did i tell u guys i got into an argument on twitter bc i said foxes are dogs and someone tried to bring up their actual fuckin. classification or whatever and i just said âfoxes are dogs cause they are fluffyeâ and they kept arguing with me. the entire time i was like âyou will not survive the immigration to tumblr you are lucky we are not there right nowâ
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Never forget when he sat in front of a congressional hearing about Lewd Music Corrupting the Youth and completely shut that shit down in the most professional manner that no member of that committee expected from a hair metal musician. They thought they'd get easy points off of a dumb metalhead and this man not only knew exactly what the fuck he was talking about, he tore their arguments apart.
Hello Mr. Neil Gaiman, I would have a specifical question about good omens. Did you plan for the series\Book to convey some kind of message? Like: Be youself? Or somthing else? I hope you can answer this question and have a good day :)
If there's a single message I'd like people to take away from Good Omens it's from Adam:
âłâI donât see whatâs so triffic about creating people as people and then gettinâ upset âcos they act like people,â said Adam severely. âAnyway, if you stopped tellinâ people itâs all sorted out after theyâre dead, they might try sorting it all out while theyâre alive.ââ
But it's a lot bigger than a single message, and there are so many things Terry and I had to say.
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Random writing thought: the best stories are often the ones that only you could have written â but also the ones that you could only write at this one moment.
I couldn't write All the Birds in the Sky from scratch now if I tried. But the me of 2013 couldn't have written The Prodigal Mother either.
When people ask if I'd change anything about a book I've already written, I want to explain to them that I'm not the person who wrote that book any longer, and even if I tried right now I'd write a different one. Everything you make as a writer* is a combination of what you want to say and who you are at the time you are telling that story.
"I'm a beagle!" is absolutely how beagles operate..
(and I'm sitting here trying to figure out if the foam weapons are from a workshop I know or homemade)
Way way back I drew a comic explaining what we really mean by âThe Autism Spectrumâ and posted it here back when Tumblr was Huge. Then the comic really blew up!! Last year I did a remake of the comic, with some updated language, and using Mia, a character from a graphic novel I made. Figured Iâd share for Autism Acceptance Month!
Some Villain: Oh Doctor, you think you can just walk away and get a happy ending? Oh no no no. What will you do when your precious family have been kidnapped by me? When you try to save them and fail -
Donna, barging out of her front door: OI! OFF MY LAWN!
Donna *beating the villain with a broom*: HE. IS. RETIRED!
Doctor and Rose: *watching from the front window and sipping tea*
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20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity â it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:
I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:
WARNING: THIS DEVICEâS FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLDâS MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE â BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEYâRE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, ITâLL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.
Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.
But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:
Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.
This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:
Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:
Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month â Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real â but so is the threat to conferences that host them:
20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument â then and now â was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z â and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.
But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:
But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:
Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.
These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.
This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit â when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).
Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:
Imagine putting years of your life into making a program â showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!
But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies â and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.
The point here â the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson â is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.
Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over and anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.
Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
âMom, thereâs someone under the bed.â You bend down and see your son there instead and he whispers âMom thatâs not me up there!â You take a step back when someone tugs your shirt. You turn, your son is in the closet asking âwho are they?â You suddenly hear him calling from downstairs âMommy?â
You sigh, raising your voice so that all of your sons can hear you. âAll right, everyone into the kitchen. Now.â Hearing a shuffle in the attic, you add, âYes, Duncan, that includes you.â
You donât see any movement as you go down the stairs, but youâre used to that. You know theyâll all be there by the time you walk through the kitchen door.
As usual, your children have all fitted themselves into the kitchen. The dimensions of the room are a little wobbly with so many of them present, but youâve long ago learned to ignore how the laws of physics only occasionally apply to them. A host of little faces look up at you anxiously, and you smile gently.
âItâs okay, none of you are in trouble,â you reassure them. They relax - and how astonishing is it, that they trust you so much? Youâre so proud of their progress.
One, however, still looks nervous. You beckon him forward, and he comes reluctantly, shoved by his identical older brothers.
âAre you new?â you ask carefully.
He nods, and you drop to one knee. âItâs okay, sweetie,â you tell him firmly. âI love all of my sons, even ones I havenât met before. Ask your brothers, theyâll tell you.â
ââm here because I heard you were nice,â he says in a tiny voice.
You open your arms, offering a hug but waiting to let him decide whether he wants one. This child must have seen hugs before, because he flings himself into your arms and starts crying. Thatâs good. Some of your sons are traumatised from what theyâve seen, knowing more slaps than kisses.
Eventually, the sobs dry up, your other kids patiently waiting for your attention again. âWhy do we look like this?â he asks, curious.
âBecause this is what the first of you looked like - Wilson, where are you?â
A hand raises from the crowd and waves energetically.
âWilson took on my sonâs form to play Child or Double. Calling from downstairs when my son was in bed, getting tucked in when the child I bore was playing out in the garden. Once I figured it out, I hugged him and told him that as far as I was concerned, I now had twins. It took him some time before he believed me.â
Wilson shrugs unrepentantly.
âWhen my son died, Wilson stayed. It helped, having one of my sons with me while I grieved. Then another of you began to turn up, and I had twins again. Then more. Until now, when I have more of you than will technically fit in my kitchen.â You give your sons a look of motherly disapproval, but they only giggle. They know you donât mind.
âItâs not like you need to feed us!â calls out one of your bolder sons. Eric, probably. Your newest, unnamed child looks up hesitantly, then steps out of your arms to join his brothers. Lucas might be a nice name, you think idly. You donât have a Lucas yet.
âThat does help,â you admit. You put steel into your next words. âHowever, there are Rules in this house, and one of them is no messing around at bedtime. I know that bedtime is a traditional time for the Child or Double game, but four of you is pushing it.â
Youâd say more, but thereâs a knock at your back door. You turn to answer it, knowing that your sons will have evaporated before your fingers grasp the handle, and brace against the cold night air as you pull the door open.
Two identical little girls stand there. One has a bruise on her cheek, and has clearly been crying recently. The other - the other is a Doubler, just like your sons. After this long, you can tell the difference.
âPlease,â the Doubler says, and her voice trembles on the word. âPlease. She needs somewhere to stay.â
Part of you is shocked, already looking ahead to the potential legal issues. The rest of you is all mother, and you whisk her into the nice warm kitchen and get her a glass of water.
Your sonâs bed will be occupied by someone else tonight. You think heâd have been okay with that.
Hey not for nothing but this is exactly why I have no trust in digital media "purchases" that aren't physical and also why I am of the opinion that if a physical option isn't made possible then it should be considered morally neutral for me to download a copy for my own digital collection to view when offline.
Explaining in simple terms: if you don't vote for Biden because "he is murdering palestinian babies", you will get Trump as a president, who, being an open and proud islamophobe, will murder even more palestinian babies.
It is no good situation when you have to choose between two shitty candidates. But you have a two-party system.
russia has previously aided trump during elections, and they will do so again. A call to boycott the elections = a call to support trump
You are in no position to afford the privilege of being idiots.
Also, a lot of his goons have been filling a LOT of important spots in the military and civilian fields to have positions available for trump to fill in with his loyalists and to easier do a hostile takeover if he wins the election.
IF YOU DON'T VOTE FOR BIDEN YOU WILL GET A DICTATORSHIP BY TRUMP AND WE WILL ALL BE FUCKED
I don't know how many times we have to tell people to make everythingin their power to stop Trump from coming to power again. USA will be fucked. Ukraine will be fucked. Palestine would be fucked. We don't know how many other countries will be fucked.
Trump's presidency already gave cart blanche for the international far right rise, and I don't think we need to spell out to people that the state of the world today is directly credited to Trump's presidency, his incompetence, him being Russian puppet, etc etc.
As much as I am actually an opponent of the whole idea that USA is responsible of everything in the world, it does have a huge influence on international politics scene.
SO GO VOTE.
And since USA is a democracy, then, again, y'all are responsible for the president you elect.
I really really really don't think you've been reading what I wrote there with your reading eyes.
I literally said up there "USA will be fucked" so like pretty good indicator that I don't hate you. THEN I said "Ukraine will be fucked" which, as a Ukrainian, makes me very aware Trump election will affect us.
Are you conflating collective responsibility and wanting you to experience what USA has been complicit in? Where was it said up there I want you to suffer?
Maybe through some reading comprehension classes, yeah
Jumping in to say that I'm already hearing from people in my life that they are going to vote 3rd party because they don't like Trump or Biden. While this is a right afforded to voting Americans, this is not the fucking year for that.
Please vote Biden. Please vote a blue ticket - Democrats all the way down. There is no such thing as a perfect party, let alone a perfect politician, and I get it. I have criticisms of Biden too. But for fucks sake, Biden is the lesser of two evils here, and Trump supporters are not going to vote independent! Democrat voters have always, always been more likely to vote independent compared to Republicans, so you are not taking votes away from Trump, you are taking votes away from the person most likely to beat Trump in the polls.
I saw this phrase a lot four years ago, and I think it's time to bring it back:
Please remember what happened in 2016. Trump won that time in part because people wouldnât vote for Hillary. So they either didnât vote at all/went third party/wrote in. Learn from the past and know: if Trump gets a second chance, he likely wonât miss this time.
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Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro calls for the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to look into whether the studio violated antitrust g
âThe WBD tactic of scrapping fully made films for tax breaks is predatory and anti-competitive,â the San Antonio Democrat wrote. âAs the Justice Department and @FTC revise their antitrust guidelines they should review this conduct. As someone remarked, itâs like burning down a building for the insurance money."
Ao3 is actually massively culturally important and very very good at being what it is. Iâm so serious when I say that ao3 needs to be protected as the anti censorship, by fans for fans, nonprofit, volunteer run, expertly designed archival site that it is. You donât have to read or like fanfiction to understand that on principle, ao3 is a site that should be defended.
Dude with all due respect ao3 was literally created because other fanfiction sites kept deleting and censoring stories with rape, noncon/dubcon, incest, etc porn as well as LGBT ship fics. The site does have a required ratings and warnings systems and tags so that you can exclude works that have themes or content within them that you donât want to see.
If you donât like what the site is showing you, you are using it improperly.
There is no such thing as âa little censorshipâ
The above tagger has subjects they dislike; they need to learn to navigate around them so they donât need to interact. Thatâs why tagging is so important: allowing the work to be found or avoided as needed.
The problem with âa little censorshipâ isâŚendless. You want to control what other people are doing: how do you not see how thatâs fucked to begin with?
You want to remove the âgrossâ or the âinappropriateâ subjects, like that isnât wholly subjective. Incest bothers you? Donât read incest.
I canât typically do fics with cheating, but I am not about to go tell the folks who write it that they canât, purely to make me feel better. My eldest hates unhappy endings, they donât get to dig up sad ending fics and yell at the author. My middle kid likes a different ship than I do in pretty much all of our common media. I donât get to tell him he canât read it anymore.
Fancy, emotionally charged buzzwords donât change the fact that yeah, all of those are the same concept. You donât like it, someone else is writing it, others are reading it, and that bothers you. Thatâs on you, my dear.
You will never have the right to tell someone else they cannot read or write it purely because you dislike it.
Learn to block, learn to filter, learn to accept that the real world has people who like things you do not.
This is the donut/diet argument all over again: you canât have or dislike donuts, so you want to make sure no one else can have it either. Hard no, my friend. You have control only over yourself, and you need to remember that.
âBut those are bad things, Iâm trying to get rid of the bad things only!â No. They make you uncomfortable. There is a difference. Just as there is difference between reality and fiction. Just like what you think is bad may not, and probably will not, line up with someone else.
Fiction is not promoting rape, incest, whatever else. Kids arenât going to go out and recreate things theyâve read for shits and giggles anymore than playing grand theft auto is going to make them join the fucking mafia or whatever it is. Sims players donât suddenly rip their clothes off and drown in the pool, reading about Vash banging his brother a la Flowers in the Attic is hardly going to make someone knock on their actual brotherâs door, etc etc etc ad nauseum.
More importantly: there is no end to âa little censorshipâ. Someone else gets to decide what Iâm allowed to read and write, and the organizations with that aim have proven over and over and o v e r to be insane. Anything remotely queer is banned for being Bad or Sexualized (because these people have learned that PROTECT THE KIDS is the easiest way to rally the ignorant masses into believing that the rainbow is somehow preying on children⌠and thus need to be ControlledâŚ)
You donât want incest, you donât want no con, someone else doesnât want any form of kink, a third busybody canât stand that boys kiss boys, a fourth canât handle trans characters, another carves out the ace spectrum, yet more go after the stories exploring gender dynamics in the ABO verse.
Thatâs not even getting into politics, where it turns into now no one can post stories that explore changes in government, that are anti war, that are hopepunk and show all the ways society could be better. Or, on the opposite spectrum, things akin to the anarchistâs cookbook: how to make weaponry to forcibly make things change.
Oh, canât have books that talk about different religions, either. Canât have books that let girls know they should be treated equally, that they can do whatever they please, that theyâre more than a walking baby factory. canât have stories with magic, thatâll lead to evil thoughts. Canât have stories with explicitly consensual anything, gotta keep the population pure and filled with shame about their desires. (There is a reason so many romance novels have a bit of unsavory shenanigans: the thrill of being wanted so overwhelmingly in a world where feeling that want means you are Not a Good Girl)
Weâre living this, right now, again.
This is why knowing your history is so important.
Look at books have that been banned, burned. Iâm going to oversimplify but: Picture books (and tango makes 3) because two male penguins adopted a baby, and we canât let our kids know thatâs acceptable, never mind that I, a child of a lesbian, literally bawled my eyes out upon finding that book in my twenties. I would read it every day to my own toddlers, because look! Theyâre like Awa and Gramma! 1984, because the entire point is how burning books is Bad. Animal Farm, the new government is just as bad as the old and we the people deserve better. Gone With the Wind, for being about the American south and not only making it seem like maybe slavery is kinda meh but also hinting at a woman having a sexuality. The scandal. Harry Potter. Not because JK turned out to be transphobic trash, but because itâll turn kids into satanists, yâknow, because of all the magic. A thing that is totally real and possible to recreate. Are you there god, itâs me, Margaret. Because it talked about menstrual cycles.
As an American, seeing headlines where kids are banned from the library because of policies like this is terrifying. Kids in Florida have zero books in the classroom. They have to be screened to be considered âappropriateâ. And that means whitewashed, bland, and unchallenging of the norms the neo nazis are pushing. Canât have anything about the struggles of the non white populace, canât have anything at all about the queers, canât have anything that paints the south in a bad light.
There is a bill currently attempting to pass into law, KOSA: kids online safety act. Under the guise of âprotect the kidsâ the government here is literally attempting to sanitize and censor the entire internet, for everyone. AO3 will be on the list of places theyâre going to try and nuke. Yeah, even your cute vanilla super straight happy ever afters. All in the name of making sure imaginary little Johnny doesnât think kissing boys, wearing pink, becoming friends with the Mexican kid down the street, or opposing genocide is acceptable behavior.
Censorship is not about protecting you, me, the mythical children, or anyone at all. It never has been.
Censorship is purely about control.
Censorship is about controlling your awareness, your intelligence, your ability to realize you are living in the worst timeline, and your ability to organize and fight back. Censorship is division. Censorship is deliberate cruelty meant to cripple you and make you malleable.
After all, youâve given up your ability to explore new ideas, to think outside the box theyâve put you in. You are tamed, declawed, and too stupid to notice now. Donât worry your pretty little blonde haired and blue eyed head about it now, Julie, the government will tell you want you need to know. Oh, what happened to your neighbor? Sweetie, what neighbor? No one was ever there. Repeat after me, no one was ever there.
AO3 is protecting my ability to read and write whatever the fuck I want, while giving me the search capabilities to NOT run into shit I dislike. AO3 is giving my teens a safe place to read and explore their own sexualities and interests, to engage in uncomfortable situations in a controlled way. AO3 is giving my teens a place to practice being human.
Censorship is always the bad guy.
AO3 is a fucking godsend, a pillar of creativity and freedom of engagement, and should be revered as such.