when thinking about how oppression works, on a structural level, my guiding principle is that I must spend at least as much time looking down as I do looking up.
what do I mean by this? here's an example. when my surgery is delayed multiple times, I spend a little time looking up (there is only one surgeon in the entire area who will perform this surgery on trans people, so every trans person's surgical timeline is bottle-necked and delayed by months every time he goes to a conference or takes a vacation or experiences an injury. in other words, if I was cis, I would not encounter this difficulty in accessing surgery). and then I spend time looking down (due to nonstop harassment and legal threats, this practice now only treats adults and will no longer perform surgeries on minors. in other words, my access to surgery is predicated on adult privilege I have at the direct expense of trans youth's lack of access).
if you do not build a habit around thinking in this way, you will become the person Audre Lorde describes as "so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face." If we are seeking to dismantle structures of oppression, rather than to simply use and climb them, then we absolutely must make a practice of looking in both directions, especially when we feel like we're on the bottom.
I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.
"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!
The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.
Tailoring the argument to the things she already cares about does not mean we're forgetting that she has more privilege than most—entirely the opposite, in fact. A privileged ally can be extremely valuable. Jennifer votes in every election. And so do all the other ladies at her book club, and church, and in the PTA, and those folks listen to Jennifer. There's a reason both parties were courting suburban women so hard in the last election cycle! If we can find common ground with her on this, if we can get her calling her representatives and talking to her friends and phone-banking and door-knocking and making a stink, that's how the needle starts to move. If I can convince her to take her support away from the candidates who are actively restricting my rights and throw it toward those who want to restore and expand those rights...then I'm sorry, but Jennifer is a more valuable ally to me than the people who agree that the legal boundaries of gender ought to be abolished altogether but refuse to actually do anything except complain online about how both sides are equally bad because the right is trying to force everyone to drink the cyanide kool-aid while the left keeps serving bean soup and they don't like bean soup
Eryka Caldwell is a back trans woman who was murdered by her partner in her apartment last Sunday, and the story is getting a fraction of the attention that the murder of Juniper Blessing did. The police had already been called several times about her partners violence before her murder and did nothing, and she deserves the same outrage and mourning as Juniper got, and every one of our murdered trans siblings deserves. Trans women of color are more likely to be the victims of murder than any other group of queer people, and they need our solidarity, protection and support.
Caldwell’s boyfriend, 38-year-old Jonathan Fernandez, has been charged with murder.
so wildly obnoxious when you agree with the starting point of someone's stance only for them to hard turn into things you DON'T agree with and now you have to defend the thing that was originally annoying you
"too many authors in the current market are focusing on selling 'spice' instead of telling interesting stories"
"oh yeah, i agree. i started reading one that i heard a lot about and it just wasn't-"
"and it's all of these women reading their fucking mommy porn out in public like FREAKS"
*through gritted teeth* "people should be allowed to read whatever they want, and actually these books should be left alone and you should shut up about it"
The way adult fandom people hold indie online creators and cartoons to a much higher standard than their actual local politicians. You could be putting that energy into terrorizing and protesting conservatives at your town hall and actually make a good material impact on the world but instead you're background checking everything the trans woman who made the amazing digital circus has ever said
i will preface this by saying that im not an it guy, i dont code or anything but i do love linux. after i found a distribution that i liked i found that finding open source alternatives and trouble shooting stuff etc became pretty satisfying. linux is like a puzzle that you can make into whatever you want if you have the right pieces. but i will apologize in advance to it peeps if i dont use the right technical term for something.
to start off with some technical stuff you have the linux kernel, then you have all the distributions based on said kernel that are customized to suit different needs.
"A kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system that always has complete control over everything in the system. The kernel is also responsible for preventing and mitigating conflicts between different processes. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components."
tbh i think of it like ice cream flavors. each distro is a different flavor but theyre all ice cream. so while anything that i say here is geared towards my distro of choice, cachyos, it would work on other distros, you would just want to find a tutorial to see the differences.
i have tried other linux distros, but cachy has blown me away by how well and fast everything works. i honestly think that if youre gaming or doing any kind of content creation its the way to go. for the sake of this post not getting stupid long im going to assume you have linux installed. if not here is a tutorial: "How to Install Linux."
starting out
thinking of content creators you would usually go to streamers, digital artists, photographers, gamers etc. so thats what this post (kind of guide?) is geared towards. so. if youre on your fresh cachyos install you can navigate to cachyos hello.
i have cachyos hello launch at start as its an easy way to update your computer.
go to apps/tweaks and click install gaming packages. thatll prompt it to download stuff that makes gaming easier on linux. also in cachyos hello go to install apps, which will open the gui (graphical user interface) of the package manager and you can install the heavy hitters, discord, obs and steam, pretty close to how you would on windows by clicking through the prompts. i also downloaded krita, libreoffice (awesome microsoft office alternative), and vlc (my preferred media player). theres also some cool stuff like opentoonz (2d animation), blender and darktable (RAW photo editing) in there.
when you download programs from your package manager (through the terminal or with the gui), youre installing them natively. there is something called a flatpak, which runs a sandboxed version of the program. its in the name of security so its sectioned off from the other stuff on your computer and so that a company can make one version, the flatpak, and it should work on all linux distros without issue. well get more into flatpaks later.
discord: finding json files
once you have all of that installed these are some tweaks that i did. sometimes the cachyos update of discord is a little behind the official discord update (usually less than a day tbh but if youre planning to log into a call not being able to before a collab stream would be bad) so you can navigate to the json of discord (basically just the settings txt file) and turn off that discord checks for updates before launching.
you will want to go here: ~/.config/discord/settings.json
and add this line somewhere in the file: "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true
it should look something like this. you can still update whenever its rolled out but youll be able to use discord uninterrupted while youre waiting.
obs: git, the aur and yay
obs almost works the same as on windows. the plugin structure is a little different but its not too bad once you know what to look for. you have the easy ones like this closed captions plugin. where all you have to do is download the linux zip, extract it and put it in this folder in your file directory: ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins.
then there are the harder ones like the move plugin. where you have to clone and build the plugin yourself from github. or the aitum multistream plugin where cloning and building it myself resulted in a cmake error so the best bet is to navigate to the aur and download it that way.
which sounds like A LOT. so let me explain.
something that makes linux so cool is how easy it is to just grab cool shit from github. but to do that well need to start talking about the terminal which seems to scare people.
so background, cachyos is based on another flavor of linux, arch. its super lightweight and customizable! but when you dont know what youre doing it can be scary. since cachyos is based on arch it used the same package manager and the same commands to navigate through the terminal.
you can follow this tutorial here: "How to Install Git on Arch," and just follow to first steps to install and verify that you installed it. ill be honest i havent actually needed to configure it as it works just fine without doing so.
after youve done that you can install all the cool stuff youve seen on github. going back to the obs move plugin you would type the following in the terminal to clone (download all the necessary files from github): git clone <repository link>
which is https://github.com/exeldro/obs-move-transition
still in the terminal, you want to navigate to where it downloaded by typing: cd <folder name in file directory>
which is usually the name of the program obs-move-transition
most github pages have instructions on how to actually build the thing. for the move plugin you would type: cmake -S . -B build -DBUILD_OUT_OF_TREE=On && cmake --build build
(i realized that i already had cmake installed when i wrote this but if you dont youll want to before try to set up the move plugin. you can install it with the command “sudo pacman -S cmake” then check that it’s installed with “cmake —version”)
youll see a bunch of stuff pop up in the terminal and once its done, you should be able to see the folder for it in your file directory.
youll navigate to /home/*your username*/obs-move-transition/build/ and there should be the actual plugin move-transition.so. thats what youll put in your obs plugin folder from earlier. youll might have to make a few new folders but it should be nested like this: /home/*your username*/.config/obs-studio/plugins/move-transition/bin/64bit/
git is cool but theres another really cool thing that cachy has because of being based on arch. and thats the aur, the arch user repository. it hosts packages made by the community. in order to install these packages i personally use yay. and heres a tutorial for how to install it here, i followed option 1: "How to Install yay on Arch Linux."
but going back up to the obs plugin example, its similar to what we did earlier. first youd have to find the aur version of the aitum multistream plugin then you would type: git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/obs-aitum-multistream-bin
then: cd obs-aitum-multistream-bin
the difference is that someone already built the plugin for us so you just have to type: makepkg -si
it should once again appear in your home directory and you can go digging for the .so. for me it was in /home/*your username*/obs-aitum-multistream-bin/pkg/obs-aitum-multistream-bin/usr/lib/obs-plugins/. and youll nest it the same way we did earlier with the move plugin.
since i linked what we needed for the multistream plugin we didnt need to use yay very much but the tutorial i linked earlier shows the other ways that you can use it!
once youre done collecting all the plugins you want you can start obs, connect your twitch/youtube account and start streaming the same way you would on windows.
steam: proton, wine and flatpaks
moving onto steam... honestly... a lot of steam games should just work. steam comes with proton, which is basically a compatibility layer that lets window games run on linux. its something that we actually downloaded earlier when we installed the gaming packages. if you want to check before hand what games work you can visit ProtonDB. what is pretty much a guarantee NOT to work are games that use kernel level anticheat, like apex legends, sorry. i dont play any games like that anyways because that seems like an invasion of privacy. but you do you.
if theres something that you want to play that isnt on steam you can use wine instead, or the wine manager bottles to do so. wine is another compatibility layer, its actually partially what proton is based off of. if you want to check and see if something specific runs through wine you can check WineHQ.
if you want to use bottles (which is my preference it keeps everything neat), well be rounding back to flatpaks! to get flatpaks set up youll need to install it by typing in the terminal: sudo pacman -S flatpak
sudo means your acting as the "superuser," itll prompt you to type in your password to verify that you actually want to do what youre doing and that your authorized to do it. you wont see your password as your typing. it looks blank for security purposes but if you type your password and hit enter it will work as long as it was typed correctly. pacman is the name of the package manager for arch. heres some more about the commands you can use in pacman: "pacman."
now with flatpak installed you can install anything from the flathub! but were specifically looking for bottles right now. if you go to the bottles page on flathub the install button will give you what to put into the terminal: "Flathub- Bottles"
getting started with veadotube
veadotube is a good place to start if you want to try out streaming. its an easy to learn program for pngtubers specifically. mini is available for free and once the full version is released i can only imagine that it would be installed the same way.
honestly this is the easiest thing to install out of everything weve talked about. all you need to do is go to the veadotube website and download the zip file for mini. you extract it and inside is an exe file like youd be familiar with if you use windows.
i moved the extracted veadotube mini folder to my home folder for easy access. i will admit im not sure if theres a better place but this works for me. once you launch it, veadotube should work pretty much the same as how it does on windows. i havent run into an issues yet but just in case ill leave the docs for veadotube here: LINK
closing thoughts and links
those are honestly the biggest things that i can think of right now. just walking through how to setup/tweak discord, obs, steam and bottles walks you through everything that ive needed to learn in order to get streaming working comparably to how i used to stream and game with windows. everything that i use can be installed with once you know how to use pacman, git or yay.
something that might be helpful is wget... but honestly i wouldnt worry about it unless its needed for something you want. theres no need to have it if you dont use it.
some other useful things:
a general how to doc for streaming on linux, with a bunch of programs i didnt mention: LINK
streamer.bot for managing streams: LINK
what i used to get csp working. my fiance noticed lag while drawing, but its worth a try if you dont want to use krita or other drawing programs with linux versions: LINK
or you can set csp up in a bottle: LINK
opendeck, to use the elgato streamdeck: LINK
this is a plugin for opendeck to use the fifine steam deck, which is what i have: LINK
slime2 is just a neat chatbox for obs, it doesnt say anything about linux but because of how its built it works: LINK
the obspluginbuilding page for if you want to look more into how plugins work: LINK
prism launcher, to play minecraft, i just used pacman but theres other ways to install it listed on the downloads page: LINK
cachyos wiki: LINK
arch linux wiki, if you run into problems that you cant find in the cachyos wiki the solution is probably somewhere in here: LINK
ill sign this off by saying linux, especially distributions like cachyos, are constantly improving. make sure you update often (the easiest way to do so is using cachyos hello) and keep your files clean so you know where everything is if you run into problems!
pre-linux i didnt have a super extravagant streaming set up so theres not too too much here but i hope it at least gets you started and gives you resources to figure out the rest!
titsay
janainaart
germansingergirl
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
blakekathryn
2087
