C H I L L S
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here's the annotated text with a little more historical context, for those who want it... apparently authorship is uncertain, but likely Shakespeare.
almost home
DEAR READER
Keni
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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Origami Around
AnasAbdin
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
wallacepolsom

Janaina Medeiros

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shark vs the universe
d e v o n

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Game of Thrones Daily

JVL
Sade Olutola
One Nice Bug Per Day
we're not kids anymore.
seen from United States
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@uncursedswan
C H I L L S
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here's the annotated text with a little more historical context, for those who want it... apparently authorship is uncertain, but likely Shakespeare.
Ivanpah, my love, they could never make me hate you.
https://x.com/StrangerJosh11/status/1856410822983201030
It’s dire out here
Literacy Data and its impact on the Nation • Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 130 million adults are now una
We should start making everyone take a literacy test before they're allowed to vote. Y'all are not helping my superiority complex.
You…. That’s also not good and illegal. We did that before. It was extremely racists
“Address the underlying issue..? No. Fascism.”
squinting at the 'fix it fic' tag on any given story on Ao3, trying to discern if it's intended in the sense of:
I genuinely think the story had bad writing and I am taking my toolbox and improving it [and i the reader agree]
I genuinely think the story had bad writing and I am taking my toolbox and improving it [and i the reader disagree]
The story's ending was Tragic and I Respect that but also i just want to read about my faves having some kind of joy and fulfilment okay?
The story's ending was Tragic and I do Not Respect That please God Damnit Let Them Be Happy
We Are Literally Fixing The Canon With The Application of Time Travel or Reality Warping or some other Wild Plot Device
I am going to fix one obscure detail or plot element that 95% of the fandom has never thought about in their life
(because these are all extremely different vibes)
The whole genetics project of the Bene Gesserit may have been dubbed a failure because Paul wasn't a girl but there was nothing stopping Paul and Feyd-Ruatha acting on that sexual tension they had in both book and film.
Paul could have taken Feyd as a third Consort. Just imagine Paul with his Empress Irulan and his wife Chani sitting at his side and Feyd just sprawled on the dais steps just wearing something scandalous like
You were right Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, wasted potential.
I know the US government acts like a corporation but it’s not.
Not voting isn’t the same as a boycott. Because you can’t bankrupt a government by not voting. All you get by not voting is less control over what the money is doing.
The money comes from taxes, not voting. Abstaining from voting does nothing to reduce the governments ability to get money and spend it on shit.
So yes, sometimes you vote to reduce harm because not voting WILL NOT REDUCE HARM.
It’s not a boycot. Abstaining doesn’t take power from the government. It just reduces the number of people they feel answerable to.
"Not voting isn’t the same as a boycott. Because you can’t bankrupt a government by not voting. All you get by not voting is less control over what the money is doing."
The problem with adapting the "Foundation" novels was always going to be that Hollywood runs on individual heroism, whereas the thesis of the books is that history is primarily a deterministic, collective phenomenon. Having now watched the first season of David Goyer's version of the story, I would say that he's having some difficulty squaring that particular circle.
The relationship between shipping and fanfic is so much more than a binary choice between "niche ship where it's impossible to find anything" and "popular ship where it's impossible to find anything readable". There's also "niche ship that has thousands of fics because it's captured the imagination of an extremely specific kink subculture that you're not into at all", "popular ship whose writing community became established during an early hiatus and never incorporated any subsequent developments, instead diverging into an alternative canon that's unrecognisable to fans of the actual source material", "moderately well-represented ship where literally everything seems to have been written by a single impossibly prolific author whose grammatical quirks drive you up the wall", etc.
today my wisdom is: the ecological crisis of our planet is not a thing that will Suddenly destroy us sometime in the next century—it has taken decades of continuous work for our biosphere to be preserved thus far, and it will take decades more of continuous work to continue preserving it.
The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."
Things will continue to steadily get worse without steady action, but "augh! it's already too late to stop climate change and mass extinctions!" is specifically the worst response
what I mean is, there is a persistent fallacy that the present situation of a thing is always worse than the past, even if there have been fluctuations in badness.
This is not true. There is a great wealth of specific cases where ecosystems/species/a specific anthropogenic impact on the environment is CURRENTLY, RIGHT NOW, better than it has been at any point in the past 100 years
I've been researching the history of conservation in the USA...and I think current doomers would benefit from knowing just how bad things got throughout the 20th century.
The eastern USA's natural environments were fucking razed. We went scorched earth on everything.
In the 1930's, DEER and WILD TURKEYS were almost eliminated from my state. Deer. Wild turkeys. Common animals that you can see all the time.
I've seen animals close to my home that a person in the 1970's would not have been able to see. I saw river otters and a bald eagle a couple months ago! Farmer family friend remembers when a bald eagle sighting here made the news. There is a thriving population of elk (16,000 animals) in the Appalachian Mountains, for the first time since before 1850!
We actively tried to exterminate so many species. Bison. Wolves. Mountain lions. The US GOVERNMENT PAID PEOPLE TO KILL CARNIVORES. They're still here. They're reclaiming their old territories. All is not lost
There was a time most American cities almost never saw a blue sky. Brown and yellow smog was the norm and rivers were garbage sludge that are now teeming with fish. People don't know that government environmental regulation actually did succeed, that the EPA really worked as intended. Now it gets eroded because people think it isn't making a big difference, and they think that because they haven't seen what it's still holding back.
When my mom was a kid it was mildly alarming, but not unusual, for parts of Lake Erie to catch fire.
Yes, that Lake Erie. The Great Lakes Lake Erie. On fire. Not the whole thing, but…
Despite being much smaller than previous fires, the river blaze in Cleveland 50 years ago became a symbol for the nascent environmental move
The Cuyahoga flows into Lake Erie, so if the fire was close enough to its mouth, yeah, Lake Erie on fire. And my mom actually remembered one in the lake proper, near my hometown, where waste from the Hammermill plant caught fire.
In 2019–fifty years after Cleveland’s first Black mayor, Carl Stokes, campaigned and won on a promise to clean up Cleveland’s waterways—the fish from the Cuyahoga—fish! In the Cuyahoga!—were declared safe to eat.
It is important that you understand that the Cuyahoga in 1970 was described as a river “that oozes instead of flows” and where if you fell in you would “not drown, but decay.” That’s how full of sludge and chemicals it was.
And now it’s full of living, eatable fish. Why do I emphasize the eatable? Because fish can survive and even, to an extent, thrive, under circumstances that are actually extremely unhealthy. The fact that the fish are safe to eat is equally remarkable to the fact they’re there.
Incidentally, I’d like to point out it was a city mayor who started that push. So if you want to keep moving in that direction, start writing letters to your local government. Pick a cause. I’m currently researching light pollution in Phoenix and its effects on our wildlife, and potential solutions. (If that sounds like a first-world complaint to you, imagine living in a city where birds sing all night long because they can’t tell the difference between night and day, and imagine what that does to their health and breeding cycles.) Get friends to work with you. Go to city council meetings. Make noise.
It’s not enough to say “we could have a solution!” You’ve gotta actually make it happen.
“No one is expected to complete the work [of repairing the world], but neither may any one refrain from it.” — Rabbi Tarfon, Pirkei Avot
Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.
People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"
Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.
I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.
#this excludes writing pedo or incest.
If you look at the tags on my original post, this post was originally about hospital horror, and how it's allowed to exist even if an individual has medical trauma and doesn't like the genre. But since someone wanted to go and put some shit on my post that I disagree with:
No, actually, it doesn't exclude those things. Dark themes in fiction are allowed to exist whether you like them or not.
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was not a real little girl who really got brutalized. She was a fictional character. No real child was harmed. People are not reading Lolita and going out thinking, "oh, this told me to abuse children, and clearly it's morally okay now." The existence of Lolita is not responsible for the existence of CSA.
Wes Craven's New Nightmare was pretty meta, but Freddy Krueger was still never real and never hurt any real kids, either. He's a story. None of those kids ever died, none of them ever got abused, and Fred Krueger never got burned to death, because they're all fake and never existed. Murder and CSA in the real world aren't Freddy Krueger's fault.
Jaime and Cersei Lannister are not real people. They are fake. They are words on paper, and actors on a screen. Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not siblings, and did not ever have real sex in the show. It was fake, simulated, not real sex. No siblings actually fucked. Nobody is watching/reading Game of Thrones and thinking, "oh, I can totally go fuck my sibling with no repercussions now!" The existence of Game of Thrones is not responsible for real-world incest.
Guillermo del Toro's film Crimson Peak didn't kick off an epidemic of everyone deciding it's okay to fuck their sister and kill their wife. William Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" isn't making people kill men and sleep with their corpses, and Emily never really killed Homer because neither of them actually exist in the first place.
John Wick isn't making people run out and become hitmen. The very cute doggy that infamously dies in the first movie was not actually a real dog death--the dogs in John Wick were treated very well, according to a ScreenRant article I found!
Ghostface was played by a combination of stuntmen and a very talented voice actor, and all his murder victims were actors who were filming a pretend story. It was all choreographed and nobody really died. The benind-the-scenes stuff for the Scream series is actually really cool if you're into that sort of thing like I am.
Arcane didn't put grenade launchers in people's hands and turn them into vigilante fighters juiced up on Super Drugs--and you know what, neither did any of the things the Batman franchise has churned out. The Joker and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn aren't out there terrorizing New York City, because they're fantasy supervillains who aren't real and can't hurt you.
The endless waves of bandits in Skyrim are pixels on a screen, and I'm not killing real men when I cut them down. No real people got hurt when my Sims 4 house caught fire. Playing Super Smash Brothers hasn't gotten me into underground fighting rings, and neither did watching Fight Club.
It's all fiction.
None of it is real.
The characters are fake and do not exist.
Curate your own media experience and get your head out of your ass.
I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.
Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.
This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.
So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.
The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.
People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.
I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.
So there’s been a bunch of replies to this to the effect of “Boo hoo you can’t draw porn anymore, cry me a river.” They’re so perfectly proving the points I wanna make that I couldn’t possibly try to invent a strawman argument more perfect than the real people in the replies.
Here’s the thing: censorship always starts with a group of people whose ideas make others uncomfortable in some way. Sluts are an easy target. It’s the kind of censorship you can easily sell to middle America. It’s sinful, dangerous, harmful. You get to frame it as “for the children’s sake!!!” (as if our government cares about protecting children when it lets the police murder them on the reg). Even people who don’t see sexual content as bad per se still don’t see it as worthy of defending. It’s frivolous, rude, unnecessary, silly.
So the censorship laws pass. Two things happen. First, we discover that these laws are targeting people with a very broad brush. The laws never tend to define pornography, as Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s famous “I know it when I see it” statement shows. It’s up to others’ discretion, with many people getting swept up in it who tried to follow the rules, or who even undeniably did follow the rules, but with little to no appeals process, the accusation, even if mistaken, might as well be a guilty verdict.
Secondly, we have just moved the goalposts from “the government must not censor freedom of speech or expression” to “the government can sometimes censor freedom of speech or expression.” Now the precedent of censorship has been introduced and accepted. Now it’s easier to censor other things. Things that you may hold dear.
Because again, these sites aren’t just banning sexual content because they want to. They’re not just doing it because of advertiser pressure or app store pressure or financial company pressure (although we must also assign some of the blame there). This stuff started really ramping up after the government passed FOSTA/SESTA, barely over 3 years ago. These laws, under the guise of stopping sex trafficking, harmed sex workers in countless ways while driving actual sex trafficking deeper underground where it’s harder to find now. There have been so many studies about how FOSTA/SESTA had the opposite impact on helping trafficking victims, but again, this was never about protecting people. This was about introducing censorship in a palatable way.
“But there’s still porn on the internet. Just go there.” Ah, yes. There is still porn on the internet. As someone making adult content, who knows more sex workers than most people, these giant corporate megasites are a very similar experience to working for Wal-Mart or Amazon. They take a huge cut of your earnings, upwards of half. Onlyfans “only” taking 20% is pretty low, but again, in the wild west early days of the internet, you could have your own site and keep 100%. And yeah, there’s free porn everywhere. Fuck you for not paying the sex workers who get you off. Pay sex workers and tip them well!
It also means porn becomes more homogenized. It’s marginalized people who have the hardest time competing within/against big porn companies, and marginalized people deserve to see their sexuality portrayed the way cis, het, white, able bodied, fit people get to see theirs. Tumblr was host to a lot of queer, trans, poc, disabled, and fat people making erotic content featuring people like themselves. It was host to a large audience of people grateful to see people like themselves. It is so much harder to find that now. Nobody cares about protecting marginalized people, and nobody cares about defending porn. That combination means the sexualities of marginalized people gets even more stigmatized, secretive, fetishized, demonized. TERFs are usually SWERFs, and both have a lot more in common with the far right than they do with feminism or progressive justice.
You’ve been duped good and hard if you get up here in 2021 on Al Gore’s internet defending censorship when it’s a steamroller two inches away from your own heels. You’re can’t wait until your life gets fucked up by it to say something. The sluts have long been the canaries in the coal mine.
If you enjoyed my words and want to support my adult work, I am on a shadowbanned Patreon at patreon.com/RosalarianXXX and a pretty decent OnlyFans at Onlyfans.com/RosalarianXXX. I post 3 different adult comic series on Patreon, and I post both comics and surreal nudes on OF.
The combination of frustration and exhaustion is this post feels so familiar. I can’t count the number of platforms I’ve through or the number of policy changes that have made it more and more difficult to actually make money as an artist. It’s a constant onslaught that’s numbing in nature when it doesn’t make me cry.
And honestly? Sometimes, we just need to fucking complain for a moment. We just need to sigh and say this sucks. And it doesn’t have to be this way. And I’m so so tired.
Anyway, thanks for writing this. I’m sorry it’s so damn hard. It’s not fair, it’s not fun, and it didn’t have to go this way.
Why is nuance dieing?
The younger generation seems to be so much more obsessed with moral puritanism in fiction and irdk why. Could it be because kids these days don't interact with real people and are just chronically online so they repeat what they see on the internet?
Actually saw someone saying people who like fictional bad boys are the reason why men get away with sa & rape irl and countries are criminalizing abortion...
It's just so depressing to see that. This line of thinking is scary actually.
I don't remember people going this mad over morals when shows and movies like Vampire Diaries and Twilight saga were huge. It's like people have regressed.
The media we consume is becoming more and more didactic as we enter an age where it seems like every piece of popular media is obsessed with delivering their messages and themes like an after school PSAs. Media is becoming increasingly more sanitized and “family friendly” to appeal to the broadest possible audience to create more and more profits for corporations. This obsession with sanitized fiction has become commonplace with many younger people who parrot what they see online and on the media they consume and proceed to deliver underdeveloped takes on subjects they don’t fully understand yet.
It becomes even more interesting when people point to fictional narratives as the cause for societal problems when there are already larger institutions that have historically been responsible for what they claim fiction causes. They displace the blame for societal ills like SA, abuse, patriarchal violence and misogynistic legislation onto fiction, fan fiction and media that explores taboo subject matter. While I don’t deny that fiction has power, 90% of the time these people have no idea of the ways literary works influence our culture and default to a 1:1 “monkey see, monkey do” explanation for why people must consume the “correct media”.
Another factor is the way that people have become accustomed to moralizing their content consumption. They have convinced themselves that they need a concrete and righteous justification for their likes and dislikes and this has ruined the way fandom interacts with literature, film and other art forms. With this in mind, they can no longer dislike or even hate something without creating some moral justifications for why “hating this thing is actually progressive and righteous!” and in the process, conflate consumerism with activism.
The comparison to Puritanism is quite fitting in this case. After all, the principles of that religion were based in purity, obedience and censorious beliefs for self-indulgences and we can draw comparisons with the way people online discuss certain subjects. There’s a phenomenon where people will say something along the lines of: “It’s alright to like (insert problematic character here)! But you need to acknowledge that they are a bad person.” To them, it seems like a gesture at fairness and magnanimity when in reality, it is an attempt at exerting unearned moral authority over the tastes of others. It is a demand that a person proves their moral innocence to them in a performative manner that validates their need to feel superior. But it’s all performative purity because even if a person did explain/justify their fictional tastes, these people wouldn’t care and would continue to demand purity from others.
People can’t even discuss certain characters anymore without running into people accusing them of being terrible people who would approve of real-life violence and abuse. And I can’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t always like this, when did it change?
“your rent should be a third of your income” well wouldn’t that be nice. wouldn’t it. lower the rent pussy
Casual observation from someone old enough to remember: in the year 2000 financial advice was that rent should be no more than 1/4 of your income.
Until the mid 80s, the advice was that if you must rent instead of owning, then that 20% of your monthly income (oh yes, only 20%) should include all your utilities too.
After all, rent costs more than a mortgage, so it should offer more too.
The housing market is a fucking travesty.
Hmm what happened in the mid eighties....
StopNCII.org is operated by the Revenge Porn Helpline which is part of SWGfL, a charity that believes that everyone should benefit from technology, free from harm. Founded in 2000, SWGfL works with a number of partners and stakeholders around the world to protect everyone online
Sounds legit
StopNCII.org is operated by the Revenge Porn Helpline which is part of SWGfL, a charity that believes that all should benefit from technolog
Headlights are just too bright now. We gotta regulate them.
(And before anyone says it’s just an aiming problem - no. Like I apologize to the headlight aficionados clearly lusting after lighthouses, chernobyl, or the death star, but no amount of aiming is gonna fix the fact that the moment your car encounters any kind of hill, curve, or bump, my retinas are vaporized by a shade of blue-white previously known only to god. Just accept your limits and settle for a soft orange like the rest of us)
this is no joke.
it's a legit safety issue. plenty of drivers who wear glasses or get migraines or any number of other things legit can't handle the brightness. it fully blinds multiple drivers I know. I have friends who do not have actual night blindness who avoid driving at night and limit to back roads at night because of this. I don't drive, but as a low vision passenger with photosensitive migraines, going somewhere at night is horrible for me. my vision comes and goes from the impact of those fuck-you-bright lights and I almost always come away with a migraine. I have been in cars where we have had to pull over because someone passed us with "cops spotlight" bright headlights and the driver legit couldn't see for a minute. I've been in a car that was inches from being driven off a protected drop because someone had lights bright enough that the driver flashed them to turn their brights off and the other persons response was to actually turn their brights on and it legit blinded the driver (and me in the passenger seat) for several minutes. we had to pull over and the other passenger had to drive because the original driver had a migraine after that. a few of these are definitely examples of assholes whose lights cannot be street legal, but several of them ASR just normal cars with center of the sun headlights.
after a certain point of brightness, it adds nothing to safety for the person driving the eye of Sauron car. and even if you want it past a certain brightness, the normalcy of the colder and colder blue white lights makes it even more dangerous. the brightness should be standardized, and the color of the light should be standardized to a warmer shade. more similar to the lights you used to see on cars. it's okay if the brightness standard is a bit higher than what those old lights were, but it should be far less than some of the people I've seen