Endrael's Ramblings & Writings

site for when you can only remember part of a word/its definition 

site that gives you words that rhyme with a word

Fighter’s Block is the best writing app I’ve come across in a long time.

You type in the amount of words you want to write and as you write, your mini lil avatar fights a monster. Each word you write acts a hit towards your monster, and once you’ve hit your word count the monster is defeated!!!

How cute!!!!

Work quick though as how long you spent not writing decreases your avatar’s health. It’s a productive fight to the death against the clock!

Best things about this app:

You can PAUSE it!!!! Need go get a cup of tea? Need to sneeze? You can!!!!!

Settings are adjustable! You can change the monster’s speed and the attacks!

You can change the theme and font!

You can level up!!!!! The number of words you write equals your EXP. You can unlock one avatar thus far, but I believe there may be more in the future!

You can minimise the fight above if it serves as a distraction, and only show the decreasing green bar.

Best of all: If you don’t hit the target word count in time, YOUR WORK DOES NOT DISAPPEAR. In the past I’ve lost so much work because I wasn’t typing fast enough, or sneezed.I cannot express enough how thankful I am that it presents a challenge where the consequence is a knock of pride and not a fit of rage.

Stingrays (AKA IMSI catchers) are a  widespread class of surveillance devices that target cellular phones by impersonating cellular towers to them (they’re also called “cell-site simulators”).

IMSI catchers are so easy to build and operate that they have leapt from police agencies to criminals, and foreign and corporate spies, exposing us all to potential surveillance from all quarters.

That’s why it was so important that the new 5G mobile protocol be designed to foil IMSI catchers, and why the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, or 3GPP (the body standardizing 5G) updated the Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) to resist IMSI catching techniques.

But new research from ETH Zurich and Technische Universität Berlin has revealed a critical flaw in AKA, a defect that not only allows attackers to track the number of calls and texts being sent while a user is connected to the fake tower, but also a count of calls and texts from before the device was compromised. More importantly, the attack allows for fine-grained location tracking.

“But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.”

Something happened on Facebook awhile ago that I’ve never written about and only shared with a few people. I kept it to myself, mostly, because I didn’t want to upset the people in question, but I guess it’s time. (And for probably the first time I am going to put a content warning on a post, because this post probably requires one. So, here’s a CW for violence against trans people.)

For a long time I wondered about the understanding of gender on the far right, the Trump right. The bathroom controversy, in particular I thought bizarre. I can understand the basic conservatism and fear of new ideas, but the bathroom conflict seemed odd to me. It was extremely important in the minds of Trump supporters, even though it can’t possibly be a common  problem in most of the areas these people live. The position on the right seemed precisely the opposite of what it should be. Why do you want someone presenting as a woman in every respect using the damn men’s room, or vice versa? Isn’t that going to be more socially outrageous, in most situations? I didn’t get it. So I decided to ask the Trump supporters.

I posted a picture of  Buck Angel, a transgender  adult film actor, in a few of large, sometimes huge (nearly half a million), Trump groups. The picture showed a very buff, ripped Mr. Angel from the waist up, shirtless, with a shaved head and sporting a Fu Manchu mustache. He is an extremely masculine looking guy. With the picture I included the question “This person has a vagina. Which bathroom should they use?”

I thought at least some of these people will realize how silly it would be to want this man to use the ladies room. How socially awkward and alarming that would be, in so many situations. Putting aside how dangerous it would be for the man, simply on the basis of the the immediate, practical effect on the other diners in the given Applebee’s or wherever it was happening.

The post got hundreds of comments, finally thousands. Immediately. The Trump supporters had a very clear answer and they were adamant about it. Almost no one answered with “the men’s room”. A few said things like “if they’ve got a vagina, they use a woman’s room, if they have a penis, they use the men’s room.” But the majority of the  of the commenters had an answer I hadn’t considered at all. These people had worked out a very simple solution to the problem of transgender people and the norms revolving public restrooms.

They wanted transgender people to die.

They were quite explicit about it, very blunt. “They should die.” That simple. That concise. “They should die.”

Let me be entirely clear about this – they knew what they were saying, they knew exactly what they wanted. They didn’t want a trans man in the men’s room and they didn’t want a trans man in the woman’s room. They wanted the trans man to be dead.

Of course some of them were more loquacious than that. They had  reasons they should die, preferred methods, they expressed their feelings about the fantasized the deaths, but death or something similar was the most common answer. “Stop being”, essentially. A lot of other people answered “they should stay home”, maintaining the status quo without having to deal with the problem while still allowing transgender people to, you know, live, but mostly death or some sort of violence was the preferred option. Comment after comment, they should die, fuck them, stay-at-home, don’t use the bathroom, I’ll kill them if I catch them in the bathroom with my daughter, they should die, they should die, they should die.

Oh, and in case That’s not plain enough, it wasn’t just death they were threatening. They were threatening anything they could think of. Torture, castration, humiliation, at adults and children alike. Any brutal, vicious insult or threat imaginable. I’ve watched these groups for years, dozens of them.  Anyone who watches the news, who’s seen our president make a speech, knows how mean, how  grotesque, how petty and ugly these people can be. The things they say about  Mexicans, Muslims, about women, gay people, immigrant children. Even if you haven’t been in one of these groups, it’s not hard to imagine. Jesus, our president publicly mocked a disabled man. But I still wasn’t prepared for the comments in this thread. Just sheer, stark, gut level hatred, unencumbered by the slightest empathy. Loathing. Disgust. Raw hate.

As much time as I’ve spent in these groups, examining these people, I didn’t think anything could shock me. I was wrong. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but it did.

There is not one single issue that brings the evil out in Trump supporters the way trans-people do, there is no class of people more loathed. More than anything else, gender self-determination symbolizes precisely the social progress that animates the Trump right. They despise it and the people who embody it. Understand this. This issue is central to these people on the right, there is nothing they feel more deeply about. The Trump right does not want a solution to the social problem of trans people and restroom use. They simply do not want trans people to exist. That is what they want. What they demand. Nonexistence.

Today the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is now in the process of redefining the administrative understanding of gender as simply a matter of biology and nothing more. Gender would be determined solely and entirely by birth assignment – as male or female, immutable and unchangeable, a fact. They are already rolling back numerous civil rights guarantees instantiated in the Obama years, policies that allowed a significant portion of our nation to live their lives with some basic dignity and safety. Essentially the Department of Health and Human Services intends to define transgender people out of existence.

This is happening now. Right now.

Like I said at the beginning, I never really talked about that little test I did in the Trump groups with Buck Angel’s picture much before this. I know so many trans people and I know how difficult it can be for them, sometimes, just to live their lives, what a scary place the world can be. I felt like it was all too awful, I didn’t want to scare people even more. I guess it probably wouldn’t come as a shock to most of my trans friends, it’s a reality they live every day, but I just didn’t want to pile on. But it’s too late for all that now.

I haven’t heard people talking about the Health and Human Services attack on trans rights  all that much, so far, and I’m a little surprised, because we should all be clear about something. The changes they are making don’t mean a little inconvenience for a few trans people.

They mean death. It’s that simple. It’s going to mean withdrawal, seclusion, humiliation, violence and death.

Think about the Trump supporters I described, think about the thousands of comments I just told you about. Now think about the reinforcement this sort of decision makes for their worst instincts, think about a trans man, presenting  as a man, being forced to use the ladies room in some Podunk, red state, Trump voting shithole.

Now how do you suppose that goes down with the rest of the folks in the  having dinner?  And how do you suppose the teenage trans boy using the ladies room goes down with the parents of the teenage girls at the high school? And how does that make the teenage trans boy feel? Or the teenage trans girl having to share a bathroom with the testosterone jacked 17-year-old jocks at the high school? And what do you suppose happens to the trans girl forced to onto a man’s prison block?

Humiliation, violence, rape, suicide, and murder. Death. Trans rights are a matter of life and death, in a very real, very palpable way. The definitions change, and people  die. The rules change, and people die. The laws change, and people die. Immediately.

This is happening because the people in the White House get it. They know their base, and they know exactly what their base wants. They got it 100% right this time. They are defining transgender people out of existence because they know their base wants transgender people to be gone. Disappeared. Non-existent.

Trans rights, opposition to gender self-determination, hatred for trans people, as I’ve already described, are at the heart of the Trump phenomena. There is nothing that evokes the hatred and fear and violence on the right the way the simple existence of trans people does. It is   stomach turning to see, horrible in its blind ferocity, and I don’t know how the fuck my trans friends have the strength and poise to live every day in the face of that horror, that hatred, but they do. I suppose they have to, and that’s where the fight is now.

I don’t care who you are, I don’t care where you are in the political spectrum, I don’t care how fucking liberal or leftist you are, I don’t care how feminist you are, if you don’t support trans-rights, you are not on my fucking side. I don’t give a fuck about your bio–essentialist arguments, I don’t give a fuck about your history with men, I don’t care about your pissing eight year old or your bigot grandmother. Frankly, I don’t give a fuck about your traumatic sexual assault if it means you’re going to take it out on some fucking teenage girl who doesn’t want to have to use a bathroom with a bunch of frat boys and have the same fucking thing happen to her. Fuck you.

If you want to know where the battle lines are drawn most clearly and unmistakably, between decency and the dark, right now, in the United States, in 2018, it’s here. Trans rights are the battlefield and trans people, like it or not, are in the vanguard of that battle. They are the front-line in a fight they never asked for, every fucking day, every hour, every time they leave the fucking house.

There is no fight more important as this, now, today. There are no people so vulnerable, so marginalized and there should be no fucking doubt among anyone on the left, any liberal, any libertarian, about this.

The fight is here now, it’s happening. An entire marginalized community, federally defined out of existence and set up to be victimized by a segment of the population too fucking backwards and just plain, willfully dumb to bother to try and understand what the hell is going on in the world, or empathize with another fucking human being.

If we don’t stop this, people are going to die, killed for something they can’t change, for who they are in the deepest part of themselves. Not somewhere down the road, not in five years, but now. They’re going to start dying now.

We can’t let that happen. Those of us who still live in the modern world still own this culture and we need to do what we can to make sure it doesn’t. We cannot go back to the 1950s, we cannot watch more people die for  their gender. We cannot let that happen. We can’t lose this battle.

This isn’t temporary, this isn’t going to go away tomorrow, the last two years is only the beginning.  Gender self-determination will be the civil rights battle of the 21st century.  If we have to fight this for the rest of our lives, we cannot allow these fuckers, this raw hate, to win.

So be shocked for a second, cry about it for a minute, and while you’re at it, maybe today is a good day to hug your trans friends, tell them you got their back. Because we do, a lot of us. America isn’t just Trump supporters. Remember that. For what it’s worth, some of us got your back.

Then get over it and get ready, because this is a fight and you’re in it. We all are, all of us, left, liberal, libertarian, right, if you’re a decent human being and you care about basic human rights, you’re in it up to your ass and the water is rising fast.

Hatred is a powerful emotion and it is temporarily ascendant, but hate can’t beat the future, and that future is an America, a world, where every single trans person lives their life safely and with the same dignity any other human being enjoys, because ultimately, as badly as they want to, they just can’t turn back the clock. Not when so many of us stand in their way, not with so many lives on the line. They just can’t.

And that really is immutable, unchangeable. That really is a fact.

Tumblr is biting at the ‘artists’ heels and suddenly there is a bit more noise, because artists aren’t supposed to be treated like shit, are they? However even now the hair-splitting over what’s porn and therefore garbage and not-art shows that attitudes are not so different. It’s still the same divisive, dangerous us v.s. them mentality that is so easily exploited.

We believe it is of utmost importance for users to have control of their content and how it is accessed. Tumblr’s structure encourages users to think of other people’s content that they reblog as partially their own, but we think that that mentality leads to a lot of the harassment and plain rudeness that has grown on Tumblr over the years. The fact that a post can be reblogged by others, ridiculed, and passed around endlessly after the original user has already decided they don’t want that content to exist and represent them anymore has always struck us as a massive design flaw. On Pillowfort a user’s post is always their post first and foremost, and all reblogs and comments to that post are still under the control of the original user. So yes, while it may be unfortunate to have a post you like disappear from your blog or lose a comment you left, we think it is still more important for a user to be able to delete their own content when they choose. I can’t think of any benefits to non-destructible reblogs that is worth having a user’s control over access to their own content taken away.

This is a great policy, if your primary goal is to ensure that abusers cannot be challenged or disputed, ever. It is a great policy if you want to actively punish people for putting in any effort at all in conversations.

Yes, we think of things that we write in response to other people as “partially our own”, because we wrote some of the content in the post. When people put effort into responding to me, that effort is theirs. If I make a silly shitpost and someone responds with a 2,000 word essay, their post was more effort than mine.

Fuck’s sake. Look at the writing prompts blog. Think about how this plays out in Pillowfort’s world: You post writing prompts which are a sentence long, other people write multi-page responses, and you get to delete any of those responses any time you want leaving them with no record of the work or effort they put in, no way to retrieve the data, nothing.

Conclusion: If you go there, do not attempt to interact with other people. If you want to comment on something someone said, do it by starting a brand new post with no trace of direct connection to theirs, so it will probably be safe.

I post:  Angelgirl4eva′s  post (linked) on Spuffy ignored all the central events of the fifth season.

I have an animated discussion in my comments.   Angelgirl4eva deletes her post.  The link no longer works, but my reply and my comments are in my journal, and persist.

  My post was so much work!

Sure it was. And you know what? Other platforms don't care. On moderated platforms, the entire thread or individual posts can be deleted without regard to the rest of the discussion if it's deemed inappropriate or in violation of the rules. I've lost replies in threads that are two or three pages of content, reference links and context and all, because the entire thread was removed due to the level of asshole other people were being. Am I annoyed about losing that work? Yes, but it wasn't ultimately anything I couldn't reproduce elsewhere if I were inclined to do so. The same goes for any post you lose under pillowfort's policy.

On the flipside, people put unreasonable amounts of work into making posts promoting hate, violence, and any number of other despicable things. By the logic of, "It was a lot of work!", should we allow posts like that to remain up, knowing full well what kind of end result they lead to? Fuck that and fuck you if you think we should.

And this doesn't even get into people who shitpost abuse on other people's material. Sometimes it's easier and more effective to remove the dumpster before the comment fire gets worse.

Or maybe you want to allow people, like other platforms do and which is so common here on tumblr, to easily manipulate reposts/reblogs to claim other people's content as their own?

  OP deletes their post, leaving no context for following discussion

It does make more sense to do things this way, but at the same time, there's still a lot of room for rampant abuse. All you need to do is look at some of the dumpster fire forums over on reddit to see this in action, where you'll see comment threads headed by followed by fifty posts of people being trash toward the OP, or followed by a dozen posts of incomprehensible corrections because there's nothing to give them context as to what they're replying to/about. Given the current state of social interaction online, posting abuse is going to be far more prevelant, so it therefore makes more sense to just delete the whole mess than allow it to remain and stand as reinforcement to assholes vomiting hate.

  It will do a lot of damage!

I don't even know how this makes any sense.

More damage than tumblr leaving alone all of the white nationalist, neo-nazi hate blogs calling for genocide because Verizon apparently thinks nudity and consensual sexual interaction among adults is more dangerous?

More damage than Facebook shrugging at those same people using their platform to organize and perform outreach?

More damage than reddit doing practically nothing about the vitriolic cesspit that is the_donald and related subreddits, further radicalizing the people who post there?

More damage than gab still being allowed to exist even though its role in allowing hate groups to connect and plan active violence is becoming increasingly clear?

More damage than all these and more? What the fuck world do you live in that all of that- *waves hands at above mess* -pales in comparison to a social platform allowing the OP to retain full control of their content even across reblogs? Are you fucking serious?

No, it fucking won't cause a lot of damage, and if you think it will, you are very much not looking at bigger problems.

  -------------

The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.

Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.

Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.

Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.

These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.

During the medieval period, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual. According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers[1], the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker participating in the eight-hour movements of the late nineteenth century was “simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago.”

The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official – that is, church – holidays included not only long “vacations” at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints’ andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.

A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year – 175 days – for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.

The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor

Washing and even sterilizing the outside of it won’t help, and you don’t cook lettuce. The only way to make sure there’s no e. coli in your lettuce is to make sure no e. coli gets in your lettuce.