World's Most Normal Macaque Lover

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

Thousands of you called, good job!! Your voice matters! 🩷 Be happy with me today. This is a huge win!

i know a lot of people are going to hear the words "it passed through the senate" (as i've already heard it phrased in news articles, unfortunately) and panic. however, it has just passed through one step. this was not a full vote. this was a markup to get it out of committee. the full process it has to go through goes:

senate markup/committee -> senate floor -> house committee -> house floor -> president -> made into law.

its the same for bills that were introduced within the house, except it goes house -> senate instead of senate -> house.

on a bit of a happier note, the screen act failed to advance out of committee!

I was writing this earlier but lost the draft.

What's missing from this image?

I wouldn't expect you to know. It's my pronouns.

On my channel, I list my pronouns as he/they, for two reasons:

In case people want to know how to address me

To signal I welcome queer people in my community

Recently, I've noticed these have been disappearing. Now, I'd rather have my pronouns visible, for the reasons outlined above. I understand others might not, others might not even care. I just want mine to be seen. But, they keep vanishing!

Sure, YouTube is a massive platform, 21 years old and counting, full of moving parts. It's understandable that a feature introduced in 2024-ish might be a bit buggy on a site this ancient and this rapidly-changing. What I don't get is, why JUST the pronouns? I don't see subscriber counts disappearing. I don't see video counts disappearing.

In fact, both of these metrics can be turned off. You can disable the subscriber count (or, if your Google account isn't specifically a YouTube channel) and if you don't have videos, you won't have a video count.

To demonstrate this, here's a user I found by searching the latest Mr Beast video for newest comments:

Notice how there's neither a sub count nor a video count? Because neither exist, or the subscriber count is hidden? Why do these counters work flawlessly, but a piece of data (that doesn't change!) keeps vanishing?

Here's where I get a little conspiratorial.

Pronouns are a touchy subject. YouTube introduced them at the tail end of the Biden administration, at a time where not only queer rights in America were better, but companies made more of an effort to acknowledge queer pride. Since then...

Ahem.

Safe to say, YouTube's parent company is trying to be more friendly towards the current fascist government. Even more damning, if you can read that third article. Let me post it here:

Google was among the tech companies that donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration. It also, like many other companies, pulled back on its internal diversity hiring policies in response to the Trump Administration’s anti-DEI crackdown.

There's a concentrated effort to target queer people, sadly. And it seems pronouns are going to be targeted. Expected, of course, since pronouns have always been this weird boogeyman of the conservative/fascist political sphere.

This really frustrates me. Pronouns are a non-issue. (Almost) everyone's got them, it's not something we should hide away from, or treat as this threat.

More importantly, it's another attack on a system which largely benefits quer people. Do most cis people list their pronouns? No, because they're presenting themselves in line with their assigned gender, and wouldn't expect you to assume otherwise. Queer people, on the other hand, find more benefit in expressing themselves with non-conforming pronouns.

I've known people use "it", or "xe", or even just plain "they". People find these words distinctly describe them. It's just like denying someone the right to use their own name. Imagine if I was forced to go by "Daniel" or "Mike". Neither of those are my name. It'd be miserable.

Why do some people show off their pronouns? It's because they're proud of them. It's who they are. If I had to pick between learning a new pronoun, or watching someone die from the inside out, I'm learning a new pronoun in a heartbeat.

Remember a time when Google said, "Don't be evil"?