Eat Biscuit, Drink Flip

“I’m giving thanks that we don’t have to go through this for another year. Except we do, because those bastards went and put Christmas right in the middle, just to punish us.” - Adele Larson

While Christmas and general winter holiday films are by no means in short supply, films about Thanksgiving are few and far between. Televised Thanksgiving parades and Thanksgiving-themed cartoons and television episodes are available for your Turkey-day viewings, but whole movies about Thanksgiving aren’t a standard part of the U.S. holiday culture. Thankfully, the 90s gave us one perfect example: 1995′s Home for the Holidays.

HftH is the second film directed by Jodie Foster and follows a woman’s trip home to visit her family for Thanksgiving. Which sounds very simple, and in some ways it is, but the description still sells it short. Holiday movies have a habit of falling into schmaltzy sentimentality with very little substance. Not that those movies aren’t enjoyable, just that they have a tendency to feel too superficial. The images of holiday cheer and family togetherness in movies tend to be a bit too far removed from reality with everything wrapping up too neatly in the end. HftH, on the other hand, is the kind of movie that balances sentiment with a real sense of people and place. Your holiday may not look exactly like the Larsens’, but it feels familiar. It’s not neat, it’s not pretty, it’s not an all-out love fest of forgiveness, but it is family. Also, it’s totally fun.

sir/ma'am/insert correct honorific here.

you are going to get me to read a fic for a fandom I know exactly zero things about by posting many amusing snippets, aren't you?

not that I am upset or anything. And I am going to read it, and I almost certainly am not going to look up the source material first.

but I have no idea what red dwarf is

nonbinary-octopus asked: you have. a very particular and pleasantly amusing way of phrasing things. if it were not already past my bedtime I would go reread some of your fics again

fdgkjdfhglkjh she/her but whatever honorific u want!!

i have good news for you, due to the AU nature of this one I think you'll be 100% fine to read it without knowledge of the source material! i hope u enjoy it!!

this is Red Dwarf:

also I'm gonna guess that The Cat is the one in the zebra jacket (vibes????)

which means the guy on the end with the H on his forehead is probably Rimmer (process of elimination + also vibes. the probably-an-alien looks too cool to be Rimmer I think)

“Lister. There is at this very moment a very large, bald Canadian man cleaning our oven who says that you told him you could stay here. I did explain to him that there was absolutely no way you’d have invited anyone else to stay with us considering that this flat barely has enough space for the two of us, let alone waifs and strays, but he wouldn’t budge. Will you please come and tell him to get out?” “Oh, yeah.” Lister rubbed at his eyes foggily. “That’ll be Kryten.” Rimmer’s grip on the rail, if such a thing was possible, tightened. “Who is Kryten?” “The very large bald Canadian man cleaning our oven,” said Lister.

Kryten is an android in canon & a bald guy in my fic. Rimmer has the H bcos he's a hologram recreation of Lister's dead roommate. The Cat is literally a cat who is also a guy.

yeah it's a sci-fi comedy!! technically ran from 1988 through 2020 but in practice ran from 1988 to 1999 and has since sporadically put out new episodes. cast look like this now:

so if you're seeing job openings for screenwriters at places like netflix, amazon, paramount, etc and you're thinking "hey, maybe i'll apply and get my foot in the door," just know that you WILL be scabbing and you WILL be barred from ever obtaining WGA membership. permanently.

April 28, 2023

I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this

What is the EARN IT Act?

The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.

This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.

Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)

This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.

NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.

The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.

EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.

As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.

This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.

This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.

Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.

It will make CSAM much much worse.

One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.

(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)

The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.

I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.

HOW TO FIGHT BACK

EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.

CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.

This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.

(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.

2. Sign these petitions!

Link to Petition 1

Link to Petition 2

3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE

If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.

Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.

DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT

Hello,

I am writing to encourage you to cancel your subscription to the New York Times, in light of their consistently aggressively biased, irresponsible, and shoddy reporting on trans issues and stacking of their op-ed section with transphobic voices.

This is not a new problem, but it’s one that the NYT has compounded and doubled down on over the last few years. The open letter published yesterday is a remarkably civil overview of the issues with their reporting and the material harm that reporting has done; it doesn’t even touch on the op-ed stuff, which is absolutely vile. The NYT’s official response was to dismiss the signatories–including hundreds of NYT contributors and thousands of readers and other media professionals (including me)–as “activists” working at odds with the NYT’s nominal goal of journalistic integrity. The next day–today–they headlined their op-ed section with a defense of J.K. Rowling, who has done more to misinform and stoke the fires of transphobia–in both practice and official policy–than any other public figure, comparing her “persecution”–being correctly identified as transphobic–to that experienced by Salman Rushdie, and repeatedly misgendering trans men as women.

I am trying to figure out what to write about aside from perfume; I would like to do that 1-2 times a week, and then we have the bread and butter posts, some kind of longterm commentary content. (This is difficult to plan while I have fallen sick, AGAIN, with a head cold, but we persevere.) You would be able to read posts a day early on, say, a $5 Patreon level--that's my plan, but they would show up here for free, for sure. Here is my question:

I have not been reading the Dracula or Dracula Daily tags, but before the pandemic, I had been doing tweet threads on each chapter of the book (I made it through three before getting covid). It seems to me that Dracula may be discoursed to death now. There are several things I love about it and would like to talk about, but Tumblr may be... saturated by now. My alternative is to pick up with the Varney the Vampire recaps I was doing even longer ago. (I would go to those after I finished Dracula anyway.) What do you think I should do? A vote for Dracula is a vote for both; a vote for Varney is "We have had enough Dracula, honestly just skip to that."

Finishing up some Twilight content is not a poll option because I will be doing that anyway, knock on wood.