even mountains are in flux

"on the wrong side of 40" "huh, which side is that?"

The Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe made this card for their citizens to present to ICE.

If you are in a different federally recognized tribe in Washington State:

“I am a member of the (insert tribe here) Tribal Nation, which is Tribal Nation federally recognized by the United States.

This means I am also a United States citizen according to the U.S. Citizenship Act of 1924, 8 USC Section 1401.

Our tribe’s enrollment office number is (insert phone number here).

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

and by this, i mean: it's labor!

Anthropic illegally downloaded some 500,000 titles, and 92% of those eligible for an award—both authors and publishers are entitled to payment—had opted into the class action. Martínez-Olguín denied all but two requests to opt out of the agreement. “We applaud the court’s final approval of this settlement, which represents an important victory in the larger battle to hold big tech accountable for its unscrupulous appropriation of intellectual and creative properties that clearly belong to authors and publishers,” said Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, in a statement. Pallante praised the court for recognizing that downloading from pirate sites “is not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it’s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.” She also argued that fair use should not be extended to allow tech companies to copy copyrighted materials, and that tech giants should look to licensing agreements to train their AI models.

Now we'll see how long the payouts take to come through. I had between a half and two-thirds of my lifetime output stolen by these schmucks, but payouts from many of those thefts will be split 50/50 with the publishers. (Which strikes me as fair enough.)

This is an inherently exorsexist and intersexist worldview, in my opinion.

Bigender people are almost always forced to 'pick' which gender they are 'more', or have it automatically assigned for them. Their pronouns may be conditionally respected, but people get very uncomfortable, when a bigender person challenges the concept of man and woman as opposite. Constantly, you see "male spaces" and "female spaces", discourse about which labels are for men (and therefore not for women) or vice versa, and other similar conversations, inherently leave out men who are women, and women who are men. Bigender people are ignored, or spoken over, or pushed to 'pick' a gender so they can be neatly categorized, because man and woman are conceived as two opposite mutually exclusive ends of a spectrum that cannot intersect.

Agender/genderless/transneutral people are similarly erased or forced to pick sides, often sorted into a box either based on what people assume they're 'closer' to based on their physical traits (and i hope i dont need to stress how dysphoria inducing that can be) or told they're transfem/transmasc regardless because, well, "You're still transitioning away/toward something", because people conceptualize agender/genderless individuals as being not truly genderless at all, but as being merely at the center of the man to woman spectrum.

Then there are perisex nonbinary people who identify closely with their agab, perisex nonbinary women/fems afab and perisex nonbinary men amab. Gender essentialists either try to cut these people out of trans identity entirely, fakeclaiming them, insisting they're basically cisgender, engaging in intense transmedicalist rhetoric dressed up in a slightly more 'acceptable' font now that transmedicalism is somewhat less accepted in the community..or they insist that, despite many not being at all masculine, perisex nonbinary people afab are all transmasc, and vice versa.

I consider all of these things to be misgendering! Forcing any nonbinary person toward any binary or gendered term they do not identify with is misgendering! And it's done constantly by other trans people who would rather be openly and violently exorsexist than rethink their gender essentialist simplistic reductive sliding scale framework for how extremely complex societal structures and personal identities work.

yeah unfortunately bluesky is the current last bastion of uncensored, publicly posted art. i don't want to go back to twitter.

The real Sultan was a bit of a local celebrity, by all accounts, and in his retirement was taken around local horse shows as part of parades or opening ceremonies or what have you. So, when the art was designed, the locals and the artist both named it after him.

By the end of the collieries, the ponies came up to surface once a week. It’s worth noting, though, that for most of mining history, they were better treated than the human workers on multiple metrics; better fed, but also not sent into dangerous shafts in case of collapse. Mine owners were very open about it - ponies were expensive, but people were replaceable

No, wanting to see the night sky isn't a twee retvrn to ghibli-ass take. It's not a matter of some anprim impulse to dismantle industrial society for ~nature aesthetics~, it's an extremely visible symptom of environmental degradation that gets downplayed because the externality seems trivial to most people: "Oh no, the night sky, what ever will we do without it."

But it actively disrupts light-sensitive circadian rhythms in plants and wildlife, which disrupts foraging patterns, reproductive and hibernation cycles, and contributes to wildlife population declines. It's not the major contributor to those declines, but it's an additional point of stress in an ecosystem already stressed by climate change and other forms of industrial pollution. And so much of it is wholly unnecessary.

I don't think people realize how far-reaching the problem is, either. That light isn't just confined to the places people use. You don't escape it by just taking the bus to the edge of town. That light carries, in some cases for hundreds of kilometers. Death Valley has some of the darkest skies in the US, and yet, the dome of light above Las Vegas is visible on the horizon over 250 km away! Anywhere within 50 km of a major urban center, just about anywhere in the world, never gets darker than a night under a full moon.

And this is very much a recent problem too. Before the switchover to LEDs, it was relatively expensive to light places. That meant actually accounting for the energy use and making sure it was being used where it was needed. That light was also warm-colored, so it didn't travel as far. With the decreased cost of lighting, it became standard to light places like daytime whenever they might be needed. Lighting didn't get safer, it just got more thoughtless.

The reason you see astronomy-types sounding the alarm most loudly is because they're the ones who have been seeing the full effects of light pollution and its encroachment on dark skies. It's a hobby for me too, but it's partly because I am a night owl who grew up in a small town with nothing else to do. I used to be able to clearly see the Milky Way horizon to horizon when I grew up in the mid-00s. The last time I visited about five years ago, I could only see it overhead. The population has fallen by like 10%, but the skies are brighter. I can tell when the college decided to leave the football stadium lights overnight. I can tell where the car dealerships that added overnight display lights are. I can even see when trucks with the fuckass LED light bars are coming over a hill from 5 km away.