Enjoy your stay!

I'll add smth here cos I learned after posting this on IG that people still aren't entirely understanding how scary and dangerous this is. Ppl kept saying to me 'I can still buy your book in shops though' or 'Its okay, I'll order your book into my library!'

I dont give af about my book lol No one outside of Ace ppl ever read it, its yearly sales don't even cover a month of expenses for me.

The thing you should all be concerned about is that a totally benign unheard of book about someone's every day life is being banned. And those laws listed above are passing through US government right now. One of those laws would make it so that any teacher/librarian in the US could lose their job/go to prison for simply sharing 'ideology'- and I don't mean only lgbtq folk, these laws are attacking black history, civil rights history, disability rep in books. Just talking about these things will now legally be considered a 'dangerous ideology'.

And once that's set into law, the US government has backing via law to go ahead and say 'if these books aren't legally allowed in schools, then they shouldn't be allowed in shops, either.' And from there it sets up a great argument for 'The dangerous content in these books is lawfully being removed from public, shouldn't we be lawfully removing the people living out/promoting this ideology too?'

I can see why ppl don't fully understand how dangerous book bannings are, if they're not familiar with the history of fascism. If you're interested, there are plenty of graphic novels that share this history via first hand accounts- Maus, Persepolis, Banned Book Club.

But guess what? You're on limited time to get these via libraries...cos all three of these books are on banned lists too, and they got nothing to do with lgbtq rep, and everything to do with warning ppl about fascism.

And the US government knows it can get away with this, because they are passing these laws as we speak and barely anyone is doing anything about it or talking about it. I've been trying to talk about it for years and no one does anything except say to me 'don't worry, I'll buy your book!' or say its a badge of honour that I have a banned book.

Until.

Ilya is watching Shane interact with Luca one day. Luca says something and Shane repeats it in Luca's Swiss accent. Luca doesn't really seem to notice or care. Shane isn't acting like he's making fun of Luca. And when Ilya comes over, he even says 'hey' in Luca's accent.

And Ilya then does some googling. He comes across the phrase 'echolalia' and reads the sentence: "-especially when individuals feel comfortable or have a strong relationship with the person they are imitating."

We switched to using syncplay. After we choose a movie, I provide a download link to the video file ahead of time, everyone downloads it, and during the session proper all that syncplay does, is synchronizing play/pause state and current position. Very little bandwidth is used for this, the video quality for everyone is massively improved, and the overall experience is better as even several minute long disconnections are not a problem for as long as video is not paused/rewinded/forwarded by the room operator.