Ask me about Pathfinder Pit Spells

"Using AI to design flyers looks cheap and tacky" 👍 I completely agree.

air travel is a mess? shortage of air traffic controllers - for some mysterious reason

logistics a mess? shortage of truck drivers - for some mysterious reason

public transit can't meet demand? shortage of bus drivers - for some mysterious reason

We even mysteriously have shortages of doctors, nurses, teachers... FOR SOME MYSTERIOUS REASON

90% of the volunteers were wealthy retired neurotypical cishet white women. That meant that for basically every call these people received there was a pre-existing power dynamic where the caller was well below the call-handler, and the call was consequently handled totally paternalistically, never with any sense that the volunteer might actually have something to learn from the caller. The similarity to the typical patient-GP/PCP dynamic was really striking.

Most of the callers were prisoners, homeless, or people who had recently stopped taking anti-psychotic meds. I think many of the volunteers enjoyed the feeling of the power dynamic that was obvious in these calls. If you spend most of your social time with people of the same high social class as you, I guess you might find it refreshing to encounter people who remind you that you've actually done well out of life, only from a safe distance and through a phone ofc.

We also got a lot of trans callers. Hearing how the volunteers talked to these callers was a really radicalising experience. "Why do you think you're a woman?" "Why do you think you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Is there a sexual component to it? Maybe something that happened in your childhood?" "What do the other girls at school think about you calling yourself a boy?", plus the obvious constant misgendering and pronoun "mix-ups", saying, "Oh sorry, miss, your voice sounds like a man's so it's confusing."

People would say this stuff during training too, and the people training us would say it was correct. It's not like they were letting their bigotry cause them to deviate from policy, bigotry was the policy. I remember there was one senior volunteer who was a retired cis lesbian police officer, and I asked her about handling trans callers and she just repeated back all the same bigoted nonsense everyone else thought (at the time I put that down to her being a cop, not being aware back then that being a cis lesbian is no guarantee at all of an absence of transphobic views.)

It didn't take long for me to start getting reprimanded for having too much empathy for the callers. I was an unusual volunteer in that I had actually been in the same position as a lot of the callers. I was trans (albeit not out yet), I was frequently suicidal, I had been on anti-depressants (incredibly I was the only volunteer out of around 150 with that experience), I had experienced CSA and domestic abuse, I had lived through times when I had a zero bank balance, I had eaten food out of a bin because I had no money, I had been heavily addicted to alcohol and nicotine.

It meant I normally had some commonality with all the callers that I could use to make sure I was talking to them in the way I would've wanted to be talked to, i.e. as an equal. I would actually let the caller direct the conversation rather than directing it myself (which was the policy), I would show genuine interest in their story, I wouldn't tell them to hurry up because there were other callers with "real problems". After a while, I couldn't handle it and I just left, not because of the stress of dealing with the callers, but the stress of dealing with the other volunteers.

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH EVERYBODY*

here's the lgbtq tag trending as it does regularly due to pornbots catfishing using the same stolen photos from the same trans woman on the same trending tags page

remember the year in review? this was one of the featured tags

here's tumblr staff stating that making death threats towards trans women isn't a violation of the ToS or user guidelines

type of shit you can just say to trans women on this website. same person btw

here's tumblr staff terminating me for appealing the explicit flag on a post immediately before accepting said appeal and then terminating my already terminated blog to change the termination reason to something i can't appeal when I appealed the termination for explicit content

here's tumblr staff doing the exact same thing a second time

here's tumblr staff flagging SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY REBLOGS of a year old post with 15,000 notes as sexually explicit despite it not actually showing anything

here's SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY REBLOG of a post with gifs of two fully nude people fucking center frame being flagged as sexually explicit and the same gifs in the trending tags thumbnails

here's tumblr letting people blaze sissy hypno captions even though anything actually mentioning trans women gets denied

here's tumblr giving my original blog of 13 years a special kind of mature flag that automatically marked every single post i made as mature content separate from the actual content label

here's one of the pictures of the PMMM gachapon toys from the photoset of them that someone reported as CSAM that tumblr terminated me for - one of the two surviving images from it, from back when they actually bothered to moderate posts instead of just hitting the nuke button without looking

here's tumblr instantly denying my appeal for these terminations before I even get the email where they assure me they will carefully review it

here's tumblr terminating me 5 times in the weeks it took them to remove a burner blog and a single post encouraging people to mass report me and harass me forever over completely fabricated claims

here's tumblr flagging my already mature-flagged blog as mature out of the blue 15 minutes before dropping the age verification shit

and here's the episode of the anime that I posted a screencap from that they flagged as sexually explicit, denied my appeal on twice, and then marked my blog mature the first time for posting - available for viewing on youtube with a TV-14 age rating

but I'm hearing there's a NSFW-friendly ko-fi alternative built on atproto that's actively in the works, and being vetted by lawyers right now. as torrent-princess (OP) says, you should be able to swap out payment processors while keeping your account intact. this matters since even if stripe removes support, you'll still have a shop and all of your links intact. (ATproto is an infrastructure that bsky is built on, but is far bigger than bsky with far more opportunities.)

additionally, the Free Speech Coalition is working on a credit union specifically for adult work (including kink art) - here's the link so you can add your interest & support. Since this will be built by sex workers, there'll be far less risk of being debanked for spurious and puritanical reasons.

on a domain TLD level, there's an initiative here for a .furry domain built from the ground up by seasoned furries; it's unclear whether they'll support NSFW, but it's yet another promising turn of events for a group that's been similarly affected by censorship.

it has been a while, here is a new commission i got :)