I'm the real girl boss

I've never really come up with a satisfying answer to the "their barbarous cliches, our glorious tropes" thing, and I don't really think I'm going to; my respect for a story's execution is often bound up in my respect for the overall project, which is often contingent and vibes based.

An example of this- around Easter, I was doing a review (since on the backburner) of a bad pulp sci-fi novel from the 60s called The Day They H-bombed Los Angeles, which is, basically, the exact kind of referent fiction for the pastiches present in Fallout. I found it interesting as a time capsule but not good in any meaningful way- but the thing is that it did contain a plot twist, right. Well telegraphed, logical within the rules set up within the story, more visible on a second readthrough (although still pretty visible on the first readthrough.) It borders on active genre commentary, even! But it's embedded in a book so thoroughly mediocre and of-its-time in its prose and politics that I can't bring myself to be enthusiastic about or even fair in my assessment of the solidly workmanlike elements. And on the other hand, I know for a fact, right, that if I'd encountered this book as a small child, if it had been a formative read rather than a curiosity, I'd be running defense for the exact same elements that I'm writing off right now, scrambling to find something worthwhile to latch onto and elevate in order to validate my one-time tastes, in order to escape the sense that I've built my entire sense of aesthetics on a foundation of quicksand. Which is what I think a lot of people are doing a lot of the time.

No, and that is why the laws were written. These laws were written so that stochastic terrorists can form lynch mobs of one to enforce white supremacy. Full stop.

I saw this when running newpipe. But wait, it gets deeper. I clicked on the details buttons and it said as of today, we have 83 days left until Google rolls out this new requirement for apps inside and outside of the google play store. If any developer disagrees with their new terms and fees, they will be blocked!

I'll share some of the info below:

Looks like they're trying to nuke the remaining privacy and freedoms we have left on the internet.

What to do?

-Get your developer friends to not comply to their new guides

- Sign the open letter on the site and take action by checking out the full resources list on their website as well!

To summarize, this is all daunting especially when you feel all alone with unfair and inhumane regulations comming out faster than improvements but we got this working together!

Share the link with your friends, family and anyone who will listen!

Unfortunately, I have bad (though unsurprising) news regarding the hate crime suffered by the Black Youtuber CerosTV which was highlighted here a few days ago. The cops have essentially closed it because "no one saw it and there's too much crime for us to investigate it" (Here's the video where Ceros describes the experience in his own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPNWrtS2osc)

As a reminder, he currently has a fundraiser active to help him recover, where you can read the full story of what happened: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-ceros-after-car-theft-and-attack (tw for homophobia, racism, and a graphic image of his injury). His car was ransacked, he is looking for a new place to live, and he needs surgery for lasting nerve damage.

If you can spare even just a few dollars, please, consider helping a queer Black man recover from this horrific attack. I know the economy is hard for all of us right now though, so if you can't contribute, please share the fundraiser to your blog instead.

I want to end this ask by uplifting Ceros, so here are a few of my favorite videos from him for you to check out after you've shared or donated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI8SI7Ut5KI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWsofHCfm-I

This was only 55 years ago. You can understand a lot of what’s wrong with the US if you realize that the average age of our elected senators is about 63. “Good old days” is a dogwhistle.

“The couple is given a choice: flee or go to jail. After they were arrested, the Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison. Then, a judge offered them a choice: banishment from the state or prison. They chose to leave Virginia at the time, but after several years, the Lovings asked the American Civil Liberties Union to take their case.Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, two young ACLU lawyers at the time, did.”

My father just had his 70th birthday.

When my parents first met it'd been less than a decade since the ruling was official.

They were convinced it'd be overturned and did not want their children to have to suffer for it, so they did not get married and searched desperately for each other in their own races. They could not find the love they had together in anyone else. They did eventually get married.

Too late for them to have the amount of children they'd desired. They had two, adopted a third, and that was that.

It was near enough to now that I, my sisters, and my parents were directly affected by it.

The Watsonville riots of the 1930's where white mobs attached Filipino farmworkers for being seen in dancehalls with white women, are part of a very long history of whiteness violently asserting its need to "protect" the purity of it's women and future children. And these kinds of backlashes are not in the past, we've just moved to different battlegrounds, the same accusations, of defiling the purity of white womanhood and white childhood are now leveled at the dangerous "othering influences" through book bans and other right wing conservative censorship efforts.

According to PEN America’s Banned Book Index, 41% of banned books include LGBTQ+ themes. 40% feature characters of color and 21% address issues of race or racism.

Remember, if we don't keep standing up loudly for equality the biggots on the right will be louder and keep dragging us further backwards from every step towards equality we make.

That's why I write stories for mixed, brown, bi, folks to see ourselves and our loves reflected in.

1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.

2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).

This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!

3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible

4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do

5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.

Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too

For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn

For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.

You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.

For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.

Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).

Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.

Marlow Trottie was killed on June 8th 2026. She was found dead, alone, in the streets of Alexandria, Louisiana. It was a homicide.

Marlow Trottie was a woman. Her family has contested this, and publicly misgendered her, and many news sites have already deadnamed and misgendered her as well. I fear what her obituary will say. I fear what her gravestone will say even more.

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

the problem that cropped up over and over and over again was that essentially all of these bios presented the women as looking for a heterosexual marriage with children regardless of any information on the profile that actively contradicted any of those things. even as the model got better and more streamlined at everything else, this persisted.

Baby I’m so sorry but a LOT of white people had periods of time as kids or even early adults where they regularly regurgitated slurs and direct racism and performed cruelty on racialized people. It can legitimately anywhere from “saying slurs on COD at 12” to “putting various unsanitary and hard to remove things into Black classmates hair” to “excluded racialized kids around them because they were yucky/etc.” to “assaulting racialized people around them” to “spent time on /b/ and gained standard 4chan racism brainworms”

You also straight-up can’t guess what it’ll be until they mention it or it jumps out. As an example, back in montana there was a white woman in my local kink community who was generally SO fucking sweet, kind, and caring to everyone around her, including me. One day she posted this on Facebook out of literal nowhere:

And doubled down after I called her on it.

Please understand that “hasn’t deconstructed racist social beliefs” means “can and will use racism when useful or they think they’re safe to, or will engage in white solidarity”

If they haven’t actually put in the work to destroy the white supremacy they’ve been internalizing from society their whole life, this can be basically any white person, at any time, no matter how they’ve behaved previously and how much you think they’d never do something like that.

Being fully honest, over the past few years I’ve met multiple white queers who were literally born and raised in full-on white supremacist cults and only escaped as adults, and every single one of them was leagues more tolerable than the average white queer because they KNEW their shit was fucked to hell and they were quick to self-question, address, and apologize when something they didn’t know was false/racist/supremacist came up and they actively wanted to do/be better.

Meanwhile average white queers just don’t want to be cancelled and often don’t actually give a fuck whether they’re harming racialized people around them or whether they’re doing the work of picking the white supremacy brainworms out. Getting an apology, reparation, or basic fixes is like pulling fucking teeth with them.

if you are able to spare anything at all, it would go a really long way. inflation and currency exchange is so bad that $50 could pay someone’s rent in tehran for an entire month, so every little bit counts

please write ‘donation’, and please don’t put any country or city names in the description 🙏 we are endlessly grateful for your generosity, it truly saves lives

Paypal: @nojin

Ríhanna Kelver, a bartender and trans rights advocate in Laramie, has been charged with aggravated assault and possession of a deadly weapon with unlawful intent after a 13 September 2025 confrontation outside the Crowbar & Grill, whereshe worked. Kelver could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison if convicted on both charges.

Despite Wyoming’s “Stand Your Ground” statute, which allows people to use reasonable force in moments of self defense, Kelver faces up to 15 years in prison for both charges, as well as up to $11,000 in fines, per Cowboy State Daily. Kelver faces an additional year and $1,000 fine for a charge of interference with a peace officer. [...]