Im Hazel

If this post reaches your dash after Jan 1st- YOU'RE NOT LATE to the party!!!

It's never too late to practice selective consumerism, and when companies try to pull bullshit it's up to us to say we won't stand for it by not continuing to use their product until they roll back the change. If we don't push back that's seen as consent, and more sites will follow in YouTube's (and Spotify's) footsteps.

And if this post reaches you before Jan 1st- GREAT! Please reblog (or even repost this on other socials- no need to credit!) to help get the word out as quick and as far as possible!

And if you have more questions on the hows and why's they're under the cut:

Step one: Stop using YouTube (if you're required for school or work, do so with an adblocker, but aside from that avoid giving YouTube any traffic at all) Also, if you have YouTube Premium, cancel it.

Step two: Complain. Leave 1 star reviews in the app store and on google. Tell them why you're upset with this policy.

Step three: Spread the word! Make your own posts and/or memes. Just be sure to let people know the boycott is ongoing and that we won't be returning until we are heard.

Step five: Remember that we're boycotting YouTube/Spotify- NOT the creators on those platforms. Find other ways to support them. (i.e: do they have Patreon/Kofi? Something else? A different platform perhaps?)

This ties into Step Six, which is to find an alternative to fill the void. Personally, I've switched to podcasts and Internet Archive for the time being. Others have suggested Public Library sites (Libby, Hoopla, Overdrive, etc- PBS has lots of free shows); Bandcamp & SoundCloud for music; Twitch for streams; as well as Newgrounds, Bitview, and Glomble which are YouTube alternatives. And I'm sure there's plenty of other alternatives out there! (I have also seen some recommending NewPipe- but be aware that this still gives YouTube traffic)

And finally, Step seven: Encourage, don't shame. (This goes especially for those of us who have been already boycotting since August.) Shaming those who started boycotting later than you, or for boycotting 'imperfectly' will only hurt the cause by pushing people away. We need numbers for this to work, so encourage people to fight back- don't shame them for not getting there 'soon enough.'

https://www.fairsandfestivals.net/states

every now and then.

The above is a video shared by smrchildsadness on Twitter, showing a person participating in a pride parade exchanging a pride flag with a person standing on his (am using his pronoun based on the TikToks/Tweets of what happened) doorway who had a Portuguese flag. There are sounds of cheers and crying and the two people hug each other as they exchange the flags. The man at the doorway then waved kisses to the crowd within the pride parade.

The Tweet says: "NO YOU DONT UNDERSTAND HE WAS WAVING THE PORTUGUESE FLAG BECAUSE HE DIDN'T HAVE A PRIDE FLAG AND THEY TRADED FLAGS AND HE'S SO EMOTIONAL TO GET HIS OWN PRIDE FLAG I'M EMOTIONALLY RUINED"

For context, apparently they were worried that maybe he's a nationalist because he was waving the Portuguese flag and some nationalists opposing the pride march were waving that flag. But upon interacting with him, it turns out he didn't have have a pride flag and he wanted to wave *a* flag in support of the pride march. So they had an exchange and now he has his own pride flag 😭🥹.

The image above is a Tweet by kunwara_ladkaa that says "I'm crying so much right now (Image taken by Manuel Fernando Araújo/Lusa)". The image shows the same man from the pride parade crying as he hugs his new pride flag.

The above image is a Tweet by dudz_zZzz that says "ainda não parei de pensar nele," which according to Google translate from Portuguese to English is "I still haven't stopped thinking about him." The image is a drawing of the person from the pride parade, crying as he hugs his new pride flag.

i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.

so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”

And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”

I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”

Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism aren’t marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.

Thirty-year-old Tamara Rees shows us what trans empowerment looked like in 1954. She fought Nazis, taught parachuting, and traveled the world... but her biggest challenge came when the press learned of her identity.

1950s news coverage of Tamera Rees' transition shows a time before the trans moral panic. Most stories regarded her as brave or heroic for her openness. National newspapers even celebrated her wedding in 1955.

The New York Daily News, which now hosts daily anti-trans editorials, ran a shockingly respectful series on trans people in the 1950s. Tamara Rees's narrative was among the longest and most detailed. She thoughtfully implored the public to respect not only her identity, but also other trans people like her.

I often compare disability/class/age-based eugenics to sex-selective abortion. Banning sex-selective abortion does not solve the problem; it just violates people's bodily autonomy, builds parental resentment of their children, and compounds the misogyny that leads to the demand for sex-selective abortion in the first place.

People practice sex-selective abortion because having a child AMAB is more beneficial to the parents' social and economic standing than having a child AFAB. The solution to that problem has to be changing those social and economic conditions so that a child's gender or AGAB has no bearing on their parents' social and economic standing -- so that sex-selective abortion is no longer a rational choice in response to the parents' circumstances.

And the only way to prevent disability-selective abortion is to make disabled people so socially and economically equal to abled people that disability-selective abortion no longer looks like a rational choice.

The only way to prevent economic/class eugenics is economic equality. The only way to prevent age/status-based eugenics is social equality.

This is the main impetus that drove me to socialism. I used to be more of a center-left social democrat; I figured "Complete economic equality would be nice, but it's a pipe dream; the important thing is that everyone has enough. It doesn't really matter if the CEO is richer than everyone else, as long as no one is hungry or homeless. Besides, it's kind of 'fair' in a way for people with more specialized/demanding jobs to be compensated more."

But the thing is, as long as inequality exists, parents will want their children to rise to the top of the hierarchy. As long as inequality exists, parents will want to prevent their children from falling lower in the hierarchy. As long as inequality exists, parents will do anything to coerce and pressure and abuse and modify their children to give them a "competitive edge."

And as long as inequality exists, and certain physical/cognitive traits correlate with "success," choosing children with those "successful" traits will be a rational choice.

Americans in disability liberation discussions tend to blame our country's ableism on our lack of social safety nets and universal healthcare... but countries with robust social safety nets are just as ableist as we are, sometimes more so. The abortion rate for fetuses with Down Syndrome is higher in Iceland than in the U.S., even though an Icelandic child with Down Syndrome would have access to healthcare. Iceland, while deeply flawed, has a decent enough social safety net that someone born with Down Syndrome would probably not starve or be homeless. But they would be at the bottom of the social hierarchy. There is still a social hierarchy. Eugenics is still a rational choice. Changing that behavior requires changing the social hierarchy that values so-called "general intelligence" and devalues disabled people.

The same is true of other kinds of eugenics -- as long as raising children is a net financial loss for families, avoiding having children "you can't afford" will remain a rational choice. As long as having children means a decrease in the birthing parent's educational or professional opportunities, people will avoid giving birth to children they "can't afford."

This disrespects the characters, the story, the author, the entire point of the book, and every single trans Discworld fan.

Context, for my non Discworld followers: Monstrous Regiment is a book which plays with the trope of "girl dresses as not to join the army", in which the protagonist slowly realises she's not the only one; all the other new recruits of her squad are similarly disguising themselves. Shenanigans ensue, and at the end of the book it's revealed a lot of the military higher ups are actually women with a facade of maleness, putting on the part so they can do their duty.

Sergeant Jackrum is also one of the people who ran away as a girl to join the army, but unlike the others he doesn't wear a facade. It's entirely himself. He is canonically a trans man. He doesn't want to leave the military and return to civilian life, cos he doesn't want to re enter the closet and live as a woman, and his squad's like oi mate you're literally sergeant fuckin Jackrum, there ain't a kid in this kingdom who hasn't heard of you in all your decades of service. Return to the family you left behind, the kid you birthed doesn't need to know you're trans, you can just say you're the guy who fathered that kid. Go be a grandpa and be happy.

I just did some quick research, though, and it looks like they may have gone back and fixed it? I'll have to listen to the audiobook again to see if that is indeed the case.

EDIT: Nope, still the wrong pronouns. However, in my search I also came across something interesting: there's two versions up on Audible. One released 2/23/23, published by Transworld Digital and one released 9/25/23, published by Harper. Both exactly the same length, both with the same narrator/cast. The Harper edition is the one that I have. But I think, the Transworld Digital one is the correct one.

Simply because I had to use address trickery to purchase Nightwatch's audiobook back in 2023, and it, too, was published by Transworld Digital. I think I'm going to spend a little extra money soon and buy that version and see if it's correct.

Most people in Amity know Danny is Phantom, especially the teenagers. More importantly, they've realized that everyone in Amity is liminal enough to be summoned with the correct runes. And so a system has been devised so when they want to hang out somewhere, one person goes in, draws a big summoning circle, and just summons everyone else. It saves a lot on transportation and it's just practical.

Now that they're all old enough to go to college, most have spread all around the country. Staying in contact is not a problem, however, they can just summon each other, get together for a while, then break the circle and send them back to wherever they were before. Perfect solution. It doesn't even register as weird, they've been doing it for years and no one even bats an eye anymore. No one in Amity that is.

Hero, dodging: but your entire room? I’m not painting my entire room orange

Video, No Audio