how are you gonna be 31 and posting fandom content bro leave it to the teenagers
People 10 and 20 years older than me are writing your favorite fanfics, and drawing your favorite characters. You'd have no fandom without the people you think are 'too old' to have hobbies.
Who the heck do you think started modern day fandom with Star Trek? It sure wasn't teenagers.
Who do you think makes professional quality fanart and fanfic? People who've been practicing it for ten, fifteen, twenty years!
Or even people who've been practicing it for thirty, forty or fifty!!!!!
example: Diane Duane. Currently in her seventies. Star Trek fangirl since the original run. Goddess-level Ascended Fan who has created official tie-in works in more forms of media than pretty much anyone else alive, possibly even Rodenberry himself because they didn't have audiobooks or video games when he was with us. Writer of Spock's World, The Wounded Sky, Doctor's Orders in TOS. Co-writer of TNG script Where no one has gone before, and writer of the tie-in novel Dark Mirror among others. Writer of a half-dozen Star Trek Comics. She has adapted her own work for audio, has written for the Star Trek manga series, has written short Trek fiction for anthologies, and plotted and wrote the video game Star Trek: the Kobayashi Alternative.
In other fandoms, she was a personal friend of Terry Pratchett himself. As a scriptwriter, she's also worked in fandoms like Scooby-Doo, Transformers, My Little Pony, Gargoyles, Batman: The Animated Series, Spiderman: Unlimited (and a trilogy of tie-in novels still in print) and Barbie: Fairytopia. ...And that's just cherry-picking her imdb page.
While she can't give out specific details due to Obvious Reasons, she's still active in the Sherlock BBC fandom - and there's a specific subset of her fans who love guessing which of the legendary fanfics might be her work (I am not one of them, BTW, as it is None Of My Business. I'm old-school that way).
Fandom is not for teenagers. Fandom is for everyone of good heart and enthusiasm for a good (or even bad! No judgement!) story.
Just wait until you grow up, Anonymous OP. Wonder how long it'll take you to change your mind.
...Some days when you're feeling tired and sad, and wondering "what the hell is the point... why am I even bothering?"... it's nice to be reminded that you're supported.
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I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me TONIGHT (Jun 25) in PHILLY and TOMORROW (Jun 26) in CHICAGO.
It's not often that someone on a panel says something that makes my jaw drop, but that's what happened earlier this week when the moderator of a panel I was on in Toronto described jailbreaking an iPhone as "rampant theft of IP."
Some context: the panel was in Toronto, and the nominal subject was "digital sovereignty," though all the panelists (except me) interpreted that to mean "sovereign AI." All of their interventions were focused on how Canada could build and operate its own AI, which I found very weird, since there is no AI-related threat to Canadian sovereignty. If Donald Trump ordered OpenAI and Anthropic to turn off all of Canada's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change: every firm, ministry and household would operate as per normal:
Now, that's not to say that Canada doesn't have a digital sovereignty problem – it really does! Donald Trump and US Big Tech have fused into a single entity and Trump now orders US tech giants to terminate the online accounts of foreign officials who displease him. When Microsoft turns off your Office365 account, you lose your working files, your calendar, your address book, your email archives, and the Outlook email address you use to log in to every online service:
So while turning off Canada's chatbots would not inflict any real harm on Canada, M365 terminations could paralyse any federal or provincial ministry, any structurally important firm, and most Canadian households.
The threat doesn't stop there: Trump can also order Apple and Google to brick any of Canada's iPhones or Android devices – terminating individual officials' mobile access, or terminating whole provinces. It's not just iPhones either – Trump can also brick any tractor in Canada:
This is the real digital sovereignty risk, and Canada needs to address it now. But Canada can't – our hands are tied…by us. In 2012, we passed a law, The Copyright Modernization Act, that criminalizes "jailbreaking," meaning that Canadian companies can't go into business figuring out how to install different app stores on phones and consoles, or change the firmware in tractors to enable independent repair, or reliably export their cloud data to rival Canadian services:
Why did we pass this law? Because the Americans promised us free trade and no tariffs on our exports if we agreed to it. That's a promise Trump tore up, but we're still holding up our end of the bargain. That's crazy. It means that American companies can use Canada's courts to destroy Canadian businesses that offer the Canadian people tools to help them escape Big Tech's sleazy ripoffs of their data and cash.
And boy do those US tech companies take in a lot of cash. The US ad-tech duopoly of Google/Meta rig the advertising market, taking 51% out of every ad dollar through an illegal, collusive arrangement called "Jedi Blue":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
The US mobile tech duopoly takes 30 cents out of every dollar spent via an app, by forcing every app vendor to use their payment processors, which charge 1,000% more than any other payment processor in Canada. That means that every time a subscriber to a Canadian news site signs up through an app, 30% of the lifetime subscription revenue for that Canadian subscriber is funneled to one of two California companies.
The corollary, of course, is that if Canadian businesses were free to compete with US companies – if Canada stopped foolishly holding up its end of the bargain that Trump has dishonoured – then it would be as though every Canadian news outlet increased its subscriber base by 25% overnight! What's more, the Canadian companies that sell those jailbreaking tools would make billions out of US Big Tech's billions.
And that's where the moderator of this week's panel comes in. When I finished making this pitch, they turned to the rest of the panel and said something like, "Well, apart from rampant theft of IP, what else could Canada do to secure its digital sovereignty?"
That's when my jaw dropped. Making it possible for, say, a Canadian company to sell its own Canadian game to a Canadian customer, in Canada, without giving Apple or Xbox 30% of the purchase price, is not "theft of IP." It's not "theft of IP" for a rightsholder to sell their own products to their customers. It's not "theft of IP" for a Canadian owner of a device to decide for themselves which software they want to run on it. If buying software from the company that made it and installing it on a device you own is "theft of IP," then so is putting non-Nike shoelaces in your Air Jordans.
It's not "theft of IP." It's just good business. Moreover, it's the kind of good business that created America's tech giants in the first place. As Jeff Bezos tells his suppliers: "Your margin is my opportunity." US tech giants make whopping margins around the world, thanks to the anticircumvention laws that the US Trade Rep crammed down every US trading partner's throats, laws that allow US companies to use other countries' legal system to destroy their competitors.
I've been mulling this "rampant theft of IP" remark for a couple of days now, but it wasn't until a reader wrote to me to remind me about Apple's origin story that I realised what the punchline is. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak financed their first product launch by selling "Blue Boxes" (devices that let you make free long distance calls by cheating the phone company) door to door in the UC Berkeley dorms:
Now, I'm not going to weep for the lost revenues that Jobs and Woz denied to AT&T. After all, AT&T was stealing that money from its customers, which is why, just a few years later, a federal court convicted AT&T of monopolistic practices and broke the company up:
But the legal term for what a Blue Box does is "toll theft," which is to say, Apple – a company literally founded on theft – now makes the majority of its profits by convincing people that making a competing product is literally stealing. A company whose founders got their seed capital by marketing illegal circumvention devices now markets products designed to make it a crime for a rightsholder to sell their own work to you.
I've long said that "every pirate wants to be an admiral":
But this is just a little too on the nose. When Apple went into business selling products to rip off the phone company, that wasn't progress. When Canadians go into business selling devices that let iPhone owners use their own property to do legal things – like buying copyrighted works directly from their creators – that is not piracy.
Canada has a real digital sovereignty problem, and it's not AI. Canada will not mitigate its digital sovereignty risk by successfully launching a Made in Canada version of the money-losingest venture in the history of the human species:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/
Canada's real digital sovereignty problem is its reliance on the apps, cloud services and devices that are tethered to the American cloud, access to which Donald Trump could – and does – terminate whenever he feels grumpy. Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada and turn us into "the 51st state." He's trying to steal Alberta right now. Our digital sovereignty risk is the risk of Trump paralysing our country in order to steal Alberta – or the entire shop.
We can address that digital sovereignty risk – and make billions at the same time – by legalising jailbreaking and becoming the world's "disenshittification nation." Unlike a program to build Canadian AI, this will make billions, not lose them – and unlike Canadian AI, this will make our country more resilient and safer, by delivering products that Canadians – and the world – want to buy and will pay us a fortune for.
Big Tech's margins are our opportunity.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
ive heard the argument that transitioning is a "voluntary surgery" and so its not necessary. while its true that medical transition is an elective surgery (all elective surgery means is that youre not going to die immediately if you dont have it now, as opposed to emergency surgery), most surgeries are elective. still, ive seen people argue, "would you let someone cut off a limb if they didn't want it?" and id say, yes. ive seen it done before
ive worked in hospitals for a long time, and years ago i saw a patient very frequently. he came in once every month or so, inpatient. one day he told me what he kept coming in for. he had a knee replacement, but it kept rejecting. so the hospital would take it out, keep him, and then put it back in. he told me that he was fighting to just have it amputated. he said he was in his 70s and he just didnt have enough time anymore to spend it all in the hospital. he said that he felt he could live a better and more fulfilling life for the years he had left if they just took the leg off. he could get a prosthetic and just not have to go to the hospital all the time. he said that the doctors were fighting him on it but that was what he wanted. i said that i understood, and that i hoped he could get that amputation
anyway, some time passed, and i saw him again. i asked whats up, he was beaming and said, "i got it done! they took the leg off!" i was like, "hell yeah man, how are you feeling?" and he said "well it hurts right now but im not gonna have to come here all the time anymore." he left the hospital some time later, and i never saw him again, which is all you can hope for when you work in a hospital
he also had an elective surgery, a "voluntary" surgery. he chose to have an amputation because he was suffering with the limb intact. and thats really what we're doing too. yes, transition surgeries are elective, but that doesnt mean that theyre not necessary to improve the quality of our lives
idk. i told my dad about this years ago, and my dad said he couldnt understand choosing that. but i could. and i hope hes still out of the hospital. i hope he never goes back
"Scientific fraud doesn't make sense, why would you claim you can turn mercury into gold when everyone can see you can't" well because the vast vast vast majority of scientific fraud is not Elizabeth Holmes Theranos level chicanery but instead juicing the numbers (or the Western blots) to make the results more statistically significant in what is otherwise a fairly minor & straightforward paper
You're a grad student. You're already a semester behind. One of your experimental replicates failed halfway through a 6 week experiment and you didn't notice til you collected the data. You no longer have the statistical power you need and have to start over, with money you don't have and no time. Telling no one and making up some numbers that supports the pattern you can see in the other data is a huge temptation.
And if you succeed at that fraud—because, realistically, no one is going to check—the deadlines don't stop coming and that temptation is always there. You need another grant, you need another publication, another pilot study, on and on and on.
The people who finally get nabbed for scientific fraud, like spider biologist Jonathan Pruitt or the many medical researchers Elisabeth Bik catches, typically were getting away with it for yearsss. And none of them were claiming they could cure the common cold or turn dogshit into gold. They were publishing unassuming papers, with reasonable results. The pressure for publishing above all else is a perverse incentive.
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When you manage a fabric store in a midwest town, you see this played out in real time. Young women coming in during that first year of marriage - when their husbands go to dental college - pert, bubbling with creative plans. Then, four years on, you help them shift to the reality of balancing budget with creativity - and they learn the value of that inexpensive flatfold table that they used to badmouth - to make that 2nd & 3rd baby their own quilts. And they're exhausted. And they're scared. And they are 1000 miles away from family.
And you have your staff play with their kids while you hold them in the tiny restroom as they come completely undone because they just found out that their golden boy husband is having an affair with the someone he's been doing residency with for the past three years.
He confessed that he'd rather be with the other woman but she's of a different faith and it's more important to have kids than to be happy. And no. No he will not grant her a divorce. And he will not stop seeing the other woman - because he's a man. It's his right.
TRUE story.
Also - She was NOT THE ONLY ONE to fall to pieces in our store for similar reasons.
I loath the ideology of "tradwives". It is a false doctrine preach by Patriarchy not a divine being.
This is 100% what happened to the host mom I've been au-pairing for. And to many other moms my friends have been au-pairing for.
Married out of college, 4 kids, he spent 15 years building up his career while she took care of the house and the kids. When he was earning $600k a year suddenly he started to pull away - she wasn't as pretty anymore, the kids were loud, the house was a mess... She wasn't good enough anymore. He got himself a flat. He got her me and my precedessors to help with the kids. No, they can't divorce, that would make him pay her money for the kids and he didn't like that. Every once in a while a bill would be unpaid. My weekly checks would bounce. We lived in a $1,5mil house around DC and our gas or water was turned off more than once.
Somehow he was always out of money.
By accident she learned from a friend of a friend that he was actually seeing a young lady lawyer for a few years now. It wasn't her, it wasn't lost interest. He was just a piece of shit.
Thankfully, she had family that took no shit and they stood behind her and borrowed her money for lawyers to force the divorce now that she had proof of him cheating. She's spent tens of thousands to get there while he was resisting every step of the way - because without divorce he wouldn't have to pay her alimony, he could just throw scraps whenever he wanted and still pretend to be a good dad.
She's spent tens of thousands and two years to free herself from this man, and when she could finally go to work (thank fuck she finished college) she was earning $25k a year.
She only managed to get away with the support of her parents and family. Through the au-pair grapevine I've known other families like that. Too many. Lady down the street tried to commit suicide when same happened to her - she was from Taiwan and had no support to get free. And people around scorned her for being "dramatic" - women who held on to their places with their fingertips talked shit about her, because their own husbands would never...! Right?
This? This is the kind of shit that first wave feminists and suffragettes were fighting against. Hell, even into second-wave feminism.
This? Is why conservatives want to take away no-fault divorce--because if some dude says no to a divorce and you don't have any (IRON-TIGHT) evidence of cheating? Then you're stuck in that situation and he doesn't have to pay a drop toward you and your kids. He can go get a flat, fuck his mistress, and you will starve with your kids until you can get some kind of proof of him cheating and a judge who likes you.
Now imagine all of this horror movie shit, AND you can't open a bank account without this piece of shit opening it with you. That was what women dealt with until about the 70s when we were finally allowed to open bank accounts with a man's signature.
That is what conservatives and fundies want to take you back to. When this shit was just the fucking norm.
There are old white guys still alive who remember who damn nice it was when a woman couldn't open a bank account without a man's signature and his dad could go live a double life with a mistress with zero repercussions and oh how they slather and drool for those times. And how they have waxed poetic about these halcyon days to their desperate daddy-issues sons now eager to please and without the social skills or emotional maturity to understand the fucked up nature of it all.
I'm willing to bet there's like 2 or 3 Tradhusbands(tm) out there for every Tradwife you see, they just haven't found someone they can sink their claws into. Which should maybe terrify you. This Tradwife(tm) movement should really be considered a canary in the coal mine.
Kneading bread dough is the most grounding thing for me. So I decided to make some rolls to relieve some stress and make something nice.
@stealingyourbones has made some delightful food abominations, which taught me I can replace the water in bread with almost any liquid.
So I tried Miso.
The yeast loved it and frothed up super fast. Mixing miso broth with the egg and oil smelled funky. The dough didn’t rise any fluffier than usual but the texture feels good. Then I decided to roll in some black garlic and green onion. I’d add nori crumbled up but I ran out.
This is amazing. It tastes like if miso soup was solid. The flavor is immaculate. It’s just missing the nori flavor. I can add that next time because I am 100% making this again.
- mix in slowly with a fork until it’s hard to stir with the fork, then stir together with hands until it stops sticking to your skin when you rub your hands together.
- knead the dough about 10min until it starts pushing back (it gets springy)
Let the dough rest for 30min.
(I make a redneck proof box by microwaving a cup of water and quickly replacing the water with the dough bowl and shutting the door to give it a warm place to nap. Do not microwave the dough itself by reflex.)
Roll out the dough and add any flavors you like. For the miso soup bread I chopped up a couple black garlics, and a handful of green onion. Roll it up like cinnamon rolls, cut into 12, and roll each into a ball shape.
Stick in a greased 9x13 casserole dish and let the dough rise to double size. (About 40min-1hr depending on how warm your kitchen is.) (the redneck proof box won’t fit my casserole dish so I stick the rolls on top of the oven while it preheats with a dish towel over it.)
Preheat the oven to 350 and when the dough looks nice and squishy bake it for 20min.
You can brush butter on top if you want. That would look pretty and help a sprinkling of furikake stick after you pull it out of the oven. If you wanna up the miso taste you can also spread a very thin layer of miso paste in before you roll it up with the other fillings. I’m gonna try that next time.
Bake! Eat! Enjoy! Knead all your frustrations into the bread then cleanse it with fire! Lemme know how yours turn out 💕🍀✨🥖
we can really recommend making bread using tomato juice instead of water, and adding garlic and herbs to the mix - the yeast loves the tomato too, so the bread tends to be really fluffy, which means it goes stale faster - but that's really not a problem, because you can't stop eating this pizza toast
These pescatarian birds are directly exposed to PFAS contamination due to the island's position near the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.
While continued vigilance a regulation is needed, this data indicates that regulations are working to reduce PFAS concentrations in marine ecosystems.
Yes!!!! I did a review of literature on PFASs in human drinking water about half a year ago, and there is a lot of really good progress! Please celebrate this, please don't let this solution be forgotten (at least so quickly) as the ozone layer or acid rain.
We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!
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With sound being very important:
The human in the video is silent, and you only hear the general crinkle of packaging, the friction of the cap going on, and then the vigorous fluid shaking sound. Near the end there's some sound of fabric-on-fabric from the human's clothing.
When the milk replacer powder is being poured in, the kitten has a low, whiny, growly sound. The sounds grow in length as it sees the cap going on. They turn into loud and long meows.
When the shaking happens, the cat loses its shit, and it becomes very shrill, very loud, yowling and screaming like it's in a fight.
Then it notices the nipple is in reach it abruptly stops all screaming, latches on, and very rapid sucking-sounds happen. This continues while the cat is moved back to the bed and deposited there.
Didn’t anticipate one of the bonuses of going to a drag show in a smaller more conservative town would be getting to see a bro who clearly wandered into the wrong part of the bar by mistake experience what looked to be a transcendent awakening upon seeing his first drag show.
Pleased to report that after a day of this i am not longer craving caper brine and my mouth is not dry as usual. There's some good suggestions in the notes too that I want to try.
-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)
-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt
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as a small dick haver people really underestimate the versatility. and if you need a bigger one for whatever reason? penis extender. they’re cheap and they work great.
this is the kind of positive can-do attitude that I love to see
And that's why I start foaming at the mouth when I hear " we need more shelters". NO. We need more HOUSING for unhoused people. We need a system where a person does nor become immediately homeless because they lost a job or got sick. System supporting someone with mental or addiction issues so they can function IN the housing. A shelter is a temporary and often shifty solution. Stop lobbying for "more shelters", start lobbying for housing.
