the pub closes in five hours

Someone pointed out that article's from 2023, and that's my mistake! Here is one that describes better where we are today.

So.

Downloads are still available as of time of writing. If you have music you want to keep, maybe go download it.

If your favorites sell music directly, go buy it there.

Do NOT go yell at musicians for being on Bandcamp. Where, one day after this broke, do you expect them to go? Where else can we get DRM-free files?

If the new owners keep Bandcamp Friday and DRM-free downloads, I will keep buying music from them.

Think of it this way: who are we trying to help? Musicians, right?

It won't help musicians to boycott Bandcamp and I have not (as of this writing) seen a call for it that's actually from a musician.

It really won't help musicians to yell at them about being on Bandcamp.

Next Bandcamp Friday I'm going to go buy albums I'd miss if they disappeared.

On the northwest Belgian coast, there is a little known tradition: shrimp fishing on horseback. The activity consists of what its name describes: fishing shrimp on a horse. In the 15th century, shrimp fishing on horseback was still practised on the North Sea coasts in France, the Netherlands and even the South of England. This activity represented an extra revenue needed for the household. Nowadays there is only one place in which it is still ongoing: Oostduinkerke, a sub-municipality of the municipality of Koksijde.

When we ask children to be things that they are not, and to express themselves only in ways that we deem appropriate, we communicate the message that what we want for their bodies is more important than their self-determination. If we truly want to end child sexual abuse, we need to recognize the autonomy children have over their own bodies. That doesn’t mean that they can do whatever they want; it simply recognizes that they have the final say over their bodies when safety is not a concern. It insists that a child who flaps their hands, doesn’t speak at all, won’t make eye contact, or never stops talking doesn’t need to be “fixed” just because adults don’t like the behavior.

My family and community would have needed to revise the way they thought of me to make space for my agency before they could effectively demand accountability from the woman who molested me. Personally, I believe that the accountability model is a conservative and confessional one. It stops at the level of admitting to the violence—an important step but only the first one. When I hear about “community accountability,” what I think people mean is that the whole community will work to hold a single person “accountable” to a harmful action or series of actions. This model forgets that abuse thrives in silence and isolation, and that can only occur when a community turns away from great injustice. Thus, whole communities are implicated in all instances of child sexual abuse.

I don’t need anyone to confess their guilt publicly—I already know who harmed me, and in many cases, so does everyone else. I need a community where everyone recognizes the role they played in that violation. Child sexual abuse flourishes under the hot lights of the church because of the “mind your own business” culture it creates. We can no longer afford to mind our own business and say that we act in solidarity with one another and with the most marginalized parts of our families.

To stop child sexual abuse, the way that parents treat their children must be considered a matter of public concern. Most importantly, abuse can no longer be treated as something unknowable. When a child speaks of having been violated, the response should never be disbelief and interrogation. Being a child is confusing enough without exploitation. Negative responses make it more difficult for victims of sexual abuse, particularly victims of molestation, where the perpetrator is more likely to be a trusted part of that child’s life than a scowling outsider.

One reason why communities—a word I use here to mean some amorphous combination of families, neighbors, congregations of faith or worship, and institutions such as school or local government—choose to ignore child sexual abuse is because the response is assumed to be necessarily punitive and to require an overwhelming amount of evidence to prove. Nobody wants Uncle Jerome to do jail time. How can you prove the pastor touched you? Aren’t you too young to even know what rape is? The victim is punished because the perpetrator is unavailable to receive punishment or too important to punish. Victim are of no importance because they are sullied by the crime and are suspect just for telling someone.

Instead of radical communities constantly asking for ways to make child sexual abuse accountability less punitive for those who perpetuate it, I would like to first see it become less punitive for the children who have endured it. It would take reparations to restore communities after child sexual abuse has occurred. I don’t think that these must be monetary, but it is important to recognize that in such acts of great violence, something material is taken. If communities provide CSA survivors with somatics or therapy, people may be less likely to continue the cycle of abuse and could heal from the addictions and harmful coping mechanisms that often come with having experienced violence. If communities paid for training or education for CSA survivors, we could gain a new dream in exchange for all the ones that were squashed and snuffed out. I don’t think it is realistic to try to restore the relationship between abused and abuser after CSA, but I believe that we can restore the relationship between children and their community by offering services and benefits after such a violation.”]

My nephew is very allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame. Last year my sister discovered all hot dogs and hamburger buns now contain sesame. Not "may contain", but listed in the ingredients. This year basically every brand of sliced bread also now contains sesame, making it very difficult to find bread items he can eat.

They're just adding it to their products, so they can just list it as an ingredient and not bother with worrying about cross contamination. And they aren't even bothering with telling anyone. Capitalism is going to kill us all.

"Which brings us back to Kellogg’s. Back in 2016, the company found a way around the added burden and expense of complying with the FSMA: they simply began adding trace amounts of peanut flour to their cracker products. Doing so allowed them to list peanuts as an ingredient of the product, freeing them from having to prevent cross-contact.

Judging from Pandolf's face and demeanour, I think he tried to introduce himself to this hedgehog with trust, goodwill, and his nose.

After making his point a second time, the hedgehog decided he had reached the limits of pedagogy and returned to the woods.

"Actually women should be putting the seat back up when they're done peeing as a courtesy so that I don't have to touch it and put the seat up before I pee"