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Hi speaking of medical literacy for trans people, transfems pls check out the website Transfeminine Science, especially their introductory article on feminizing HRT
Non-transfems can reblog this as well btw
i do not want to live in the fucking panopticon fuck the camera that blinks above me at work, the tv watching me at the store, the "smile you're on camera" signs, the ring cameras, the flock cameras, the apps to track your child or partner, the activist friends telling me "just assume everything you do in public is being recorded somewhere", the government building protester databases, the teslas recording every move all around them, the knowledge that everything i type or search or save is being tracked and logged, the ads and search suggestions that mysteriously know what i was just talking about, the way biometrics keep creeping into more places, the way my car spies on me, the way my phone spies on me, the way there is nowhere to go to get away from it!!! no wonder the internet is full of vindictive little stalkers and witchhunts when it's the water and the air of society from the culture to the infrastructure
We can take control back! Community mapping projects using free open source software let you add where surveillance cameras are. I often take walks through new areas and observe the buildings to spot the bastards. When you do it, you find out there are more blind spots that you think. If you have a good map of public cameras you can avoid them or tell people about them. Or other things :)
Surveillance cameras and other means of surveillance
Surveillance cameras and other means of surveillance
Find license plate readers (LPRs) near you.
I made a mistake on Bluesky and now my notifications won’t stop but hey i’ll post it here too!
Anti-Prime sale on bookshop.org until the 11th
girl who sat next to me at the coffee shop had that Tortured By Computer Work look in her eye so i turned to her and was like Are u doing research? and it turns out she (white) just started working as an indigenous liaison for an ecological wellness surveying company (hired bc she worked with the local nation for a year) so i was like OMG can i share resources with you. and whipped out my 1 million notes and academic papers on ethical Indigenous-settler relations/research and Indigenous perspectives on ecological restoration. she was like omg are u sure this is basically a whole course for free and i wanted to tear my shirt off liek YES!!!! I WANT TO PROMOTE LOW BARRIER EDUCATION TO ADVANCE DECOLONIZATION AND RECONCILIATION!!!!!!!!!!! STEP IN2 MY GOOGLE DOC !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
here's a googoodrive folder containing learnings on Experiential Learning in Ecological Restoration annnddd Research Practice in Indigenous Contexts. each course folder contains a "![Course number] Notes" document as well as PDFs of all the text-based readings that the notes draw from :-)
i plan 2 make accessible the learnings from my other classes too but i think ill only have time to do all that anonymizing & reformatting once i graduate in a few months lol
queer reading list
• stone butch blues by leslie feinberg • transgender warriors by leslie feinberg • drag king dreams by leslie feinberg • trans liberation: beyond pink or blue by leslie feinberg • transmissions - interview with leslie feinberg • the persistent desire: a butchfemme reader edited by joan nestle • a fragile union by joan nestle • a restricted country by joan nestle • the femme mystique by leslea newman • powers of desire: the politics of sexuality edited by ann snitow, christine stansell, & sharon thompson • whipping girl by julia serano • forbidden passages by multiple authors • femme: feminists lesbians & bad girls edited by laura harris & elizabeth crocker • gender trouble by judith butler • gender is burning by judith butler • lesbian images edited by jane rule • i am your sister: black women organizing across sexualities by audre lorde • age, race, class and sex: women redefining difference by audre lorde • s/he by minnie bruce pratt • crime against nature by minnie bruce pratt • labors of love and loss: an interview with minnie bruce pratt • punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens by cathy j. cohen (suggested by @psychimadyke) • real queer america: lgbt stories from red states by samantha allen • sissy insurgencies: a racial anatomy of unfit manliness by marlon b. ross • boots of leather, slippers of gold by elizabeth kennedy & madeline d. davis • telling moments edited by lynda hall • coming to power edited by members of SAMOIS • compulsory heterosexuality & lesbian existence by adrienne rich • from the archives: an interview with lesbian stonewall veteran stormé delarverie by grace • sylvia rivera & marsha p. johnson: listen to the newly unearthed interview by liza cowan • paris is (still) burning by chauncey k. robinson • black queer studies edited by e. patrick johnson & mae g. henderson • feels right: black queer women and the politics of partying in chicago by kemi adeyemi • transgender history by susan stryker • the color purple is a lesbian story by claire heuchan • lesbian love stories edited by irene zahava • the mammoth book of lesbian erotica edited by rose collis • we are everywhere edited by mark blasius & shane phelan • not a passing phase: reclaiming lesbians in history edited by the women's press • a timeline of lesbian, gay, bisexual, & transgender history in the us • "they wonder to which sex i belong": the historical roots of the modern lesbian identity by martha vicinus • feminism is queer by mimi marinucci • lesbian poetry archive • how to validate your own sexuality
Knowing about DARVO is a lifeline for abuse survivors. Especially if you are still in your abuse or still in contact with your abuser. Understanding that this is the playbook of abusers gives you power.
This is designed to disorent you, force you into a defensive position and leave you apologising and unlikely to raise an issue again. Survivors come away from these interactions confused and dazed.
Get comfortable with these phrases
"My recollection of events is not up for debate."
"That may be true, but we are discussing your behaviour right now."
"Let's focus on what actually happened."
"You are holding me accountable for your actions"
You will be so much firmer in your conversations and more importantly, in yourself, now you know about it. You will find yourself holding your ground better and blaming yourself less. You will find yourself more confident in your truth.
fsr people love to bring up land back but never actually in context of the canadian indigenous people that started the phrase and movement. also ill see people talking about it and using it basically "im being progressive and antiracist" but also like explicitly using it in a super vague tokenizing way where they dont actually seem to be invested in or care about what land back actually means ..?
time to drop the epic landback reading list by mike gouldhawke
I could have sworn he had an essay at one time titled something like "the matriarchal roots of landback" that talked more specifically about the origins of the phrase but I can't find it now
re-reblogging myself because seriously go read or watch at least three things off this list. the vast majority of non-Indigenous people who talk about Land Back have no clue how people within Indigenous communities are actually conceptualizing this stuff because almost every hypothetical I see is so far removed from the things most people I know on the ground in community want and what they are actively doing. (hint: its not a balkanized mass of ethnostates where tiny native minorities landlord over everyone else)
Every day i think about those black musicians whose songs were made into covers by white people and now everyone thinks that these are the originals. Youtube comment sections are full of people like "is this what it feels like to find out you're adopted?" instead of celebrating and promoting the original creators of the songs.
Gloria Jones - Tainted Love
Little Eva - Loco-Motion
Martha & The Vandellas - Dancing in the Streets
James Ray - I've Got My Mind Set On You
Big Mama Thornton - Hound Dog
Robert Knight - Everlasting Love
Erma Franklin - Piece of My Heart
The Family - Nothing Compares 2 U (written by Prince)
The Supremes - You Can't Hurry Love
The Supremes - Keep Me Hanging On
The Top Notes - Twist and Shout
Lord Creator - Kingston Town
The Paragons - Tide is High
Commodores - Easy
And here's an entire playlist with songs by black artists covered by The Rolling Stones:
the complete and total defeat in the prosecutor's voice at the very end..... im 💀💀💀
Havent seen a lot about this on tumblr so maybe not a lot of people know:
He was wrongfully raided by police in 2022
He used footage and names of the specific cops in posts, videos and songs making fun of them
The cops sued for defamation and cried in court about the songs ruining their lives
He won anyway
I love how unapologetic he is. And rightfully so!! How you gone cry about being embarrassed when you weren't crying about barging into my home and threatening my life? No one was worried about anybody's children when they weren't the right color. They good. 🤷🏾♀️
frankly hell yeah, he WAS a good goddamn sport. And one classy man at that, holding his ground and STILL being respectful despite the bullshit they’re trying to pull. The incredible song he wrote with his home surveillance video of the “police search” itself, btw, for today’s lucky ten thousand:
National Theatre is streaming their rendition of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde this week for free on YouTube. The production is a delight.
This show is one I constantly return to as a theatre educator for middle/high school, and it is MUCH better enjoyed when performed rather than on paper.
Whatever the opposite of rolling in his grave is, Oscar Wilde is doing it
I just found out they also have accessible BSL (British Sign Language) and audio description versions. The closed captioning has also been done correctly (a bare minimum many YouTube videos do not meet).
here's a list of programs/sites/whatever that were helpful to me when i was moving away from using spotify & back to downloading music:
soulseek - peer to peer downloading program, has most music you'd want. there's "rules" to it though and the UI is a little confusing, but you can figure it out. there's tutorials. i believe in you
cobalt.tools, ytiz.xyz, yt-dlp - mp3 downloaders, for the songs that you can't find on soulseek
musicbee - music player, extremely customiseable. reminds me of when i used itunes back in the day. has a lot of good features, including syncing music over to your phone
lastfm & listenbrainz - sites that keep track of your listening stats. i'd recommend this even if you still choose to use a music streaming service
syncedlyrics - cmd thing that gets you timed song lyrics, like the ones spotify has. there's no UI but it's easy enough to use. just grab the lyrics and timestamps it spits out and paste it into musicbee
music presence - program that shows what song you're listening to in your discord status, in case you use discord and enjoy the thought of other people seeing what you're listening to, which i do for some reason
i'm not going to lie to you and say that switching away from spotify/streaming services is an effortless task, it took me half a whole day of nonstop Work to get all my music downloaded and sorted out, but i will say that it was worth it!! and you should do it 👍 if you want to
Spotifymate - not 100% reliable, but very helpful in downloading songs from your spotify lists to your mp3 folder.
MusicBrainz Picard - named after Starfleet's esteemed bald man, a program for all your tagging and renaming needs.
Mp3Tag - fewer features than Picard, but a bit easier to use. I like it especially for mass renaming of the tracks. Offers 3 days free without registration, and it counts only the days when you use it. Usually, one afternoon of using it gets you sorted out.
As a much-superior alternative to Spotifymate, take a look at casualOnTheSpot. It will grab entire public playlists, albums, or artists. It does have some bugs, but persistently retrying when it starts having issues, or re-running your query will almost always work.
first assigned reading in my textile history class is about orientalism and the political appropriation of the paisley print and kashmir shawl by the british written by a south asian researcher
"in this essay i would like to offer a way of reading pattern and textile history as political and ideological" sickos yes ha ha ha yes . jpeg
dropbox link to the PDF of the reading i just uploaded bc it's institution paywalled otherwise <3 let me know if you have any issues downloading it
There are a lot of really dog shit things in the world of tech that can be solved with a bit of time, some stubborn googling and maybe some special hardware and piracy is only the tip of the iceberg.
Printers are notorious for claiming they’re out of ink when they haven’t come close to the suggested number of prints, and their cartridges literally still have ink in them. So after a bit of googling I found out how to ‘reset’ a cartridges automatic stopping system (its literally 1 physical wheel on the cartridge that you gotta turn back). The only downside is that I don’t get a digital ink monitor, but since it told me it was empty when still half full, I don’t mind.
Like, you can just jiggle with some shit and solve one of the biggest money making scams in the post-industrial world and I don’t think people realise its that easy.
Or, like, repairing your own technology. A few months ago, I swapped out my sister’s laptop screen. Did it myself, I removed maybe 4 screws, no vital parts were exposed and it cost me $40. I even got a choice of matte or glossy.
My point is, any walls that capitalist technology presents you with will be a false one. And one already broken by a dedicated community of interesting people working hard for free to break down that wall.
kids these days will be all “be gay do crime” and dont even know how to watch a cartoon without paying for it smh
IN FAIRNESS
piracy was definitely leagues easier a decade or so ago when thepiratebay was functional, megaupload was still running, and YouTube and Google made only the most cursory attempts to block copyright content. like let’s not pretend that the internet hasn’t got a lot more corporatised in the past decade or so. piracy is still possible and you can and should do it but it’s a LOT harder to do safely and reliably than it was.
^thank u
Sorry, this is all wrong.
1) ThePirateBay is still functional. (It’s not the same pirate bay that it was back in the day, but let’s not get into Theseus’ ship territory. It’s still here and it still works, that’s all that matters.) There are plenty of torrent sites around, more than there were 10 years ago – although overall traffic has plummeted. Now as then, it’s a whack-a-mole game.
2) Why was it “leagues easier” a decade ago? Some countries, not all (not north America, for example), now mandate ISP blocking of torrent sites, but this new complication can be bypassed with one (1) step: a google duckduckgo search for proxies. No government agency or ISP can possibly keep up with proxies, it’s yet another whack-a-mole game. So yes, it was technically easier before, but I don’t see “leagues” anywhere.
3) It was safer before? Are you shitting me? Have you lot forgotten that the legal departments of MPAA and RIAA sued torrent sharers (not even uploaders) and asked for millions of dollars for damages? AND GOT THEM? (By which I mean they didn’t actually get millions since the people they sued didn’t have any, but said people were convicted and ruined and that was the goal in the first place. It was a deeply amoral and cynical scare tactic.) Well they stopped doing that at some point, and focused on hunting P2P and torrent sites. Running a site is certainly less safe today. Using one, though? Depending on where you are, the ISP may be allowed to block you after repeated instances, and that’s it. You’re not getting in trouble with the law or into crippling debt. And either way there’s only a minuscule chance that any of this will come to pass, which becomes zero (0) with a VPN. (Safety of course depends on the country, and in some cases piracy is the least of your concerns. Let’s not get into that.)
4) Ten years ago there was no Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis was in its infancy. If today it’s harder to find PDFs on google, it is orders of magnitude easier and more reliable to find them elsewhere. People just have to unstick their minds from the notion that stuff is either on google or doesn’t exist at all. Geez.
5) P2P still exists. IRC (the sharing channels in particular, #bookz and the like) still exists. Torrenting functions like it always did. All these methods are exactly as easy to use as before, i.e. not necessarily a piece of cake, there’s a learning curve. But it’s the same learning curve it was 10 years ago.
6) So what have we lost? Only YouTube (meh, the film/tv quality was appalling anyway, and music is still there) and direct downloads (at least the permanent ones: there are plenty of them still around, but files expire and you need to keep track of what goes up when. So this goes beyond knowhow, it’s about internet communities. Let’s not get into that either, it’s a huge subject.) It’s a loss, sure, but I wouldn’t call it a terrible blow.
7) And in exchange for that loss, we got streaming sites. This is piracy, too, and it’s much much easier than torrents, and tons of people do it. Any “piracy has declined” narrative either implies that we’re excluding streaming from the discussion for some reason, or is flat out wrong. Ten years ago, grandpa couldn’t possibly torrent a film, and it’s debatable if he even knew how to open the file you helpfully sent him. Now, as long as someone has set up kodi or similar, grandpa can watch it on his tv and it just feels like cable.
8) On why torrents in particular have declined in recent years, see here. It’s a big subject and I didn’t cover all of it, but the main reason is that people had access to easier methods to get what they wanted (some legal and affordable, some illegal and free), so they didn’t need to learn how to torrent. Ergo, they never did. There’s more of course, and there’s definitely a cultural shift too, but that’s a very long story so let’s not get into it. The linked post also includes some thoughts on why torrents aren’t dead and doomed just yet, and ooh, I forgot a very important one: you can’t stream photoshop.
To summarise, internet piracy is NOT more difficult, unreliable, and unsafe today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. For reasons why people (young or otherwise) seem less versed in it, please look elsewhere. I have thoughts on that too, but this is already a very long post, so I’ll just leave you with the best kind of thought. I’ll leave you with a doubt:
ARE people less versed in piracy? Are they really? Or is it simply that 20 years ago, internet users were computer geeks by definition, whereas now everyone’s online? Perhaps the percentage of skilled pirates in the general population remains more or less the same, and the only thing that’s dropped is the percentage of skilled pirates to total internet users. I can’t be sure without statistical evidence, but it’s a possibility.
You can literally google “watch _____ free online” and find most movies but the third result just download Adblock or popup blocker and you’re golden it truly couldn’t be easier
I’ve been meaning to make a piracy masterpost for awhile and what better time than now?
Materpost: A curated Githup tutorial of links to more torrent sites, software, VPNs, uBlock origin filters, ect. Basically everything you could ever want starting out. Do be warned though it doesn’t appear to have been updated in awhile so a few of the links are dead.
GAMES:
Vimm’s Roms: NES era->ps3 era roms and emulators to play them. Has user ratings on games. Cons: slow download speeds.
NxBrew: Switch roms/game updates/dlc
nsw2u: More switch roms. Check here if nxbrew doesn’t have the game you’re looking for.
Hshop: 3ds games/updates/dlc. Very well organized and sorted by console region. Bonus ability to generate QR codes to scan with homebrew to begin download directly on your console.
Oldgamesdownload: Old 90’s-2000’s PC games and some gamecube games. Technically, all of the games here are abandon ware, meaning the original company/creator doesn’t sell nor make money from the games anymore period. If you’re into that.
Fitgirl repacks: Heavily compressed PC games, and other various consoles. Small downloads and faster speeds for the size of the games. Somewhat limited game selection.
Steam unlocked: Steam games with easy-to-use installers. Check here if fitgirl doesn’t have what you’re looking for.
Steam Underground: A user forum for piracy support, usually about installing cracked games. Does have some scattered PC game downloads.
Google doc of Skyrim SE creation club content.
Amiibo life: Amiibo bins, can be loaded with some homebrew to load in games without any external source, or, if you buy writable NFC cards, you can make your own free amiibos.
Books:
Library Genesis: a good all-in-one ebook finder. Has books, magazines, scientific papers, ect. Well organized and able to sort by Author, Genre, ect ect. Almost all books in .epub format
Calibre: Not piracy but a free software for reading said .epub files, and other ebook formats. Good for sorting your books.
Sci-Hub: Research papers, academic books, pdfs, ect. Helpful for collage students.
IT ebook: eBooks about learning programming languages.
audiobookbay: Audiobook downloads.
Booksonic: Audiobook streaming.
5e.tools: Dnd player’s manual, guide, ect.
Books on learning various languages.
Mangadex: Manga, Doujinshi.
Headspace sleep audio.
Various books and manuals.
Streaming:
ustvgo: Free streaming of live tv, has most US cable tv channels.
tutturu: Spiritual successor to Rabbit, allows you to stream your screen with friends.
Yes movies: Movies
Kimcartoon: Cartoons/animated movies
aniwatcher: Anime
animedao: Anime
Computer software:
getintopc: Wide selection of pc (mostly windows) software of all sorts, and different versions. Can personally vouch for the site, I’ve gotten Photoshop, Maya, and Sony Vegas from here over the years.
Other:
the eye: An archive of old roms, OS systems, roms (non nintendo), comics, books, ect, ect. Cons: No search function and slightly hard to navigate.
1337x.to: Torrent site for movies, shows, games, comics, ect.
ThePirateBay: The classic.
Recorded broadway musicals. Verying quality.
Finally someone actually posted links instead of just bitching or saying “it’s easy”
Ok just want to plug the eye a bit more considering I lost a few hours in their yesterday.
the eye has been up since 2017 and in the last four years have accumulated 140TB of data (according to their own reports). Part of their growth is just their own work, part of it is absorbing other archives/open directories that were having issues: I know rpg.rem.uz used to be its own archive - gave way to The Trove, which is having its own issues right now unfortunately… - but now most-all of their content can also just be found on the eye. Same with a few dozen other archives.
And they have ‘old roms, OS systems, roms (non nintendo), comics, books, ect, ect’, but massively more than you might think just based off how this sounds. Like…
They have it all.
If you want to try and homebrew alcohol, go check their stuff. If you want to try and read books that are out of print or otherwise in public domain (and some that aren’t yet in public domain), go check their stuff. If you want to run a campaign and can’t pay for expensive print tabletop books, go check their stuff. If you want to fuck off into the woods to live off the land (or research how that would work for a writing project), go check their stuff. If you’re trying to learn shit about drugs - any drugs, almost - go check their stuff.
Hell, if you want to go read what looks like literally every research paper on coronaviruses from 1968 up to Feb 2020, you can do that too!
As chickenmcnuggies said its a mess and a half to navigate through their collections, partially with how large it is and the fact quite a few folders were once whole other archives since absorbed by the eye…
But goddamn you can lose an afternoon just going through all the stuff they have.
The subreddit r/freemediaheckyeah is a great resource and their index: https://fmhy.net/ has A LOT of stuff with a pretty straightforward UI. Its got free resources for pretty much anything you could want on the internet, both fully legal and dubiously legal.
The largest collection of free stuff on the internet!
resources for staying safe online
always important, but i feel like especially recently. particularly stuff that’s a bit more than just the usual “don’t post personal info”
feel free to share this post on twitter or anywhere else, staying safe is important
justdeleteme.xyz - direct links to delete accounts
how a photo’s hidden exif data exposes your personal information
have i been pwned? - check if your accounts have been compromised in a data breach. CHANGE ANY ACCOUNT THAT USES THE SAME EMAIL AND PASSWORD
online harassment field manual
form for removing personal information from google (for the eu), see also: “remove your personal information from google”
extreme privacy: what it takes to disappear (personal data removal workbook)
filter lists for ublock origin, and more
restore privacy - online privacy resources center
privacytools.io
online spyware watchdog
how secure is your password?
defensive computing checklist
cloudflare dns
non-technical tips on staying anonymous
webrtc leak shield - chrome, firefox
web safety tutorials by the electronic frontier foundation
crash override network - resources for victims of doxing and online harassment
The Watermelon Woman (1996) dir. Cheryl Dunye
Hey this movie is really important in queer history! It was the first feature length film directed by a black lesbian! You can watch it here for free!
I really recommend you do because while it is a rom-com (and a drama), it also looks at how the stories of black queers are over looked in history.
This is important because black queer history IS queer history. Black trans women led the charge in Stonewall. A black gay man was the chief organizer of the March on Washington where MLK gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. A black gay man was one of the first to openly write about homosexuality. A black woman was the originator of the theory of intersectionality.
Black people led the way in LGBTQ+ advoacy. Y'all aren't telling queer history if you're omitting black history from the story.
It's reported that it was actually likely to be Stormé DeLarverie, a Black, biracial, butch lesbian drag king, who incited the Stonewall riots. Marsha P. Johnson said herself that she was not present when the riots started and this has been corroborated by Sylvia Rivera, who was also likely not there on the first night of the riots. That doesn't diminish their acts as leaders and pillars of the community, particularly with STAR, however it is a narrative that erases the important presence of a different Black queer figure in our history.
Not to mention, these people have names. Baynard Rustin. James Baldwin. Kimberlé Crenshaw. If we're giving flowers to the Black people who have gotten us to this point in history we should be naming them while we do so.
Unlearning 101 with Saffana: Part 1 - Divide & Conquer