🔥🔥🔥

Ladder. 30 yrs old. No gender. They/Them

[weerewolf-mullets]

Grief and sadness are so tedious and heavy. I forget just how tiring it is until someone I love passes and then it just slams back down on my shoulders. I lost my drag mom a few days ago to cancer and the bombardment of regrets and I'll never have x again have been overwhelming to say the least. I know there is no "right" way to grieve but seeing friends share stories about him just glaring reminds me of how little I've remembered. I used to drink pretty badly when I went out from like 2017-2020 which is also all of the time I knew him. So most of my memories with him are just booze soaked and hazy and God it makes me feel like shit. So many should haves and could haves running around in my head. It hurts extra bc I don't live in the city anymore and am physically cut off from it all. Everyone is sad and shocked bc he passed so quickly after being diagnosed and I think we all thought we'd have more time. My biggest regret right now is that I never msgd him after he told everyone he was rly sick. I didn't know what to say or how to say anything and then he posted about being overwhelmed with msgs so I held off again. And just when I was thinknkng "I should really reach out with anything" he died. And now I can't say anything. I can't see, hear, touch, taste or smell him ever again. I'm giving myself the grace to be crazy about these thoughts right now but I know that I cannot change these things and I hope that he knew I cared and loved him. This Grief will change with time, I will learn how to carry it better and eventually be able to set it down. Grief is hard and it sucks. Tell the people in your life you love them and hug them for me.

[weaver-z]

I heard this metaphor growing up, and in my case, it backfired supremely, because I went out into my neighbor's backyard where a rose bush was growing, and the one I tested had like 30 petals (it was yellow, but definitely a rose of some kind), and as a very logical lass, I came to the conclusion that you could have premarital sex AT LEAST ten times before your future husband would even notice something was up. Moral of the story? Test your metaphors on the weirdest and most neurodivergent child you know before writing your weird religious propaganda.

[natalieironside]

Shout out to trans women who aren’t computer scientists or musicians or avant-garde artists or whatever.

Shout-out to tgirls who work at Taco Bell. Thank u queen, society would collapse without you

[snkrfnd]

Over twenty years ago my big brother got me a job at a Taco Bell in the St. Louis suburbs-West County. He warned me that it was the “gay Taco Bell”, but since I was coming from the “gay Howard Johnson’s” I wasn’t shocked. It turns out it was the black trans women Taco Bell complete with black trans women in management. And they’d worked out an arrangement with the local teen Narcotics Anonymous group so that twice a week we would shut down the drive thru and the dining room and exclusively serve 60+ teens in various stages of recovery. And many of the women I worked with were in various stages of being out or transitioning and they were from all generations from teens to over 50. One woman I worked with had a regular corporate job presenting as a man 9-5 Mon-Fri and then came to Taco Bell and worked 6pm -2am Friday and Saturday night so she could be herself surrounded by other black transwomen in those stolen weekends. And we had customers come from all over the metro area because they knew they could be themselves in the dining room. I only worked there from 1999-2001 but for young me, this was a vital, formative experience. Some of the girls came from north city all the way out to the “gay Taco Bell” on Manchester in west county because they heard it was safe to work there. Like- I know times have changed but they haven’t changed much in 20 years. I’m still convinced that for lgbt youth, finding a job at your city’s version of the “gay Taco Bell” is key to survival.

[natalieironside]

Thank u for sharing this with us

[fanzines]

'Transfem DIY HRT' and 'Transmasc DIY HRT' are a pair of zines aimed at teaching transgender people how to safely self-administer DIY Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT).

Both zines are 100% free to download here from Little Mouse (who also made the zine). Print, share and distribute to those who need it!

The information contained in this zine is collated from, and openly available from, DIYHRT.info. PS: Follow FANZINES on BlueSky... 👀

[victusinveritas]

[lavenderprose]

In my mind, Shane's username is ShaneHollanderHockeyPlayer because there is another Shane Hollander who is a forensic anthropologist out of UC Berkeley who got the username ShaneHollander first. Shane's username was originally just ShaneHollander24 but that didn't differentiate between them enough and Shane was waking up once or twice a month to DMs like "Hey Shane my name is CSI Sanders with the Las Vegas crime lab we wanted to get your opinion on this scene in Henderson NV, hope you don't mind got your info from your office out in SF they said this was the best way to contact you" and several dozen images of what is clearly a violently murdered skeleton.

Shane Hollander the anthropologist has a standing invitation to any of the Metros games against the Mission and donates generously to the Irina Foundation every year. Also, he had to deactivate his professional accounts for a few days in 2021. Shane and Ilya sent him an edible arrangement. Ilya wrote "Sorry bone man :(" on the card when Shane wasn't looking.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I think it's really funny how the practice of bleeping out profanity is not only completely ineffective as a censorship tool, it's had the opposite effect of creating an environment where it's ridiculously easy to edit apparent profanity into footage that doesn't actually contain it. Like you can just grab any audio or video clip and bleep out anything and people will automatically mentally insert profanity in there it fucking rules.

[kyleblackpaw]

my favorite example of this is the count's song from sesame street where they censor the word "count"

[glorious-spoon]

honestly i think the selling point of romance for me (and where it usually fails to land) is 'can i imagine these people sharing an in-joke'

like, are they in cahoots. can they laugh together. do they have a similar enough or at least complementary enough outlook that they can connect over something being funny (even if it's funny in a fucked up way! sometimes those are the best in-jokes!)

that's not necessarily true love in and of itself, but it does feel like an essential component to me

[laerugo]

[linguisticparadox]

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

[ri-writing]

Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain.  You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free. 

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this.  I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this.  Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this.  When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here.  It’s a great resource.

[linguisticparadox]

Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

[wanderingchaos]

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

[athenadark]

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

[the-haiku-bot]

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[elfwreck]

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

[noswordinourlake]

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

[stevespookington]

browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change

https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

[rostekhorn]

Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:

And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.

[trambrosia]

And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.

This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book

[violet-periwinkle]

GUYS GUYS GUYS

THEY RELEASED THE COYOTE VS ACME TRAILER !!!!!

WE WON !!!

[chucktaylorupset]

sorry the looney tunes movie that got buried by a massive company for corporate purposes is about fighting back against a massive company trying to bury incidents for corporate purposes?

[znj]

[waspsinyouryard]

admittedly i know little of the subject but one would think, at 45 years of age, he would be a ryan goose by now

[theprideful-deactivated20251201]

“select your gender” except the options are uquiz aesthetics

[theprideful-deactivated20251201]

less of this

more of this

this is what im talking about. that’s gender

[theprideful-deactivated20251201]

@scentedluminarysoul @stelte23

more gender

[notajerusalemcricketd-deactivat]

Most inclusive option:

[professional-chaotic-dumbass]

[cannibalcaprine-deactivated2024]

[uploads DOOM as my gender]

[foone]

So fun fact that won't surprise anyone who knows me: I've done this. My job had a inclusivity survey that pissed me off (they included "transgender" and "cis gender" as possible responses for "what's your gender?", alongside "male" and "female"!) but I noticed they didn't put a length limit on the gender field if you selected "other". So...

They didn't accept binary files (which is fine, my gender isn't binary) so I had to base64 encode doom, but even though it froze chrome for nearly 8 hours, I was able to paste a full copy of the Doom install disks into the form.

as a side project while waiting on chrome to unfreeze, I developed a way to encode Doom into PNG files that could safely be posted on Twitter without them being corrupted into JPEGs, as Twitter loves to do.

Anyway, the thread is here, but really all you need is this one screenshot.

[notajerusalemcricketd-deactivat]

Oh my god they ran doom on their gender

[professionalchaoticdumbass]

[chillywillow1]

Captcha test

[the-big-mood]

Stuff like this makes me question if I’m actually passionate about anything

Although he lost the use of both legs, Xie Junwu from Jiangxi Province never lost his sense of freedom. Watch him take on a skateboard from

[angealainn]

[solongfranklloydwright]

the french beatles

[solongfranklloydwright]

jean, paul, george, et ringeaux

[solongfranklloydwright]

[high-quality-tiktoks]

it’s been a few days and he loves it

[claptrap14]

[weerewolf-mullets]

I desperately need smut writers to understand the use of lubricant during sex. Please for the love of fuck remember to add a quick "x grabbed the lube" in ur anal smut BC if it's not mentioned at all I'm going to assume they're going at it dry. Unless u want them going in dry, then fucking go off king.