Untitled?

Let no *man* steal your thyme. Complete, 300 words.

ONE YEAR LATER! The Ignoble Invasion of Prince Proculo is available for pre-order worldwide (links below)

A little bit for Monica, she's my wife

A little bit for Erica, for her strife

My books all go to Rita, cause she reads

My greenhouse goes to Tina, she plants trees

The furniture is Sandra's, on my lawn

Jewelry for Mary, she can pawn

Ashes go to Jessica, that's my plan

We are Beautiful in our Infinite Diversity

We are Never Going Away

We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used To It 🙌

Most importantly, to my queer Jewish friends, who have been ostracised from and made to feel unsafe in queer spaces, you matter and you are loved and glorious just as you are ❤️

Maybe don't be dicks about it? Let people come in, and give them a little raccoon mask and teach them how to have grubby little raccoon paws.

[text from Twitter user evacide: "Some of you have never had your home on the internet crumble beneath you like chalk, and it shows."]

You will realize that there are people you only know in a online space, and you will realize it when that space goes dark. You won't know the size and shape of space it takes up in your head and heart until it vanishes. Those little interactions on a daily, weekly, monthly, or even occasional basis mean nothing until they're gone, and suddenly there's a weird fucking hollow space when an icon on the other end of a screen just isn't there anymore - and not just one, but multitudes are gone.

You won't understand how you're mourning just a silly website, until you realize the way your day or week flowed around it like water around a boulder in a stream. Is it better or worse? That's not the question - how different is it? And how does that difference feel?

The first time a BBS I dialed into went dark, I realized there were people I enjoyed talking with that I would never chat with again. It's like they fell off the earth. "Were they friends" is not the question - suddenly there was a thunderclap of silence because people who had been there were suddenly gone, and I knew I would never ever talk with them again.

It's just a stupid hellsite until you realize it's all people. And you're a human animal who is hardwired to notice the absence of other humans. Capitalism foundationally sucks, but it is the foundation. Good or bad, right or wrong, money goes in and hellsite comes out. If money stops, hellsite goes away. You're looking at one of the last big bastions of old-school weirdness out there. They're not offering participatory monetization like ad-free and blaze to get rich, they're doing it to keep the lights on.

Let's talk about why you see those checkmarks and why I don't hide them.

Mostly, you can read it here.

I understand we like to hunt people who express cringe ideas for sport, because it's a great 30-second sop to mop away the powerlessness that we all feel in modern late stage capitalism. That's a fantastic way to end up bitter, alone, and hollow - I've sure seen that play out over the years.

The current owner of tumblr sure seems to me to be a slop-addled egomaniac who's increasing irrelevance in the world of tech is eroding the myth that most tech ceo's have propped their egos up with - which wouldn't matter if the fallout didn't happen to land on so many people (and so many of those disproportionately trans). The best damning endorsement I can give is that he's a social network CEO that isn't throwing nazi salutes at fascist rallies or gutting public policy that will kill millions more or inciting racist pogroms, all as part of trying to find relevance. It sure puts a dirty fucking smog over all of this.

But also, you don't have tumblr at home. You don't have it anywhere else. Separate from what you may think of the owner of this site, it's a fucking wonder and miracle that this weird funky garden still exists at all in the endless suburban hell of green monoculture lawns on all side. And when it gets paved over for shareholder reasons or some other bullshit, there's not gonna be anything on the sides or periphery that will re-seed it elsewhere.

The days where another social network site that will let even half the shit we yell about here, with any reasonable large group interaction, are over.

I haven't grabbed any new checkmarks in a couple of years. But I'm not deleting them either, because this is all we really have left. I remember the boxed in and narrow fucking world before the internet, before dial up BBS's. Nobody knew shit about fuck, and it sucked and that's where we're getting herded in the direction of.

This time I decided that historical laundresses probably knew what they were doing, and grabbed a metal pole to stir my DIY laundry cauldron and poke the floaty bits back under the surface. Historical laundresses were right, it works great.

As I stood there, I had a moment where I thought, ‘oh wow, so many women in my family tree must have done this exact set of motions throughout history.’ Which should be a humbling and heartwarming feeling of connection, right?

Wrong. I swear I could feel twenty generations of shtetl women going “For this you went to college? You want to work with old shmattes all day, fine, but you could have saved the tuition to buy a house.”

It's just the changing density of the air refracting light weirdly, so it looks like there's a reflection of the sky on the ground, which our brains often interpret as a pool of water. It can also happen upwards instead of downwards, especially at sea, when the air is much colder near the surface and a warm front appears above it:

I am once again begging people to realize that AI checker doesn’t work. it’s never worked. it’s notoriously known to have flagged human-made works as AI and AI-generated works as human-made. and by feeding it people’s works, you are feeding more works to AI, because apparently the machine itself is AI.