, which is a buzzword that eugenicists have used for decades to justify conversion therapy for gay kids, forced sterilization of mentally ill people and POC, and the illegality of gay marriage. 

Christofascism hates any violence that is not the violence of its own against The Other (which is anyone not drinking the kool aid). It weaponizes “family-friendly values” to wash out any nuance and moral complexity from a piece of art. It weaponizes “family-friendly values”, a distinctly white American Christofascist construct, to delegitimize, suppress, and erase any story that does not conform to its standards. Which includes… a lot. 

If you look at the larger trend of mainstream (film) storytelling over the last 30 years, you can see this clearly. We had films, shows, and stories in the mainstream that would never have been able to be made today: Full Metal Jacket (1987), a viciously, violently antiwar film. Leon The Professional (1994) about a middle aged hitman who befriends a precociously sexual preteen girl and teaches her how to kill people. That 70s Show, which was much more recent (ended in the early aughts) but still showed minors drinking alcohol and smoking pot onscreen. Entrapment (1999), a film where a young woman in her 20s or very early 30s gets sexually and romantically involved with a man in his 70s. Contrast that with today, when the most “edgy” thing in the mainstream is an irony-poisoned superhero movie that relentlessly queerbaits its audience but makes it painfully clear that No, Actually, They’re Not Gay, They’re Just Doing It For The Lols. No shade if you genuinely enjoyed Deadpool and Wolverine, by the way. I did too; thought it was funny as shit. But it's also very much a product of its sociocultural time, and the time is Kinda Bad.

Thankfully we do have people still making genuinely Good stories with heavier, more complex, more morally grey themes, but my point stands.  

So was everything better back then? Oh hell no. Sexism and racism were also onscreen full bore, so in that way we have moved forward. But my point is not to say “back then things were better”, which is, itself, an authoritarian dogwhistle. My point is that rightwing Christofascist authoritarianism, with the help of corporations and governments lacking the political will to oppose it, has driven much of the nuance and humanity from mainstream storytelling to serve its sociopolitical agenda and it has begun to show in the downstream culture of fandom. 

This is where authoritarianism on the left wing rears its head: why you see people getting kicked out of discord servers for offenses that would get them nothing more than a hard look in real life. The insistence that shows up on both sides of the political aisle: that fiction is reality is fiction. On the right, this looks like "violent video games are turning my kid into a murderer". On the left, this looks like "this person wrote a fictional minor having sex with a fictional adult, so the person is a CSA apologist in real life and should die."

That is the truly reactionary bullshit in this scenario.

I myself, a frequent creator of exactly the kind of content this authoritarian fandom culture hates, have been kicked out of several fandoms and have received several death threats for writing things that violate this purity culture that has developed in so many fandom spaces nowadays. My friends and people I know have been victims of the same. And it has only gotten worse over the last 15 or so years.

This purity culture is what the original post is meant to talk against. The purity culture is performative, closed-minded, and (left-wing) authoritarian. It finds any art that does not meet the purity standard (see above) disgusting, degenerate (there’s that word again), and unfit to exist. It incentivizes simple, nonthreatening stories; stories that do not require the reader to think critically or face any kind of moral conflict. In the mental landscape of the authoritarian, Moral Good is cozy, comfortable, white-coded, simple, and does not force one to confront or examine one's morality or ideology. Moral Evil is complicated, nuanced, scary, colorful, and defiantly deviant.

But again, this does not mean that if you write, read, or enjoy these kinds of stories, that you are a fascist. It just highlights this false equivalency between Moral Evil and thematic darkness/deviancy.

I hope this helps make sense of the original post a little.  

[noodles-07]

today is the one-year anniversary of Brian Thompson's shooting, so this is a friendly reminder that Luigi Mangione is innocent until proven guilty and that, hot as he may be, he's still Just Some Guy who's life has been ruined over the last year in a high-publicized trial for a crime that he pleaded innocent to

[pinkrangerv]

Also your reminder that:

Faking handwriting is easy, especially if you have time to prepare the 'confession'.

Guns are mass-produced and cannot actually be identified beyond a brand if you only have a bullet.

Facial matching via any kind of LLM or probability calculator is very unlikely to be actually viable.

Planting evidence is really fucking easy.

Fake IDs: also easy if you're a cop, because your department already arrested someone who knows where the good IDs get made.

When someone has a really important reason to think something is true ("If I found the shooter, I'l get paid enough to get out of poverty"), your brain will helpfully provide reasons to think it's true.

The above list is actually the majority of 'evidence' the cops have on Mr. Mangione, so...this ain't actually the shooter anyway. Not unless the responding PD has some new luck superpower and should be banned from Vegas.

Remember: Sir Conan Doyle had a story claiming you could turn humans into apes. Just because it looked cool in Sherlock Holmes doesn't mean handwriting or bullet analysis are actually scientifically valid.

[manorofshepard]

Can I just say something honestly and very seriously to all you writers?

With the Internet going down the "nothing adult, no death, no nothing. Make it kid friendly" route,

Please don't ever stop making art or writing wips that are gruesome, horror, other things like that. Don't let the Internet sanitize how you wanna tell a story. Channel your rage into your art and keep going and don't give up

[sterekxhale]

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

Huh, weird new kind of... spam bot? possible scam?? I've gotten this exact message with the very same wording commented on random posts twice from different accounts.

[somewhereinasgard]

Yeah watch out. Aren't those the ones who tell you they reported you by accident? It is a scam anyways

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

I think I've heard of the "reported you by accident" scam ones but I haven't got any myself.

[hashtag-anthems]

Scams will ask you to do this because most platforms are more concerned about protecting you from messages originating from outside of your account than from messages responding to one you sent. I have an iPhone and I get job offer scam texts all the time bc one of the job application platforms I used over the summer sold my fucking phone number 🫠 you’ll always see them say something like “to accept this offer, reply YES, exit out of the message, come back in, and click this link” because they KNOW that iMessage will kill links in incoming text messages from unfamiliar numbers or email addresses, but if you reply it waives that protection because oh you replied you probably know this person.

If you originate the message, you bypass a lot of spam protection. Do not invite these scammers into your house.

Remember: if someone accidentally reported you and was genuinely concerned about the impact of that, they should be contacting SUPPORT, who can actually do something about it. If anyone pulls this shit in your inbox or comment section, block and move on. And be VERY careful if you decide to engage with these fuckers for the joke. One misclick could get you in a lot of trouble if they send you a malicious link.

Sincerely, a very tired employee of the financial system who is up to their neck in fraud claims this time of year.

[depsidase]

[iwilleatyourenglish]

thanks for the comments and asks saying i'm being mean for very mildly saying i don't like when people make social decisions based on horoscopes.

your behavior has made me realize i should be "meaner": horoscopes are fake.

the position of planets and balls of gas did not in any way impact your personality or destiny. it has nothing to do with what kind of people you are compatible with, despite what an app or magazine told you.

i think sincere belief in horoscopes shows a concerning propensity to trust pseudoscience and a susceptibility to confirmation bias.

i'm pretty tired of having to tiptoe around this kind of thing and include disclaimers. if you genuinely think you shouldn't be friends with someone because of the date they came out of a uterus, you're being a clown.

[iwilleatyourenglish]

"people only criticize horoscopes because women like it" is an embarrassing argument i, as a woman, am violently sick of seeing.

[partiallyvoid-mostlystars]

ok, capitalist.

tell that to the many indigenous peoples that created everything surrounding horoscopes and followed it as a religion. The zodiacs are in the stars and the movements behind astrology are very real.

why dont you like it? are you afraid of people looking into you? do you not like people seeing you for what you try not to be?

the problem isnt astrology. the problem is weirdos that cant think for themselves. dont bash something ancient bc some white girl said she wont talk to a gemini.

[iwilleatyourenglish]

i despise capitalism and nothing here indicates i am a capitalist.

please elaborate on which "indigenous people" you believe followed the modern western take on the zodiac. go on. keep in mind they are not a monolith.

the age of a practice or belief system does not validate it to me. sorry. and, again, the western astrology people read about via apps is not an ancient practice.

i don't like it because i have no time for anything that insists the circumstances of one's birth dictate inherent personality traits, skills, and flaws. it is based entirely on confirmation bias and coincidence yet some people treat others differently because of their birth sign. some clowns have even used it for hiring practices. it is a pseudoscience and nothing good comes from treating such things as fact.

i am not afraid of anyone "looking into" me because my birthday would not grant someone any insight into my life, mind, trauma, or flaws.

you are 27 years old and having a tantrum because a stranger thinks star signs are fake. sorry you include them and your Meyers-Briggs (also a pseudoscience, btw; made by eugenicists, as well) in your bio but i promise there are other things you can base your personality and worth on.

[flameraven]

@partiallyvoid-mostlystars Re: Capitalism, Google tells me that astrology is now a $12.8 billion dollar industry, with about $3 billion of that in the US.

Capitalism is using your belief in these false ideas to extract money from you.

Health & wellness grifters also love to appeal to this idea of "ancient practices" selling their products, but it's still snake oil. Belief in the 4 humors is also an ancient idea. That does not make it less false.