Evolving Volans

New addition to the Trans Guy Archive!

Hey guys, the Free Speech Coalition looks serious about starting an adult industry credit union and they need our help to demonstrate to regulators that enough people would use it.

(and yes, credit unions can issue credit cards!)

Fill out this form if you're interested:

"Mastercard has not barred any legal transaction" is, technically, a true statement – because Mastercard is not the one processing the transactions in the first place. Mastercard does not deal directly with any merchant, and in fact typically refuses to communicate with merchants at all; there's always a payment processing service sitting in between Mastercard and the merchant, whether that's Stripe or Paypal or any of dozens of other service providers.

Consequently, there are two layers of service agreements in place: the agreement between Mastercard and the payment processing service, and the agreement between the payment processing service and the merchant. That second layer of service agreements, between the payment processing service and the merchant, is where all of these content restrictions are being imposed. Mastercard can thus truthfully claim that they aren't barring legal transactions.

Now, if you've been paying attention, you've probably already spotted the issue: if the content restrictions are being imposed upon the merchants by individual payment processing services and not by Mastercard, why do all of those payment processing services seem to have exactly the same content restrictions?

That's where the critical sleight of hand comes in: while Mastercard's own terms of service do not require payment processing services to bar transactions of particular types, their ToS does require payment processors to bar transactions which could be damaging to the Mastercard brand. What constitutes damage to the Mastercard brand is not defined; it means whatever Mastercard wants it to mean. The payment processing services are thus in a position where they can be held in breach of Mastercard's terms of service for basically any reason, which gives them a strong incentive not to test any boundaries.

"Mastercard did not communicate with Valve directly, despite our request to do so," a Valve representative said. "Mastercard communicated with payment processors and their acquiring banks. Payment processors communicated this with Valve, and we replied by outlining Steam’s policy since 2018 of attempting to distribute games that are legal for distribution.

A recent analysis conducted by the AI startup Oumi at the behest of The New York Times found that the AI-generated summaries, which appear above Google search results, are accurate around 91 percent of the time.  In a sense, that may sound like an impressive figure. But here’s an even more impressive one: five trillion. That’s roughly the number of search queries that Google processes every year, translating to tens of millions of wrong answers that the AI Overviews are providing every hour — and hundreds of thousands every minute, the analysis calculated. In other words, Google has created a misinformation crisis. Studies have shown that people tend to trust what an AI tells them without question, with one report finding that only 8 percent of users actually double checked an AI’s answer. Another experiment found that users still listened to AI when it gave them the wrong answer nearly 80 percent of the time — a grim trend the researchers dubbed “cognitive surrender.” Large language models adopt an authoritative tone and can confidently present fabricated information as fact when it can’t immediately glean a straight answer. Add the convenience that Google’s AI Overviews offer, and it’s easy to imagine untold numbers of users taking its summaries at their word.

Seriously, this is such a great way to go about organizing your home.

I really can’t express how much easier your life can be when you accept that there’s no objectively right way to do this kind of stuff, especially when you let go of the idea that it’s a moral failure when you can’t do something the “correct way” nor is it evidence of you being lazy.

In this video Rowan Ellis explores how moral panics form, spread, and become powerful cultural forces.

She traces recurring patterns across history - such as the satanic panic, the lavender scare, and anti‑LGBTQ+ hysteria - and shows how fear, misinformation, and media amplification create “folk devils.”

She illustrates this with a fictional “Shapeland” example. A country dominated by squares will demonize circles. She connects this to the real‑world trans panic in the UK.

Ellis argues that today’s anti‑trans moral panic follows the same blueprint as past queer moral panics, driven by disinformation, sensationalist headlines, and political opportunism, with harmful consequences for trans people’s safety, rights, and daily lives.

no but you can FORCE it away. use ublock origin and copy paste the blacklist i made into the filters to be able to remove the bullshit AI overview that google forces. it also removes youtube's forced ads (at least until they fix it)

you can also use the ublacklist extension and use this blacklist of AI image generation websites to curate your google image results

A little less than 10 years ago i was a teenager on the internet who watched cringe compilations on youtube. Literally every single person in those clips were either feminists, trans, autistic, furries, fat, mentally ill in some form, or LITERAL CHILDREN, etc.

It was QUITE LITERALLY an alt right pipeline. We were laughing at feminists protesting for gender equality, for fucks sake. My youtube recommendations were plagued with right wing videos and debates from watching these.

You are 100% allowed to dislike certain media and fandoms and whatnot but publicly shaming them is not only low-brow, but close minded and gullible behaviour, to say the least. Is that person with a Sonic self insert really hurting you at the end of the day? When you think other peoples harmless behaviour needs to be policed, you are already slipping.

> ask the people if it's objects or gambling

> they don't understand

> pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is objects and what is gambling

> they laugh and say "it's a good collectible sir"

> look up how to buy a collectible

Labubus are blind bags but they're also blind bags with some of the most insane dark patterns stacked on top. The online store for them has a thing where they tell you what you got the second you order it online so that you can immediately try again if you didn't get the thing you wanted.

experiencing consequences for legitimately bad behavior often feels absolutely terrible. even worse than being punished for something you didn't do, in my experience! if you allow your emotions to dictate whether you think you have been mistreated, you're going to treat the people YOU mistreat like they have harmed you unforgivably.

it's an empathetic injury, that's why it's *so* fast, so severe, and the "reasoning" can change so much even when the same story is told again; it's not pre-planned, there's no mastermind string-pulling or whatever, it's "Ah fuck, why do I feel so bad, it can't be my fault, so I need to explain why it is your fault".

I wish I could tell past me this. It would have shattered a lot of the illusions of control built into my environment if I had been able to see how many of the lies were just made up on the literal spot and that the people telling them were not expecting their actions to have consequences.

the biggest thing I've learned about people who get into abusive and manipulative behavior patterns is that something can be absolutely terrible and indefensible and also, at its core, DEEPLY pathetic.

we don't want to see people who do that kind of harm as pathetic because there's this feeling that that somehow excuses their behavior. it doesn't. a lot of the time its behavior that they saw Work for people with power over them when they were children, and now they think it's the only behavior that Works when interacting with people over whom they have power. because it connects back to early developmental learning re: interpersonal interactions, this also often explains why people approach these situations like they're the victim -- it's a child headspace, it's a path that was originally trodden during childhood, and childhood is a state defined by a lack of autonomy. which I think also acts as a way to insulate people from the need to consider other people's experiences and feelings -- when you're a kid it's absolutely vital to defensively hyperrocus on your own experience because nobody else will do that for you. no one does that for children, generally. and so, many people learn that prioritizing their feelings = dismissing other people's. anyway I'm rambling now and none of this is like. I don't have citations for it, lol, but this is the best way I have found to conceptualize these dynamics in Learning terms. because I truly do think that so many things in life are about Learning, and how we are initially taught that the world works.